Bristol County Massachusetts is in the midst of a prison suicide epidemic. At this point nobody is doing anything about it although there is mounting alarm at the growing body count.
Yesterday WGBH News ran the first of two reports on prison suicides in the Commonwealth. The report, written by New England Center for Investigative Reporting (NECIR) reporters Jenifer McKim and Chris Burrell, took Bristol County sheriff Tom Hodgson to account for fudging details of his self-investigation into the death of Michael Ray on June 10, 2017. According to the sheriff, who deflected blame for failing to monitor Ray, “we have very high standards here and we’re constantly looking for ways to improve.”
Hodgson blames his suicides on the opioid epidemic — though Ray had been in custody for almost two years and drugs should not have figured into the death. The fact is, Michael Ray was not getting the help he needed for depression. “If something happens to me, I want people to know that I’ve been getting no help, no matter how many mental health slips I’ve put in,” Ray wrote shortly before his death.
A month before Ray’s suicide, the same NECIR reporters ran an article in the Globe asking, Why Is The Suicide Rate In Bristol County Jails So High? Scarcely a month later Ray was dead. Even if Hodgson was preoccupied by his busy talk show schedule, the Globe article should have sent a signal that things needed to change at his facilities.
But on June 1, 2017 Tom Hodgson was having brunch with the Mass Fiscal Alliance, a group that promotes anti-immigrant rhetoric like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, where Hodgson sits on the advisory board with its white supremacist founder, John Tanton. Nine days later Michael Ray was dead.
Two weeks after Ray’s death, on June 28th, Tom Hodgson was back selling anti-immigrant xenophobia at a far-right hate group event called “Hold Their Feet to the Fire.” Hodgson appeared with gay-basher Sandy Rios, xenophobe Dan Stein, conspiracy theorist Michelle Malkin, white supremacist Tom Roten, white supremacist congressman Steve King, Muslim-basher Robert Spencer, and real-life fascist and anti-semite Sebastian Gorka. Rather than running jails humanely and competently, Hodgson had better things to do.
Despite Tom Hodgson’s denials of responsibility for a suicide rate twice the state average, we tend to agree with Governor Charlie Baker: “Look, any time anybody kills themselves in a prison, something clearly went wrong.”
Something clearly is going wrong, and it’s time public officials hold Hodgson’s feet to the fire.
Comments are closed.