By Dave Wedge
The Boston Herald
BOSTON — A tough-on-crime South Coast lawman is pushing Beacon Hill lawmakers to legalize his $5-a-day fee for jailbirds, reinstating a controversial program shut down by the state’s highest court last year.
Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson said the fees, which rankled inmate advocates, raised $750,000 in two years and he wants the Legislature to pass a law permitting jailers to charge daily rent as is done in several other states.
‘I just can’t imagine any legislator after looking at our program ... would turn their back on the taxpayer,’ said Hodgson, who is slated to testify today at a hearing before the Legislature’s Committee on the Judiciary. ‘This is a program that works.’
Hodgson, who said daily fees help offset taxpayer costs and teach inmates fiscal responsibility, collected from inmates at the Bristol House of Correction in Dartmouth from 2002 through 2004. The practice was stopped after a Bristol Superior Court judge ruled the fees were illegal. Hodgson appealed but the state Supreme Judicial Court ruled against him in 2010 and he was ordered to pay back the fees to ex-cons.
A similar bid to legalize inmate fees failed last year.
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