MORE CELLS OR FEWER PRISONERS

Sheriff Glodis Leads a Push to Deal With Overcrowding at the Jail

Worcester County Sheriff Guy Glodis says correction officials across
the state will be putting the "full-court press" on the Legislature
next month to plea for a bond bill they say is desperately needed to
deal with the issue of overcrowding in Massachusetts jails.

"I think we have made a very compelling case being at 185% over
capacity," Glodis says, referring to the West Boylston facility run
by his department. "We are at 1,440 for a facility built for 822. We
were close to hitting the 1,500 mark two weeks ago."

The bill that is expected from the governor's office next month is
said to include statewide funding for prisons, including what Glodis
hopes will be either $100 million for a 100-cell jail or a $50
million set-aside for a proposed 250-plus-cell facility earmarked for
Worcester County. Glodis says if the situation does not improve, he
sees early releases, more lenient sentencing or the setting of little
or no bails as a way to alleviating overcrowding. "I've said from Day
1 that unless we get some much needed jail expansion money, or a bond
bill coming forward, sooner or later, we are going to be forced to
either stop accepting new inmates or releasing non-violent,
non-sex-offender, or certain minimum security inmates early. "It's
inevitable. We are not at that point right now. Let me make that
clear. We are not planning on releasing anybody. And we are not
planning to stop accepting people. We are not at that point right
now. But if you look at the demographics and you look at the
statistics, our inmate population has increased by 26% since 2000. We
are almost double where we were in the 1990s with no new construction."

The whole scenario puts Glodis in a somewhat ironic situation. When
he was a legislator himself, a Democratic state senator from Auburn,
he helped to vote in many of the tough-on-crime bills that have
effectively put away so many convicted criminals. "I still support
putting violent, dangerous criminals away," he says. "That hasn't
changed. What the Legislature failed to do was provide the resources
to enact that legislation. In the 1990s, early 2000s, the Legislature
passed very strict sex-offender [laws], Melanie's Law, some very
strict laws that I support. We need to be tough on crime. There
needs to be zero tolerance."

"It's a Catch-22 of the criminal justice situation," says local
criminal lawyer Michael Wilcox. "Everyone wants tougher sentences.
Everybody wants mandatory sentences. The reality is: If you are going
to do that, then you need more spaces to put them. There's no money
to build new prisons. So now you have a classic overcrowding situation.

"I think Glodis is right. What you are going to start to see is civil
rights cases get filed again. Then you are going to have orders from
the federal court ordering the release of prisoners. I think he is
anticipating this at this point."

Worcester County District Attorney Joseph Early says he understands
full well the predicament that the sheriff has at the jail. He says
he recently visited the West Boylston facility with Jack O'Brien from
the Probation Department to discuss the possibility of facing a
federal mandate. The also talked about ways and means of dealing with
the issue of overcrowding. "They mentioned the possibility of GPS
monitoring," Early says. "O'Brien talked about one of the casualties
of truth-in-sentencing was that on a single charge, no longer could a
person get a split sentence, meaning a jail term with a probationary
period after where they could monitor people - get some hooks and
claws into a person where they could send them into mandatory coping
classes as part of the probation.

"[Glodis] mentioned that there would be a court-ordered mandate
coming down that would force him to get his numbers down to a certain
level. I know there is no easy way to fix that. I don't know
specifically what the order or mandate is yet, but they spoke where
this is going to happen and we were going to have to deal with it."

Asked where he expects the money to come from in a state facing
budgetary constraints, Glodis says, "There's money, but it's where
the money is needed most. Obviously, you can make a strong argument
for education and healthcare. But you can also make a strong argument
for public safety. It's going to cost the taxpayers more money in the
long run if you are not rehabilitating the inmates and not dealing
with inmate crises with litigation, with lawsuits against the
Commonwealth, and with re-entry."