LYNN — Essex County Sheriff Kevin Coppinger, in a wide-ranging interview with the Item Thursday, touted the ways in which he has used the sheriff’s office to launch a number of new programs to address the root causes of crime and help the thousands of inmates he is responsible for overseeing.
Coppinger, who emerged from a crowded field to claim the sheriff’s job in 2016, is now running for reelection and facing a primary challenge from Lynn social worker Virginia Leigh, who contends that traditional law enforcement experience is no longer a key requirement for the sheriff’s job.
For his part, Coppinger says that his experience, spending 33 years as a police officer and eventually becoming the chief of police in Lynn, makes him the ideal candidate for the job, which he says still requires law enforcement.
“I have the balance. I’ve got murderers, I’ve got all these hardcore people in there, you have to know how to deal with them, classify them, get them you know, control them. Crimes occur in the jail and you have to have that knowledge of how to handle that stuff,” Coppinger said. “You also have to have good working relationships with the law enforcement outside, there’s a lot of interaction … We communicate all the time. That’s where I think my background really sends me up the chain there.”
“It is part of the criminal justice system. We also have a lot of community service workers that we bring the inmates out into the community under the authorization of deputy sheriffs who do have police powers out there. So they are out into the community. They are all part of police reform, they are getting the extra training, and therefore that is a criminal justice aspect of it,” he continued. “It’s not just a little bit of social work and then they’re out.”
As sheriff, Coppinger oversees the county’s jails as well as houses of correction, which are home to inmates serving sentences two-and-a-half years or less. He said a major part of his job has been working to provide programs for inmates — the majority of whom have mental illnesses and/or drug addictions — to ensure they do not wind up back in the system.
Coppinger said he spent time building up two key programs — CARE, or correctional alternatives for reentry, and CASE, the clean and sober existence unit — as well as launching a third — correctional opportunities for personal enrichment. In recent weeks, his office has also launched the STAR program, short for supporting transitions and reentry programs.
CASE, he said, is a voluntary 28-day program for those struggling with substance abuse where no contact is allowed with the outside world. CARE is similar, but includes those who are on medication assisted treatment.
“Both of those programs … I did kind of build it up. When they are getting released, we’ve got intricate partnerships with a lot of halfway houses, sober homes, long term residential, short term residential, we can hook these people up and get them a bed, we’ll even drive them there,” Coppinger said.
COPE, Coppinger said, serves as a way for the sheriff’s department to get those struggling with mental health issues like anxiety out of their traditional cells and into dormitory style housing in a unit with 40 beds. As part of the program, the department embedded mental health clinicians and embedded them in the unit in an effort to make essential services readily available.
“The point here is these folks with mental illness, they have the clinicians there during the work day, they’re right there, but it also can encourage the buddy system. So if these folks are in a dormitory rather than one or two person cells, so they can socialize a little bit,” he said. “We do a lot of the programming right on that unit.”
The STAR program, Coppinger said, aims to provide inmates with the resources they need to ensure that they become successful members of the community after they leave his department’s purview. The program, which was launched in mid-April, currently has 15 people enrolled, split between Lynn and Lawrence.
“The gap here is there was no connection when they leave … We can refer to community programs but there’s never really that link. We created STAR to bridge that gap,” he said.
STAR is available not just for those transitioning out of being incarcerated, but also for those who might be “on the bubble,” where a judge is trying to determine whether or not to send them to jail.
“The judge can sentence somebody or refer them to STAR, they’re not incarcerated. Hopefully they’re still working. Hopefully they’re still maintaining their family relationships. But they can go and do the programs,” Coppinger said. “A lot of our programs in the jail are also offered in STAR.”
Coppinger said members of the Lynn Police Department Bicycle Unit have begun referring people to STAR before they’re incarcerated, in an effort to provide them with the resources they need without having to send them to jail.
As STAR continues to grow, the hope is that it can lead to lower rates of recidivism, which Coppinger defined as being found of guilty of a new crime, having a new arraignment, or a violation of probation or parole, a definition he says keeps his rates higher than other departments because one could be found guilty of another crime while already in jail.
The 2021 sheriff department’s report, which tracks data from the year before, lists the county’s recidivism rate at 41.58 percent, 5 percent lower than the figure in the 2020 report.
Despite making substantial progress in the department, Coppinger, who first ran for the position because he saw the sheriff’s department as an “island,” said he knows he can do more if given another six years by voters.
“My longer term goal is to just continue to address a lot of the issues that we have,” he said. “I think I’ve made a good impact. I think I have a good reputation in the company [and] I think I have a good handle on what the county needs.”
Charlie McKenna can be reached at [email protected].