A march Sponsored by Bristol County for Correctional Justice begins at the Coalition for Social Justice Office at 1:15 pm on Saturday, January 18th (rain/snow date, January 19th) 105 William St. Suite 26 and proceeds along Union Street to rally at the Ash Street Jail.
Recent revelations from the American Civil Liberties Union’s Freedom of Information Request depicts a disturbing side of Sheriff Hodgson. The sheriff spends a great deal of time in Washington, D.C. on the taxpayers’ dime cozying up to white nationalist Stephen Miller, an American far-right political activist who serves as a senior advisor for policy for President Donald Trump.
Sheriff Hodgson reportedly was spying on his own church for providing information to immigrants on their basic legal rights. Added to the string of abuses that BCCJ has chronicled over the past 2 ½ years —highest suicide rate in the state, no drug treatment even though the vast majority of people housed at Sheriff Hodgson’s jails have addiction issues, no medical attention for people with serious medical problems, high rate of putting people in solitary confinement, and the not surprising high rate of people reoffending.
A February 2019 report from the Office of the State Auditor showed that, for a year and a half, Sheriff Hodgson failed to reimburse the state for nearly $350,000 of federal payments for housing ICE detainees. The Bristol County Sheriff’s Office never submitted required inmate total cost analysis reports or documentation for over a third of credit card expenditures sampled by the Auditor. Sheriff Hodgson considered the audit findings trivial.
For three years BCCJ has been calling for a forensic audit of Sheriff Hodgson’s finances and a thorough investigation of the suicides, medical neglect, and numerous human rights abuses at the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office. Each time the sheriff complains that it’s all politics. But it’s the sheriff’s own politics which lead him to spend all his time lobbying for hate groups and which now lays bare his general incompetence and neglect of duty.
To implement positive change and stop the deaths and abuses inside Sheriff Hodgson’s jails, BCCJ calls on Sheriff Hodgson to resign immediately from a job that he is no longer qualified to perform.
Visit https://bccjustice.wordpress.com/2020/01/09/january-18th/
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