Oops. Mass. Inmate Jailed Too Long, Despite State's Vow to Reform
When Mark Taylor asked about the reduction in his prison sentence that he was supposed to get for good behavior, an official told him, in writing, that he wasn’t eligible as a habitual offender.
But last month, the prison realized that it had made a mistake. More than seven months after he should have been freed, Taylor was suddenly ordered to pack his belongings in garbage bags and abruptly released to a homeless shelter in Worcester, Mass., reports the Boston Globe. Without any notice, there was no way he could take all of his belongings with him, or make arrangements for a place to stay.
At the homeless shelter, Taylor—a schizophrenic who has a history of drug abuse and attributes his last conviction, for assaulting a friend, to being high on cocaine—spent a long night watching other men smoke crack and shoot heroin, he tells the newspaper. “I couldn’t believe what was happening.”
He is now staying with a friend while he waits for space to become available at a mental health facility, and is thinking about filing a lawsuit over his delayed release.
Not quite two years earlier, the Globe reported that Massachusetts had kept 14 other prisoners beyond their release dates, and state officials promised reform.
Since then, Taylor apparently is the only prisoner who has been kept too long, Commissioner Harold Clarke of the Department of Correction tells the Globe. While a “serious mistake,” the situation shows that “the system worked,” he says, because officials caught their own error this time.
