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Barnstable County Correctional Facility

    INCARCERATION

    Barnstable Jail Sees Sharp Rise in Women Inmates

    A large number of Essex County women are moved to the Cape’s county jail

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — The number of women locked up at the Barnstable County Correctional Facility in Bourne has ballooned in the last 15 months — the result of two unrelated factors. One is the lack of facilities for women in most of the state’s county jails. The other is a sharp rise in the number of women being arrested on Cape Cod.

    As of July 21, there were 252 inmates at the county jail, and 113 of them were women, according to Barnstable County Sheriff Donna Buckley. Ninety-one of those women live in Essex County, in the northeast corner of the state. But the Essex County jail doesn’t take women, so female detainees from that county are normally sent to the Suffolk County jail in Boston.

    A 2012 class action suit against the Suffolk jail for fostering unsafe and unsanitary conditions, however, led to the closing of that jail for renovations last year. The Essex County sheriff’s office looked to Barnstable — one of five county jails in Massachusetts able to house women — and transferred more than 70 women inmates to the Bourne facility in April 2024.

    Meanwhile, the number of women arrested in Barnstable County has “crept up,” said Buckley. The total number of arrests of women in the county in 2023 was 183. In 2024, that number was 620. Part of that increase, according to Buckley’s communications director, K.C. Myers, is a “rebound” from pandemic-related low numbers of arrests, but other contributing factors are unexplained by prison authorities.

    In April 2024, the Barnstable jail’s male-to-female inmate ratio was 7.78 to 1, said Myers. By July 2025, the ratio was 1.23 to 1.

    The women’s section of the Barnstable jail now holds far more inmates from other counties than from Cape Cod. On July 22, there were 19 women from Barnstable County, two from Bristol County, one from Dukes County, and 91 from Essex. Only 21 of the 139 male prisoners at the jail are from outside Barnstable County.

    The distance from Lynn, the largest community in Essex County, to Bourne is 68 miles. Being incarcerated at that increased distance from inmates’ homes and families adds to the stress of their situations.

    Despite the rapid population growth, Buckley said the influx has not strained the jail’s staffing or resources.

    “We were able to accommodate the women with our existing staff,” the sheriff said. “I mean, there were different transportation needs and more impacts on medical and mental health, but the total population is certainly within the realm of what we’ve operated on before.”

    But Buckley claimed that the jail still needs to address longstanding staffing vacancies.

    “We fill the vacancies with overtime,” she said. “But the preferred way is to increase our staffing, and we’re working to do that.”

    The Barnstable jail’s capacity is 588 inmates, but the numbers have largely stayed below 300, even with the transfer of women from Essex.

    Despite the small number of prison facilities for women in Massachusetts, Susan Nawab, an attorney with Prisoners Legal Services and the director of its Women’s Incarceration Conditions and Reentry Project, is opposed to building more spaces for female inmates.

    “Most institutions that incarcerate women are generally far under capacity, which reflects that we have moved in a good direction as a commonwealth in terms of incarcerating fewer people,” she said.

    “If there is money poured into expanding our carceral footprint for women, there’s going to be pressure to fill it, whether the need is there or not,” she added.

    While current facilities are far under their maximum capacity, according to Nawab, the demands on women’s facilities are expected to increase as renovations and inmate transfers continue to reshape the regional incarceration system.

    Gov. Maura Healey announced a $360-million renovation plan for MCI Framingham, a medium-security state prison for women, in early June. The renovations will involve the relocation of women from the prison, according to a fact sheet released by the Healey-Driscoll administration.

    Buckley said she has not received any communication from the state on whether the women in Framingham may be sent to Barnstable.

    Editor’s note: Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article, published in print on July 24, reported incorrectly the number of male inmates at the Barnstable County jail. The number is 139, not 118.

    CORRECTIONS

    County Jail Ends Contract With Medical Provider Wellpath

    After ‘a death spiral’ in private staffing, sheriff moves to in-house care model

    By

    BOURNE — Sheriff Donna Buckley ended the Barnstable County Correctional Facility’s contract with private medical care provider Wellpath two months before the contract was set to expire at the end of this month. Buckley said this week that the county jail moved to in-house medical care on Aug. 14.

    The for-profit vendor, owned by a private equity firm and operating in prisons across the country, had proved unable to meet its staffing obligations since 2020, Buckley said.

    “We had no other choice,” she said. “We cannot afford to have all our cards with Wellpath and have them not show up.”

    According to Buckley’s office, Wellpath had been operating at the jail at 20 percent staffing capacity, leading to what the sheriff called a “death spiral” —the burnout of clinicians working up to 16-hour shifts.

    Wellpath’s deficiencies were in plain view before Buckley’s predecessor, Sheriff James Cummings, a Republican who held office for 24 years, outsourced the jail’s health care to the company. The Atlantic reported in 2019 that in the previous decade Wellpath had been sued at least 1,395 times in federal courts by inmates or families for medical malpractice and negligence.

    In October 2019, a year before Cummings gave the contract to the company, its founder and former CEO, Jerry Boyle, was indicted on charges of bribing the sheriff in Norfolk, Va. with cash, travel, loans, personal gifts, sports tickets, and campaign contributions from 2004 to 2016.

    Reestablishing In-House Care

    The Barnstable County Sheriff’s Office had its own in-house health care team until 2015, when it contracted private vendor Correctional Psychiatric Services (CPS) to provide mental health care. CPS expanded to provide all health care to inmates in 2017. That contract went to Wellpath in 2020.

    The sheriff is now working to establish a health services department with its own licensed clinicians, nurse practitioners, mental health clinicians, and a recovery coach. The coach position was established by a federal grant awarded to Barnstable in 2020 and which Buckley said the previous sheriff had not used.

    Buckley asserted that she is not ditching Wellpath because of the quality of services. Instead, she said, the problem has been with the “levels of services and expectations under the contract.” Those, she said, “were a reflection of the previous sheriff’s comfort level.”

    Buckley said that she has rehired staff who previously worked at the jail under Wellpath. “Despite the model not working,” she said, “the staff were exercising Herculean efforts to try to provide services.”

    Buckley added that “our model adds more services into the mental health piece, which is a huge factor in someone’s ability to be successful when they are released.”

    Buckley said the jail’s medical team is “fully staffed.” But according to the sheriff’s website, there are job openings for nighttime registered nurses and practical nurses, a mental health clinician, a recovery coach, and a licensed clinician to assist inmates with substance use disorder.

    Buckley said that Wellpath had failed to keep up with requirements regarding the timeliness of medical exams. This failing was the subject of an audit conducted by the state auditor last March, which revealed that the sheriff’s office did not ensure that inmates received health appraisals on time between 2019 and 2021, before Buckley was elected.

    The jail’s policy requires inmates to undergo screening within seven days of admission. The audit found that up to 196 health appraisals were not completed in the required timeframe.

    The sheriff’s office at the time told the state auditor that its health-care vendor did not have enough staff members to complete health appraisals on time, according to the audit. Buckley said that under her predecessor’s deal with Wellpath, the sheriff “had no control over the circumstances if they failed to perform.”

    “Because BCSO does not ensure that its healthcare vendor completes the health appraisals within the required timeframe,” the audit found, “there is a higher-than-acceptable risk that inmates’ medical issues are not identified and treated, ultimately affecting the health and safety of all BCSO inmates.”

    Tragedies Foretold

    Last year, the U.S. Dept. of Justice reached a settlement with Mass. Dept. of Correction (MDOC) in which the DOJ found that MDOC violated the constitutional rights of incarcerated people experiencing mental health crises in Massachusetts state prisons.

    The DOJ accused MDOC of inadequate supervision of inmates, lack of mental health care, and the abuse of solitary confinement.

    Last summer, three men died in solitary in the Barnstable County jail, two from suicide and one from a drug overdose. There had been two suicides at the jail in 2017, the same year that the sheriff first contracted out medical services. Before that, there had not been any suicides in the jail in over a decade.

    Wellpath is one of the nation’s largest providers of inmate medical care, according to Prison Legal News. It is owned by the Miami private equity company H.I.G. Capital and operates in more than 350 prisons, with responsibility for the care of more than 135,000 adult and juvenile patients.

    Wellpath serves all Massachusetts state prisons, according to the Mass.gov website. But according to a 2020 report by WBUR, the company had contracts with just two other county jails in the state besides Barnstable: Worcester and Essex. Those counties continue to have contracts with Wellpath.

    Wellpath and other players in what the report calls “a multi-billion-dollar industry with little public scrutiny” enter into contracts with jails that include incentives to curb costs and reduce hospital trips. At the time of that report, Wellpath had $1.6 billion in annual revenue.

    When private health-care vendors focus on financial incentives rather than quality of care, “there is a huge economic incentive to deny or delay care,” said Michael Horrell, a senior attorney and health-care and disability project director at Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts.

    “Every dollar that they don’t spend on health care is a dollar that is going to their bottom line,” Horrell told the Independent. He said that in counties that operate in-house health-care models, “we get fewer complaints. That’s an indication of whether it’s working.”

    CONFINEMENT

    Why Three Men Died This Summer in County Jail

    All three were in Covid isolation unit

    By

    BOURNE — Rob Davis lost the connection on a phone call that might have saved his son’s life.

    His son, Robert F. Davis Jr., 40, was being held at the Barnstable County Correctional Facility on the night of Aug. 17, 2022. Davis Jr. had been arrested in Tewksbury the day before and brought to Orleans District Court on charges of violating a restraining order. He wrote an apology letter to his former girlfriend as part of a 12-step program in March, six months after breaking into and ransacking her Dennis home, according to court documents.

    Bail was set at $500 cash, but because Davis Jr.’s case was the last of the day and his family lived over 100 miles away on the North Shore, bail could not be posted that day.

    Davis Jr. called his father’s landline later that evening from the county jail in Bourne. The connection was poor, and Davis Jr. was not able to hear his dad telling him that he would bail him out the next day.

    “I told him when I was coming to get him, and he’s going, ‘I can’t hear you,’ ” the father recalled. “And then it disconnected us.”

    At 9 p.m., Davis Jr. called his father’s landline again. Davis was out walking his dog and missed the call.

    At 9 a.m. the next morning, Aug. 18, the jail notified him that his son had been found dead in his cell at 1 a.m. He had been incarcerated for less than 24 hours.

    Davis Jr.’s suicide was one of three deaths at the Barnstable County Correctional Facility this summer.

    On the same day as Davis’s death, Tyler J. Gibbs, 23, another inmate at the Barnstable County jail, attempted suicide and died the next day at Falmouth Hospital. Gibbs was being held without bail on charges that he murdered his ex-girlfriend, Kiana Barrows, 20, on May 10 in Falmouth.

    A correctional officer is being investigated for procedural mishandling of Gibbs’s death, said Sheriff James Cummings.

    Two months earlier, on June 16, 2022, David A. Allain Jr., 30, died in his cell from a drug overdose, Cummings confirmed. He had been in jail since late February 2022 on charges of possession of narcotics with intent to distribute and attempted escape.

    All three of the men were in pretrial detention and had not been convicted. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than three-quarters of the inmates in the U.S. who died by suicide from 2000 to 2019 were awaiting trial and not been convicted of a crime.

    Rob Davis recognized this as a particularly alarming element of his son’s case. “We’re talking about a county jail,” he said, “where people being held still haven’t been convicted of anything. They’re innocent until proven guilty.”

    Neither Davis Jr. nor Gibbs were on suicide watch or being monitored by mental health clinicians, Cummings said.

    Covid Confinement

    Thomas Iovieno, Tyler Gibbs’s attorney, visited Gibbs 10 days before he died. Iovieno observed Gibbs to be in good spirits. “He was looking forward to defending the case, looking forward more than looking behind,” he said. “I was shocked when I heard the news.”

    Iovieno was not aware that, after his last visit to the jail, Gibbs had tested positive for Covid-19. The Barnstable County Correctional Facility maintains a unit for Covid-19 isolation where inmates are quarantined for 24 hours a day.

    In fact, all three inmates were in Covid isolation units when they died. Davis Jr. was newly detained, and Allain Jr. had just returned from a court appearance. The jail’s policy is to isolate new arrivals for the first 10 days of their incarceration. Inmates who have returned from court hearings are subjected to the same 10-day Covid isolation policy.

    Bonnie Tenneriello, a senior staff attorney at Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts, said that Covid protection protocols at many prisons look a lot like “restrictive housing,” also known as solitary confinement, whereby a prisoner is confined in a cell for 22 hours a day. “There is a vast difference between what restrictive housing is and what Covid isolation should look like,” Tenneriello said. “Most places do not do humane Covid isolation.”

    Restrictive housing has been shown to increase the likelihood of suicide among inmates. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2019 found the effects can follow people beyond jail: people exposed to solitary confinement were 78 percent more likely to die from suicide after their release.

    Solitary confinement and its danger to prisoners were addressed in the state’s Justice Reform Act of 2018. The law set limits on the number of days of confinement allowed and stipulated that inmates have access to proper food, phones, and a canteen. But Liz Matos, executive director of Prisoners’ Legal Services Massachusetts, said that, with little oversight, some sheriffs are violating if not the letter of the law then its intent.

    “The whole point was to recognize the permanent impact of solitary confinement on a population largely suffering from mental health and substance abuse,” she said.

    “There are so many proven benefits to giving incarcerated people access to phone calls,” Tenneriello added. “It’s the single most important factor to help people successfully return to their communities.”

    Sheriff Candidates’ Views

    State Rep. Tim Whelan, the Republican candidate seeking to replace Cummings in November, said Covid isolation is necessary to prevent outbreaks. Solitary confinement for punishment must also be allowed as a last resort for inmates who endanger themselves or others, he said. Suicide prevention in isolation units comes down to clearing cells of any tools that could be used for suicide, providing staff training in suicide prevention, and proper observation, Whelan said.

    Proper observation, however, requires sufficient staffing and, right now, the Barnstable jail is trying to hire 60 correctional officers, Cummings said.

    Whelan said the officers have told him “forced overtime” is common and is “burdensome.”

    “I can tell you, if I am elected, my number one job will be recruiter-in-chief,” Whelan said. “It can be fixed. It is a matter of recruiting.”

    But the current total of 147 correctional officers amounts to nearly one officer per inmate. The state Special Commission on Correctional Funding noted that Barnstable, Berkshire, and Franklin county jails have the highest ratio of correctional officers to inmates in the state.

    The Barnstable County Correctional Facility’s inmate population is down to 174 in a jail built for 588. Yet Cummings’s budget has not gone down in years.

    Whelan, who served on a commission in 2021 that studied sheriff budgets statewide, said all the county jails have fewer inmates than usual, but it is too early to determine if that is because judges are imposing less jail time due to Covid or if there are other factors. So, the commission recommended delaying reductions in sheriffs’ budgets for three to five years.

    Donna Buckley, the Democrat running for sheriff, said Covid protocols are necessary and solitary must be used at times. But a lack of staffing is not an excuse, she added.

    “Much-needed correctional staff should not be offline to train as municipal police officers or to operate a marine unit,” she said. “Mental health spending needs to be more than the current 1.7 percent of the budget. Our Covid protocols should not come at the cost of inmate safety.”

    Cummings said the three recent deaths don’t reflect the full picture.

    “From 2017 to 2022 we had 63 saves where the staff saved folks who were trying to commit suicide,” Cummings said. “When someone is successful, that’s the rare occasion inside the correctional facility.”

    Cummings admits, however, that the conditions at his and other jails are what lead inmates to suicide in the first place. “It’s almost the perfect atmosphere for someone to do something reckless like that,” he said.

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