DARTMOUTH — Orange sparks flew inside a cell at the Bristol County Jail and House of Correction. Two inmates in welding helmets fixed roaring blue torch flames on a metal bunk bed frame, leaning into work that the new sheriff assigned in his first year.
About 80 frames modified, hundreds more to go, as the inmates work on curbing suicide risk and learn a work skill. Sheriff Paul Heroux campaigned for the office in part on a pledge to curb suicides, but no one figured the effort would lead to reconfiguring bed frames, or to a revived welding jobs-training program.
So goes Heroux’s first year in office: work that was on his list from Day One, plus other matters that have emerged unexpectedly.
The 47-year-old former Attleboro mayor and state legislator did not, for instance, campaign on closing the Ash Street Jail and Regional Lock-Up in New Bedford. But weeks into the job, Heroux offered a first, then a second, then a third way. The third appears to have stuck: planning is now in the early stages to shutter the 19th-century red-brick complex that has come to represent, for many reform advocates, an antiquated corrections approach.
Another surprise erupted on a Friday morning last April at the Jail and House of Correction in North Dartmouth. Pre-trial inmates in two housing units went on a destructive rampage, then staged an hours-long standoff. The inmates caused nearly $200,000 in property damage. The event soon launched a project to renovate the many housing units on the jail campus that have cells without toilets and locking doors.
That was what Heroux calls his “most challenging” day on the job in a year otherwise engaged with taking stock of and re-shaping the agency. Heroux is gaining a reputation as more collaborative, more focused on the task he stressed during the campaign: running a jail.
The phrase is simple, the follow-through complicated.
Help for released inmates
The St. Vincent de Paul Reentry Program’s nine volunteers work out of a red-brick former public school in Attleboro, helping some 250 released inmates a year find their footing in a new life. About three-quarters have come out of the Bristol County Jail and House of Correction.
Diana Reeves, who co-founded the operation with her husband, Peter Kortright, in 2016, said they already had good support from the reentry crew at the sheriff’s office under Heroux’s predecessor, Thomas M. Hodgson, who held the office for 25 years. Now, though, she sees a more robust effort, and “an observable attitudinal change” — a greater recognition that “an effort needs to be made before [inmates] leave the facility, before they get here.”
Sean Costello, who directs the Attleboro program, said it’s very easy for newly released people to get overwhelmed with all they must do at once: find a place to stay, medication, transportation, and an identification card.
To help released inmates not fall back on familiar ways that got them into trouble, the sheriff’s department is expanding about tenfold the number of people working on inmate “reentry.” Heroux aims to have 40 people assigned to this, up from four.
It’s following up his campaign mantra: “housing, health care and a job” for people who have completed their sentences.
More on assistance for inmates
The sheriff’s reentry services crew will work under four coordinators: one each for housing, health care, employment, and for “miscellaneous.” That last category will include helping with details that can make or break a person’s effort to re-start their life — such as securing acceptable ID.
“Without it you’re dead in the water, but people don’t think about that,” said Reeves.
So far, Heroux has created 60 new positions in the Sheriff’s Office; 14 support inmates after their release.
The work includes new, existing, and revived efforts to help released people find jobs. Members of the Attleboro reentry group say Heroux has asked them to help spot local employers willing to hire people coming out of jail. He recently sent two officers to help the reentry group organize a March job fair.
Inside the walls, the department is reviving two training programs, one for a commercial driver’s license, one for welding.
Jodi Hockert-Lotz, the sheriff’s new chief of inmate services, said seven inmates are now taking the driving course. They’re using a behind-the-wheel simulator at the jail and expecting to complete the course by the end of this month. The first goal is to have 18 inmates complete the program: Passing a state permit test, enrolling in a local driving school, road testing.
A few inmates are also working with maintenance engineer Darryl Almeida on their welding skills. He’s working with four inmates at a time, noting a waiting list of 10 inmates in early February. He’s also keeping in touch with employers about job prospects. He’s placed one inmate in a job so far.
More to come, he hopes, given the work they’re turning out. As Heroux recently led a tour of a few current projects, Almeida pointed to a pile of bed frame pieces and what he said are professional-grade welds, shiny as a new nickel, straight as a ruler edge.
The April jail uprising
With the benefit of hindsight and security video, certain things seem clearer about the inmate uprising of Friday morning, April 21, 2023, Heroux said. Even without sound recordings, he said, you can see pre-trial detainees in one housing unit acting like something was afoot. Men were up early, gathering in clutches to talk — unusual movement that could have been spotted before the eruption, even the night before, Heroux said.
“The beehive was buzzing differently,” Heroux said. “You could see the way inmates were congregating.”
The pre-trial detainees had evidently heard that they would be moved to other quarters so work could begin on modifying metal bed frames as a suicide prevention measure, and other maintenance work. Trouble is, they were being moved from housing units where the cell doors do not lock to units where they do lock.
More on the jail uprising
Many of the inmates were not happy about this. Among 75 men in one unit, some resisted orders to move. Some shouted protests. One inmate lit a roll of toilet paper on fire and tossed it from an upper tier toward a guard station. Another tossed a flaming waste basket to the floor below.
Some of these inmates egged on pre-trial detainees in the unit next door, where property was also damaged.
As the disturbance escalated, correctional officers on duty in both units got out, locking the unit doors. Inmates destroyed a security console and broke windows, pipes, security cameras, a tablet-charging station, electric fans, bed frames and pipes. They wielded makeshift weapons, but never used them against correctional officers, or each other.
Through a broken window facing a courtyard, they issued demands about living conditions. Heroux tried negotiating, acknowledging that some of the things they wanted, such as lower canteen prices, were already in the works. The talks did not persuade inmates to relinquish control of the units.
As the standoff dragged into late afternoon, reinforcements arrived from outside agencies, including five sheriff’s offices and the Massachusetts Department of Correction. A force of some 150 officers in tactical gear lined up in a courtyard outside the two housing units, where inmates could see them through the windows. The officers took back the units without violence.
Heroux sticks to his assertion that this was not a “riot” because there was no person-on-person violence. He stands by his decision to wait hours to retake the housing unit, for which he said he took some heat from outside critics on talk radio. He said his purpose was to resolve the situation without anyone getting hurt, and he thought the show of overwhelming force helped to do that.
One inmate suffered a minor cut, apparently from falling, but there were no other injuries. Heroux noted that so far, no lawsuits have arisen from the episode. Based on video camera evidence, five men have been charged with vandalizing the property of a state prison institution.
Still, Heroux said an in-house review showed that some things might have been handled differently. Perhaps the trouble could have been averted if officials had noticed the unusual activity before the outbreak and tried to weed out instigators. Perhaps if officials had communicated earlier and more openly about the plans for the move, tension would have been defused.
At one briefing on the incident, a reporter asked Heroux if he was angry. No, he said, “just doing my job.”
Preventing inmate suicides
The high suicide rate of people in Bristol County custody became a big issue during the sheriff’s election in 2022, but no one ever mentioned bed frames.
Yet there was a glaring pattern: of seven inmates who committed suicide at the Jail and House of Correction since 2017, all used the metal bunk beds to hang themselves.
The pattern had not been spotted, or at least not made public, until Heroux in his first few weeks on the job called on a nationally recognized authority on the subject.
More on suicide prevention measures at the jail
Lindsay M. Hayes visited the House of Correction and Ash Street Jail for three days in early March, then delivered a report in April with 24 recommendations, including modifying the bed frames. Almeida and the in-house welding shop got the job of reconfiguring the frames to make it more difficult to tie a cord or sheet onto them.
Heroux has been changing practices to follow Hayes’s recommendations. These include adding suicide prevention training for correctional officers, changing screening procedures to spot suicide risk, and having mental health clinicians evaluate Ash Street detainees immediately after their arrest and before their first court appearance.
The changes come too late to avert one suicide that occurred just a day after Heroux took office. On Jan. 4, 2023, Frank Moniz, a 41-year-old man from New Bedford who had been arrested on drug charges on Dec. 30, was found dead in his cell at the Jail and House of Correction. Since then, no suicides have been reported.
Closing the Ash Street Jail, renovating cells
It wasn’t supposed to go this way.
During the fall 2022 Bristol County sheriff campaign, Heroux never said he planned to close the Ash Street Jail. If elected, candidate Heroux said he would study the issue.
After taking the job, Heroux got talking. Even by his own account, he likes talking. In this case, he was talking on WBSM Radio in January 2023, and soon the talk turned to the Ash Street Jail.
Built in the late 1800s around remaining pieces of an earlier 19th-century structure, the building a few blocks west of downtown New Bedford houses about 100 inmates. All but 10 or so are pre-trial detainees, the rest sentenced inmates living there for work assignments. The jail also provides holding cells for police departments — mostly in Bristol County — that do not have their own.
More on jail closure plans
Many of Heroux’s supporters pointed to the Ash Street Jail as a symbol of much that was wrong with the jail system under Hodgson — who had cultivated a “tough on crime” reputation for trying to discourage recidivism by making Bristol County jails more forbidding. He resisted calls to close the place as advocates pointed to poor conditions there: faulty plumbing, showers that often did not work, bad food hygiene and lack of programs for inmates.
Heroux told the radio audience that the old jail could be replaced by renovating the shuttered immigration detention center. Cost? Maybe $10 million, he said.
No formal study. No budget. No public consultation with state legislators, who would have to approve paying for any such project. Was it a “plan” or just an “idea,” as Heroux suggested at one point?
Either way, it made news. Within days, reporters were summoned to the former immigration center for a briefing.
In a week, Heroux scratched that notion in favor of building cells stacked in two tiers in a high-ceilinged former gym at the Jail and House of Correction. Heroux gave a group of state legislators a tour of Ash Street and North Dartmouth. All agreed it would make sense to study that option.
But that changed after the uprising in two housing units with unlocked cell doors and no toilets in the cells. Of the 22 housing units in North Dartmouth, 11 are set up that way. The housing unit locks, not the cells, and the inmates use communal bathrooms.
After the jail opened in 1990, a state high court ruled that locking a person in a cell without a toilet violated the U.S. Constitution’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment. Rather than put individual toilets into the housing units using communal bathrooms, locks were taken off cell doors, Heroux said.
The uprising underscored the potential risks of unlocked cells, Heroux said. At the same time, it seemed that Ash Street Jail could be replaced by locked cells at North Dartmouth — once they were equipped with toilets.
The state agency that manages buildings is working on a plan and cost estimate for all 11 housing units, Heroux said. He’s been touting the project so often, using a shorthand catch phrase, that his assistant gave him a Christmas present of a desk nameplate marked “Sheriff Heroux/Toilets in cells & locks on doors.”
Shedding programs, listening to inmates
The new sheriff was no lawman, but he had experience running things.
Heroux followed into the sheriff’s chair a fellow who had held it for 25 years, who in recent years appeared publicly in regalia suited to a police official or a sheriff from the American South or West: uniform, badge, sidearm. Hodgson’s campaign theme was “tough on crime,” while Heroux said he wanted to run a “modern” jail.
Heroux never donned the uniform, badge or gun. Soon he found much work to do re-organizing the agency, drawing on his experience as mayor of Attleboro.
“If I hadn’t been mayor I’d have been lost,” said Heroux, who led Attleboro, a city of some 46,000 people in northwestern Bristol County, for five-and-a-half years before he took the sheriff’s job.
Heroux said the experience as chief executive of the city where he was born and raised taught him a lot about running an organization: basic management principles, chain of command, budgeting, personnel. Heroux said that has helped in leading a department of some 500 employees — roughly the same number as the Attleboro city payroll — in a different direction.
Heroux has steered away from Hodgson’s expansive approach to the job of sheriff, cutting out anything that in his view has nothing to do with running a 21st-century jail. Not everyone has been happy about this.
Heroux has ended daily wellness checks on 130 elderly people and electronic monitoring of 50 disabled people. K-9 officers no longer visit schools with “comfort dogs” to support children in emotional distress. The dogs are being retrained for drug-smuggling detection and other security work. Sheriff’s officers will no longer be assigned as investigators in the State Police, FBI, or the Dartmouth and Fairhaven Police.
The former immigration detention center on the North Dartmouth campus is being renovated as a training center for recruits and current correctional officers. A Winnebago that served as a “mobile command center” has been donated to the New Bedford Police Department.
As much as he claims the governing vision, Heroux is quick to acknowledge the job is a collective.
“I don’t make decisions alone,” Heroux said.
Indeed, at least four management people said Heroux seems more open to hearing other points of view.
Caitlin DeMelo, human resources director, said she’s had more meetings with Heroux in one year than she had with Hodgson the previous 20. She said his approach to managing employees seems to be helping to keep people.
“In the two years before Sheriff Heroux got here, we lost 200 people,” she said. While the pandemic was one reason many resigned or retired, “most left due to being unhappy here” and “feeling they were not valued.”
In the last six months, DeMelo said, “we’ve had very little resignations.”
To deal with a shortage of correctional officers in the department, Heroux has bumped the sign-on bonus from $1,500 to $5,000. For their first two months, new officers are on first shift, rather than third, meaning they have more contact with senior staff and more chances to learn the job. In months three, four and five, new officers rotate shifts, to see all aspects of the operation.
In March, 37 people are scheduled to start the nine-week academy, the largest academy class since 28 started in January 2018.
Heroux said he’s also talking with inmates.
“I try to go on a housing unit at least once a week” to hear from inmates, Heroux said. After they complained about prices for food, clothing, and personal items in the virtual “canteen,” he said, he dropped the markup from 32% to 20%.
Will all of it work? Will the changes show the results Heroux is after in lower recidivism? One year is too soon to say, but Heroux said this year he’ll start acting on a campaign promise to measure the effectiveness of rehabilitative programs and making the results public.
Of all of the work so far, he said the expanded post-release unit, with more hiring yet to come, is one of the things he’s “most proud of. This will drastically change how we set people up for success.”
Email reporter Arthur Hirsch at ahirsch@newbedfordlight.org.
Editor’s note: This story was modified on Thursday, Feb. 29, 2024, to add video featuring the retrofitting of bunk beds at the House of Correction in Dartmouth.
I commend Mr. Heroux’s work ethic and ability to listen to staff and inmates respectfully. The ‘system’ is gaining a new perspective about how to create successful inmate housing and living conditions. Assisting human beings to perhaps ‘unlearn’ bad behaviors, building them up to gain self-respect, confidence, and to foster positive actions through mentoring relationships is outstanding! If our nation only took a look at this ‘novel’ model!
Thank you for your wonderful work, former mayor. Blessings to you!