Police chiefs speak out against Ash Street Jail closure due to costs

Bristol County Sheriff Paul Heroux hopes to close the Ash Street Jail in 2027, which a number of the police chiefs have spoken out against due to the increase in costs. 

Ash Street Jail and Regional Lockup was built in 1888, and holds around 200 inmates awaiting trial. It is used by almost all of the Bristol County towns and cities to hold overnight and weekend arrests as well as those being held before their arraignment. 

Currently, the Bristol County House of Correction & Jail in Dartmouth is unable to accommodate the extra prisoners as the cells do not have locks or toilets and it is against the Eighth Amendment to have prisoners in a locked cell without a toilet. 

Heroux hopes to move the regional lockup from Ash Street to the Bristol County Jail should he get a $10 million state grant. This grant would be used to put locks on the doors and toilets in the cells. 

The reason Heroux hopes to transfer the detainees as it costs less money to upgrade Bristol County Jail than it would to maintain Ash Street Jail. He describes Ash Street as a “money pit.”

Already, Ash Street Jail has been turning down lock up prisoners following mental health and medical screenings, forcing local police to spend overtime hours transporting to and monitoring prisoners in hospitals. 

In 2022, the jail refused 32 prisoners. This rose to 135 in 2025 and 92 so far this year. 

Currently, the county spends $4 million on forced overtime for officers working at Ash Street Jail. Dartmouth chief of police Brian Levesque stated in a letter to the Dartmouth Select Board that closing the Ash Street Jail would only transfer the overtime from a county level to a town level. 

The letter states, “From a purely budgeting standpoint, closure of the facility would convert an intermittent cost into a standing one and a recurring one. Without a regional lockup, every overnight and weekend arrest that cannot be released becomes a local holding problem.” 

To house the overnight prisoners, the Dartmouth police would need to have police for hospital details, station watches, mutual aid, cell use and the overtime required to keep minimum patrol strength. They also would need to change their way of training to be able to have and administer medication to lockup prisoners. 

Currently, the Dartmouth police do not have it within their budgets to do this. The letter states; “That cost is not in most current police budgets. It will appear as an unbudgeted overtime, reduced proactive patrol, and if the pattern holds, pressure to add positions solely to cover prisoner watch.”

Currently, the Dartmouth Police Department has budgeted $29,000 toward using the regional lockup. At a rate of $75 a day for 320 prisoner days, this totals around $24,000 being spent on the lock up annually. 

To keep the police staffed and run a lockup, Levesque estimated that the annual cost would rise to $180,000. 

The letter to the Select Board served as both a request for support in litigation for an alternative lock up and a warning that the annual budget must be affected. Currently, the chiefs and Heroux are in talks to figure out a solution. 

Both the Select Board and chiefs are considering reaching out to the Department of Justice to find a solution.