Governor sees that process can be a tool for racial, gender justice
I am writing to applaud Governor Maura Healey’s recently released guidelines for clemency in Massachusetts (“Healey overhauls pardon guidelines,” Metro, Nov. 1). Healey has taken a positive step forward for the Commonwealth in her recognition that clemency can be a tool for racial and gender justice and address bias in the criminal justice system.
In particular, I am heartened to see her recognize that clemency can be an avenue to address harsh sentences for people who were convicted of transgressions related to surviving domestic and sexual violence and for people who were immature at the time of the criminal offense. This latter point is especially critical given what we now know about brain science and the decision-making capabilities of adolescents.
Clemency can help us further reduce the incarcerated population in Massachusetts, especially people who are aging, sick, and have done decades of time already. I urge the governor to take the next step to halt the construction of a $50 million prison for women and instead use all available options to bring women home, including through regular use of clemency and elder parole.
Releasing guidelines is an important step, and I hope Healey will implement them immediately by reviewing petitions and recommending people for release.
Lili Allen
Brookline
Our bloated prison system has had only onramps, not offramps
I am so pleased to see Governor Maura Healey’s new clemency guidelines. These were desperately needed, and I look forward to seeing them implemented to their fullest potential.
Our punishment system, like the rest of our government, was designed to have checks and balances. It is supposed to have onramps and offramps. But in the last 35 years, we have choked off most of the offramps. That leaves us with a bloated prison system packed with mistakes and excesses, many of them racist, with barely a solution in sight. Our current system makes us unsafe by damaging communities, destabilizing families, and wasting so much human potential. Massachusetts prisons are full of people who do not belong there.
Today, though, I can see a path forward. We need a five-year moratorium on jail and prison construction. We need to establish second-look sentencing, in which a judge reviews lengthy sentences after a convicted person has served a significant period; to raise the age of criminal adulthood from 18 to 21, so that defendants in late adolescence are charged in juvenile court; to reform parole; to repair the injustices of joint-venture sentences, in which a person adjacent to a killing gets the same sentence as the person who took a life; and to make many other reforms. A robust clemency system is essential to solving this puzzle. I am eager to see the governor and the state Parole Board moving a stream of traffic down this gleaming new offramp.
Betsey Chace
Cambridge
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