Although he justifies the harsh conditions at the Bristol County House of Corrections in Dartmouth MA by claiming that his toughness keeps inmates from returning as his jail is a punishment for crime not a country club coddling criminals, the Sheriff of Bristol County, Thomas Hodgson, consistently has the highest recidivism rate in the state.
That means that he has more inmates returning for repeat offenses than any other sheriff in the state of Massachusetts, the ones who aren’t cruel.
Either his cruelty is a facade to promote his image as tough on crime and the scourge of the unlawful, or the criminals of Bristol County really like the dungeon setting and treatment.
A little Fifty Shades of Hodgson perhaps.
When lamenting the toughness of his job as a way of excusing his ineptness, he will point out that his inmates come from the lower economic levels of the county, most notably the Brown ones, those who fall between society’s cracks, and upon release return to their old environments where they survived through crime and resort to it again.
There is a fundamental truth about county jails that the sheriff ignores and leaves unaddressed, resulting in his high rate of recidivism.
A friend, Ira, a lawyer who has worked not only with the county jail inmates but for those the sheriff collected in his ICE detention menagerie until his denial of human and civil rights had ICE revoke his contract effectively firing him for poor and harmful performance of his duties, pointed out the simple, fundamental fact that the sheriff ignores.
Every inmate in a county jail, unless they die through (alleged) accident or suicide, will be going home.
That is what the sheriff does not seem to grasp.
If he did, he would have in place programs to help in re-entering society when it comes to housing and jobs so that upon release, inmates do not simply go back to the environment that got them in jail in the first place and hope for the best.
Going to the sheriff’s internet site one can see a list of educational and rehabilitation programs, but the reality is that just like the memes on Facebook with Abraham Lincoln opining on modern technology or the current political situation, you cannot assume it is true because it is on a computer with lots of color, pictures, and logos.
Just because it is on his website, it does not mean he actually is doing something.
Even on his own website there is an endless stream of pictures with the sheriff giving yet another person or group of people some form of recognition for what they have done as if that is what he does.
At least besides telling us who turned 100, Willard Scott also told us the weather.
This man’s primary job seems to be acknowledging that other people work.
Even though he knows the petty thief, the gangsta wannabee, and the two bit burglar will be going home to perhaps the worst conditions to be called a home, returning to petty thievery because there are no jobs available or for which he has had no training, and will resort to that which at least allowed for survival and some degree of humanity, the sheriff does little more than recite a list of impotent or dormant programs rather than start real ones to find inmates homes if that is necessary, job training, or any of those things that will change conditions and present opportunities to be a better citizen for the benefit of us all as well as the released person.
And, comically and blindly, while they return to the jail his cruelty ruled out their ever doing, and ignoring his system is not reducing recidivism, he gives speeches about how tough his job is because of the backgrounds of the people his jail houses who keep coming back because that is who they are.
He knows every inmate in his jail will be released back into those conditions, yet he does nothing to change the future of anyone he is supposed to be rehabilitating.
You get sent to your room to spend time thinking about what you have done, You don’t go to jail for that.
You go to jail to come out a better person for society’s sake and your own.
I am sure many of us, not all of us but I would venture to say most, have stood in the 12 items or less express line at the supermarket waiting as the person at the front with the overflowing shopping cart watches as each item is rung up, and only when the clerk announces the total price, begins for the first time to consider which method of payment to use, and then hunts through pockets or purse, wading through the different payment methods one of which will be eventually chosen with the understanding that, rather than take out all possible credit or debit cards to have at the ready in the event the first chosen is not approved, replaces all others back in their resting place and then, if necessary, repeats this each time an attempted card is not approved.
The reaction upon being told the price is usually one of shock, not at the total price, but at being told that after everything is rung up, the shopper is going to have to pay somehow.
When did that start?
They stand there totally ignoring the inevitable, neither taking out cash, card, or check book even when stores have signs reminding customers to start filling out a check when entering a line and some have little shelves on which to write all but the total amount.
Paying at the end of the checkout process should not come as a surprise.
Once could be because of distraction. More than once shows a disconnect from reality or an unconscious state of just being rude and self-centered to the disadvantage of all others.
The final step in either scenario is not a surprise.
It has been some thirty years since Governor Weld appointed Tom Hodgson to a position the general population knows little about and only takes an interest in if for some reason they end up in court and see a deputy sheriff in the building.
Bristol county has been found to be the only county in the state where the majority of citizens of it know the name of the sheriff and some of his reputation. But that is more because of his conrtroversies, grandstanding actions, the huge blunder of his ICE Detention Center, spending tax money on ostentatious but unneeded equipment, giving high paying, short-hour jobs with little responsibility to friends so they can qualify for a good medical program and retirement benefits their real jobs don’t have without the burden of actually having a real job, and for a while his being the monkey on Michael Jackson’s hip when it comes to his relationship with Trump.
It is not because of the sterling job he does as sheriff.
It is because of how bad he does it.
If in thirty years he hasn’t noticed his inmates keep changing and that they all eventually go home, this basic incompitence is enough of a reason to escort the man to the door.
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