Donations Incentivize MA Sheriffs To Keep People In Jail: Report

MASSACHUSETTS — A new report identifies more than $6 million in campaign contribution with potential conflicts of interests to U.S. sheriffs in 11 states, including $2.7 million in political donations in Massachusetts.

"The Paid Jailer: How Sheriff Campaign Dollars Shape Mass Incarceration," which was released Tuesday by Common Cause and Communities for Sheriff Accountability, says most of those contributions were made between 2010 and 2021 and primarily went to sheriffs' campaigns in five of the state's 13 including:

• $319,002 in Suffolk County
• $324,870 in Bristol County
• $396,604 in Hampden County
• $504,516 in Worcester County
• $738,008 Plymouth County

The report says the potential conflicts could be incentivizing sheriffs to make more arrests and keep more people in jail. The contributions come from construction and real estate companies, legal firms who are often hired to defend the sheriffs in wrongful death lawsuits, healthcare companies, utilities and tech companies.

"Besides enriching sheriffs’ campaign accounts, this money incentivizes arrests, incarceration, and a host of related practices that too often prioritize profit over human lives," the report said. "Sheriffs are politicians who make major decisions about health and safety for millions of Americans—and they shouldn’t be up for sale to the highest bidder."

Quincy-based CPS Healthcare, for example, has donated $20,365 sheriffs campaigns in Massachusetts, including $12,040 to Bristol County Sheriff Thomas M. Hodgson. In return, sheriffs in Bristol, Dukes, Middlesex, Norfolk and Plymouth Counties paid $9.82 million to CPS to provide inmate health care services between 2012 and 2021.

Birmingham, Ala.-based NaphCare, meanwhile, donated $7,100 to Suffolk County Sheriff Steven W. Tompkins’s campaign. In the time NaphCare has handled health services for Suffolk County inmates, 31 prisoners died.

Two representatives at Securus, which reportedly has 2,600 contracts to provide telecommunications services to inmates, are responsible for more than $7,000 in contributions to the sheriffs in Essex, Hampden, Middlesex, and Norfolk Counties, according to the report. One of those donors listed her company and occupation in different ways for different sheriffs, "making it more difficult to gain the full picture of Securus’s operations in Massachusetts and perhaps elsewhere," the report said.

Construction companies have also made contributions to victorious sheriffs’ campaigns over the past 15 years, including:

• Sheriff Nicholas Cocchi, Hampton County, Massachusetts ($28,404)
• Sheriff Kevin F. Coppinger, Essex County, Massachusetts ($9,550)
• Sheriff Thomas N. Bowler, Berkshire County, Massachusetts ($7,840)
• Sheriff James Cummings, Barnstable County, Massachusetts ($7,840)
• Sheriff Thomas Hodgson, Bristol County, Massachusetts ($23,470)

Patch has asked all of the sheriffs and companies named in this article for comment and will update it when we hear back.