WITNESS
Sheriff Michael J. Ashe, Jr. was elected Sheriff of Hampden County, Massachusetts, in 1974. He has been re-elected five times since, without opposition. Among the operations at Hampden County that Sheriff Ashe is most proud of are the nation's first Day Reporting Center, started in 1986; the nation's first After Incarceration Support Systems program to assist inmates during the critical time of community re-entry; and a medical department which has developed a new paradigm for correctional medicine in its linkage to community-based health centers, and which was selected in 1998 as the facility of the year by the National Commission on Correctional Health Care. In 1996, the Hampden County Sheriff's Department became the first county correctional department in the nation to be awarded four (4) separate accreditations from the American Correctional Association for four different levels of security.
Sheriff Ashe is a past president of the Massachusetts Sheriffs Association. He has received, among other awards, the Howard B. Gill Lifetime Achievement Award from the Correctional Association of Massachusetts, the Annual President's Award of the Massachusetts Sheriffs Association, and the Beverly Ross Fliegel Public Service Memorial Award. He holds a Bachelor's degree from St. Anselm's College and a Master's degree in Social Work from Boston College.
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STATEMENT
First, let me point out that although we often hear that all the high-sounding vision statements in the world are just empty chatter without organizational follow through, it is also true that any successful correctional organization must be infused with, and guided by, a vision of what it seeks to be and, indeed, what it seeks not to be.
It is also important to state my belief that what ultimately makes a correctional institution work has to do with the hearts and minds and spirits of those who people it, not with bricks and mortar, shatterproof glass, pre-fab cells or organizational charts.
…As with any correctional facility, our foundation is a safe, secure, orderly facility, but that is only our foundation, not the whole edifice. If you stop there, you miss a great deal of the challenge and energy and good efforts of corrections. The house that we build on that foundation, our daily operational practice, has to be humane, positive, productive, and permeated with a respect for the worth of every staff member and every inmate.
Like most of life, the answers in corrections will not fit on a bumper sticker and they do not lie at the extremes. We do not want to run hotels, but we also don't want to run cesspools of stagnation, frustration and new crime.
Excerpted from a written statement submitted to the Commission
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Note: Some witnesses submitted documents in addition to the written statement they prepared for the hearing. In most cases, those documents are not available on the Commission's web site.
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