SENTENCING PLAN SEEN COSTING $900M PLUS, AND SWELLING PRISONS

Acting Governor Jane M. Swift's proposed guidelines to toughen sentences
for criminals would swell the state's prison population by 20 percent, the
draft of a new report predicts.

Based on average costs of construction and inmate care, the increase in
incarceration would push state spending up by $900 million for new cells
and add $250 million per year for feeding, clothing, and housing inmates to
the state's budget.

The report is being prepared by the state Sentencing Commission, a
nonpartisan panel of judges and lawyers named in 1994 to limit the wide
discretion judges have in sentencing defendants.

Swift's sentencing proposal, one of the first initiatives she announced on
becoming acting governor, mostly reflects the wishes of state prosecutors
and keeps intact tough mandatory drug sentences. It also raises potential
sentences by 25 to 35 percent and would shift "a substantial number of
cases from the District Court to the Superior Court," the draft of the
Sentencing Commission report states.

Those changes would swell the state's inmate population by 8,690 prisoners
by 2009, according to the draft. The increase would be 2,203 in state
prisons, which house about 11,000 inmates now, and 6,487 in county jails,
which had a population of 11,136 in 1999.

Swift's proposal was in part a response to a controversy last year, when
Superior Court Judge Maria Lopez sentenced a defendant convicted of
kidnapping and sexually assaulting an 11-year-old boy to probation and home
detention.

Opponents quickly jumped on the Swift's plan yesterday, accusing her of
fiscal irresponsibility.

"This proposal is totally unrealistic," said Senator Cynthia S. Creem, who
is cochairwoman of the Legislature's Joint Criminal Justice Committee. "How
are we going to pay for this? What about clean elections? What about housing?"

The acting governor has not seen the draft report, and the administration
is working on its own estimates, Swift spokeswoman Sarah Magazine said
yesterday. But cost is not Swift's first priority, Magazine said.

"We feel that you can't put a price on public safety," she said. "If we
need to build more prisons to prevent dangerous criminals from walking the
streets of our commonwealth, then that is what we will do."

State judges have wide discretion in sentencing. Various proposals would
make the state courts more like the federal system, in which judges must
sentence defendants within a range of penalties based on the offender's
crime and criminal record.

The Sentencing Commission prepared its own guidelines in 1997, under a
mandate from the Legislature that their proposal not add to the state's
prison population.

The commission's guidelines have languished on Beacon Hill, stalled chiefly
by opposition from district attorneys who want to keep the state's
mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders.

Martin Rosenthal, chairman of the guidelines committee of the Massachusetts
Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys, charged yesterday that Swift's
proposal would create a tougher justice system, rather than one that's
fairer. With reforms such as truth in sentencing, Massachusetts long ago
shed its image as being lenient on crime, he said.

"How can they make any kind of case with a straight face that our state
needs a wholesale ratcheting up of the prison population?" Rosenthal said.
"There is no plausible case there that passes the laugh test."