“You would think that locking people up who are creating disorder is always beneficial, but if you’re putting a lot of people away for nonviolent offenses, it reduces the stigma attached to going to prison and makes it less of a deterrent,” Ben Forman, research director at MassINC, said in announcing the results of the Sept. 25 report.

…In the study, MassInc noted that crime in Worcester is relatively low and socio-economic conditions are better than in many other Gateway Cities. Mr. Forman said high incarceration rates are “no doubt even more problematic” in cities that struggle more deeply with crime.

In an opinion column, Mr. Forman wrote that “overuse” of incarceration exacerbates the long-term costs of the opiate crisis, because offering treatment in jail is less effective and more costly.

The MassINC report juxtaposes a number of costs in its report. The cost to incarcerate residents from the Main Middle neighborhood in 2013, $1.7 million, eclipsed the city’s $1.6 million economic development budget that year, it noted; the state spent twice as much incarcerating Union Hill residents that year ($1.9 million) as it gave to the city for youth violence prevention.

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BOSTON — Fear often trumps levelheaded reasoning when it comes to criminal justice policy in Massachusetts. With audience-hungry news broadcasts constantly fanning the flames, counterproductive laws have accumulated like weeds on a long neglected lot. This has repercussions for everyone, but the pain is especially sharp in Gateway Cities. If these communities are going to provide solid pathways to the American dream in a challenging economy, we must confront this reality.

A new report from the nonpartisan think-tank MassINC demonstrates the extent to which the overuse of incarceration hurts Gateway Cities by mapping the Worcester County Sheriff’s intake data: On some Worcester streets, admissions to correctional facilities come from home after home; a downtown Worcester neighborhood lost one out of every 10 young men to incarceration between 2009 and 2015; within the span of a single year, another neighborhood saw 350 admissions to the county’s correctional facilities.

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This week, however, we were reminded by a MassInc report on the city that economic development must be intractably linked to social development, or the former will be harder to maintain.

According to the report, “The Geography of Incarceration in a Gateway City,” high rates of incarceration can have a chilling impact on community and economic development in cities like Worcester.

In addition to creating a climate for increased crime, high incarceration rates can lead to low school performance, behavioral problems among children, and long-term political and civil disengagement, the report noted.

Meanwhile, communities with high incarceration rates generally nurture high levels of poverty, unemployment and racial segregation, according to the report.

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The Regeneration Project — a group of community leaders convened by the New Bedford Economic Development Council — deserves recognition for raising awareness that the city’s fortunes lie in the fate of its public schools (“Our View: Statehouse must boost its support for education,” May 24). Whether it’s growing a skilled workforce or maintaining healthy neighborhoods, nothing is more essential in today’s economy for regional urban centers like New Bedford.

It’s especially notable that these leaders have the courage to acknowledge that New Bedford’s public schools are simply not going to meet the needs of their students without additional resources. This sound judgment is backed by an independent commission formed by the Legislature two years ago to look at whether schools in Massachusetts have the funding they need.

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As for efficiencies, one likely candidate appears to be the state’s correctional system, where a 12 percent drop in the inmate population since 2011 hasn’t been offset with a similar decrease in spending. Rather, it’s increased 18 percent over the same period. Those contradictory figures were the subject of a forum earlier in the week by MassINC and the Massachusetts Criminal Justice Reform Coalition.

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THERE IS A LOT of talk in Massachusetts about moving away from the misguided “tough-on-crime” policies of the 1990s and instead embracing a more rehabilitative approach to criminal justice. But as an important new study set for release Monday demonstrates, policy makers aren’t living up to the second part of the bargain.

The report, from the MassINC think tank, shows that even as the state’s average daily prison population declined by 12 percent over the last five years, corrections spending soared by 18 percent. Read More…

The MassINC think tank, in a new report, criticized state government for increasing spending on corrections even as the inmate population has declined.

The report found that most of the spending has been on hiring staff and raising salaries, not on programming to benefit inmates and reduce recidivism.

The MassINC report also highlights disparate spending levels between counties.

“(Spending has) gone up considerably when the population is going down at a time of very tight state budgets,” said Ben Forman, research director at MassINC. “The question we ask is are those additional dollars going to provide better services to reduce recidivism…. The data suggest they hadn’t, which is troubling.”

MassINC is pushing for reforms to the state’s correctional system that focus on increasing programs and services for inmates and implementing less harsh sentencing and incarceration practices. It plans to release the research at a summit on criminal justice reform on Monday.

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As the Trump administration revives a tough-on-crime strategy, Beacon Hill continues its debate on rethinking how best to treat those convicted of crimes. That debate has put the spotlight on the usually subdued leader of the judicial branch, Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Ralph Gants.

Gants renewed his call for the end of mandatory minimum sentences Monday, saying the cost of incarcerating so many members of society is untenable for the Commonwealth.

“Mandatory minimum sentencing is a failed experiment that must end. And it must end for all crimes, except the crimes of murder and repeated OUI offenses, not just for drug crimes,” Gants said at a criminal justice summit hosted by MassINC.

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The report comes from the nonpartisan think tank MassINC, which advocates for criminal justice reform measures.

Its authors write that, over the five years, spending “associated with recidivism reduction did not increase significantly, and these services continue to represent a small fraction of total correctional expenditure.”

“The savings if we’d held the spending growth to inflation would have been $72 million,” co-author Michael Widmer, former president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, told WBUR’s Newscast Unit. “That $72 million could be used dearly elsewhere, including on programs to reduce recidivism.”

The report follows a survey, from the MassINC Polling Group, that found most Massachusetts voters are concerned about the effects of incarceration. Fifty-three percent of poll respondents said they think that when inmates get out of prison, they are “more likely to commit new crime because they’ve been hardened by their prison experience.”

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BOSTON — Spending on state and county correctional facilities grew over the past five years despite a significant decrease in the prison population, according to a new report from a local think tank.

The report found that the spending increase was focused on raises and new hires for correctional officers, and not on programs for the prisoners, according to MassINC. Their research, which they called “the most detailed report on state correctional expenditure,” is being presented Monday at the organization’s Massachusetts Criminal Justice Reform Coalition Summit.

BOSTON — As the number of people incarcerated in Massachusetts state or county facilities declined since fiscal year 2011, state spending on correctional facilities climbed by about 18 percent, according to a report released Monday.

Since fiscal 2011 — the highwater mark for the state’s incarcerated population — the average daily number of people incarcerated in state prisons and jails has declined by about 12 percent from 23,850 to 20,961 but state spending for the Department of Correction and the 14 county sheriffs’ offices increased by $181 million to $1.2 billion.

The report’s findings were the focus of a summit hosted by MassINC and the Massachusetts Criminal Justice Reform Coalition on Monday morning to examine how the state could spend savings associated with a declining inmate population on ancillary programs like drug rehabilitation and mental health counseling to improve the broader criminal justice system.

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The state’s inmate population has declined in recent years, but Massachusetts is still spending more money to operate jails and prisons, specifically to pay corrections staff, according to an independent criminal justice report that questions the state’s spending priorities.

Spending for the Department of Correction and the 14 county sheriffs’ offices outpaced inflation and rose 18 percent from 2011 to 2016, reaching $1.2 billion, according to the report by the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, or MassINC, a nonpartisan think tank.

The prison population, which was at its peak in 2011, declined by 3,000 inmates, or 12 percent, in those same years, according to the report.

The report, which is slated to be presented Monday morning at a Criminal Justice Reform Coalition Policy Summit, raises questions about the state’s spending priorities at a time when legislators and policy makers have proposed reforms to the state’s criminal justice system and the approach to inmates. Scheduled speakers at the summit include Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Ralph Gants and US Representative Katherine Clark, Democrat of Melrose.

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A popular perception these days is that the public does not trust judges they see as detached, unrealistic and often too soft on criminals.

According to a new poll, that’s not true in Massachusetts. Voters surveyed showed support for reforms to the state’s criminal justice system, including giving judges more discretion in sentencing and providing job training and education for inmates.

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Massachusetts voters support reforms to the state’s criminal justice system, including giving judges more discretion in sentencing, providing job training and education for inmates, and sealing criminal records sooner, according to a poll released by the MassINC Polling Group on Thursday.

The polling group is affiliated with the MassINC think tank, which supports criminal justice reform.

“Massachusetts voters are ready to embrace reform throughout the system,” said Steve Koczela, president of the MassINC Polling Group. “They support changing practices in everything from sentencing to what happens in prison to policies for what happens after release.”

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The National Day of Empathy, held in conjunction with MassInc. and #Cut50, was designed to generate empathy on a massive scale for millions of Americans impacted by the criminal justice system…Those gathered at the Statehouse highlighted the needs and shared the perspective of Americans impacted by the current justice system — with speakers ranging from incarcerated individuals working to transform themselves to people with criminal records desperately seeking a second chance.

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MassInc. Research Director Ben Forman said that for so-called Gateway Cities like Pittsfield, urban centers outside of Boston that are critical indicators of the state of the commonwealth, to advance, they must enhance their educational assets and vision to create high-quality learning environments.

“If the new formula the state designs to sort schools is not sensitive to the complexity of inclusive urban districts,” Forman wrote in a December 2016 policy paper, “Gateway Cities will have great difficulty attracting both families with young children and talented educators to their communities.”

MassInc. convened a public breakfast forum at the Berkshire Museum last week, in partnership with the Berkshire Compact for Education, to address how to best improve the state’s current accountability system.

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“The criminal justice system, from the front end to the back end . . . is broken, it’s deeply broken,” said Senator Sonia Chang-Diaz, one of about a dozen senators who have filed criminal justice reform bills this session.

The senators characterized the reforms as a matter of inequality because people of color and low-income residents are disproportionately incarcerated. It is also a financial imperative, they said, because it is expensive to keep people behind bars.

A 2016 report by MassINC, a nonpartisan think tank, found that Roxbury residents are incarcerated at twice the rate of Boston residents as a whole. It also found that more was spent incarcerating residents of the Codman Square neighborhood in Dorchester in 2013 than was spent on grants for gang prevention for the entire state of Massachusetts.

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Federal No Child Left Behind legislation measured schools based on test scores, too narrow a gauge for most observers.

But how will schools in Springfield, Holyoke and other Massachusetts Gateway Cities respond to new standards that require a broader measure of how well a school is doing?

“Everybody says that a thing that gets measured gets managed,” said Benjamin Forman, research director for MassINC, a Boston think tank. “What is happening now is that people are taking broader measures of school performance.”

Forman hosted a series of panel discussions Thursday in Springfield in an effort to learn how schools in Gateway Cities — older industrial communities now struggling to reinvent their economies — can have a say in new school criteria and use them to their advantage.

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MassINC and the Univeristy of Massachusetts Dartmouth hosted a breakfast meeting Monday at the Waypoint Event Center to discuss potential changes.

Matthew Deninger of DESE told the group that as the state rewrites the rules for measuring school quality, it could consider such factors as access to the arts, a well-rounded curriculum, advanced coursework in high schools, school climate and culture, and the rate of chronic absenteeism.

“ESSA provides us an opportunity to push our thinking,” he said.

Ben Forman, research director at MassINC, said the state’s system of accountability has helped raise achievement to the point where low-income Massachusetts students now rank first in the nation in Grade 8 math, the same as all eighth-graders in the state, whereas in 2003, low-income students ranked 26th, far behind the general population, which ranked third.

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A thinktank that co-sponsored the forum, the Massachusetts Institute for a new Commonwealth, or MassINC, is helping gateway cities and school leaders take advantage of the new education act as a way to advocate for their school districts.

A MassINC report on ESSA shows the challenges that Lowell and other gateway cities face. An average of two-thirds of students in such districts are from low-income families, a major increase from 2002, and claim a disproportionate share of students who are foreign-born or do not speak English as their native language, according to the group.
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WORCESTER – A teachers union president, a school administrator, and a high school student all agreed at a panel conversation Thursday morning: there is room in the state’s next accountability standards for factors other than test scores.

Other speakers at the event, which was hosted by MassINC and the Worcester Education Collaborative at the Beechwood Hotel, also expressed optimism that Worcester and other “Gateway Cities” in the state in particular could be helped by a new approach to measuring school success.

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MARK TWAIN made famous the adage that there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.

Over the years, piles of reform proposals on an array of issues have been decided by statistical analyses that could be colored dozens of different ways. But when statistics show that in some parts of the city, residents from nearly every other home on some streets are ending up in jail, the need for wholesale change is irrefutable.

SPRINGFIELD — Worcester Public Schools Superintendent Maureen Binienda has worked to create partnerships with local corporations and non-profits to create more opportunities for students.

Those efforts earned her an award at the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth, or MassINC, fourth annual Gateway Cities Innovation Awards and Summit.

At the event on Tuesday, Binienda accepted the Gateway Cities Champion Award, given annually to someone who has shown “exceptional leadership,” MassINC said in a statement.

“I was humbled to get the award because there are so many people doing great work,” she said Wednesday morning.

The event, held at the MassMutual Center, seemed to have a recurring message of collaboration, Binienda said, which especially stood out to her. She took in stories of other people and organizations who addressed problems by looking beyond themselves.

“Collaboration is the only answer,” she said.

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“In the communities of color in our city, nearly every other home, at least every other street has been affected by incarceration,” said Ben Forman, the research director at the independent think tank MassINC and an author of the report. “When you have so many families all at once affected by incarceration, that neighborhood cannot be healthy.” Read more…

On the surface, that seems like a plus for house-hunters and businesses looking to relocate in Gateway Cities — but it actually has negative consequences. The low cost of housing means it is not financially worthwhile for developers to build there, so the cities and their economies are not growing.

That is one of the key pieces of information included in a new study released by the MassINC think tank called Rebuilding Renewal.

The study identifies the economic challenges faced by Gateway Cities due to slumping real estate prices. Although Massachusetts already invests disproportionately in Gateway Cities, the study recommends that the state increase its efforts to invest in what MassINC calls “transformative development,” which means building projects that are meant to catalyze other development in the surrounding areas.

“Urban neighborhoods are attractive to people today… On the other hand, these neighborhoods aren’t improving the way we would like them to,” said Ben Forman, research director for MassINC.

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“It’s really striking that Massachusetts spent more on courthouses in Gateway Cities than on housing or economic development,” said Benjamin Forman, research director at MassInc. “We need to approach every single dollar spent in these cities by thinking how can this dollar create more growth block by block.”

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BOSTON — In remarks at a conference on criminal justice reform at UMass Boston Friday, two retiring Massachusetts sheriffs with a combined 62 years of experience praised a state law passed this week to fight opioid addiction.

“As you look at the opiate crisis, it’s a medical issue, it’s a public health issue. It’s not a criminal justice issue, where we’re putting people who are obviously addicted, compounding it by putting the criminal justice system on their backs,” said Hampden County Sheriff Michael Ashe. “It’s quite a cross.”

Ashe, who has been sheriff since 1974, and Essex County Sheriff Frank Cousins, who has been sheriff since 1996, were the keynote speakers at the annual conference, organized by Boston-based policy group MassINC. The sheriffs discussed the importance of addressing drug addiction and other needs that inmates have before they can successfully return to society.

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