The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

"I'm leaving today," he recalls telling them. "My sentence is over."

Instead, Jones was whisked out of his cell and placed on a mental health watch at the adjacent maximum security prison for two weeks.

Jones does sometimes hear voices; he has been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. But, in this case, he or the voice inside was absolutely right about the sentence.

He should have been headed home that day in May 2005. His time was up. In fact, it had been up for years.

But in what prison officials now acknowledge is one of the state's "most egregious" cases of wrongful imprisonment, Jones was held until last July, more than four years beyond his rightful sentence.

And Jones was far from the only inmate mistreated in this way.

At least 13 other inmates have been held beyond their release dates, the outgoing correction commissioner, Kathleen M. Dennehy, said after inquiries from the Spotlight Team. One of the 13 was held a year and a half too long.

For the state Department of Correction, already under fire for allegedly shoddy treatment of mentally ill inmates, the errors call into question its ability to perform one its most basic functions, deciding when it is time for the jailhouse door to swing open.

It is a failure that could open the state to costly court claims.

"It's absolutely stunning incompetence," said James R. Pingeon, director of litigation for Massachusetts Correctional Legal Services, who is scheduled to meet with Jones tomorrow morning to discuss potential legal action against the department.

In the case of Jones and several other inmates, the department did not comply with a court order that modifies some sentences for time spent on parole. In other cases, the department relied on a sometimes-faulty computer system that tracks time served, credits for good behavior and other factors that go into sentencing or simply botched the math.

The failures were compounded by something like indifference.

When the Spotlight Team first confronted department officials earlier this year about the error that robbed Jones of four years of freedom, they called it a bookkeeping anomaly that had little or no practical effect on his quality of life.

They have since retreated from that position and acknowledged a more basic ethical lapse. Department officials never told Jones of their error, even after he was belatedly released July 5. He only learned of it months later from a Globe reporter.

The other inmates held too long were also kept in the dark.

Dennehy said her expectation had been that a department lawyer would inform Jones, through his lawyer, at the time of his release. Dennehy said she believed that Jones's mental illness would have made it impossible for him to fully grasp what had gone wrong.

Trying to make him understand might even have been unkind, she said. "I think we could be criticized for explaining this to someone . . . with the history of mental illness that this individual has."

But Jones understands what was done to him, and grieves how much he lost.

In the four years he was mistakenly detained, Jones missed his mother's wake, lost contact with his teenage daughter, and endured the daily perils of life behind bars. where his mental illness meant a ping-pong existence between life in a prison cell and the psychiatric wards of Bridgewater State Hospital.

"She doesn't know me," Jones said softly over a recent lunch at the Prudential Center, referring to Dennehy. "She's saying they made a decision not even to say anything because they didn't think that I would be intelligent enough to understand. That's horrible. That's one of the saddest excuses that I've ever heard. All she had to do is just try me. I'm more intelligent than they know."

Teen hoodlum
As a teenager, Rommel Jones beat people up and stole their wallets. He was, he now ruefully concedes, a hoodlum.

Growing up in Dorchester, he dropped out of school after the 10th grade -- he later earned his GED -- and was often high on crack cocaine, smoking $200 worth a day and drinking heavily.

Along Newbury Street, he hustled for cash to feed his habit, strictly obeying his personal dictum to never hector women.

"Rippin', robbin', runnin'," he explained. "Then I just got strung out, you know?"

He was first arrested as a 17-year-old for shoplifting and, a year later, was sentenced to jail for assaulting a man and stealing his wallet. It contained $13.

Now, at 40, Jones does not diminish the seriousness of his offenses. Behind his stern visage is a soft-spoken man on the edge of middle age who seems content to sit in his room listening to soft rock, sipping afternoon coffee, reading his Bible, and anticipating weekend services at church.

Sober for nine years, he said he now accepts that mental illness is part of who he is. "I'm not [saying] that I don't have a mental illness, because I do," he said. Today, with medication to ease his symptoms first diagnosed when he was 19, he is able to live safely outside the rigors of an institution.

Jones's treatment at the hands of the department is not just a glaring example of the agency's administrative shortcomings. His journey through the Massachusetts prison system also offers an instructive glimpse of life inside the walls for the mentally ill, who make up one-quarter of the state's prison population, according to department statistics.

By 1988, Jones was in the custody of the department, which operates the 17 state prisons. Over the next 10 years, he would be paroled three times, once for six years, only to be returned to prison, often for possession of drugs.

In 1995, a mental health clinician declared that his psychosis was in remission. But a year later, in a sign of the episodic nature of his condition, he was on a mental health watch in MCI-Norfolk with no belt, no shoelaces, and no sharp objects allowed.

Jones's condition frequently landed him in Bridgewater State Hospital, a medium-security facility where those charged with or convicted of crimes receive mental health care. Unlike his treatment elsewhere in the system, Jones said, his care at Bridgewater often was very good.

But it was not without incident. He sometimes refused his medication and once had it injected forcibly into his thigh. More than once, he was placed in four-point restraints there. He trashed his room. But, after periods of psychosis, he also improved.

"I'm almost 30 years old, and I'm starting all over again," he said in 1996, according to department medical reports. "I am a good person. I just need to get my act together. I have learned a lot about my illness. All of those years, I had schizophrenia and I never knew how bad."

His medical records, obtained with his permission, are replete with references to Jones's religious fixation, something he called a genuine devotion to the Bible, but which department clinicians, who had chronicled his delusions, took as a clear signal of psychosis. However, there were lengthy periods of lucidity, too.

Throughout the years, it was not unusual for Jones to ask prison officials to check the proper length of his sentence and to make sure he was getting the credits the department allows for stretches of good behavior.

"If you don't write in to get your dates calculated, they beat you out of good time," he explained. "You've got to stay up on it."

And Jones did, always receiving assurances from department officials that they were on top of things.

On May 21, 2002, he saw the Parole Board, which is also supposed to check his time served against the sentence he received, and again received bad news. As usual, his petition was denied.

Ten days later, he was seen by a Bridgewater State Hospital clinician just before 2 p.m. "Mr. Jones reports that he is doing well," the clinician wrote. "He said that his parole was denied but he is doing OK. Reports no side effects from medications. Neatly dressed, pleasant, mood good. . . . Stable on current meds."

If prison officials had been doing their job properly, Jones would have doubtless been doing much better. May 31, 2002, should have been a day of elation for him.

It was the date on which he should have been freed from the care, custody, and control of the state Department of Correction.

Arcane science
Calculating prison sentences -- taking into account time off for good behavior, disciplinary history, and arcane court guidelines -- can be a complex undertaking. Few know that better than Dennehy, who will leave her commissioner's post next month for a job with the Bristol County sheriff's office.

And few people know better than her how dysfunctional the department sentence tracking system had become.

During sworn testimony in 2005, she counted herself among an estimated 12 people in the state who truly understood how the system was supposed to work. "I used to be expert in sentences, used to even train judges and lawyers," she said in an earlier deposition.

Dennehy was testifying in the whistleblower case of Jean Lahousse, a veteran department employee, who complained that she was transferred in retaliation for complaining that sloppy work was keeping inmates locked up after their release dates.

"I think it is fair to call it a mess," Dennehy said of the sentence computation system.

In that case, which Lahousse won, Dennehy said mistakes were well known.

"You can't trust the dates in the system," she said, according to a transcript of her deposition. Sentences "need to be manually verified and, you know, quite frankly some of the biggest horror stories we have [are] when an inmate steps forward and says, 'I have been in this system for 25 years and you have lost 300 days of good time,' which is almost a year."

But none of the mistakes approached the magnitude of the Rommel Jones case. And because the harm was to a notably unsympathetic population, locked-up felons, they drew almost no attention.

Most sentence computations are now done by the department's computer network, the $12.2 million Inmate Management System that went on line in 2004.

The system mostly works well, said Carol Mici, the department's director of classification, though it must be regularly updated to deal with difficult cases.

David Slade, the department's sentencing counsel, called late releases "sufficiently rare" and said that in his 18 years of sentencing work for the prison system he could not recall a single instance in which a prisoner had successfully sued the department for being held too long.

Further, department officials maintained in January, even if they had made a mistake with Jones, the real-world effect on his life was negligible. He was at Bridgewater and even if he had been released on time, they said, he would have remained there on civil court order even after his prison sentence ended.

But Jones and his lawyer say that is little more than department spin and simply untrue.

"They would have sent me to the [Shattuck] Hospital the next week, and I would have been on the street," Jones said. "Because if my commitment ends, they can't hold me. When my sentence is over, they can't hold me no more. They've got to let me go."

And when the department finally discovered its error last summer, that is precisely what happened.

As his release date, the erroneous one, finally approached early last summer, Rommel Jones checked in with officials at Bridgewater State Hospital to make sure his paperwork was in order.

"I spoke to the [staff member] at Bridgewater and I said to her: 'You know, I should be wrapping soon. Can you check the records and calculate my good time for me?' " He recalled her reply: Don't worry about it. I'll take care of it. Don't keep coming to me with this nonsense. "So I left her alone," Jones said.

And things appeared to be running smoothly. In fact, Jones got what he thought was an unusual prison parting gift: Officials said they had checked his dates and told him that they had made a tiny error. He should have been released the previous week, they told him. It was time to leave.

Jones packed up his belongings, and at midmorning on July 5, 2006, he boarded a department van that took him to Shattuck Hospital, where, as a voluntary admission, he began to prepare for his life after prison with the help of the state Department of Mental Health.

"I don't want to live off the state," he told Bridgewater officials before he left. "I want to work and take care of my daughter."

What Jones did not learn until the Globe contacted him in January was that the extra week in prison had actually been an extra four years.

How could such an error have been made?

Jones went to prison on consecutive sentences, a 20-year term to be followed by another 10-year sentence. What prison officials missed was the effect of a 1995 court decision that said that when an inmate is out on parole, the two sentences must run concurrently.

"Consecutive sentences turn into concurrent sentences when you are on parole," said Pingeon, the MCLS litigation director. "And Rommel got paroled. He got paroled three times."

One of those stints on parole lasted nearly six years, a period that proved critical to his sentence miscalculation.

In a later interview, Mici, the classification director, acknowledged that the consequences of the court decision were beyond the capability of the prison's computer system. The calculation had to be done by hand. But the department missed it.

"A mistake was made," said Dennehy. "And as soon as it was made, it was corrected."

But no one bothered to tell Jones.

"I'd call this unlawful false imprisonment that was the result of gross incompetence and deliberate indifference," Pingeon said.

He represented the inmate, Stephen Crooker, who brought the case leading to the 1995 ruling that now governs sentence calculations such as Jones's. Each time an inmate moves from institution to institution or appears before the Parole Board, Pingeon said, the sentence dates are supposed to be reviewed.

"Multiple people in the Department of Correction who should have been familiar with the Crooker decision were not," said Pingeon. "That's scary, because of the consequences not just to Rommel Jones, but to other people. If they don't understand Crooker, it makes you wonder what else they don't understand."

There have been more mistakes, in fact, than the department was willing to concede at first.

Prison officials said they had reviewed their records to make sure other inmates were not similarly affected. In February, Mici said a review had uncovered 25 inmates affected by the court decision, none of whom had been held beyond their sentence wrap-up date.

But after the Globe's initial inquiries, the DOC did a more extensive examination. And last week it acknowledged that 13 more inmates in the last four years were affected by what Dennehy called "out and out errors that resulted in people who should have been released to the street not being released to the street."

In those cases, the length of time of the wrongful confinement ranges from one day to 34 days, from 101 days to 515.

Four of the 13 were held because of the same miscalculation that kept Rommel Jones behind bars four years too long.

In a letter faxed to the Globe on Thursday, the department said notices about the sentence miscalculations were being mailed to the affected inmates. Those letters, which went out Friday, will offer inmates a meeting with the department to discuss the error. They also will include the telephone number of a department lawyer, "should the inmate's attorney wish to discuss the implications" of the mistake.

Dennehy, in a memo last week to her boss, Public Safety Secretary Kevin M. Burke, said the department's technology staff is studying how to avoid similar errors in the future.

She said the department has held four training sessions to make sure similar mistakes are avoided, and she rejected any suggestion that the problem is systemic. "It's your worst nightmare to have a late release," she said.

When asked whether Jones would have been told about his late release if the Globe had not confronted the department about it, she replied: "He would not know it."

Eyeing settlement
In early February, Nancy Ankers White, the department's general counsel, sent a message to Rommel Jones through the Committee for Public Counsel Services. When the letter finally reached Jones at Shattuck Hospital more than a month later, he was not sure what to make of its dense legalese.

"Should Mr. Jones choose to pursue any legal avenues he may have, please be advised that the Department of Correction is open to discussing the matter further with you," White's letter read.

It held the prospect, as yet unfulfilled, of an apology. Jones read it and stashed it away.

Pingeon said he will discuss with Jones tomorrow his legal alternatives. State law imposes a $100,000 cap on damages as a result of negligence by state officials, he said, but if a court determines that Jones had been falsely imprisoned, that cap does not apply. The department said Friday it did not intentionally hold Jones past his time and that the cap should apply.

For his part, Jones has no calculus by which to measure what the state has taken from him.

He wishes he could have been with his mother in her final days. He wishes he could have had the chance to watch his daughter grow up.

"My daughter doesn't even talk to me any more," he said. "We used to write each other like once or twice a week. She just got tired of praying and waiting -- nothing happening."

Still, he is reconnecting with the family he lost touch with while in prison. He is touch with his father and occasionally visits his only sibling, an older brother.

For now, Jones is savoring the little things that a year ago would have been treasures.

"Just freedom," he said last winter. "I haven't been able to really get out there and live yet. I need to get my own space. I want a single room. For the last eight or nine years, I've been sharing a room with people."

That changed a month ago when he moved into a group home in Mattapan. He has his own dresser, a nightstand, a bed to call his own.

"It's nice. It's small. It's quaint. It's all right," he said, smiling into a late-afternoon sun in the home's second-floor living room. "I just want to get a vehicle, get an apartment, get a job, get a bank account."

He said a settlement with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts might help him accomplish those things.

But if there is one thing Rommel Jones learned from the state, it is how to be patient. For now he's finding solace in his Bible and taking things day by day.

"I don't feel lucky at all," he said. "I'm just glad that it's over. I'm ready to move on with my life."

Spotlight team members Michael Rezendes, Francie Latour and Beth Healy contributed. Thomas Farragher can be reached at farragher@globe.com. The Spotlight Team can be reached at spotlight@globe.com or at 617-929-7483.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/04/22/correction_system_mess_held_inmates_past_their_time/