On June 9, your headline article, “Behind Bars: Suspect in Jail 500 Days, No Trial Set,” by John Chappell was very disturbing but, I think, right on target.

I am responding to and agreeing with Sgt. Smoak’s observations. I have no way of knowing whether Sergio Sanchez is innocent or guilty. However, I did work for six years in the Department of Corrections. For over four of those years I was a case analyst, interviewing from four to six incoming inmates a day about their criminal, family, and work history and then writing their files that would follow them throughout their prison terms.

During those four years, my impression was that I interviewed a significant number of innocent men. These inmates would be poor, black males who had lived in areas of heavy drug traffic. They had already stayed in jail awaiting trial much longer than anyone who would have been convicted of a drug crime.

These inmates might come into prison with a two-year sentence for felony possession of cocaine but would have four or five months of jail credit. In the days before structured sentencing, an inmate might be expected to serve a month to six weeks on a two-year sentence. Here is how it worked: The two-year sentence was cut immediately by good time to one year. Then, after processing, the inmate was assigned a gained-time job that reduced his sentence by about two months to 10 months. Since he was eligible for parole within the last nine months of his sentence, he could be released in as little as a month. So why were these inmates serving four or five months in jail?

These inmates would say that they were innocent — in the wrong place at the wrong time or victims of mistaken identity. In any case, they ad refused a plea bargain because they thought they were innocent. They were poor, so they could not get out on bond. They were poor, so they could not pay a lawyer to do all the legwork necessary to prove their innocence.

They would tell me with bitterness in their voices that they thought they would never get out of jail unless they took a plea. After hearing a large number of such cases, I believe that many of these stories were true. The system uses delay and the piling up of charges to force people into taking a plea. It’s cheaper to do it that way, and the courts are jammed.

Cultural and language factors often place Hispanic inmates in a similar situation to the inmates mentioned above. For instance, when I worked at a certain correctional institution, every Hispanic inmate was tested for IQ with a standardized test that supposedly was adjusted to minimize the effect of cultural and language differences. Yet, all of the Hispanic inmates tested as nearly mentally retarded, even though they obviously were not. The psychology department recognized the pattern and stopped recording the test results.

Thank you for highlighting the plight of people who may be overlooked in our judicial system. Your article was insightful and needed to be said. The more difficult issue is what can be done to fix the problem.

Charles F. Taylor

West End