At the end of a task force meeting on prison reform at the State Capitol on Wednesday, a man casually dressed in a sport coat, turtleneck and clean New Balance sneakers moved to the podium to address legislators.
In a room filled with dark-suited men carrying expensive briefcases, the senior citizen seemed an unlikely lobbyist, yet everybody seemed to know him.
"No tie, no business cards, no cellphone," Jack Davies said later. "So I guess I'm an amateur."
Nothing could be further from the truth. John Thomas "Jack" Davies served in the Minnesota Senate from 1959 to 1982. He was chair of the Judiciary Committee and helped pass the sentencing guidelines that have affected people's lives ever since. The lawyer originally from Harvey, N.D., was later appointed to the Court of Appeals, where he saw scores of men and women pass through the justice system, heard their stories of hardship and woe.
But now he was coming before the legislative body, as he has so many times since he left the court in 2000, to try to persuade it to correct what he calls "the biggest mistake I ever made."
The establishment of the legal guidelines, intended to make sentencing consistent throughout the state, inadvertently prompted the Legislature to later abolish the parole board, and with it the hopes of many prison inmates for an early release. Davies' message is particularly salient now, as the state tries to figure out how to deal with crowded prisons. Last December, the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission voted to drastically change how long some drug users and sellers spend in prison, but that's being challenged in the Legislature.
Davies has proposed a bill, carried by Sen. Kathy Sheran, DFL-Mankato, that would restore a parole board of three retired or sitting district or appellate judges who would hear inmates' petitions for release and decide who to let out. "The goal of the program is to release inmates who no longer need to be incarcerated to protect the public," the legislation says.
Given that he's failed several times to pass similar legislation, Davies realizes he's tilting at windmills. That doesn't deter him one bit from addressing what he calls "a plague of prisons." In a letter he intends to send to task force members soon, Davies states: "It seems tragically shortsighted to bar any consideration of changes in an inmate's character, self-control, maturity, chemical dependencies, ethical attitudes, empathy for others and religious underpinnings. People do change."