Hodgson has a race, at last
Is this the end of the line for Bristol County Sheriff Tom Hodgson?
One can dream. Hodgson, who rules jails in the state’s southeast, has been in the job for 25 years and has, until now, seemed utterly untouchable. This despite the fact that his lockups have much higher suicide rates than those in other urban counties, according to the New England Center for Investigative Reporting. Earlier this month, a suicidal man who murdered his mother and set her body alight in Truro was transferred to Hodgson’s decrepit Ash Street lockup, rather than to a secure psychiatric facility: Instead of Adam Howe being placed under constant supervision, Bristol county corrections officers checked on him every 15 minutes — plenty of time for him to find a way to kill himself. Howe was dead less than 48 hours later.
Hodgson has built a national reputation on the backs of the unfortunate souls who end up in his jails, burnishing a tough-on-crime persona by trying to make his charges pay for their own incarceration, attempting to resurrect chain gangs, and offering them up to build a border wall for the sheriff ’s beloved former president Donald Trump, for whom Hodgson was a uniformed lap-dog.
Last year, the federal government terminated its contract with Bristol County, after finding Hodgson’s office mistreated federal immigration detainees. This came after various authorities found that the county’s failure to take adequate COVID precautions amounted to deliberate indifference to them, and that the sheriff had broken the law by using excessive force against immigration detainees during unrest at the lockup. But at least it all comes from Hodgson’s heart: The immigration hard-liner has ties to hate group the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
All of this should be disqualifying. But for decades, Hodgson has won a bunch of six-year terms by leveraging the fact that people don’t care about what happens to those with the misfortune to land in his jails. He even ran unopposed in the last election.
Not this year, though: Attleboro Mayor Paul Heroux is trying to unseat Hodgson. Thoughtful and well-qualified, Heroux has a master’s degree in criminology from the University of Pennsylvania, another in international relations from the London School of Economics, and a third in public administration from Harvard. He has worked in the jail system in Philadelphia, and as a director of research at the state Department of Corrections.
He has thought deeply about how best to house those awaiting trial or serving time, and how to prepare them for the outside world so that everyone is safer upon their release. He has promised to bring a more compassionate approach to the jails, saying he will expand treatment for mental illness and substance use disorder, and better equip those leaving for the outside, with connections to housing, further treatment, and jobs. Heroux also believes he can improve Bristol’s dismal record of suicides by making the jails feel less like hopeless places.
“Hodgson’s attitude is, ‘If you don’t like it here, don’t come back,’” Heroux said. “He just doesn’t get it. We can do so much better.”
What the Democrat is promising here is a smart-on-crime approach even conservatives once supported. It’s also the approach of a sheriff who is all about the people under his supervision, and not about himself. A Sheriff Heroux will not spend endless hours he should be devoting to Bristol County burnishing his national profile.
If, that is, he can overcome the inertia of incumbency. Hodgson has been in office a long time, and plenty of people in the county know him or owe him. And, in a head-scratcher of a development, a super PAC connected to outgoing and vaunted moderate Republican Governor Charlie Baker is backing the Trump sycophant, CommonWealth Magazine reported.
Those who disagree with Hodgson appear not to have shown up in significant numbers before now. But this year’s threeway Democratic primary saw a big jump in votes cast for the office, according to Carol Rose, head of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.
“Voters are waking up,” Rose said. “Maybe not this time, but soon, [a sheriff ] is going to be held accountable by the voters.”
Please, please, let it be this time.