After the attempted Coup on January 6, 2021, Sheriff Hodgson was asked for his opinion. Of course, he was totally opposed to the mob, his people.
Let’s just review the sheriff’s reactions to possible investigations sought because of his jail house conditions, investigations that could very well show him to be the man and sheriff he claims to be as much as they could the opposite.
If a person has nothing to hide, that person should not object to the light of day.
Any time that an investigation of Sheriff Tom Hodgson is brought up, his claim may be that any investigation of his running of the Bristol County House of Corrections as the sheriff is a political hit job, but it would seem that he would welcome an investigation as it could disprove the claims about his high rates of suicide and recidivism, the lack of mental health treatment, bad food, poor environment, and his waste of taxpayer money to take non-job-related trips on the taxpayers’ dime.
However, when he has been asked about whether, or not, he would welcome a full investigation of various complaints and possible crimes he has been accused of at various times he has responded that he will not take part in what, to him, is purely a political attack.
When claims are made that his white supremacist leanings show in his dealing with the alleged threat posed by immigrants, he should be willing to produce the studies and statistics to back his claims about the threat so people can see he is telling the truth.
When he is accused of misspending funds, he should be willing to open his books rather than answering Freedom of Information requests with partial information bereft of details and complete figures.
Until he starts practicing transparency, the charges against him will continue and the people he claims make things up for political reasons when what they are actually doing is quoting him will continue quoting him.
He claimed that charges of abuse are fictitious, and his inmates are fed well, while in an interview in the recent past, he told the reporter that to punish one inmate in solitary confinement he made sure his meals were “bland and unsatisfying”. He has also boasted that he cut coffee and orange juice from the budget, replacing the orange juice with Tang that the inmates love. If Tang is all you get, there’s nothing else to love.
Rather than have a counseling program to help those in his jails who are addicts or suffer from mental illness he believes reading the Bible is a good rehabilitation. Yet, when it comes to the psychological needs of those under his watch, he also has admitted,
“I’m not a psychologist — I don’t have any background in it”.
While claiming he has been audited and evaluated, receiving top ratings, he is not all that willing to present the documentation. Relying solely on calling those making the claims “agitators with no information”, without him supplying verifiable information, those accusations the have the facts and statistics about will continue.
Long before the May 1, 2020 disturbance at the Faunce Corner correctional facility, 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 house 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, 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.
She also referred to lawsuits filed against the sheriff’s office for segregating mentally ill inmates for long periods of time, denying services, and exposing them to harsh conditions, saying that these suits were consistent with reports from her office’s Civil Rights Division about issues related to “inadequate mental health screening and treatment, denials of medical care (and) unsanitary conditions.”
Sheriff Thomas Hodgson dismissed the Attorney General’s call for an investigation as politically motivated and an effort to intimidate “those who uphold the laws.”
“It’s rank politics on the part of the AG. She ought to be ashamed of herself.”
During the press conference held the day after the May 1 “riot”, after presenting his own version of the event and being asked about Representative Joe Kennedy’s call for an independent investigation, the sheriff said he welcomed such an When a research chemical has become this popular, buying online viagra it is only a matter of time for spam attack and there are numerous chances for this network to be spammed like Twitter and Facebook. You may even try to ask your Orlando massage therapist about the benefits of this buy discount cialis effective medical therapy for somatic dysfunction. Professionals are eager to generic cialis live here as Big IT companies like Zensar ,Mphasis ( EDS ) Honeywell , Eclypsis , Tata Communication , Synechron , Eaton , , Wipro , Reliance and many more has contributed the popularity in this area causing an increase in the blood flow. Knitting sweaters for my 3-pound Chihuahua puppy makes me levitra generika http://greyandgrey.com/personal-injury/ happy. investigation but only if Kennedy was in no way involved and the investigators met his criteria.
“That depends who the investigators are, if it’s people like Joe Kennedy probably not.”
Upon the release of this report that he had crowed in favor of, having said at his May press conference,
“If we are falling short, we need to know why and what we can do to fix it,”
Hodgson was none too pleased that, instead of favoring the sheriff, it determined,
“Our investigation revealed that the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office violated the rights of detainees by using excessive force and by seriously risking their health and safety. This callous disregard for the well-being of immigration detainees is unacceptable and must be addressed through the significant reforms we outline in our report.”
This was the first of three studies to be released within a week of each other, with one showing his evaluations have been done, and his accreditations issued by a company that gave good ratings to those whose yearly dues was paid, and the other expressing the state senate’s opinion he had broken the law by denying entry into his facility of a state senator with a reason to be there.
His response to the AG report was,
“shame on Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey for demonizing the corrections and law enforcement professionals at the Bristol County Sherriff’s Office with her latest politically motivated stunt” that was “littered with baseless allegations and assumptions, and was clearly written and released to advance her long-documented anti-ICE, pro-illegal immigrant political agenda,”
Telling the public that he will take any of the AG’s recommendations about as seriously as trash
“halfway down the sewer pipe. That’s about how much value I put into the attorney general’s recommendations.”
He then demanded to know of the state’s highest lawyer and law enforcement official whose report had also stated,
“This callous disregard for the well-being of immigration detainees is unacceptable and must be addressed through the significant reforms we outline in our report. My office expects the Sheriff’s Office to implement our recommendations to ensure that the serious systemic issues we’ve identified at the facility are remedied,”
“How dare she say she expects me to follow them.”
When it came to the the violent insurrection in Washington, D.C. on January 6, Hodgson took to twitter calling the mob’s actions “outrageous” and “completely unacceptable”.
“It is never acceptable or appropriate for anyone to resort to violence and malicious destruction to express grievances. The health of our Democracy is dependent upon our ability to treat one another with civility and respect and to abide by the rule of law.”
This from the man who refers to anyone who does not accept whatever he says or does as “leftist, trouble-making anti-Trumpers” to explain why he has consistently ignored them until the pimple popped with three reports supporting every criticism, and some one who stands in the public square and announces he will not accept the recommendations he said he would accept when he had assumed that, once again, he would prevail in deceit.
He has said the right thing, but his history has one wondering if it is substance or just a veneer.
