Bristol County Sheriff’s Office receives 2nd straight perfect score in national accreditation

DARTMOUTH – Report cards are in, and the Bristol County correctional complex got an A+.

That’s the grade national corrections experts have given the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office after it was recently awarded its second consecutive national accreditation from the American Corrections Association. The Dartmouth correctional facility, which encompasses the Bristol County House of Corrections and Women’s Center on Faunce Corner Road, achieved another perfect 100% score on hundreds of operational indicators after the grueling ACA inspection and audit.

“All the credit goes to my amazing staff,” Bristol County Sheriff Thomas M. Hodgson said. “From the corrections officers and security staff to the administration, finance, food services and the many others, it’s truly a team effort, and I couldn’t be more proud of the team here in Bristol County.”

ACA inspectors informed the Sheriff’s Office of the accreditation recommendation during the audit closeout in October and officially awarded the accreditation at the organization’s conference in January.

This is the second consecutive ACA accreditation in which the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office has achieved a perfect 100% score; the Dartmouth correctional complex achieved a perfect score in 2016 as well during the last three-year ACA audit.

To pass the inspection, The Bristol County Sheriff’s Office met or exceeded more than 360 different operational indicators representing best practices and industry standards. Steve Bailey, the chairman of the ACA audit in Bristol County, said achieving a perfect score is rare.

“One-hundred-percents are not given out very often,” Bailey said during the audit closeout in October. “They are very few and far between.”

The inspectors offered their comments on the audit at the closeout last year.

“You are doing a great job. You have a good medical facility here,” said ACA auditor Fred Campbell, who recently retired from the Arkansas Department of Corrections after 40 years, including time as the warden of a prison hospital, and who performed the medical portion of the audit. “This shows the citizens of your county that you’re not afraid to bring people in and say ‘look at us, nothing here we’re hiding.’ You got more inspections than the meat plant. You are looked at up and down. I think you can be proud.”

“I’ve had my bag full in my mind of stolen ideas that I’m going to take back to my facility where I know without a doubt that it will help our facility,” said Lt. Timothy Lippett, a corrections officer and watch commander from Columbia, S.C., who handled the security portion of the audit. “I can say that if something was to happen where I had to come back to Massachusetts, I definitely wouldn’t mind coming to work here.”

The American Corrections Association is a national organization focused on increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of correctional operations. Its standards are written and refined by corrections professionals and represent the best practices of professional corrections teams across the country. The Bristol County Sheriff’s Office joins several Bay State Sheriff’s Offices which have also received national accreditation from the ACA, including facilities in Plymouth, Barnstable, Middlesex, Hampden, Suffolk, and Worcester Counties.

Audits and accreditations are nothing new for the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office, which is also accredited by the National Commission on Correctional Health Care (NCCHC) and receives annual inspections by the Massachusetts Department of Corrections and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The next audit of the facility is coming this spring after Sheriff Hodgson volunteered the complex for an inspection by the National Institute of Corrections to support a state-wide commission focused on correctional funding.