Boy With a Knife by Jean Trounstine

Author:Jean Trounstine [Trounstine, Jean]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781632460257
Publisher: IG Publishing
Published: 2016-04-01T22:00:00+00:00

8. VIOLATION

In 2008, there were 868 prisoners serving second-degree life sentences in Massachusetts, and those seeking parole were required to serve twelve to eighteen months in minimum or prerelease status before their release.1 However, there was a catch to this: potential parolees were prevented from being transferred to lower security facilities if their crime was connected with taking a life.2 This made it much more difficult for them to take the kinds of programs that helped them to adjust back into the community, such as job readiness and other life skills offered only in lower security settings. In essence, Karter had to earn his parole before he could move out of the medium-security unit at MCI-Shirley.

This catch was due to classification regulations in Massachusetts. Classification is a system that determines the level of custody and programmatic needs of prisoners.3 The security level decides, in part, the facility where a prisoner will be housed, and lower levels of security afford more privileges. The Department of Correction can decide to alter a prisoner’s classification status based on “pending disciplinary reports, immigration status, ‘institutional negative adjustment’ and prior criminal history.”4

Karter had protested aspects of this rule in 2004, after being told he was being denied classification to a minimum-security prison because of his crime. He spent the next two years unsuccessfully challenging the Department of Correction’s classification policies, which had come under fire for two reasons. First, prisoners were serving out their full sentence—in many cases, refusing to go through the lengthy and difficult parole process—and being discharged to the street without supervision, services, or support.5 Unsurprisingly, such prisoners are more likely to return to jail.6 (In 2012, Massachusetts was ranked two times more likely to directly discharge prisoners to the street than the national average—more than all other states except South Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Maine, and Florida.7)

Secondly, the Massachusetts’ policy to move those it considered more violent into higher security units had backfired. After defrocked Catholic priest John Goeghan was transferred from a medium to a maximum security prison, he was strangled by another prisoner.8 Activists said that while his crimes against children might be horrific, the classification system was nevertheless “corrupt,” as it shifted more prisoners to higher security than was necessary.

While he understood the serious nature of his offense, as a model prisoner with only two disciplinary reports on his record, Karter claimed that it made no sense not to transfer him to minimum security. In 2008, he wrote to the associate commissioner of correction: “Now that I am within 15 months of possible release, I am no longer eligible because of new guidelines. What happens if I am released? Where is my reintegration? I have been in prison since I was sixteen years old. I have never had a job. I have never paid taxes, never had health or car insurance. I was just a kid. Why am I not being prepared for my possible release?” Karter also wrote to then governor-elect Deval Patrick, referring in his

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