Following weeks of intense training and challenges, the Hampden County Sheriff’s Office welcomed a new class of correctional officers Friday. Compared to past graduations, it’s a smaller class – in line with national trends – but as recruits and instructors told WAMC – the mission remains the same.
Making an entrance at Western New England University, 25 men and women marched before family, friends and peers Friday.
They made up the 54th graduating class of the Western Mass. County Correctional Officer Academy – a 13-week-program that sees recruits train in cell blocks, build endurance and, at one point, get pepper-sprayed – all to prove they can take on the work ahead of them.
Among them – Michael Wilson, who tells WAMC it was no easy task.
“… it was very stressful, intense, very teamwork-based,” he said. “One goes down, we all go down. You’ve got to look out for each other and just persevere and get through it.”
Wilson ended up leading one of four “squads” formed over the course of training, held for the most part at Westover Air Reserve Base in Chicopee.
Seeing them all clad in dark blue as they made their way through the auditorium, Wilson’s father, Michael Brandon Wilson, called it one of the happiest moments a parent can witness.
“It was spectacular - I was very proud of my son and all his recruits and everybody who participated inside the facilities here – I’m really proud of them of graduating,” he told WAMC.
It’s all part of a program that sees the Hampden County Sheriff’s Office bring new faces aboard its correctional staff.
The department oversees the Hampden County Correctional Center in Ludlow, plus the Western Massachusetts Regional Women's Correctional Center in Chicopee, in addition to recovery and wellness centers in the region.
As of 2019, the state auditor estimates the sheriff’s office supervises just over 1,000 full- and part-time employees. According to Sheriff Nick Cocchi, they oversee one of the largest correctional institutions in the state, with an estimated 1,140 people in custody – 1,140 people he says, who are worth giving every opportunity possible for a chance at reform.
“When you start to see a cultural, paradigm shift in someone's behavior under your leadership and supervision… when you start to see the family members of that individual coming back together and reunifying because of their stay with us - in their time of sobriety, mental health compliance, behavior modification - when you start to see those things, you're going to be a believer in change,” the sheriff said during his address.
Speaking to the graduates and audience gathered, Cocchi said professionalism and compassion are key to working daily with those who may have made mistakes, harmed victims or caused some kind of destruction to land them in the criminal justice system.
He also touched on his own errors, referencing an OUI arrest in 2024 that led to a license suspension and time in a driver alcohol education program.
“Our job is not to continue to push them down and shun them and lock them up and throw away a key,” he continued. “Our job is to say ‘How can we make him or her the best version of themselves?’ Nobody knows that better than I. About a year ago, I had a night that was not my best night. As I was growing up, my parents always asked me to just try to be the best version of yourself you can be. That doesn't mean be perfect, but it means strive for perfection. That's what we do with the sheriff's office, understanding we won't accomplish it or ever reach it, but we won't stop striving for it.”
Before Cocchi sat just over two dozen men and women hailing from different backgrounds and parts of the state. Some have spent time in the military, while others are looking for a career change.
In Wilson’s case, he says it was a matter of finding a new career that would take him from a gas station job in Chicopee to a position that sees him helping others.
“Wanting to help people - that's really all I care about, just helping people, people that are arguably at their worst times … give a little light to them,” Wilson said.
He ultimately recommends the program for those who are interested, though he adds being pepper-sprayed was less than desirable.
His was also a notably smaller graduating class. In prior years, the program has graduated well over 30 a class, even after several drop off over the course of training.
As Sgt. Alyssa Anderson explains, the sheriff’s office has not been immune to recruitment declines that law enforcement agencies across the country have been working to address.
“[For] us, as well as majority of law enforcement agencies, I will say that recruitment is certainly a little bit more challenging now than it has been over the last several years,” she said. “As far as retention goes… we're always going to lose some to state police, fire - they go on and do other things - but it's been fairly steady for the most part. Right now, we're definitely still having a little bit of an issue with the recruitment piece, but it is certainly starting to pick up since COVID.”
As the Urban Institute noted in 2022, correctional officer attrition rates have been high in the United States. In 2020 alone, the think tank reported that in Texas, home to at least 20,000 correctional officers, the attrition rate was 40 percent as the pandemic set in.
And according to the Texas Tribune, four years later, 25 percent of such jobs are still unfilled.
While there’s not a lot of data showing whether Massachusetts is facing challenges of that magnitude, earlier this year, the state did lower the minimum age to become a corrections officer from 21 to 19 to "Boost Recruitment and Build Future Workforce."
Anderson says the pension, benefits and pay are all pluses for many. That, and valuable human experiences.
“You learn as a correctional officer how to talk to people, and I think that we can all agree that, post-2020, post-COVID, the days of interacting and speaking are kind of no longer… this forces you to do that,” she said. “When we walk inside, behind the walls, we have no tools, we have no weapons, for lack of a better term, so when we have to deescalate situations, we have to do it by speaking to people. You have to have that face-to-face interaction, walking next to people, talking with them and I think that that sets the standard for when you go out into the community, because it gives you that baseline to know how to speak to people, when they're working inside.”
