So they said to him, “Who are you? We need an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?” John replied in the words of Isaiah the prophet, “I am the voice of one calling in the desert.” (John 1: 22-23)

Over the last several years, Bristol County for Correctional Justice, an ad hoc committee of citizens of Bristol County in Massachusetts, has been carefully watching the questionable actions of the county sheriff, Thomas Hodgson, reporting on his violations of his inmates’ civil right and other problems at his house of corrections. His rhetoric about immigrants and the actions he has taken against those, both here legally or not, was a concern that his rhetoric could purposely or unconsciously influence how he treats those from his loathed group who are housed on the House of Corrections campus in the ICE detention center.

BCCJ had not only written letters to those in state government strongly exposing such things as  Bristol County jails being among the most brutal in the state with a suicide rate twice the state average and three times higher than the national average, the second-highest recidivism rate among county jails, and prisoners complaints of starvation, medical and psychological neglect, price gouging in the commissary, and mistreatment by staff, but went to the State House to present their case to the Attorney General and her staff, the State Auditor and her staff, the Commissioner of the Department of Corrections, the Executive Office of Public Safety, and the Governor.

BCCJ also held rallies, informational meetings and picket lines, wrote letters to the local newspapers to inform the public that conditions in the jail did not match the sheriff’s or his spokesperson’s rosy representation, and spoke to any group who would have them.

When Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey called on Daniel Bennett, secretary of the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security, to investigate the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office citing concerns about suicides and allegations of “harsh or unhealthy” conditions at the two county-run jails that were housing some 1,005 pretrial and sentenced inmates, she referred to stories by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting that ran in The Boston Globe and on WGBH radio, both of which received a steady stream of information from local inmate advocates like Bristol County for Correctional Justice, showing that Bristol County accounted for nearly a quarter of all the state’s jail suicides between 2006 to 2016 even though it housed just 13 percent of inmates.

Although no action was visible, something was done, even if only half-heartedly, but not sufficiently as this investigation seemed to have died a quiet death from disinterest.

As his defense, the sheriff would counter anything negative said about his jails by pointing out his rating of “A” from the American Correctional Association (ACA), a nongovernmental organization that acts simultaneously as a professional association and an oversight body for prison and detention systems.

Being a public, political figure with an agenda, the sheriff’s side of the story was aired extensively in and on local media. BCCJ had to fight often with local media to get the negative information to the public.

It took a riot at the ICE detention center, which might have been avoided if the criticisms of conditions and treatment of the detainees exposed by BCCJ and other advocacy groups had not been so easily ignored and the sheriff’s weak excuses and dismissals of fact had not simply been accepted based solely on his word, and the report being issued after a months long investigation found, as had been pointed out before and constantly, that the sheriff had violated the civil rights of the detainees, and that conditions were such that, although no one said anything about a riot specifically, there were signs that something could happen that would not be good.

BCCJ had been correct.

The sheriff, however, may have to be cautious in his use of the ACA as a defense as, quietly and unknown outside her office, Senator Elizabeth Warren had been conducting a 19 month investigation of the ACA, the result of which brings into question the legitimacy of those “A” ratings the sheriff touts.

BCCJ had looked into the American Correctional Association finding problems with it, but, again, coverage of its findings was sketchy at best and too often just ignored by those who should not have ignored it.

Just as BCCJ had found, Warren’s investigation found that the American Correctional Association requires that Federal, state, and local governments pay for audits in order to become certified or keep a certification. This in itself, being a requirement for allowing sheriffs to evaluate themselves, makes the process questionable especially when a surprise inspection by the local Department of Health found violations to the ACA  standards that, although obvious, the ACA inspectors missed.

Does a favorable rating depend on how up to date your dues is?

Also supporting BCCJ’s assertions, Warren’s investigation found that, although the ACA only certifies “the best of the best”, according to its website, the list of the best of the best includes virtually every facility that pays its accreditation fees and which is evaluated after getting a three months’ notice of an upcoming inspection and being supplied with preparation tools for audits.

They are told what will be inspected and what was needed to pass the inspection on those things.

 Who wouldn’t want the questions before the final exam?”

During the three years between evaluations, sheriffs conduct “self-reporting” to show they are keeping up with the requirements of the ACA.

Based solely on their word, sheriffs can maintain their high ratings regardless of how bad their jail conditions might become through negligence or willful animosity toward inmates knowing they will be given a three month’s preparation period to clean things up before the inspectors come.

According to the report,

“A review of available evidence suggests that that accreditation has little to no correlation with detention facility conditions and practices, and therefore little to no value whatsoever. The result has been the rubber-stamping of dangerous facilities and the waste of millions of taxpayer dollars.” 

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ACA’s executive director James Gondles wrote that there is “nothing nefarious” in helping facilities prepare for audits, but did admit that the  association is “currently in the process of considering” unannounced audits.

Warren’s report found that some private prisons and detention centers that maintained their ACA accreditation  had “critical failures” like riots, staffing problems, and poor living conditions , and cited Adelanto Detention Center as an example because although accredited an 2014 and renewed in 2017 with a score of 99.6% rating, detained immigrants were inappropriately forced to wear shackles and were punished with solitary confinement before its being determined they had broken any rules, some had to wait weeks or months for medical care, even when acutely ill, and, despite a history of suicide attempts in the facility, immigrants were allowed to freely hang knotted bedsheets referred to “nooses” in their cells.

The investigation found,

“The ACA’s private prison accreditation system is riddled with conflicts of interest, lacks transparency, and is subject to zero accountability even though millions in taxpayer dollars…flow to the ACA and private prison companies. These problems put the health and wellbeing of incarcerated and detained individuals, the staff and employees who work in those facilities, and our communities at risk.”

The ACA leader countered by claiming,

“ACA accreditation does not mean that there will never be an incident of violence, or that there will never be noncompliance with a health-related, safety, or other ACA standard.”

In the example used, Adelanto Detention Center, there was obviously more than just an “incident”.

COVID-19 has complicated things with nearly a quarter million incarcerated people having tested positive for it, but the ACA reduced its auditing while refusing to adopt new health and safety standards.

While claiming that his facilities were totally protected and invoking his accreditation rating as proof of this, the local department of health found in its unannounced audit that the sheriff protocol files contained no updates from the CDC on COVID protocol.

The conclusion of the report is that this ACA accrediting process is the closest thing we have to a national regulatory body for prisons a, but it lobbies Congress on criminal justice issues  while it serves as a “voice of corrections”, a clear “irreconcilable conflict of interest” when the time comes to evaluate conditions inside prisons and detention centers.

The ACA gets nearly half its revenue from accreditation fees paid by the very entities it audits, and private prison companies pay tens of thousands more in conference costs, certification fees, training, and for other services.

Its board includes current or former private prison employees who have connections to the places at which they had worked and may still, and can easily act in favor of those facilities with whom they had or still have a good relationship, or the opposite if their experiences were negative.

According to Senator Warren,

“This investigation shows that the American Correctional Association, the nation’s largest accreditor of federal prisons and detention facilities, is rife with corruption and that the federal government should end its reliance on ACA’s deeply-flawed accreditation process and ban private prisons.”

The report came about because of a series of alarming reports on ICE detention centers from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General, a watchdog agency, and after having sent letters to GEO and CoreCivic, two private prison companies about these reports, who, like the Bristol County Sheriff, Thomas Hodgson, defended themselves by saying they were regularly audited with GEO’s touting the ACA accreditation scores of its Adelanto facility.

The Bristol County sheriff may dismiss those who have criticized his running of his facilities with the dismissive,

 “The motto of the left-wing activist groups, abolish-ICE advocates, Prisoners’ Legal Services and plain anti-Trumpers has always been, and continues to be, ‘Don’t let the facts interfere with your political agenda,”

but the two reports about his violating ICE detainees’ civil rights and the questionable veracity of the organization whose rating of his jails is his go to defense shows that Bristol County for Correctional Justice and other inmate and detainee advocates had been exposing the facts he ignored and did not allow to interfere with his agenda and acted out bigotry.

This was a good week for those working on social justice.