By Julie Manganis
The Salem News, Mass.
SALEM, Mass. — Since being shot during a 2013 escape attempt, Raymond Wallace has been confined to a bed in a locked room on a locked floor of the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital, a secure and fully staffed Department of Correction facility in Jamaica Plain.
Yet taxpayers have spent nearly $2 million over the past 4 1/2 years paying for at least one Essex County correctional officer — and two if he has to visit another hospital or go to court — to also stand watch over him.
“He’s a big drain on my budget,” said Essex County Sheriff Kevin Coppinger, who is hoping to work with state officials and the courts to take at least part of the financial burden off his department.
“I’m shocked by this story,” Department of Correction director of communications Christopher Fallon said Tuesday after learning about the situation from a reporter.
The reason for the expense: a Department of Correction policy requiring that whenever someone is being held at Shattuck before trial, the county facility that sent the inmate must also provide its own security detail.
Wallace, 40, was on probation following a prison term for a 2001 armed burglary at a Waltham farmstand when he was charged with two unusually violent holdups, one in 2010 at the now-closed Borders Books on Route 114 in Peabody and one in 2011 at a PetSmart on Highland Avenue in Salem.
He was being held on $1 million bail and looking at 20 years in state prison when he tried to escape during a trip to a Boston hospital in July 2013. The effort ended in a shootout that left Wallace severely injured.
In 2016, a Suffolk County judge found him medically incompetent to stand trial, and judges in Essex County have gone along with that finding, scheduling periodic status hearings. The next one is set for Feb. 7.
Wallace’s attorney, Ray Buso, said nothing has changed since Wallace’s last court hearing.
“We can’t go forward on anything until he’s found competent,” Buso said. “It seems unlikely that’s ever going to change. He’s been deteriorating for four years. He’s down to a weight where they can’t do surgery without killing him, and he can’t stay alive without the surgery.”
Essex County prosecutors, however, have asked that Wallace be at least deemed to have violated his probation in the 2001 case, a finding that would then allow a judge to impose a prison term, said Carrie Kimball Monahan, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office. A prison term would make Wallace the responsibility of the DOC and relieve the sheriff’s department of its burden.
“We’d like to try him but cannot because competency is an issue,” Monahan said.
That leaves Wallace in limbo, and Essex County on the hook, unless Coppinger can convince the DOC to take over supervision.
The cost of Wallace’s round-the-clock security detail came to light after The Salem News inquired about another Essex County inmate, a woman who was ordered held without bail as a danger last month in an alleged child abuse case.
The woman, who suffers from physical and mental illnesses and is pregnant, has been hospitalized since her arrest. Two Essex correctional officers had to stay with her at all times, at a cost of $2,100 a day, Coppinger said.
By the time Judge Robert Brennan asked prosecutors and the woman’s attorney to work out an agreement for conditions that would relieve the sheriff’s department, the woman had been in custody at the hospital for 36 days, costing taxpayers more than $75,000.
But that’s a tiny fraction of what it has cost to have a correctional officer stationed at Shattuck for Wallace, Coppinger said.
Coppinger said that if he has enough staff on duty during a shift, he can send someone to Boston for the Shattuck detail. But frequently, he doesn’t. That forces him to tap into his overtime budget.
The net cost to the department has been approximately $430,000 a year for the past 4 1/2 years, Coppinger said. It includes extended periods when Wallace was hospitalized at Massachusetts General Hospital, where two officers were required.
Neither Suffolk County, where Wallace is still facing charges stemming from the escape attempt, nor Middlesex County, where Wallace was actually being held during the escape because of issues with other inmates in Essex County, have been asked to share the cost, Coppinger said.
“It’s all on Essex (County) because he is our prisoner,” Coppinger said.
Coppinger took a trip into Boston last week to visit the facility and observe Wallace. “He’s locked in a room on the eighth floor,” said Coppinger.
His officers have to observe and make a notation in a log every 15 minutes as to Wallace’s status. The have been no reported incidents during his time at Shattuck.
“You need someone to sit on the inmate,” said Fallon, who said it’s not out of the ordinary to have a county facility’s officers at Shattuck.
When told that Wallace had been there for more than four years, however, Fallon expressed surprise.
“Four years just is so long,” he acknowledged. “This is definitely an outlier.”
The average cost per year to house an inmate at a Department of Correction facility is $55,616, according to a report released last year by MassINC, a nonpartisan think tank. The cost of housing an inmate in a county facility like Middleton Jail was an average of $57,217, according to the report. (Coppinger said Essex County’s per-inmate cost is lower than that, in the low $40,000s, because of efforts by his predecessor to privatize services.)
State Rep. Paul Tucker, who was Salem’s police chief when Wallace was charged back in 2011, said Wallace was a “very violent guy,” who, police suspected, was also responsible for several other robberies at the time.
“To me, I think the Department of Correction would be much more equipped to handle him,” said Tucker, who has discussed the situation with Coppinger. He would like to talk with other sheriffs as well as the DOC.
“If there’s some type of legislative fix, I’ll sponsor it,” Tucker said.
©2018 The Salem News (Beverly, Mass.)