February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
He was serving a 9-to-10-year sentence for one of the 147 cases of child molestation in which he’d been accused when he was strangled and stomped to death last Saturday at a prison near Worcester, Mass. Though prison officials said Geoghan was in protective custody because of threats made against him, his alleged killer, who’d been in solitary confinement until just two days before the attack, was nevertheless able to kill the defrocked priest before guards could reach him. The Boston Globe reported Tuesday that John Druce, a convicted murderer already serving a life sentence, has told investigators that he’d planned the Geoghan killing for at least a month. One unverified report revealed that another prisoner had tipped off officials to the plan but that they took no action.
Several of Geoghan’s accusers expressed ambivalence about his death. But there should be no satisfaction. Never mind that the 68-year-old Geoghan had served only one year of his sentence. He was also facing a second criminal case and 20 civil lawsuits. His death has cheated his accusers, and indeed the entire Catholic community of Boston, of testimony that could have revealed the true extent of and reasons for the church coverup, the acknowledgment of which forced Cardinal Bernard Law from his job earlier this year.
But Geoghan’s death cuts to a deeper institutional flaw, one that has nothing to do with the church and everything to do with our prison system. Prisoner-on-prisoner violence is nothing new, of course. A level of vigilantism is present in all state and federal jails. Still, Geoghan’s death clearly was preventable. Preventable, that is, if the U.S., which has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, would allocate the resources necessary to sufficiently staff these institutions. But that is easier said than done. A more reasonable and effective response would be to rethink the onerous sentencing laws that clog prisons with nonviolent petty criminals and drug addicts. Softening such laws would not only reduce incidents of violence against fellow prisoners, it would also make less likely the kind of tragedy that occurred in Massachusetts last weekend.