Steven W. Tompkins has run the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department since January 2013. He is on leave now, facing federal extortion charges he has pleaded not guilty to, and the trial is being covered heavily. This article is not about that case. Nothing in it depends on how the jury rules.
It is about the thirteen years before the indictment, and what the public record shows about them. Most of that record comes from the department’s own documents, his own signed answers, and an audit by the Commonwealth.
What the State Auditor found
Start with the least arguable source. The Office of the State Auditor released an audit of the Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department on December 24, 2025, covering July 2022 through June 2024. It is not an advocacy report and it is not a news account. It is the Commonwealth auditing one of its own agencies, and it produced seven adverse findings.
- For inmates in 62 percent of sampled bookings, the department “either did not provide all sentenced inmates with an intake orientation on time or at all.” Twenty-two of them waited between four and thirty-six days.
- 60 percent of the department’s vocational program instructors “did not have or were not working toward the required Voc Tech Teacher license required for courses they instructed.”
- Inmates in 48 percent of sampled bookings “did not receive an educational assessment.”
- The department “could not provide evidence that it conducted its annual reviews of the needs of its sentenced inmates as required by its policies and 103 CMR 936.03(2).”
- On medication-assisted treatment, auditors could not establish the size of the population at all. The department’s records could not distinguish whether someone was enrolled before, during, or after the audit period, so the auditors wrote that they “were unable to determine the true size of the population.”
Education and vocational training are the two things the department markets hardest. Those are the findings.
Three promises, made in writing, not kept
In July 2022, running for reelection, Tompkins completed the ACLU of Massachusetts candidate questionnaire. It was published about a month before the primary. The answers are his campaign’s, submitted over his name.
Asked whether he would commit to posting the department’s sources of revenue annually on its website, the answer was “YES.”
Asked whether he would commit to posting the department’s annual budget on its website: “Yes, As the budget is currently publicly available, we are happy to provide a link on our website to this data.”
He also described establishing an office of returning citizens, writing that it “will also be on to the open public.”
We checked all three on August 28, 2026. The department’s website has no budget page, no revenue page, and no office of returning citizens page. The words budget, revenue, and returning citizen do not appear on the site, and the Internet Archive’s full index of the domain shows they never did.
Four years, three written commitments, none of them met. Each one takes an afternoon to fulfill.
One more detail from that questionnaire. The incumbent question asking for the staff-to-inmate ratio of medical and mental health staff was the only item left blank.
Thirteen years without a target
The department’s stated mandate is “enhancing public safety by seeking ways to effectively reduce offender recidivism.”
Read that again, because the hedge is load-bearing. Seeking ways to. Not reducing it to any particular number, by any particular date.
That is not an accident of phrasing. A search of every current program page, all 102 of the department’s monthly newsletters from 2016 through 2026, the 88-page progress report and its annexes, and press coverage back to 2013 turns up no target recidivism rate, no percentage-reduction goal, and no date attached to either.
The only figure he ever gave publicly was 46 percent, at a Boston City Council hearing on September 29, 2015. No Suffolk County recidivism rate has been published since.
It gets harder to check than that. The department does not report the “Completed” program exit code to the Commonwealth, which means its program completion rate cannot be calculated from the state’s own system. This is not a claim that fails under scrutiny. It is a claim that cannot be scrutinized.
The numbers the department does publish
In July 2022 the department released an 88-page progress report covering 2016 through 2021. Its own statistics annex carries this disclaimer on page 2: “Programs and Services provided to support the Department’s public safety and recidivism goals are highlighted in this report. However, this report is not an evaluation or an assessment of their effectiveness.”
The report then asserts effectiveness anyway.
Of the Nurturing Fathers program, it says: “An analysis of the data and statistics prove this program to be successful, with fewer than four percent of the participants in the Nurturing Fathers program recidivating after their release.” The annex gives the denominator. Forty-three men attended. Twenty-three completed. Four percent of that group is fewer than two people. No follow-up window is stated and no comparison group exists.
On education, over five years, 13,172 enrollments produced 172 high school equivalency certificates and four diplomas.
On staffing, the report gives hiring that was 43 percent Black and 30 percent white, alongside promotions that were 58 percent white and 28 percent Black, and describes the two as “reflecting similar demographic characteristics.” Those figures are an inversion, not a similarity, and the report presents them without noticing.
Overtime
According to published state payroll data, overtime spending at the department rose from roughly $10 million to about $31 million during his tenure. Forty employees earned more than $200,000. The highest earner made about $344,000, of which roughly $218,000 was overtime.
That sits alongside two independent oversight findings: a 2019 State Auditor finding on overtime, and an Inspector General finding in June 2026 that sheriffs’ offices drew from payroll accounts to cover other expenses.
Over the same period, federal program grants to the department fell about 46 percent, with three of four funding streams going to zero in fiscal 2024.
Building 8
In the fall of 2021, with the crisis at Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard at its peak, Tompkins offered a vacant building on the South Bay campus as a treatment center. He wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe making the case. He gave tours. He set terms: up to 100 people, 90 days, dormitory style.
He also gave a date. On October 25, 2021, he told WBUR: “If you ask me, we’ll be going by Thanksgiving. We have no choice. I refuse to walk out of here and see somebody dead, and I don’t want that on our doorstop. I’m not having it.”
The treatment center never opened. His department’s own newsletter that November recorded that the program was still awaiting approval from the Department of Public Health. A year later WBUR reported the plan had been “scuttled amid opposition.”
The courtroom half of the plan did open. It operated nine days and heard 21 cases before the Trial Court discontinued it for low volume.
The reversal on phone calls
In that same 2022 questionnaire, asked whether he supported no-cost phone and video calls for people in custody, the answer was “Yes, if the state provides the resources for the associated costs.”
The state then provided them. Chapter 64 of the Acts of 2023 made calls free at Massachusetts correctional facilities effective December 1, 2023, and it binds sheriffs.
Sixteen months after that law took effect, at a legislative budget hearing in Clinton on March 28, 2025, he told legislators: “I understand the need for families to be in touch with their loved ones. I get that. I don’t get free phone calls. I just don’t, and I don’t think that they should either.”
He called unlimited calls cost-ineffective.
Two ethics penalties
These are the only adjudicated findings of misconduct against him, and unlike the pending federal case, they are resolved and admitted.
In a disposition agreement approved in September 2015, Tompkins admitted that in 2013 he went to eight Roxbury shops displaying a challenger’s campaign signs, identified himself as Sheriff, displayed his official identification, and asked each owner to take the signs down. All of them did. The State Ethics Commission called it “an inherently coercive use of his official position to aid his candidacy.” He paid a $2,500 civil penalty.
A second disposition agreement in March 2023 carried a penalty of $12,300.
A campaign platform that did not change in eight years
This one is small and it is telling.
His 2014 campaign website had an Issues page. It contained no issues. The entire body of the page read: “These are the issues that Steve Topmkins is covering.” His own name is misspelled. It stayed that way through the election.
By 2016 there was real content. That content is byte-for-byte identical to what sat on the page in 2021, five years and one election later. Not similar. Identical, character for character, 5,102 of them.
The text itself is copied from the government department’s website, and on the 2022 ACLU questionnaire he listed the government site as his campaign website. The platform he ran on and the agency he ran were, quite literally, the same document.
What he says the job is
During the 2022 campaign, his closest race, he was asked about the scope of the office. His answers were consistent and worth quoting.
On programming: “All the additional things that we do are not a part of our mandate. We do it anyway, because we have to help people.”
On the office generally: “All of the sheriffs are essentially the Uber drivers for the courts.”
And on four people who died in his custody the previous summer: “It’s just a confluence of incidences that they died on our watch. It wasn’t like we did anything untoward to help them along that path of expiring. They would have passed wherever they were.” Members of the audience accused him of lying. The Committee for Public Counsel Services had written to him about those deaths on September 24, 2021.
He did not respond to WBUR’s candidate questionnaire that year at all.
Who pays for this
Suffolk County government no longer exists. It was abolished, and the Sheriff’s Department is a state agency whose liabilities belong to the Commonwealth, with the Attorney General appearing on its behalf.
Every settlement, every judgment, and every dollar of that overtime is paid by Massachusetts taxpayers, and the office is filled by an election most voters do not follow. He ran unopposed in the 2016 and 2022 general elections. His 2022 primary, at 59 percent against a former subordinate, was the closest anyone has come.
What this record is not
Two limits, stated plainly.
The federal charges are unproven. He has pleaded not guilty, the trial is underway, and nothing above depends on it.
The department also wins most of the lawsuits brought against it, including summary judgment in prisoner civil rights cases in 2021 and 2025, a Supreme Judicial Court ruling in its favor in 2017, and defense verdicts in two employment trials. The largest plaintiff verdicts against the Suffolk sheriff’s office in the public record are from before Tompkins took office and belong to his predecessor’s tenure. Anyone searching his name in federal court will also find immigration habeas petitions that name him only as the legal custodian; those are not misconduct cases.
The case against his stewardship does not need any of that. It is in the audit, the questionnaire, the newsletters, and the payroll.
Common questions
How long has Steven Tompkins been Suffolk County Sheriff?
He was appointed in January 2013 by Governor Deval Patrick, won a special election in 2014, and was reelected in 2016 and 2022. He has been on leave since his arrest in August 2025.
What did the State Auditor find?
The December 24, 2025 audit found seven adverse items, including that 62 percent of sampled bookings did not receive a timely intake orientation, 60 percent of vocational instructors lacked the required teaching license, and 48 percent received no educational assessment. Auditors could not determine the size of the medication-assisted treatment population.
What is Suffolk County’s recidivism rate?
Not published. The only figure Tompkins has given publicly was 46 percent, in September 2015. The department also does not report program completion data to the state in a form that allows a completion rate to be calculated.
Is Tompkins still sheriff?
He remains in office but has been on a leave of absence since August 2025. An indictment does not remove a Massachusetts sheriff.
Who pays judgments against the Sheriff’s Department?
The Commonwealth. Suffolk County government was abolished, and the department is a state agency represented by the Attorney General.
Sources: Office of the State Auditor Audit No. 2025-1449-3J; ACLU of Massachusetts 2022 sheriff candidate questionnaire; Suffolk County Sheriff’s Department progress report 2016-2021 and monthly newsletters; State Ethics Commission disposition agreements; WBUR; GBH; Boston Herald; State House News Service; Internet Archive. General information, not legal advice.