A jail without locks in need of a quick fix
Months before the recent disturbance at the Bristol County jail in Dartmouth, there was a plan — a plan by the county’s newly elected sheriff to retrofit the facility to make it more humane, more secure, and less likely to provide the means for suicides, which were a too-frequent event under the previous administration.
In addition, Sheriff Paul Heroux proposed to close a separate facility in New Bedford that dates back to 1888 — and, yes, had once housed the accused ax murderer Lizzie Borden.
Today Heroux is looking at more than $200,000 in damage caused by some 20 pre-trial detainees — a situation touched off precisely because inmates objected to being moved to accommodate the renovations aimed at reducing suicide risks.
So, yes, it appears in the world of corrections no good deed goes unpunished.
Heroux took over the county’s correctional facilities this year after defeating Republican Sheriff Thomas Hodgson, best known for volunteering to send inmates to help build then-President Donald Trump’s border wall. Under Hodgson, the facility had the highest suicide rate in the state. Although it houses about 12 percent of the state’s inmates, it accounted for about 25 percent of inmate suicides.
That was something Heroux was committed to doing something about.
A study he commissioned earlier this year that concluded in April pointed in some useful directions. Among them “the replacement or retrofitting of metal bunk frames, replacement of ventilation grates on walls and ceilings and holes with grates that are no more than 3/16 inches in diameter” and “covering of exposed conduit piping.” The bunk frames and piping had too often become deadly for suicidal inmates.
That’s part of the renovation that was scheduled when the standoff began April 21. That and the long overdue installation of plumbing for toilets in cells. Because that particular building, built in the 1980s, had been constructed without toilets in each cell, a 1998 class action lawsuit prohibited inmates from being locked in those cells.
By all accounts, the disturbance was in the end wellmanaged by correction officers with no injuries to staff or inmates — and with a level of transparency on the part of the sheriff ’s office that certainly surpasses anything his predecessor offered.
But Heroux in an interview also conceded, “We got lucky.”
Help arrived in time and the leaders of the disturbance — a group, the sheriff said, that included three men facing murder charges and nine facing assault and battery charges — were fairly quickly dispatched to other facilities.
“But this isn’t a new problem,” he added. “Not having locks on doors goes back to that 1998 court ruling. We had 75 people who were not locked behind doors.
“We need help. We can’t do this by ourselves. And this needs to be done now.”
Heroux has been attempting to jump-start the renovations with some $1.5 million in canteen funds. But adding in-cell toilets to 11 housing units currently without them on the Dartmouth campus is about a $5.5 million item and locks for the doors (again, impossible without the installation of toilets) another $2 million or so.
The added benefit — beyond security for a facility badly in need of it — would be the closure of the old Ash Street Jail — a costly site to operate and one that Heroux told lawmakers in a letter earlier this year “does not fit the needs of a modern corrections system.”
The New Bedford facility, which is capable of housing some 226 inmates, usually houses about half that. But it still needs to be heated all winter — at a cost of about $10,000 a month for utilities. Meals for inmates are brought in three times a day from a central kitchen in Dartmouth — accounting for another 438 hours of labor a year.
Heroux also points to the fact that most of the programming options for prisoners are in Dartmouth, with a mere handful available at Ash Street. And consolidating operations at one site would help relieve staffing shortages and cut down on overtime.
“If we put locks on the doors in just two housing units, we can close Ash Street,” Heroux added.
That would certainly be a win-win for corrections in Bristol County. And with the state budget still a work in progress, it would also be a good time to acknowledge what a huge difference a relatively small amount of money can make — in the lives of inmates and in the safety of those assigned to watch over them.