Sheriff Donna Buckley:How One Sheriff is Reducing Recidivism Through Compassion

Welcome to Why Not Me the World? Podcast hosted by
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alone in this world. Hopefully you gain more awareness, acceptance,
and a better understanding for autism around the world. Hi,
I'm Tony Mantor. Welcome to Why Not Me the World?
Humanity over Handcuffs the Silent Crisis special event. Joining us
today is Sheriff Donna Buckley. She has proudly served as
Barnstable County Sheriff since January fourth, twenty twenty three. She's
the first female sheriff in the Barnstable Counties three hundred
and thirty three year history. She began her career as
the in house council for the National Association of Government
Employees International Brotherhood of Police Officers. After running her law
office for nine years, she worked at the Massachusetts Teachers Association,
delivering legal services to the members of the teachers' union
in the areas of collective bargaining, grievances, arbitrations, and employment disputes.
She also taught criminal law and related courses and in
twenty eighteen became the general council for the Barnstable County
Sheriff's Office. After that, she ran for sheriff and won.
She's here to tell us her story and what a
story it is. Thanks for coming on.
Well, thank you for having me important conversations.
What's my pleasure and yes, very important conversation. Can you
give us a little background and more about your journey
on becoming sheriff of your county.
It's sort of a non traditional path to being sheriff.
I've spent my entire career as an attorney, and in
twenty and eighteen I accepted a job as general counsel
for the Barnstable County Sheriff's Office. In that position, I
had an opportunity to see both what was happening inside
the Sheriff's office as well as be part of one
of the major criminal justice reform legislations that was passed
in Massachusetts in twenty eighteen, and think about, you know,
sort of how that was going to be implemented, what
other sheriff's offices were doing, and what we were doing.
And so through that work, lots of discussion about recidivism,
lots of discussion about mental health and addiction being the
primary reason that people are in jail. And when the
current sheriff indicated that he was going to retire, there
was only one candidate who stepped forward, and that candidate didn't,
in my view, seemed to share the priorities that were
necessary to address what was happening in the criminal justice system,
which was the prevalence of addiction and mental health and
people who are incarcerated, and a lack of recognition for
the fact that a lack of services pre incarceration, pre
criminal behavior is what led a lot of people to
spiral into the criminal justice system. So it was one
of those put up or shut up moments where you know,
you can't complain about the way things are going if
you're not willing to do something. And I was at
a point in my life where it's like, you know what,
I have a responsibility to have a conversation with a
community about what we could be doing at the sheriff's
office and especially in relation to incarceration. So I ran
with the purpose of having that conversation and giving people
an option other sheriff's offices through in Massachusetts and throughout
the state were realizing that we needed to not just
lock people up and then let them out win their
times up. So we had the conversation and upset of
upsets I want.
Well, some things are just meant to be. What was
your legal expertise? Was it defense or prosecution? What was
the transition for you from legal to sheriff?
Well? Here, no, Actually I spent my career before I
came to the sheriff's office representing public employees. So I
represented police officers, firefighters, public school educators. So I actually
sat on the employee side of the table for probably
ninety percent of my career. But I will say this,
no matter what side of the table you're on, it
is the employees who do the work, and unless we
support them and value the work that we do, we
can't provide the services that we need to provide.
Sure that makes sense now as I understand it. In
your county, the sheriff doesn't actually do a lot of patrolling,
if any at all. The sheriff actually maintained to the
jail system. Can you expand on how that works for
your particular area?
It is and It's interesting as you talk to sheriffs
throughout the country because actually even within the state, each
of us is different, which is the beauty of the office.
So in Barnstable we run the jail, which includes lock
ups so pre arraignment, pre trial and sentence. We house
both males and females. We run a Bureau of Criminal Investigation,
which is crime scene investigations, which supports the police departments
throughout Barnstable County. We run an emergency nine to one
to one communications center which provides emergency communications for most
of the towns in Barnstable County, and we are a
significant member of the regional Law Enforcement Council, so we
provide We have a canine unit, we have a drone unit,
we have swat people who participate in squat and hostage
and negotiation and search and rescue human trafficking. So we
work side by side with the local police departments. But
in Marnstable County there is no need for us to
also be police patrol officers because every town has their
own police department. So for us to do that work,
which we could, but for us to do that it
would be redundant, and I don't think a good use
of taxpayer money.
Okay, now, it's amazing that you bring that up. I
have spoken with several judges around the country, and we
all seem to come back to funding paid by taxpayers.
Many judges are trying to divert the people that come
in front of them with serious mental illness away from
the prison system because they find that that usually means
the prison is actually being the hospital, and that's not
what it was intended to be. By doing this, it
can potentially save the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars,
if not millions, in incarceration fees. Now, with that being said,
how do you see this working within the system that
you do every day?
You know, that would be the ideal if we didn't
have to incarcerate people, that would certainly be ideal. But
there's so many factors that we need to think about,
you know, in the reality that we live today. First
of all, the lack of mental health and addiction services
that exist right now is one of the reasons why
we have people spiraling into jail because we have no
place else to put them. That's a tragedy. It's a
tragedy because people who especially people who are having a
mental health crisis. It's not a surprise that they act unlawfully.
But we don't have the infrastructure left because we closed
all of the residential treatment facilities back in the eighties.
You don't have the beds, or the or the providers
to provide that service in advance to prevent someone from
getting into a crisis. So I frequently are jails not
just mine, but the jails in Massachusetts, the jails across
the country are our de facto mental health and addiction treatment.
Yeah, I've heard that said many times now.
That said that said, if we had the appropriate infrastructure
to keep people supported who need support. They've committed crimes,
they need something more than just go off and don't
do it again. If we had those infrastructures in place,
then ideally we could not put people in jail, although
there are also circumstances where people need a time out.
They need to be separated from the community, They need
the time to understand what they did, be held accountable,
and figure out what the next chapter looks like. So
I think in Massachusetts right now, what we're seeing is
that our sheriffs are remarkably amazingly billing two needs one.
We are keeping people in custody who need to be
in custody, for those people who there is no other
option people that here, we are providing the medical and
mental health services, we are providing the supports, we are
giving people the tools, are starting that work. And I
can speak for myself here, but I know there are
other sheriff's offices as well who are understanding that that
work is a continuum. It doesn't just happen while people
are incarcerated. It has to continue post release. As sheriffs,
we have the infrastructure because we have them within our facilities,
so we are able to seamlessly provide that support post release,
and we have seen some amazing examples of that working,
especially for people with mental health challenges.
All right, So it seems to me from speaking with
the various people that I've spoken with, that if the sheriffs,
the legislators, the judges, everybody that's involved within the legal
system was to get together and sit down with the
legislators and say, look, we have a problem here. We
need to tell them. We can send the families here
one by one, or we can collectively get them together,
but we have a problem, and you have the power
to collectively change that common sense tells me that the
people that have the power could get together form a
way of fixing this and helping it for everyone involved.
How am I missing this point?
I don't think you're missing it. I think that that
I've had conversations with legislators about the fact that there
are physical facilities that need to be in place provide
services for people, especially for mental health services, and it's
a non starter. While everybody will pay lip service to
the fact that it was the worst public policy decision
in the history of the world to close all the
mental health residential mental health facilities, nobody is willing to
step forward and say we need new ones. So I'm
not giving up on that conversation. Not only do we
need facilities for people to be safe and for the
public to be safe that are not jails, but we
also need services. We need access to providers. You know
in Barnstable County right now are quote access for people
who don't have the ability to private pay their way
through three to six to nine months to see someone.
That's not access and financially insurance is a huge issue.
So there's so many places along the spectrum that this
is broken. But at the same time, I can speak
for myself as sheriffs and say I'm not waiting. I'm
not willing to let write people off until we get
this system straightened out. So we have stepped forward here
in Barnstable. We parted ways with a private medical and
mental health vendor and brought our own staff inside. We
are retraining our staff. They're all trained in mental health
first aid, they're trained in cognitive behavioral therapy. We're working
specifically on increasing the ability of our staff to interact
with the populations that we have. We're going to be
hosting in September a training that includes a focus on
autism and a focus on correctional behavioral health workers, because
that's the job we're asking them to do, so we
have to train them for that. We're seeing success and
maybe if the answer to the question that you have
is that we rethink. I don't think the jail facility
itself is the best place to hold people, but if
the work that we can do is checking off all
the boxes, then that's a good thing.
Yeah. Now, the unfortunate part is some of these jails, prisons,
they have some people that are very bad people in it.
They don't have serious mental illness, autism or anything. They're
just bad people in general. So unfortunately, sometimes you have
situation where all these people get put into the general population.
Then you have the worst of the worst. You have
autistic people, serious mental illness. You've got all them together,
and that's a bad mix. What's the best way to
handle something like that?
So you are one hundred percent right, I can talk
I'll talk specifically about Arnstable. One of the things that
we instituted when I became sheriff in January of twenty
twenty three was a case management model. So now every
person who's in our facility has a case manager, and
everyone has an assessment that helps us figure out placement,
it helps us figure out classification. We also, as a rule,
have a separate housing unit for I call them high profile,
more serious types of cases that's not part of a
general population unit. And then we really do our best
to meet people where they're at, whether it's an orientation
unit or programming unit, or different levels of programming or
special management. We are making sure that we are not
putting people in worse positions through the experience of coming
through the jail. So that is a primary effort on
our part. I don't know. The model that you described
to me is sort of that stereotypical state prison model
where you know, everybody's here and everybody'slet's figure it out.
That is not how we operate.
Okay, Now, let's focus on your deputies. How are they
trained and how they incorporated in the changes that you
we been trying to make.
So we actually call them corrections officers. Okay, those are
the security staff who work in house. And actually that's
who I was referring to when I talked about who
we are training to deal with the population. So mental
health first aid was the first thing that we did.
We've already put one cohort through and we're working on
the rest to make sure all of our staff have
cognitive behavioral therapy training. We're going to be hosting it
is correctional behavioral health training and certification, so that we're
to be hosting that in the fall. You know, we're
asking people who are signing up to be security officers
to be medical and mental health workers at the same time.
And what's interesting is that a lot of people are
interested in that job. We are getting a lot of
people used to be I'll be a correction officer to
like and get hired as a police officer. That's not
the track anymore. We are getting people with social work backgrounds,
with human service backgrounds who want to come in and
make a difference. The difference that they're making is in
public safety because we are able to impact people while
we have them, the better shot they have in the outside,
and the better we can deliver on public safety and
reduce recidivism.
There's a judge down in Miami. He's opened up a
two hundred and eighteen thousand square foot facility that incorporates
everything that people need. I think he focused more on
serious mental illness than anything else, but that's his priority.
The facilities got dental, it's got medical, it's got beds.
It seems like it's a really good situation for those
that need help. He also says that by doing this,
the judicial system, in the court system, sees less repeat offenders.
So it kind of sounds like you are doing almost
the same thing as he is.
It's what we yes, it's what we need to be doing.
And the only physical facilities, unfortunately, that we have are jails.
Right you know the number of beds I think right now?
Hang on second, al a statistic for you. In nineteen
ninety nine we had eleven hundred and seventy beds. Today
we have less than seven hundred. Wow, we don't have
less sick people, We actually.
Have more sick right, Right.
COVID did a number on our youth and we're starting
to see that as they become adults. Our world is
a very mean, cruel, tough place to live, full of anxiety.
It's full of damages from social media where I seeing
people struggling that would never be in that category before.
Right, And of course we need to be concerned about
the youth that's between seventeen and twenty five with serious
mental illness because that seems to be the age group
that that's most common in. So how do you incorporate
this all together? I mean, you've got a bigger, wider
world of people. You're not just dealing with one type
of person. And of course there's no way of making
everybody happy because that's just totally impossible. So how do
you get people look at this and say, WHOA, this
is working?
So I look at the work that we do here
in sort of three spaces. We have a really robust
youth program. We work with both sort of mainstream youth
as well as at risk youth. We do it through
a summer program, We do it through school vacation weeks,
because if we can build and develop relationships with kids,
especially kids who are at risk, and keep those relationships going,
maybe it's less likely they spiral into the system. Then
we look at the work that we do while we
have people in our custody, the age old choices they
can sit here and do their time and then we
let them out and we've met our responsibility. But we
know that doesn't make us safe. So we look at
the work that we do here is to try to
figure out individually, what does each person need. Do they
need education, do they need vocational training, Do they need
medical and mental health services? Do they need addiction treatment?
Do they need a combination of all of those things?
And we start that work the day they walk in
the door here. And then the third place that we
are trying to impact public safety is when people are released.
So actually just last Friday, we opened it's called the
Bridge Center. Understanding that the most consequential thing that we
do at the Sheriff's office is let someone out, because
that is the place where they're either gonna move into
the positive territory or revert back to negative behavior, and
there's a victim, there's victims, there's harm that results if
people were back to negative behavior. So we have to
figure out how to support people post release from the
minute they walk out the door when they are at
their most vulnerable, and our community is at its most
vulnerable when someone is released. So the Bridge Center is
a one stop shop, an opportunity for us to tie
together all of the amazing resources that exist in our community.
All that the person being released needs to know is
they need to go one place. Do they need help
with a job, Do they need help with housing? Do
they need food? Do they need transportation? Do they need mentors,
they need to go to a meeting? Do they need
a support group? And there's community partners who have been
knocking on our door wanting to work with us in
this space. Now we have actually a physical facility that
brings all of this together. It's impossible for someone like
me to navigate all of the services that we have.
I don't know about all of them. Imagine if you're
the person getting out of jail who doesn't many times
a penny to your name, they not even have a ride.
You know, that's all the work we try to do
while people are here, but it's you get to sustain it.
Yeah. Absolutely. Now, when you were elected, how did the
people that were there accept what you wanted to do?
Because you wanted to come in and make some changes
and as we know most people in most places, one
thing they hate is change.
Oh so you refer to the staff.
Yeah, that's right.
I'm going to knock on wood. But the staff that
work here are phenomenal. Maybe it's because I spent the
majority of my time working with employees, you know, and
understanding that first of all, you can never take them
for granted, and change people have to be brought along.
You don't force change on people. So we talked a lot.
Everyone who worked here knew how I got elected and
why I got elected. It was a very clear option A,
Option B campaign, so there was no question about what
I was sent here to do. And ultimately, we work
for the taxpayers. So I think having a clear vision,
having a clear understanding, and bringing them along with conversation
with the changes, making sure that their needs are met.
They have all the information and that their first and foremost,
especially in this work, their safety is paramount. Safety of
the people who are incarcerated is paramount. Helping get to
a point where we understand that we don't just do security.
That's not why we exist, because that doesn't make us safer.
We do security so that we can do all of
the other work. And it's been amazing. It's been absolutely
transformative here now.
The system that you inherited, it did not have some
of the changes that you have going on now when
you first came Is that correct? It did?
It did not. I mean, it was a system that
was grounded in a very different philosophy you brought up earlier,
the forward facing law enforcement patrol. This Sheriff's office before
I became sheriff was very much interested in that area,
so it was a very different philosophy. We're actually doing
a presentation next month for the AJA American Jail Association
on something from Nothing. So one of the examples of
that is when I came on, we heused women, but
we didn't have any women's programming. So we developed from
nothing women's programming, a women's therapeutic treatment program which is
designed to treat women. Women are offenders, but women are
also victims and women are also caretakers. One day we
did a statistic. We had ninety five women who had
one hundred and nine children. But you think about the
collateral consequences to our public safety in the community when
those women are incarcerated. Start to talk about generational incarceration,
because now those kids think incarceration is part of their future.
Because that's what my mom did, That's what you know,
that's what's in my family. So we decided to work
with focus programs specifically for women. And it came from nothing.
Okay, So now we've covered a lot of things. Every event,
we've covered the people that work with you and for you.
Now what about the inmates themselves? Of course there were
some that were there before you got there, and then
of course you've got new ones coming in. Did they
see the differences that you brought? And I guess the
ultimate question is how did they adapt to the change?
Can you give me a minute because I'm going to
read you something that I received last week? Is that? Okay, sure,
all right, hang on one second, yeah, sure, all right.
So last week I got a really received a really
long letter from a woman who went through our treatment program,
women's treatment program. I'm not going to read the whole thing.
So she goes through and she thanks all of the
different staff that she interact with. I'll read you this part.
My family has made jokes that I came out of
jail with friends, and that is true. I am still
in touch with a few inmates, both current and released.
Once I'm finished with parole, I'm hoping to see them
in person. One thing I found out, the transition back
into a normal life has not been as easy as
I thought it would be. I have mentioned this to
several people, including my parole and probation ladies. It would
be non skippin' parts. It would be nice if there
was some kind of a group for released inmates that
just deals with transitioning back to life outside of jail.
From finding a job to mental health. There's a five
month wait for therapy, to financial and credit help, and
to taking care of your physical health. There's a lot
to think about and do. For me. There are days
when it's hard to get motivated. I said to someone,
I could see why some people fall back into bad habits.
Luckily I did not have a drug and houtlcohol issue,
and I have a family that's there to support me.
But it's still a tough road some days. So I
truly just want to say thank you for making what
could have been a real nightmare for me much more bearable.
When people ask me what jail was like, they are
surprised when I say it could have been much worse,
or it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.
I used my time wisely and came out with a
plan and with several books ready to go. I hope
you continue your support of the women's program, and if
I can ever be of help, please let me know.
Would you consider a program for released inmates. I would
be in even if I have to travel, So that's
her words. Another example, we had someone who has been
in custody in Barnstabale County for the majority of his
adult life, and he's probably in his fifties or sixties.
He was here when I was here as general counsel,
he was here when I came in as sheriff. But
through the work that we did sort of refocusing instead
of just housing that person, we worked with the Department
of Mental Health, and it wasn't easy, but we were
finally able even though he was a client of the
Department of Mental health. They kept denying him services. So
what we were able to do was to figure out,
how are we going to house this person anyway, the
person had housing. The person finally had support and stayed
out of here for the longest time ever, found himself
back here recently. But then those charges were dismissed. But
the behavior this person was a high maintenance person self injurious.
But that behavior didn't exist the last time they came back,
and when the charges were dismissed, they had a stable
place to go back to. So that's this kind of
stuff that we see all the time we're working on it.
Yeah, that's great. Well, this has been really good, great
information and information that people really need to hear. I've
had a lot of people come on my podcast. I
don't believe I've had anyone this has focused on this
part of the system. As you seem to be.
Well, thank you. I'm i As you can tell, I'm
passionate about this. I believe as a sheriff, our job
is public safety, and the best way to keep the
public safe is to make sure that when people leave
our jails, they don't come back. Public isn't their next victim.
That's why we do what we do, do the work
here to make sure that the people in our community
are safe, that no one is their next victim, and
that we're not this revolving door.
Yeah. Well, this has been great conversation, great information. I
really appreciate you taking the time to come on and
share everything you're doing with us.
Thank you so much. Good luck with your show, and
if we ever want to talks more, or if you're
a route in Massachusetts and you want to come visit us,
let us know.
I certainly will. Thanks again. Thanks for taking the time
out of your busy schedule to listen to our show today.
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