BOSTON (WHDH) - The Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department announced Tuesday that it is ending its contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The decision came as the sheriff’s department announced its new plan to reallocate its focus and resources toward the provision of care, custody and rehabilitative services to what will soon be an expanded population of women entering the Suffolk County House of Correction, according to a release issued by a department spokesperson.
Beginning this week, the department will start receiving pretrial and sentenced women from Plymouth, Essex, and Norfolk counties in an effort to achieve greater regionalization and delivery of critical services for what has become the fastest-growing incarcerated population in the country, according to the department.
“We are ending our contract with ICE to reallocate our resources towards helping local women to address long-standing issues that have contributed to their involvement in the criminal justice system,” said Sheriff Steven W. Tompkins.
Women’s Program Services delivers gender-specific and individualized reintegration programming to women who have been remanded to the Suffolk County House of Correction.
Every woman is enrolled in a three-phase program model that helps address the psychological and educational barriers that have hindered their success in order to better prepare them for reentry.
“We take pride in the services that we have been able to provide to ICE detainees,” Tompkins continued, “but we are elated about this new opportunity to expand our services across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to reach more women with our dedicated programming so that we can begin to work on their recovery, address some the issues that first led them into the system, and return them to society better able to care for themselves and their families.”
All ICE detainees will be relocated by mid-December.
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