Lily Robinson, “Activists seek moratorium on prison construction,” CommonWealth, July 20, 2021, https://commonwealthmagazine.org/criminal-justice/activists-seek-moratorium-on-prison-construction/.

“If you build this prison, I guarantee you, women will be beaten. Women will be starved. Women will be raped. How does that make our community safer?” asked Caroline Bays, board president of Progressive Massachusetts, an organization that pushes for racial, social and environmental justice, at a legislative hearing on the bill Tuesday.

A representative of the Massachusetts Department of Correction said that no final decisions have been made regarding the future of MCI-Framingham or women’s correctional facilities in the state.

From 2011 to 2018, the average daily prison population in Massachusetts declined by 21 percent. At the same time, the state ramped up spending by 25 percent, taking the budget from $254 million to nearly $1.4 billion. Few of those extra dollars went to programs to reduce recidivism, according to a study by MassINC, the parent company of CommonWealth.

Testifying in support of the bill, Bays recalled visiting an incarcerated friend at Cedar Junction, a prison in Norfolk, and laughing—then sometimes crying—over the irony of a sign in the waiting room declaring the facility a place of rehabilitation. She said she knew the reality of what went on within those walls: beatings and assaults such as the one that permanently crippled her friend.

Bays pointed out that Massachusetts has one of the highest prison budgets in the country, despite housing one of the smallest populations of people behind bars. The Department of Correction spends about $70,000 per inmate annually. For about two thirds of that cost, a student could spend a year at Harvard University. “Instead of a prison, why don’t you build a university?” suggested Bays. “At the end [of the sentence, an inmate] would have a degree and a future instead of a black hole on their resume and more trauma to recover from.”