Crime Behind the Bars

The killing of John Geoghan—the defrocked priest who sexually abused approximately 150 children and precipitated a crisis in the American Catholic Church—illustrates the failures of the Massachusetts Department of Corrections and of American prison policy.

Geoghan was strangled and beaten to death in the protective custody unit of a maximum security prison in Worcester, Mass. last month. His alleged killer was Joseph Druce, an inmate with a history of violent outbursts. The two were in the same cell block despite the facts that Geoghan’s crimes were well known among the inmate population and Druce was serving a life term for the similarly brutal 1988 murder of a man he believed to be homosexual.

The Massachusetts correctional system began to fail Geoghan early on. According to The New York Times, he endured guards’ taunting, contaminated food and excrement placed on his bed in the first prison he was placed. It has also been reported that the guards in the maximum security prison to which Geoghan was moved had been warned that Druce was acting suspiciously outside of Geoghan’s cell, well before the murder took place.

Geoghan was a monster of a man, but he was sentenced to nine to ten years in prison and not to death. No matter how evil some criminals might be, and however much their behavior might abhor decent people, when they are sentenced to prison they deserve a safe environment.

Instead, the criminal justice system consigns prisoners to institutions dominated by gangs and conducive to quietly ignored sexual assault. Congress has estimated over one in 10 prisoners has been sexually assaulted—literally hundreds of thousands of people—a truly barbaric number that is a mark of shame upon this country.

An obvious step Massachusetts must take to prevent the most egregious incidents, such as Geoghan’s murder and predictable rapes, is to have separate prisons—or at least separate cell blocks and common areas—for the most vulnerable prisoners. Wardens and correctional system officials know the types of criminals and the individuals who are most at risk in the prison system and can simply sort them out.

But the endemic violence behind prison bars must be addressed in its entirety. Congress recently passed laws demanding of the states to keep statistics on prison rape and investigate policy responses to alleviate the problem. This is a step in the right direction, but must quickly be followed by decisive action at the state and federal level. There needs to be an increase in the number of guards in prisons and, at the same time, guards need to be held strictly accountable for cruelty to inmates perpetrated by both guards themselves and other inmates.

This is not an issue about which any member of society should feel ambivalent, including law-abiding Harvard students. It is in everyone’s self-interest to ensure that our prisons are decently safe places. Most prisoners eventually return to society, and it is dangerous if they come out saturated with the practices of violent prison culture; certainly they will not have been fully rehabilitated if that is the case. Everyone should be concerned that a night in a holding cell for a wrongful arrest does not leave them or a loved one a victim of sexual assault.

Practical considerations of effort and funding pale in comparison to the moral imperative that our society prevent these terrible injustices from happening in its name for the sake of “correction.” If criminal justice is to be left to prison gangs and sexual predators, let us say so, if not, let us prevent it.