Thomas Hodgson is in a
showdown with the governor.
Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson is headed for a high-noon showdown with Gov. Deval Patrick. The Patrick administration is trying to rein in Hodgson and the state’s other elected sheriffs in an effort to consolidate control over an overcrowded state and county corrections system that oversees more than 25,000 inmates and has a combined budget of $1 billion. Patrick wants more coordination between the officials who run state prisons and the sheriffs, who run county jails and houses of correction. And his aides want the sheriffs to stop dabbling in law enforcement and start taking a more prominent role in preparing inmates for life outside prison.
Hodgson, a tough-talking Republican with an entrepreneurial flair, wants no part of Patrick’s consolidation effort. He says it makes no sense to turn sheriffs into an appendage of the stifling state bureaucracy.
“They’re trying to redefine the mission of the sheriff,” Hodgson says outside the governor’s office after a meeting in November. “This whole homogenizing of things is not in the best interest of taxpayers.”
The showdown, when it comes, will be in the Legislature and will revolve around money. The governor’s aides are playing financial hardball with Hodgson and a handful of other sheriffs, threatening to cut off all state aid unless they take off their cowboy hats and become team players.
“We’ll fund the sheriffs adequately, as long as everyone comes into the fold with the same terms and obligations,” says Kevin Burke, the governor’s secretary of public safety. “We are all part of the whole. Sheriffs and state corrections have got to work together to be efficient.”
Most of the county sheriffs say they will come into the fold, in part because they have little choice. “We have one foot in bankruptcy and the other on a banana peel,” says Plymouth County Sheriff Joseph McDonald Jr., a Republican who is facing a $10 million deficit this year. Norfolk County Sheriff Michael Bellotti, a Democrat who is facing a $6 million deficit, says there’s nothing wrong with working cooperatively with the state on corrections issues. “I don’t see any bogeyman in the details,” he says.
Suffolk County Sheriff Andrea Cabral, a Democrat, is grappling with a $25 million deficit. She says the sheriffs need more secure state funding, but she is waiting to see the details of any legislation that emerges before taking a stand.
Hodgson, facing a $6 million shortfall, is openly defiant. He calls the Patrick administration’s budgetary brinkmanship an idle threat because it will only lead to a public safety crisis. He says the consolidation of state control over county corrections is bad public policy that will result in waste and inefficiency.
“They aren’t looking at this from a public policy perspective,” says Hodgson on a telephone call from Washington, where he was holding meetings with Homeland Security officials and the Portuguese ambassador to the United States. “They’re saying, ‘How can we gobble up more control and money to take care of our state problems?’”
Constant budget shortfalls
The state’s 14 sheriffs may not be well known outside their counties, but they are politically powerful. Elected to six-year terms, they collectively employ several thousand workers, oversee more than 14,000 prisoners, and control a combined budget of $556 million. Their primary job is to lock up people from their counties who are awaiting trial or who have been sentenced to jail terms of less than two-and-a-half years.
Seven of the sheriffs — those in Berkshire, Essex, Franklin, Hampden, Hampshire, Middlesex, and Worcester counties — are already financial wards of the state. They stopped being county operations in the late 1990s, after Middlesex County went into bankruptcy. Like district attorneys, they are elected officials who seek funding from the Legislature every year. Their employees work for the state and participate in the state’s health plan and pension system.
Jail in New Bedford.
The seven remaining sheriffs — those in Barnstable, Bristol, Dukes, Nantucket, Norfolk, Plymouth, and Suffolk Dukes counties — are part of what’s left of county government, relying on a hodgepodge of funding from the state, assessments on municipalities in each county, and excise taxes collected on county real estate transactions. All the funding is thrown into a pot and then appropriated by the County Government Finance Review Board, a Beacon Hill entity that includes officials from the administration, the Revenue Department, and the state auditor’s office.
The last few years have been rocky ones financially for the county sheriffs. With the real estate market tanking, and state and county appropriations failing to keep pace, sheriffs have been facing budget shortfalls year after year. Last year, Norfolk County Sheriff Bellotti said several vendors stopped making deliveries to him because of his inability to pay bills. He had to borrow supplies, including toilet paper, from better-off sheriffs. All of the county sheriffs have been relying on late-in-the-year supplemental appropriations from the state to make ends meet.
Leslie Kirwan, the governor’s secretary of administration and finance, says the best way to stabilize the county sheriffs financially is to make them state sheriffs, giving each of them their own line item in the budget and transferring their employees to the state payroll. Her plan would disband the County Government Finance Review Board and transfer the revenue it receives from the deeds excise tax to the state’s general fund. Municipalities would no longer have to financially support their county sheriffs, saving them about $10 million, she says.
The approach would allow state officials to monitor sheriff spending more closely, since all expenditures would show up on the state’s computer system. It would also put all 14 sheriffs on the same financial footing. Kirwan said Patrick has been clear about that: “He doesn’t want to have a hybrid situation,” she says.
Kirwan thought she had the county sheriffs’ support for a conversion bill last year, but it died, causing some hard feelings. The Patrick administration is now working with the sheriffs on a new version of that bill, but Kirwan’s patience is running thin. If a bill doesn’t pass this year, she says, the Patrick administration will seek to cut off all state funding to the county sheriffs. With the exception of Dukes County, which has no jail and relies entirely on local funds, state aid currently accounts for about two-thirds of each county sheriff’s budget.
Most of the county sheriffs are pledging to cooperate, but they insist that their budget problems are largely of the state’s own making. They say the state constantly underfunds them, and then when it bails them out at the end of the year, it doesn’t roll that money into the following year’s appropriation. “Every year it’s back to the future,” says one sheriff’s aide.
Hodgson has actually seen his state aid decline over the years. In fiscal 2001, his state aid amounted to $37.4 million. This year it’s down to $30.1 million, a drop of nearly 20 percent, even though his inmate population has increased more than 40 percent over that period.
“It’s all about control,” Hodgson says of the administration’s budget maneuvering. He says he and the other county sheriffs have asked why they can’t get a line item in the state budget while remaining county sheriffs. He quotes Kirwan’s general counsel, David Sullivan, as saying: “If we’re going to give you the money, we want more control.”
Renting beds to the feds
Seven sheriffs moonlight as federal innkeepers, renting space in their jails and prisons to the federal government. It started as a way to fill a few empty beds and bring in some extra cash, but it has mushroomed into a booming $33 million side business. The sheriffs were holding 1,200 federal inmates in November, two-thirds of them people who have been swept up in the federal government’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
“It’s the crack cocaine of county corrections,” says Sheriff James DiPaolo of Middlesex County, a Democrat whose space constraints have prevented him from holding illegal immigrants. “It’s quick money and it can be addictive.”
It is also controversial. State and county correctional facilities in Massachusetts are already overcrowded, yet many sheriffs are adding to the problem by squeezing federal detainees into their facilities. State officials grumble that some sheriffs then complain about overcrowding and ask the state for more money.
when John Quincy Adams
was president.
Immigration detainees can spend months or years in custody awaiting deportation or fighting to stay in the country. Most of the immigration detainees haven’t committed a crime, but five sheriffs lock them up with people who have been charged with or convicted of crimes.
In a report issued in December, the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts said federal immigration detainees are being crammed into sheriff cells, receiving inadequate medical care, and being deprived of their civil rights. The ACLU said the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is failing to supervise local sheriffs properly.
The sheriffs deny that immigration detainees are being treated poorly, but they make no secret of the reason they are holding them. “I need the money,” says Norfolk County Sheriff Bellotti, who earned $2 million last year holding illegal immigrants. His facilities are operating at 194 percent of design capacity, according to figures compiled by the state Department of Correction.
Frank Cousins, the Republican sheriff of Essex County, whose facilities are operating at 255 percent of capacity, says he uses his $2 million in federal revenues to pay the cost of utilities. Plymouth County Sheriff McDonald, who made $15.6 million last year holding federal prisoners and illegal immigrants for the federal government, says he is aggressively marketing his facility to land more federal business.
Hodgson is perhaps the most aggressive innkeeper of all. When he first became sheriff in the late 1990s, he closed a gym set aside for inmate exercise, giving the bleachers to a nearby community and the scoreboard to a boys and girls club. He then converted the gym into a makeshift jail for illegal immigrants detained by the federal government, eventually turning enough profit on that operation to build a separate facility that he essentially leases to the feds. His federal business brought in $6 million last year but he says it cost only $3 million to run, leaving an operating profit of $3 million that was used to pay for other sheriff operations.
The sheriffs dabble in law enforcement as well. The Barnstable and Plymouth County sheriffs, for example, do all of the crime scene investigations for their local communities. Many sheriffs run emergency dispatch systems and regional lockups and deploy K-9 units, mobile command centers, and even mounted patrol units. Middlesex Sheriff DiPaolo staffs a marine unit, complete with a boat paid for with a federal grant.
Plymouth County Sheriff McDonald says the law enforcement initiatives of sheriffs are a form of county regionalization, a top priority of the Patrick administration. He says sheriffs help relieve the financial burden of cities and towns. “Cutting funding for county sheriffs is cutting local aid,” he says.
But some sheriff spending has attracted criticism. Hodgson, for example, recently proposed a contract with his corrections officers featuring a 5 percent wage increase for each of the next three years. He said the increase was warranted because his officers earn less than any others in Massachusetts, but state officials, who must give approval for contract offerings, rejected it as excessive. “To put out ‘fives’ in an environment like this, when people are struggling just to hang on to their jobs,” Kirwan says, shaking her head. “For one, it’s unaffordable. Two, it’s inappropriate.”
Kirwan and her legal counsel also say Hodgson’s relentless appeals of a court judgment were a waste of money. In 2001, Hodgson was sued by five corrections officers who claimed the sheriff suspended them in retaliation for their union activities; he claimed they violated work rules by engaging in non-corrections activities on the job. He says two of the officers left a jail door open, putting everyone in the facility at risk.
A US District Court judge ruled against Hodgson, ordering him to pay the officers nearly $18,000 in back pay, plus their legal expenses. Hodgson appealed to the US Court of Appeals, where he lost again. Hodgson then appealed to the US Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case last month. In all, the sheriff spent more than $500,000 on legal fees and owes the corrections officers and their attorneys another $300,000.
“This is not about me being stubborn,” Hodgson says. “I have to look at the ramifications for the future if we can’t invoke our own work rules.”
But Kirwan calls Hodgson’s appeal “frivolous.” Philip Beauregard, the attorney representing the corrections officers, says the lawsuit exemplifies the free-spending ways of sheriffs. “By any standard, it is outrageous and absurd, but he gets away with it,” he says.
Bulging at the seams
At an early November meeting with the governor, several sheriffs said Patrick assured them he had no “grand scheme” to bring them under the control of the state Department of Correction, but he was looking for operating efficiencies.
What he meant by “efficiencies” is unclear, but there have been some hints. A consultant hired by the state to review long-range capital needs for corrections asked for feedback from the sheriffs on a proposal to have state prison facilities expand their clientele to include inmates with sentences longer than a year, instead of longer than two-and-a-half years. The flipside to that recommendation was a proposal to have most state inmates transferred to sheriff facilities within 12 to 18 months of their release to prepare them for community re-entry. To free up jail space at the county level, the consultant suggested that sheriffs get rid of their federal inmates and immigration detainees.
The consultant’s report is not completed yet, but the queries to the sheriffs offer some clues on what corrections consolidation might look like. State officials say they want the Department of Correction and the sheriffs to work as a team to address two of the corrections system’s major problems: overcrowding and recidivism.
Prisons in Massachusetts are bulging at the seams. State officials say their facilities, built to hold 7,900 inmates, were operating at 144 percent of capacity during the third quarter of 2008, holding 11,400 prisoners. Facilities run by sheriffs, designed for 8,700 prisoners, were operating at 161 percent of capacity, holding nearly 14,000 during the same time period.
Some facilities are more of a problem than others. The state’s maximum security prison in Shirley, which holds inmates that pose a serious threat to themselves, other inmates, or staff, is preparing to add a second prisoner in each cell. But union officials who represent corrections officers say double-bunking will lead to increased violence.
The state’s Framingham facilities for women are also badly overcrowded, in part because most sheriffs don’t have jail space for women. The state prison for women in Framingham was designed to hold 388 inmates, but it held an average of 479 women during the third quarter. The Framingham unit where women are held while they await trial is the most overcrowded corrections facility in the state. It was designed to hold 64 women but held nearly four times that number on average during the third quarter. (To reduce overcrowding there, the consultant hired by the state suggested sheriffs hold most women awaiting trial at their facilities.)
The state’s prison overcrowding problem is accentuated by a 40 percent recidivism rate, which means four of every 10 released inmates end up back in prison within three years.
Harold Clarke, the state’s corrections commissioner, says inmates who leave prison the same way they come in are far more likely to return. He wants the state to spend far more money preparing inmates for reintegration into society by addressing their literacy, vocational training, medical, and drug addiction “deficits.”
“This is not coddling offenders,” he says. “This is the best public safety we can do.”
Clarke also wants to “step down” inmates nearing release to facilities run by sheriffs, who would oversee the prisoner’s return to society. Clarke is running a pilot step-down project now with Hampden County Sheriff Michael Ashe Jr., but mandatory sentences and prison rules limit how many inmates can participate and what they can do. Only three inmates are currently participating.
Jay Ashe, the sheriff’s brother and the Hampden County jail superintendent, says he favors legislation that would give corrections officials more flexibility in reintegrating prisoners into local communities as their sentences come to an end. Some prisoners, he says, should work during the day and stay at a pre-release center overnight. Other prisoners could work and live in the community and check in with prison officials on a daily basis. “It’s not being soft on crime,” he says. “The worst thing we can do is open the jail door and just let them out.”
Reaction from sheriffs has been mixed. Many are enthusiastic about the step-down proposal but nervous about being held responsible for an inmate who goes missing while on a program outside the prison. Hodgson says he is opposed to releasing inmates unsupervised into the community. He says they often return with drugs that they sell to other inmates. “I’m not interested in work release,” he says.
‘Close to the end’ for Norfolk County?
Gov. Patrick consolidated control over the state’s educational establishment, and now he’s trying to do the same thing with transportation. Corrections may be next on his list, but administration officials are talking only in general terms about it at this point.
From a policy standpoint, the administration is beginning to argue that better top-to-bottom coordination of corrections will reduce overcrowding and, possibly, recidivism. But officials haven’t yet identified any significant savings that would result, an argument that would carry significant weight in the current economic environment.
Politically, county corrections is a minefield. The governor is dealing with 14 elected officials, and each one defines his or her job differently. They also wield considerable power in the Legislature, and most county officials will probably oppose any attempt to transfer a county sheriff’s operation to the state payroll.
Francis O’Brien, chairman of the Norfolk County commissioners, says the loss of Sheriff Bellotti’s operation to the state would remove roughly 400 of the county’s 520 employees and leave the remaining operations — an engineering department, a golf course, an agricultural school, the Registry of Deeds, and particularly the county’s pension system — in a precarious situation. “It will be close to the end if we lose the sheriff,” he says.
Sen. James Timilty, who represents Bristol County and is the Senate chairman of the Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security, is a huge fan of Sheriff Hodgson (“He’s one of the closest things to a private sector entity in government”) and a skeptic when it comes to giving the state more control over the sheriffs.
“There’s a lot of people who don’t like county government because of the historical problems with it, but that’s largely gone,” he says. “This is not the time to kill regional government. In fact, it’s the time to look at it as the regional answer.”
Among the county sheriffs, most are so desperate for money that they will jump at the chance to get a line item in the state budget. The exceptions are Hodgson, Nantucket County Sheriff Richard Bretschneider (who doesn’t run a jail and receives almost no state money), and possibly Suffolk County Sheriff Cabral.
Plymouth County Sheriff McDonald says the pressure he is feeling is enormous. “The bottom line message is: You’re coming over to the state willingly or we’re going to bankrupt you and take you over,” he says. He hopes acceptable legislation passes soon, but he says everyone is jittery. “It takes many people to pass legislation, but only one to derail it.”
