Articles Tagged with Needforchange

While the DOC has a rehabilitative mission on paper, it has a reputation for violating the civil rights of its incarcerated population and discriminating and retaliating against its employees. Ten years ago, Zalkind Law sued the DOC for discrimination because the DOC paid a female deputy superintendent significantly less than her male counterparts in the same role and for retaliation based the DOC’s failure to consider her for promotion after she complained of the DOC’s unlawful practices. In 2020, the Department of Justice launched an investigation into the DOC’s treatment of incarcerated people who are facing mental health crises and found the DOC fails to accommodate prisoners suffering from serious mental health issues and instead exposes them to conditions that harm them or place them at serious risk of harm. In 2021, Robert Silva-Prentice and Dionisio Paulino, two men of color, incarcerated at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center sued the DOC for violating their civil rights under state and federal laws when a group of armed officers retaliated against Black and Latino men at the prison after an altercation between incarcerated men and officers broke out at the prison on January 10, 2020. According to the complaint filed in Massachusetts District Court, these officers—at the direction of then-Deputy Commissioner, Paul Henderson—stormed into Mr. Silva-Prentice’s and Mr. Paulino’s cell and beat, tasered, and kicked them, pulled out their hair, slammed them into concrete walls and a metal doorway while directing racial, ethnic, and sexual slurs at them. There is a jury trial set for August 5, 2024. Additionally, just last year, former corrections officer, Eric Smith, a Black man, prevailed in his discrimination and retaliation case against the DOC in state court and won a jury verdict of $2.8 million. The DOC’s history of violating civil rights makes the selection for a new Commissioner particularly important.  

To guide the process of finding a new leader of the DOC, the Healey administration has created a six-person search committee:  

• Deirdre Calvert, Director of the Massachusetts Bureau of Substance Addiction Services