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State Department of Correction Commissioner Kathleen M. Dennehy is revamping the agency's approach to investigating and documenting allegations of abuse by guards to impose new accountability on a system she says was characterized by bias and peer pressure on correction employees to look the other way. Managers are building a database by examining brutality allegations culled from inmate grievances, letters, and even verbal complaints to staff, Dennehy said, and investigators are being assigned from a new central office at headquarters to follow each case to a conclusion. The database will help managers monitor the allegations throughout the state prison system's 17 institutions, she said, a departure from the agency's previous practice of not keeping such precise statistics. ''Right now, we just want to know the issue," Dennehy said. ''If it is an allegation of brutality, whether you write it in correspondence, or as a grievance, or stand up and say it, we are going to take it." Previously, complaints were dealt with at the institutions under their respective superintendents, the commissioner said, and hundreds of allegations were routinely dismissed on procedural grounds such as errors on forms or tardiness in filing a complaint, with no investigation of the underlying facts. The new initiative is in part a response to the death of John J. Geoghan, the defrocked priest who was killed last August in a maximum-security prison cell after his repeated complaints about abuse by guards helped prompt a transfer from a medium-security facility, according to corrections officials. The commissioner's new approach, which she said also was prompted a mandate by Governor Mitt Romney to better manage the prison system, has drawn criticism from the prison guards union. Steve Kenneway, the union president, said guards ''lost faith" in Dennehy ''for believing the word of one inmate over six corrections officers" after she fired a guard and demoted five others in April at the maximum-security Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center. The Correction Department said the fired guard allegedly used excessive force with an inmate and the five others allegedly filed false reports. Prisoner advocates, meanwhile, are cautiously watching the changes. Rebecca M. Young, a lawyer for Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, which represents and advocates for prisoners, has photographs of inmates such as Leigh Eddings, Richard Baldwin, and Edwin Santiago with badly bruised eyes, swollen noses, or faces raked with scratches -- injuries they say are the result of abuse by guards. ''To ask a correctional agency to identify which are the staff that are committing violent crimes against the people that are in their care and custody may be unrealistic," she said. ''And to expect them to do that competently . . . is questionable. I mean, you have co-workers investigating co-workers. I think that is a problematic situation." Nationally, there is no available data on the frequency of guard assaults on prisoners, said Reginald A. Wilkinson, commissioner of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction and current president of the Association of State Correctional Administrators. Corrections managers say guard assaults on prisoners happen, but rarely, Wilkinson said. ''The perception may be that they are swept under the rug, and I am not saying that never happens, but the idea that it is widespread is just off base," he said. Joe Weedon, government affairs director for the American Correctional Association, said Congress, responding to prisoner advocates, last year ordered a first-ever scientific study of the frequency of rape of prisoners by other prisoners or staff. That study is underway, and results are expected within a year. No such national study has been made on other kinds of assaults on prisoners by guards, Weedon said. Dennehy took over as acting commissioner of the Massachusetts prison system in December after Romney removed Michael T. Maloney from the top job. The governor appointed her to be commissioner in March. Since the beginning of the year, she said, department managers have been gradually implementing the new approach to investigating and cataloging complaints. ''I think that we recognized, based on the deficiencies we identified, that we needed to design a new system," she said. Kenneway, the guards union president, said in an interview that he is contesting as unfounded Dennehy's disciplinary action involving the six guards at Souza-Baranowski. ''Prisons are brutal places to live and to work," he said. ''The public doesn't expect us to report for duty to get our heads kicked in. When an officer is attacked, it is going to cause an extremely spirited response from other officers, and sometimes injuries do result, from a head-butt or flying elbow." Kenneway characterized Dennehy's administration as ''busy trying to do the popular thing" and blamed some of the impetus for changes on ''the hysteria" caused by the killing in prison of Geoghan, the defrocked priest whose alleged abuse of children helped trigger the clergy sexual abuse scandal. In the months before he was killed, Geoghan told his lawyers he was harassed by guards and falsely cited for insolence, which led to his transfer from the medium-security prison in Concord to Souza-Baranowski. ''I think in our short tenure, certainly if you were to ask the [guards] union, they would probably regard us as overreacting. But I don't think we are," Dennehy said in an interview that included James R. Bender, the recently promoted acting deputy commissioner, who is in charge of the new centralized office of internal investigations. ''To the extent that we can substantiate that an abusive action took place we are going to take action and let the chips fall where they may." She said the database that is being built will take each case ''from the assignment of a complaint number right through to what was the resulting discipline. We would really like to restructure how we manage and track and analyze the information. It really would be helpful to see those patterns emerge in terms of locations, right down to shift, right down to housing units." Asked why managers had previously failed to collect and analyze such data, Dennehy, sitting with Bender and others, said, ''I don't think any of us at this table can answer that question." Maloney, Dennehy's predecessor, who was removed by Romney on Dec. 1, declined to comment on specifics of his management of the system, except to say some of the changes being implemented ''were put in place just before I left." Young, the Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services lawyer, has operated the Rapid Response Brutality Project since December 2001 by going inside the maximum-security prison at Cedar Junction in Walpole to interview and often photograph inmates who say they have been brutalized by guards. She said she has documented about 120 cases in 30 months -- about one a week. The data include only those cases in which she was contacted by inmates or their family members within 14 days of an alleged assault. Young said she asks for official investigations in only some cases, because many prisoners fear retaliation, and added that her work has never led to a finding against a guard. ''Every letter you write [to prison officials], you get the same letter in response: 'There is nothing there, there is nothing there,' " she said. ''How could there be nothing there when I have stacks of photographs of seriously injured prisoners? How could it be that in not a single instance was there staff misconduct? I mean, I don't believe it." Sean P. Murphy can be reached at smurphy@globe.com or at 617-929-7849. © Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company |
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