Gunfire exploded from an assault-style weapon, spraying bullets into the heavy traffic of Memorial Drive in Cambridge, Massachusetts, triggering widespread panic and causing the nine-hour shutdown of a four-lane city artery.
What started May 11th as an ordinary spring day ended in terror, leaving a police officer hospitalized and two drivers clinging to life.
Immediately, disturbing reports emerged about the alleged gunman, who had been released from a psychiatric hospital just days earlier. In 2014, he was sentenced to prison for assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. While out on parole in 2020, he committed armed assault with intent to murder a Boston police officer. For that, he received what critics thought was a shockingly light sentence. He was again out on parole when he allegedly opened fire on Memorial Drive.
A public outcry ensued. Why was such an obviously dangerous person out on parole instead of behind bars?
According to the Prison Policy Initiative, America spends $445 billion on the criminal legal system each year, with $115.8 billion of that going to prisons, jails, parole, and probation—an indication of a broad consensus favoring incarceration for public safety. At the same time, Americans are divided on whether too many people are incarcerated, and whether the conditions of incarceration are humane.
The truth is that the majority of incarcerated people will eventually reenter society, but little about prison life sets them up for success. Incarcerated people endure profound psychological deprivation, severe loss of personal agency, isolation from family, friends, and community, and poor living conditions, according to James Pingeon ’83, litigation director at Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts. “Prisons,” he says, “are inherently unhealthy and high-stress environments where people get sick easily and age quickly. Medical care is deficient, to put it mildly. Roughly a third of incarcerated individuals have diagnosed mental illness, yet mental health care is woefully inadequate.”
“I think all lawyers, whether or not they go into criminal law, should, as a responsible member of the bar, know what is happening in our prisons and come to acknowledge that those we incarcerate are persons, and persons capable of growth and change. They deserve to be given that opportunity.”
BC Law Professor Emeritus Frank Herrmann ’77, SJ
The Boston where Chiquisha Robinson ’05 grew up in the 1980s and 1990s was awash in youth violence, with children killing children for inexplicable reasons. But she also saw that tragic era end over the course of eight years. What intervened was the Boston Miracle, the massive effort that brought together hundreds of religious leaders, cops, people with criminal records and victims of crime and their families, service agencies, politicians, judges, and foundations on a common, sustained mission to stop the violence. The lessons she learned led her to a double-decade-and-counting career with the Washington, DC, Public Defender Service, where she is Deputy Chief for Prisoner and Reentry Legal Services. These lessons are fourfold:
One: Individual interventions matter. “I don’t see myself separated or any different from the clients that I represent,” says Robinson, who also co-chairs the DC Reentry Network, a coalition of nonprofits providing reentry services for people with criminal records. “But for my education, access to resources, a dad who invested the whole world into me…my outcomes could have looked very similar to theirs.”
Two: It takes a village and then some. “I saw what community can do, I saw what working together can do,” she says. “It’s not a one-stop solution. It’s an infrastructure, and it has to be intentional. And when that happens, it’s not speculative. You see actual change.”
Three: Incarceration is a symptom and a cause. The people it hits hardest are those relegated to zip codes deprived of resources and opportunities, and it contributes to community harm. “When communities are shattered,” she says, “homes are shattered, families are shattered, jobs are lost, people lose their parents to the carceral state.”
Four: Formerly incarcerated people deserve a chance not just to survive, but to thrive. “What we find with people with criminal records is there is a ceiling that’s put on them,” Robinson says. That, she argues, keeps them from reaching for their highest aspirations, and it robs their communities of their potential contributions. In keeping with these ideas, Robinson and her BC Law classmate Sarah Jane Foreman ’05 are co-founding Levels2This, a company aimed at helping individuals realize their best ambitions.
What Robinson describes is being tackled with unusual depth and breadth at Boston College Law School. Guided by the Jesuit imperative to acknowledge and foster the humanity of every person, an array of ambitious student clinics are covering everything from prison civil rights to parole to wrongful conviction to, possibly uniquely, entrepreneurship by returning citizens. These efforts are bolstered by the Boston College Prison Education Program, considered the most robust of its kind in Massachusetts, and by alums serving as policymakers, advocates, and criminal defense attorneys.
The BC Law community is embedded in a growing Massachusetts network engaged in reducing incarceration and recidivism. In 2010, Massachusetts began a journey of criminal justice reform that led to sweeping legislation in 2018. Those reforms, which included several bills authored by State Senator Jamie Eldridge ’00, founder and senate chair of the Criminal Justice Reform Caucus, decriminalized minor offenses, diverted more youth and adults with mental health challenges from the criminal legal system, reformed pretrial detention and mandatory sentencing laws, regulated solitary confinement, and provided for medical release. Then, in 2023, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled it unconstitutional to impose life without parole on those who committed first-degree murder when they were 20 or younger.
The upshot? Without making claims about cause and effect, Massachusetts has seen incarceration, recidivism, and violent crime rates drop significantly.
The rise in the number of people diverted or released from prison has brought an increased need for vocational and educational programs, legal assistance, housing, and medical and mental health care. People with criminal records are themselves stepping up, founding and leading groups like the Transformational Prison Project, which advocates for legislative reform; Justice for Housing, which fights homelessness among formerly incarcerated women; and New Beginnings Reentry Services, which was founded by a formerly incarcerated client of BC Law’s Project Entrepreneur clinic—more on that later.
Massachusetts colleges and universities are also doing more. “Boston College, both the law school and the college, have found ways to leverage professors, students, and staff to provide the access and resources to educate and represent the interests of many incarcerated people that is not only better for the incarcerated men and women, but it improves public safety and contributes to the Commonwealth as a whole,” Eldridge says.
Reform efforts continue, Eldridge notes, with bills currently filed for the creation of a prison-monitoring oversight office, higher compensation for people who were wrongfully convicted, and ending the burden of lifetime parole for those convicted as juveniles.
“Boston College, both the law school and the college, have found ways to leverage professors, students, and staff to provide the access and resources to educate and represent the interests of many incarcerated people that is not only better for the incarcerated men and women, but it improves public safety and contributes to the Commonwealth as a whole.”
Massachusetts State Senator Jamie Eldridge ’00
Despite reforms, solitary confinement, a damaging kind of extreme isolation that leads to higher suicide and death rates, persists. BC Law’s Civil Rights Clinic is tackling it head-on. In conjunction with Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts and the law firm Holland & Knight, the clinic is suing the Massachusetts Department of Correction for statutory and constitutional violations in its solitary confinement practices. The suit, Evelyn v. Jenkins, is a class action filed on behalf of some 200 incarcerated individuals. “Students have been front and center in this litigation, bringing their passion and energy to this often-overlooked population,” says Assistant Clinical Professor Reena Parikh, director of the Civil Rights Clinic.
The clinic is also partnering with a coalition of some 20 organizations, led by the group Families for Justice as Healing, who oppose the plans of Governor Healey’s administration to spend $360 million expanding the Commonwealth’s lone women’s prison. The coalition instead wants resources put toward improving conditions, programs, and services. The clinic’s role in the coalition is unique: “Students are able to have legal visits with women that are confidential, where we can ask about the conditions of confinement and assess their legality,” Parikh says.
In collaboration with Families for Justice as Healing, BC Law students interviewed more than 30 women and published a report detailing their positions on the governor’s plan. The women said that they would prefer to see state resources spent addressing the root causes of incarceration and helping formerly incarcerated women reenter the community; on remedying the prison culture of negligence, humiliation, and collective punishment; on job training, education, and healing programs; on safer facilities in good repair. The report was delivered to legislators and the governor’s staff, bringing the voices of incarcerated women directly to decisionmakers.
At the BC Law clinic Project Entrepreneur under the direction of Adjunct Professor Lawrence Gennari, student-lawyers learn how to counsel, advise, and assist real business clients—in this case, aspiring business entrepreneurs with criminal records. Since its launch in 2019, the clinic has served more than 80 individuals. Their clients’ greatest challenge “is just navigating the basics of life, and that’s not something that typical entrepreneurs have to deal with,” Gennari says.
“There are plenty of entrepreneurs who have financial and other support from family, friends; or they leave a long-held business position where they’ve developed a reputation or they see an opportunity as a result of being in a job for a while. None of that applies to people coming back from prison,” Gennari says. The course culminates in a pitch session, where the entrepreneurs present their business concepts to CEOs, foundation leaders, and investors. After hearing Project Entrepreneur client Stacey Borden pitch her concept for New Beginnings Reentry Services, a couple in attendance purchased a halfway house for the new venture.
Many of Project Entrepreneur’s clients are enrolled in the Boston College Prison Education Program, which, with more than 100 students, is the largest college prison program in the Commonwealth. PEP students who haven’t yet attained their diplomas while incarcerated can continue their studies at BC’s Woods College of Advancing Studies on campus when they are released. “We build up trust with those students,” says PEP Chair Patrick Conway. “And I think that over time, when they hear, ‘Oh, I could also have representation through the law school,’ my assumption would be that that gives them that extra level of confidence, of ‘Oh, this is going to be high quality.’”
In fact, a number of PEP students have been clients not only of Project Entrepreneur, but also of BC Law’s Parole and Prison Clinic, taught by Professor Emeritus Frank R. Herrmann ’77, SJ. Launched in 2019, after the Massachusetts reform law made it possible for terminally ill or permanently incapacitated incarcerated people to seek medical parole, the clinic originally focused on medical release cases. However, because the logistics of those cases proved challenging, the clinic now primarily focuses on parole for lifers and non-lifers eligible for parole. The clinic also handles commutation for lifers serving without possibility of parole, and disciplinary matters.
The people [incarceration] hits hardest are those relegated to zip codes deprived of resources and opportunities, and it contributes to community harm. “When communities are shattered, homes are shattered, families are shattered, jobs are lost, people lose their parents to the carceral state.”
Deputy Chief for Prisoner and Reentry Legal Services, DC Public Defender Service, Chiquisha Robinson ’05
“I think all lawyers, whether or not they go into criminal law, should, as a responsible member of the bar, know what is happening in our prisons and come to acknowledge that those we incarcerate are persons, and persons capable of growth and change. They deserve to be given that opportunity,” Herrmann says. “Most particularly, any prosecutor or judge or defense attorney should have some experience with the realities of the carceral world, as it’s called.”
Seeing one of her clients achieve parole was a joy for Parole and Prison Clinic student-lawyer Samantha Raymond ’26: “That he now gets to be free from the oppressive prison system and live his life and go to school and fulfill his dreams…to watch it happen was unlike any feeling,” she says. “It was profound.”
Alyssa Hatfield ’26, a student in BC Law’s Prosecution Clinic, participated in a day-long visit to the Massachusetts Correctional Institution-Norfolk as part of a contingent that included members of the Supreme Judicial Court’s Restorative Justice Committee. The event was led by Rappaport Center for Law and Public Policy Senior Fellow Danielle Sered, an expert in restorative justice, mass incarceration, and violence. “To have a glimpse of what incarceration looks like is really impactful and something I’m going to be taking away because I don’t ever want to treat it lightly,” says Hatfield, who will be joining the Middlesex County District Attorney’s Office in the fall.
Post-conviction and appellate attorney Amy Belger ’93 networks across many of BC and BC Law’s criminal justice initiatives, including the Innocence Program, the Prison Education Program, Project Entrepreneur, and the Parole and Prison Clinic. Long before making her career representing justice-involved clients, Belger was a prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. By serving the system in different roles, she came to realize that the line between victim and perpetrator for justice-involved individuals is thin indeed. “What I found was the life stories of a lot of my clients that led up to this night that they committed this horrible crime, they mirrored a lot of the life stories of the victims that I worked with, right? Because everybody came out of the same communities,” Belger says.It’s an insight she shares with Chiquisha Robinson, the Washington, DC, public defender who experienced the Boston Miracle as a young girl. Robinson has a vision to lift up not only presently and formerly incarcerated individuals, but entire communities. The cutting edge for reentry, she says, “doesn’t look like job training and resume support anymore. It looks like, how do we help you evolve and grow and transform?” That holistic approach, Robinson believes—that should be the mission.