Republican Tom Hodgson had run the county jails in Dartmouth and New Bedford for a quarter century, during which his charisma and his tough-on-crime approach toward inmates turned him into a local legend.
But details about Hodgson’s rehabilitation programs were often hard to pin down. In recent state-mandated reports, for instance, the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office left numerous fields blank about the size and scope of dozens of its programs.
The new sheriff, Paul Heroux, a technocrat with degrees from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the London School of Economics, is promising to modernize Bristol County’s jails with a data-driven approach to corrections. The jails house about 700 inmates in one of the poorest counties in Massachusetts, which includes the cities of New Bedford, Fall River, Taunton and Attleboro, where Heroux recently resigned as mayor to become Bristol County’s sheriff.
“One thing for sure is that services offered under me are going to be made public to a degree that we have not seen before,” Heroux said during his inauguration speech at Fall River’s Durfee High School on Tuesday night.
Heroux promised his office will publish statistics measuring whether the jail’s rehabilitation programs are helping people find stability after their release. Inmates in the Bristol County jails are either awaiting trial or serving sentences shorter than two and a half years.
“Publishing numbers is not just an academic exercise,” Heroux said. “It’s about reporting on our efforts in a meaningful way that will give the public full confidence that we are delivering results.”
“If it’s not already being done,” the new sheriff said, “we’re going to set inmates up with housing, healthcare and a job.”
Heroux also promised to offer tours of New Bedford’s Ash Street Jail, one of the oldest carceral facilities in the country, where living conditions are a subject of frequent dispute between activists and the sheriff’s office.
“I want anyone interested in seeing and learning about the conditions of confinement to have that opportunity,” Heroux said.
Heroux, who toured the facility last month, recently told WBSM, a local radio station, that the jail appears to be in decent condition. Still, Heroux said during his inauguration speech that he will bring in outside experts to study the unusually high suicide rate in the county’s jails.
Heroux is taking over as sheriff on Wednesday morning. He won election in November with 50.9% of the vote in Bristol County.
Ben Berke is the South Coast Bureau Reporter for The Public’s Radio. He can be reached at bberke@thepublicsradio.org. Follow him on Twitter @BenBerke6.
