Sheriff Tom Hodgson is routinely criticized for having the highest suicide rate among inmates of any county jail in the state. He has the second highest rate of recidivism in the state. He spends the least on inmate care in the state. His corrections officers have the highest rate of complaints of excessive force in the state. Hodgson has been faulted for excessive absences, for political grandstanding instead of doing his job, and for accepting kickbacks from a phone vendor. He’s fighting four wrongful death suits, a lawsuit for abusing mentally ill inmates, and one for illegal detention and deprivation of Constitutional rights. The Attorney General wrote a letter calling for an investigation of his facilities, but otherwise there has been absolutely no effort from any branch or office of Massachusetts government to hold the sheriff accountable.

Hodgson doesn’t care for public scrutiny. Whenever he is accused of abuse, neglect, or mismanagement at his jail, Hodgson whines that political opponents are out to get him and cites his 100% A+ perfect score from the American Corrections Association. The sheriff recently penned an editorial in the New Bedford Standard Times, trotting out the claim that “the BCSO is nationally accredited by the American Corrections Association, which gave us a perfect 100 percent score on our most recent inspection that looked at everything from security procedures to health care and everything in between.”

Public officials who refuse to do anything about Hodgson’s abuses may want to believe that his loudly-proclaimed accreditations are an indication that all is well in his facilities. But, like the sham award Hodgson received at the National Sheriff’s Association meeting last summer, his ACA accreditation is equally laughable — or would be if taxpayers were not paying for it.

In 2004 Prison Legal News published an article about the ACA entitled “The American Correctional Association — A Fraud on Texas Taxpayers.” The author described the ACA as:

“a non-governmental private agency that offers a veneer of respectability to those client correctional institutions that comply with the association’s volumes of published standards. After payment of the obligatory and substantial fees, the ACA’s audit teams visit client prisons and, finding at least the appearance of compliance, the ACA declares the prison to be ‘accredited.’ Prison officials hope that ACA accreditation will thwart lawsuits over conditions of confinement by prisoners. That some of the worst, most brutal, violent and decrepit prisons are ‘accredited’ by the ACA should cast doubt on whether the accreditation has any real world meaning. The ACA will not disclose if any prison or jail, after having paid the requisite fees, has failed to be accredited.”

The article goes on to fault ACA “accreditations” for secret audits, audits which ignore prisoner complaints, and questionable and improper payments in exchange for 100% A+ “perfect” ratings like Hodgson’s.

Besides offering cover for disinterested politicians, ACA audits also function as a legal shield. States which rely on the ACA to set “best practices” cannot be sued for neglect if they are making a “good faith” effort to follow some sort of standards. This has led to cases like one in South Dakota in 2007. Prisoners complained that “cells lacked adequate ventilation, lacked running hot water, the electrical wiring was substandard, the fire standards were inadequate, the kitchen conditions were unsanitary and unsafe, and the medical and dental care was grossly inadequate. Moreover, the prison was understaffed. The court held these conditions support a finding the double-celling was unconstitutional, but the defendants could move for an evidentiary hearing to seek double celling upon improving the confinement conditions.” But the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals also ruled that the ACA — a private entity — could determine prison capacity. This then undermined many of the prisoners’ complaints and hampered remediation of the horrific prison conditions.

In 2001 the Suffolk County sheriff’s department in Boston faced charges of abusing inmates and mismanagement at the facilities. The ACA director, James Gondles, was asked to participate in an inspection but declined to do so because the ACA had previously given “glowing” reviews in a previous inspection. Gondles’ refusal to revisit the Suffolk jail raised some alarms.

The Boston Globe reported that “a closer look at the accreditation program of the American Correctional Association — the trade group chosen by Suffolk County Sheriff Richard J. Rouse to investigate reports of systemic abuse and mismanagement in his department — shows that it has routinely accredited facilities beset by charges of abuse or poor conditions. The facilities include one that was put into receivership following a federal lawsuit, and another set to close this year, and others found by courts to be operating in violation of the constitution.”

Worse, the ACA-led inspection of the Suffolk jail was led by a Nebraska auditor from a corrections department under investigation by Nebraska state officials for failure to meet minimum standards of health care at his own institution.

In a 2006 academic study of ACA accreditations, the researcher reviewed criticisms of the ACA’s “standards” — “badly borrowed principles from outdated, never tested, academic theories.” Some facilities, as one cited study noted, do not adopt ACA “standards” until right before the ACA audit. Another observed that some facilities concoct policies and procedures consistent with ACA “standards” just prior to the audit, which were referred to as the “one-day shine.”

The study found that ACA accreditation did not necessarily signify a professionally managed jail. In fact, “with respect to levels of violence, riots, and fires, ACA accredited facilities are more violent than non-accredited facilities. The data showed a significant positive relationship between ACA accreditation and higher rates of assaults on staff and riots. Although inmate assaults on other inmates and assaults on staff decreased from 1995 to 2000, assaults on staff remained the same. Similarly, the ratio of riots increased between 1995 and 2000, and the ratio of fires remained higher in ACA accredited facilities than in non-accredited facilities.” The study also found the suicide rate much higher and noted that Hepatitis C, HIV, and TB testing was performed less often in ACA-accredited jails.

The Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College reports that in 2015 Tennessee’s prisons were being routinely accredited by the ACA — at an annual cost of $40,000 — but something didn’t smell right to Tennessee Congressman Mike Stewart. Stewart had heard [eventually substantiated] rumors that a Nashville facility had brought in extra staff for the ACA’s inspection, and he called the ACA accreditations “a sham” and a “rubber stamp,” citing similar problems with ACA inspections in Boston.

The Tennessee certifications came under fire for the state’s human rights abuses — and also for highlighting the cozy relationship between the ACA and the private prison corporation Corrections Corporation of America. According to a piece in PRWeb:

“ACA accreditation is based largely on documentation provided by the correctional agency being examined, and whether it has certain policies in place — not necessarily whether it follows those policies in practice. Thus, some ACA-accredited CCA facilities have experienced significant problems despite being accredited. For example, earlier this year two prisoners were murdered at CCA’s Saguaro Correctional Center in Eloy, Arizona, which is ACA accredited; CCA’s ACA-accredited Idaho Correctional Center is presently the subject of an ACLU class-action lawsuit that describes systemic violence condoned by CCA staff; and both Hawaii and Kentucky prison officials removed their female prisoners from the CCA-operated Otter Creek Correctional Center in Kentucky, which is also ACA accredited, following a sex abuse scandal in which six CCA employees were charged with sexually abusing or raping prisoners.”

As in the Arizona correctional facility above, where prisoner deaths were covered up by Corrections Corporation of America, ACA accreditations are frequently obtained or preserved by falsifying or destroying records — a by-product of the conflicts of interest that beset the ACA. “One former CCA employee [in Nevada], Donna Como, who served as an accreditation manager, candidly admitted that she helped falsify documents for an ACA audit. ‘I was the person who doctored the ACA accreditation reports for this company,’ she stated in December 2008, referring to her employment at the CCA-operated Southern Nevada Women’s Correctional Facility.”

And the rot goes all the way to the top of the ACA.

In 2013 former Mississippi Corrections Commissioner Christopher Epps was sworn in as the 102nd president of the American Correctional Association. Epps had been an ACA auditor for at least a decade. Only a year later the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi indicted Epps on corruption charges stemming from his receiving kickbacks from prison contracts worth over $800 million. Epps will be spending two decades in one of the facilities he ran — and audited.

Like Hodgson, the ACA doesn’t care much for public scrutiny. Prison Legal News reported that “in August 1982, David L. Bazelon, Senior Circuit Judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, resigned his position as an ACA board member. In a lengthy article entitled ‘The Accreditation,’ published in Corrections Magazine, the ACA’s own periodical, Bazelon accused the organization of multiple unethical practices. The ACA, he wrote, ‘has repeatedly refused to open the accreditation process to public scrutiny and participation; the commission’s audit techniques and deliberative procedures are inherently unreliable; the commission is unwilling to accommodate constructive criticism and the possibility of meaningful change; the commission’s priorities are fundamentally flawed; [and] the commission has pervasive conflicts of interest with the facilities it is charged with monitoring.'”

In addition to corruption, conflicts-of-interest, and the secretiveness of the ACA, its accreditations are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. You can practically print them yourself. Prison Legal News noted:

“Tennessee is one of only a few states in which the entire prison system is accredited by the ACA, and as a result the TDOC holds the American Correctional Association’s Golden Eagle Award. That honor is somewhat tarnished by the fact that for two of every three years that state prisons are accredited, they self-report data to maintain their accreditation; that the TDOC makes large payments to an ACA affiliate; and that despite the TDOC being fully accredited, when conducting its technical review the ACA found Tennessee prison officials were not correctly reporting violent incidents — something that presumably should have been discovered during the regular accreditation process but was not.”

Conflicts of interest include the revolving door between the ACA, the prison industrial complex, and state agencies. The Massachusetts ACA chapter is called the Correctional Association of Massachusetts (CAM) and CAM’s executive board is virtually a Who’s Who of the Massachusetts Department of Corrections, EOPS, Parole Board, and county sheriff’s departments. As state officials they authorize and sign off on ACA certifications with their right hand. But as ACA members their organization receives public funds with the left.

You, the Massachusetts taxpayer, on the other hand, are expected to simply pay the bill and pretend that the conflict of interest is nothing serious. You, the citizen, are expected to pass much more rigorous certifications in your own professional life. Whether cardiologist, lawyer, long-haul trucker, or daycare worker, the bar for you is much higher than a self-audit. And you’d lose your job if a payoff were involved.

So the next time Tom Hodgson waves his 100% A+ perfect score in your face, remember — an ACA accreditation isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.