The State Line
Three questions decide how much of this record a resident can get without a lawyer: does anybody inspect the jail, does the law require a death in custody to be reported, and is the result published. We have not yet established the answers for Massachusetts.
Not yet researched. When it is, the answer goes here and nowhere else — one law layer per state, so the county pages stay about the county.
Compare all fifty states →That is the one thing every county in America has in common. The jail belongs to the people of the county and is paid for out of their taxes. The sheriff who runs it is elected. The judge who decides who sits in it is elected or appointed. Three offices, enormous power, and almost nobody watching.
How much is your sheriff — and your judge — costing you?
Nationally, almost 77% of the people who died in local jails in 2019 had not been convicted of anything, and suicide was the leading single cause of those deaths. The Justice Department is required to count deaths in custody and does not do it properly — a Senate investigation found it failed to identify more than 990 such deaths in a single year. MoBetta is building the county-by-county record instead.
Your VOTE is POWERFUL.
The sheriffs who run these jails are elected. So are the commissioners who pay for them.
Deadlines, ID rules and Massachusetts’s own election office, from vote.gov — the official U.S. government voter site. Where you vote on the day is set by your county election office.
Massachusetts — all 14 counties open. Click any county on the map, or see the transparency scoreboard below.
This is our jail
Every county in Massachusetts was checked against the same ten questions on 2026-09-20. This measures disclosure, not conduct — what a county publishes about a building its taxpayers own. A county can raise its score in an afternoon by posting a document.
Not scored: No county jail (1): Nantucket County. Not examined (1) — the county's and sheriff's own sites could not be read, a gap in the research rather than a finding: Plymouth County.
Massachusetts sheriffs have custody and control of the county jail and house of correction by state law (MGL ch. 126 § 16) and are elected to six-year terms (MGL ch. 37 § 1). Eight of the fourteen counties — Berkshire, Essex, Franklin, Hampden, Hampshire, Middlesex, Suffolk and Worcester — no longer have a county government at all; their sheriffs and houses of correction are managed by the state Executive Office of Public Safety and funded by the Legislature, so there is no county board to hold to account. The Massachusetts Department of Public Health inspects every one of these facilities and publishes the reports. A county earns the inspections mark here only when it posts that material on its own site. Nantucket County operates no jail: people arrested or sentenced in its courts are held at the Barnstable County Correctional Facility under contract. Counties shown as not scored are ones whose own pages could not be read, not ones found to publish nothing.