On the surface, some of the core positions held by incumbent Gov. Charlie Baker and his Democratic rival, Jay Gonzalez, on reforming the criminal justice system are not wildly different. Both say that, in the age of Black Lives Matter, they are cognizant of racial and income-based disparities in the system. But in our interviews with the candidates comparing their positions on specific topics, we found that their respective approaches are not the same.
Gonzalez says he has long been concerned about what he calls injustices within the criminal justice system, but those concerns were amplified after reading Michelle Alexander’s book about racism and mass incarceration called "The New Jim Crow."
"It was a powerful book," Gonzalez said. "I actually read it at the beginning of my campaign as I was hearing more and more from people about the need for criminal justice reform, and I spent a lot of time digging in and talking to people who live in this world.”
Gonzalez found himself especially concerned by the possibility that low income residents would find themselves stuck in jail because they could not pay a few hundred dollars bail — people like inmate Jeffrey LaBathe, who raised the issue during a district attorney debate over the summer at the Suffolk County House of Corrections.
“To my knowledge, bail is set to give a person a chance to go back and forth to court, not hold them, put their life on pause," LaBathe said. "My question is: What are you going to do to combat the high bails that are given to people that can't afford it?”
That issue was highlighted in the criminal justice reform legislation signed into law this year by Gov. Charlie Baker, who told WGBH News that he agrees people shouldn't be locked up if they can't afford bail.
“Look, I think what Massachusetts did with bail reform previously and in the criminal justice bill, I don't have a problem with it ... basically it set a standard that said you can't use somebody’s inability to pay as a mechanism to hold them to trial," Baker said. "But with that comes a requirement, I believe is necessary, that you have in place a broad enough and accessible enough dangerousness statute that you can make it possible for judges and for prosecutors to review the body of work of somebody who's in front of them, so that gets factored into the decision about whether or not they should be out and about prior to their trial.”
The 121-page bill, while eliminating mandatory sentencing for some drug dealing, would strengthen penalties for trafficking dangerous opioids such as fentanyl and would also prevent most crimes involving children and the abuse of women from being dismissed over the objection of a prosecutor.
But Gonzalez calls the governor’s embrace of criminal reform both “half-hearted” and business as usual.
“The governor basically takes the typical Republican tough on crime approach to this issue. He got backed into a corner and reluctantly signed criminal justice reform legislation that the Democratic legislature thankfully provided leadership on,” said Gonzalez. “There are a lot of great elements of the criminal justice reform bill that was passed this year, including reforming our system of fees and fines, so we're jailing people less, requiring judges to take someone's ability to pay into account in determining how bail is set. These are positive steps forward that are no thanks to Gov. Baker's leadership.”
Daniel Medwed, WGBH News' legal analyst, has listened to both Gonzalez and Baker and says he doesn’t see much difference between the two candidates’ positions on this critical aspect of criminal justice reform.
“While Gonzales does seem to be more progressive on criminal justice issues than Baker when it comes to their discussion of bail, at least, they might be more similar than appears to be the case," Medwed said. " At first blush they both appear to acknowledge the importance of taking a defendant's economic circumstances into account — that people who are poor should not have a bail figure that's too far above their reach.”
Medwed says both candidates agree that indigent inmates should not just be released carte blanche. There must be conditions. Baker says that many suspects arrested for minor offenses who have been released from jails have gone on to commit egregious crimes, particularly against women.
"We've had a number of horrible tragedies in Massachusetts that result from the fact that we have not taken the dangerousness mechanism that we created through our domestic violence law, which I think everybody agrees was a good thing, and apply it more broadly," Baker said. "And I do believe that if you're going to go in the direction we've gone, which is to treat bail not as a mechanism to hold somebody, but instead as something to ensure that somebody comes back to court, then you really do need to do something to make sure you're dealing with dangerousness."
Baker says the suggestion to create a specific dangerousness statute was advanced by the Boston Rape Crisis Center. Gonzalez does not disagree. But where the candidates diverge is on Gonzalez’s opposition to mandatory sentencing, with just one exception: first degree murder. Baker supports mandatory sentencing under many other circumstances. But, the most clearly defined difference between Baker and Gonzalez was accentuated by the murder of Yarmouth police officer Sean Gannon and the 2016 killing of Auburn police officer Ronald Tarentino. Those killings prompted Charlie Baker to reiterate a long-held position: “I’ve said for many years that I would support the death penalty for the assassination of a police officer. And I’ve said it because I think they put themselves in positions that most of the rest of us can’t even begin to understand.”
Gonzalez shares the governor’s passion, but not his proposed solution to discouraging would-be cop killers. “The two recent shootings of police officers in Massachusetts are heartbreaking," he said. "And I'm angry about it. I mean these are people who put their lives at risk every single day to help protect us. At the same time, I don't agree with Gov. Baker that we should be bringing the death penalty back to Massachusetts.”
Gonzalez supported this year’s criminal reform legislation, but did not think it went far enough, for example, in repealing mandatory minimum sentencing. Baker signed the legislation reluctantly thinking it went too far and proposed amendments that included making those serving life without parole for many sex crimes ineligible for the new medical parole program.
But the philosophical differences between the two men could be summed up by Baker’s focus on decreasing the rate of recidivism in Massachusetts and Gonzalez’s belief in focusing first and foremost on what leads to incarceration in the first place — the institutional societal issues that he says contributes to landing disproportionately the poor and people of color behind bars.
WGBH News State House reporter, Mike Deehan contributed to this report.
