New London — Standing in front of the city’s historic courthouse Tuesday, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, Heather Bond Somers, denounced the Malloy administration’s program that allows early release to prisoners who participate in rehabilitation programs.

Somers, of Groton, also wrote to Gov. Dannel P. Malloy Tuesday and called for the “immediate removal” of Michael P. Lawlor, the governor’s undersecretary for criminal justice and policy planning, who helped design the so-called Risk Reduction Earned Credit program enacted in October 2011.

Beside the podium, her campaign staff erected poster boards bearing the names of 21,000 prisoners they said had been released under the RREC program between September 2011 and March 2014. Somers said prisoners are being released without participating in rehabilitative programs and that Lawlor has told her an estimated two-thirds are expected to commit new crimes within three years of their release.

Lawlor could not immediately be reached for comment.

Mark Bergman, a spokesman for the Malloy campaign, said the Foley/Somers campaign “is ignoring the fact that crime is at an all-time low under Malloy.” Violent crime is down by 36 percent, Bergman said, and prisoners are serving longer sentences than under the previous administration. He said that as a former federal prosecutor, Malloy “is the only candidate that put prisoners behind bars.”

Somers cited the case of Frankie “The Razor” Resto, who was charged with fatally shooting a Meriden convenience store clerk after being released early from prison. Resto has since been found guilty of murder and sentenced to 53 years in prison.

Somers also referenced the case of Arthur Hapgood, a career criminal charged in August with fatally stabbing his 1-year-old niece in Bristol just a week after he was released from prison. Hapgood, she said, had earned early-release credits even though he failed drug tests in prison. Though Department of Correction Officials have said Hapgood served 90 percent of his prior sentence, Somers said 100 percent might have saved the victim’s life.

“As a mother, this is something I can’t sleep with,” she said. “It has to stop. If you do the crime, you’re going to do the time.”

Local radio personality J.S. Brady, standing with Somers at the podium, said that while touting Connecticut’s strict new gun laws in the wake of the Newtown tragedy, Malloy’s administration said the laws were worth enacting if they saved just one life. Brady, a former Connecticut state trooper whose show airs on 94.9 FM in the afternoons, said that because of the early release program, there is a 1-year-old in Bristol who lost her life. He urged voters to elect people who are going to change the law.

“This program needs to stop right now,” Brady said. “It’s not a Republican or Democrat thing.”

Democratic Party Communications Director Devon Puglia said that in citing the Hapgood case, the Foley campaign is “politicizing tragedy in the most disgusting way.”

k.florin@theday.com

Twitter: @KFLORIN