DARTMOUTH — Bristol County Sheriff’s Office was given a grade of A+ from national corrections experts after it was recently awarded its second consecutive national accreditation from the American Corrections Association.
The Dartmouth correctional facility, which encompasses the Bristol County House of Corrections and Women’s Center on Faunce Corner Road, achieved another perfect 100% score on hundreds of operational indicators after the grueling ACA inspection and audit.
ACA inspectors informed the sheriff’s office of the accreditation recommendation during the audit closeout in October and officially awarded the accreditation at the organization’s conference in January.
This is the second consecutive ACA accreditation in which the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office has achieved a perfect score; the Dartmouth correctional complex achieved a perfect score in 2016 as well during the last three-year ACA audit.
To pass the inspection, the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office met or exceeded more than 360 different operational indicators representing best practices and industry standards. Steve Bailey, the chairman of the ACA audit in Bristol County, said achieving a perfect score is rare.
The American Corrections Association is a national organization focused on increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of correctional operations. Its standards are written and refined by corrections professionals and represent the best practices of professional corrections teams across the country. The Bristol County Sheriff’s Office joins several Bay State Sheriff’s Offices which have also received national accreditation from the ACA, including facilities in Plymouth, Barnstable, Middlesex, Hampden, Suffolk and Worcester Counties.
Audits and accreditations are nothing new for the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office, which is also accredited by the National Commission on Correctional Health Care and receives annual inspections by the Massachusetts Department of Corrections and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The next audit of the facility is coming this spring after Sheriff Thomas Hodgson volunteered the complex for an inspection by the National Institute of Corrections to support a statewide commission focused on correctional funding.