Above, District 7 Councillor Miniard Culpepper comforted Druesilla Brown, mother of Shacoby Kenny, as she testified before the City Council on Monday, Oct. 26. Yawu Miller photo
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Activists who testified at Boston City Hall during a hearing of the Council’s Criminal Justice Committee on Monday cited allegations of beatings, sexual assaults, and 20 deaths over the last seven years at the Suffolk County House of Correction.
The hearing was held in response to the December 2025 killing of Shacoby Kenny by guards at the South Bay jail. The state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner ruled that Kenny’s death was a homicide, finding that he died after guards put him in a chokehold.
Yet ten months after his death, none of the 11 guards thought to be responsible has been charged with a crime, fired, or put on administrative leave pending an investigation.
“The sheriff’s office is an island,” Druesilla Brown, Kenny’s mother, told city councillors during the hearing Monday. “They’re untouchable. How is it possible that there’s no accountability for this?”
District 7 Councillor Miniard Culpepper (right) speaks during a Council hearing as at-large councillors Julia Mejia and Henry Santana listen. Yawu Miller photo
Officials from the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department did not attend the hearing and refused Councillor Miniard Culpepper’s request to allow inmates at the South Bay facility who witnessed the killing to testify via Zoom.
While Culpepper says he made the request in April, an attorney for the department said the request was made two weeks before the hearing.
“There are numerous logistical issues that would need to be worked out prior to an event like this taking place in a correctional facility,” wrote Melissa Garand, general counsel for the department in a letter dated Oct. 23 that was shared with the Reporter.
Suffolk County Sheriff Steve Tompkins did not respond to a request for an interview, but sent a statement to the Reporter noting that Kenny’s death at the hands of correctional officers is being investigated by the Massachusetts Attorney General, the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office and the Boston Police Department.
“We are awaiting the conclusion of their independent investigations,” Tompkins wrote in his statement.
Tompkins, who was on medical leave for a year, returned to office in September after he was acquitted of charges brought by federal prosecutors related to a cannabis investment. He was not in office when Kenny was killed.
While Kenny’s death last year has been a catalyst for increased scrutiny at the county’s jails, it was indicative of widespread abuse of prisoners, according to Janhavi Madabushi, executive director of the Massachusetts Bail Fund.
Druesilla Brown, mother of Shacoby Kenny, who was killed by guards in the South Bay House of Correction, speaks to reporters outside City Hall. Yawu Miller photo
“There’s so much else that we are concerned with,” Madabushi told reporters before the hearing. “We should be just as concerned with neglect. We should be just as concerned with disruption to health care. We should be just as concerned with torture and assault and harassment with COs [corrections officers]. We should care about the misconduct that’s happening.”
Madabushi and others want the City Council to legislate reforms to keep Suffolk County residents out of the county jails, including a call to suspend the Boston Police Department’s central booking agreement with the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department through which detainees are held at the jail before trial.
Under that agreement, the city pays the Sheriff’s department $150 a day per detainee.
“The City of Boston through the Boston Police Department and the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department responds to poor people’s survival efforts by arresting them for the charges of loitering, breaking and entering, trespassing, possession and distribution and larceny under $250,” Madabushi said. “Those are the vast majority of bails that we pay.”
During the hearing, criminal justice reform advocates highlighted conditions in the South Bay and Nashua Street jails and called for reforms.
Shacoby Kenny’s death while an inmate at South Bay has been ruled a homicide. Courtesy photo
“The COOs who murdered Shacoby Kenny collectively make upwards of $900,000 salaries of taxpayer money,” said Jasmin Borges, executive director of the Massachusetts Bail Fund. “The Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department budget was $130 million. Millions of dollars are being invested into a system that is harming and literally murdering our people and nothing is being done about it.”
The Massachusetts Bail Fund requested information on the number of deaths in custody settings and the names of those who died from all 14 of the state’s sheriff’s departments, Borges said. Eight responded and cited 47 deaths.
Madabushi says the Suffolk Sheriff’s Department reported 19 deaths in the jail between 2019 and 2025, in response to a records request from the Massachusetts Bail Fund and Citizens for Juvenile Justice. The groups added to that number the report of a death this year at South Bay.
“What has been made clear is that the sheriff’s departments in this commonwealth are running their own fiefdoms and no one is holding them accountable — not fiscally responsible and certainly not morally responsible,” Borges said. “Let me be clear: If the Boston City Council does not act now, we will continue to lose people, and that is not acceptable.”
The majority of people held in county jails are those who have been charged with crimes, have not yet been to trial, and have not made bail. The jails also house people convicted and sentenced for minor crimes who are serving two-and-a-half years or less.
Katy Naples-Mitchell, Justice Policy counsel for the ACLU, said 54 percent of all incarcerated people in Massachusetts are in county jails. Of those, the majority– 62 percent – are pretrial. At the Suffolk County House of Correction, 67 percent of people are pretrial, as was the case with Shacoby Kenny when he was killed.
While there has been an overall decrease in pretrial detentions in Massachusetts following criminal reform legislation that passed in 2018, Blacks and Latinos in the state have seen an increase in pretrial detentions.
“Research suggests that the conditions in jails, which are supposed to be administering confinement — not punishing, because nobody has been convicted of anything — are actually worse than they are in the prison system,” Naples-Mitchell told the council, saying that jails do more to contribute to crime than prevent it.
“Research suggests that it makes us less safe, because even a day in jail can be so destabilizing for someone’s life that it makes future criminal activity more likely,” she said. “Jails are criminogenic, in the terms used by researchers, meaning they disrupt the pro-social factors that are protective — housing, family contact, employment, education, reliable regular medical care with a trusted provider, and they expose people to trauma and anti-social behaviors.”
The Massachusetts Bail Fund is advocating for the council to take concrete steps to rein in the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department, including utilizing its subpoena power to obtain information on misconduct in the jails, launching a civil rights investigation into condition at the South Bay and Nashua Street jails, and putting an end to the sweeps at Mass. and Cass and the agreement to house detainees nabbed in those sweeps at South Bay.
The group is also calling on Sheriff Steve Tompkins to terminate the employment of the guards responsible for Kenny’s death.
Culpepper said he would like the sheriff and the detainees who witnessed Kenny’s death to testify in the next council hearing on the matter, which he said would be held in December.
“The individuals most directly affected by the conditions we’re examining deserve to have their voices heard just like everyone else,” he said during the hearing. “They have the same constitutional rights that everyone else has, even though they’re incarcerated.”
Culpepper also said that the Council should reexamine the central booking agreement between the city and the sheriff’s department.
Suffolk County Sheriff Steve Tompkins. File photo
In his statement on Tuesday, Tompkins said his office takes allegations of abuse seriously.
“About the many deeply troubling testimonials that were given at yesterday’s hearing, I first want to underscore how intensely seriously we take any and all accounts of abuse, neglect or disrespect that we receive either through our grievance process internally, anonymous reporting or through testimonials externally like the ones given at the hearing,” he said.
Tompkins also cautioned against a rush to judgment about his department.
“I feel that I should also restate, particularly in this day and age, that just because someone says it doesn’t make it so,” he wrote. “This is why facts are so important, evidence is key, and investigations are crucial.”
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