It’s a complicated picture, but I’ll take a stab at a summary. The Senate wants life sentences for those who commit three felonies - not all felonies, but three from among a long list. The House believes the list should be much shorter and limited to violent crimes. The House would also like to reduce sharply the number of mandatory minimum sentences for drug cases, and also decrease the size of school zones where drug crimes earn more severe penalties, from 1,000 feet to 100 feet, a notion that leaves the Senate cold. Governor Deval Patrick, who filed his own crime bill last year, is much closer, philosophically, to the House.
Activists say the bill passed by the Senate would drastically increase prison overcrowding, a building crisis that gets far too little recognition.
The notion of getting tougher on repeat offenders gained a huge boost when Woburn police Officer John Maguire was shot to death in 2010 by Dominic Cinelli, who had been paroled despite receiving three life sentences. The state’s Parole Board was overhauled in the wake of the Cinelli debacle, but that has not quelled the public outrage. Outrageous as the Cinelli case was, it’s still odd that some lawmakers are calling for tougher enforcement at a time when violent crime is down and the rate of parole has already slowed substantially.
The administration makes the argument that the state has a law to put habitual offenders away for long stretches of time, a law that has only been used 84 times in the past decade. But that law - which guarantees offenders a shot at parole after serving half their sentences - is so weak that prosecutors have simply ignored it. Advocates insist that a new law will be used far more often.
