As I pay my income taxes this month, I’m thankful for at least one thing. The state legislature is finally reining in our spend-thrift sheriffs.
Lawmakers hit the brakes on the sheriffs’ runaway budgets in 2025 when they racked up over $100 million in deficit spending.
A subsequent investigation by the state’s inspector general found that the sheriffs’ budgets were “opaque, chaotic, and deeply flawed.”
The Boston Globe has reported extensively on the issue and documented just some of the wasteful spending.
Here are a few examples. In Norfolk County the sheriff’s department purchased (but never used) a $113,000 mobile home. In Berkshire County the sheriff civil process division spent $50,000 on motorcycles and $4,300 in scuba gear. The Franklin County Sheriff’s Department paid $7,300 for a St. Patrick’s Day parade float and another $3,000 for parade sweatshirts.
These are trifling figures when compared to the salaries paid to many of the deputies who moonlight as patrolmen in our cities and towns.
Again, citing the Boston Globe (2/12/2026), two Suffolk County deputies work extra shifts with the Boston Police Department. One deputy raked in $223,000 last year. The other made a whopping $270,000.
Visit the Hampden County Sheriff’s main facility in Ludlow and you’ll see armored vehicles, boats, horses, and all kinds of high-priced items that have never been and never will be used for actual law enforcement.
And that seems to be a large part of the problem. In recent years, the role of our sheriffs somehow shifted from corrections (running the county jails) to statewide law enforcement.
According to the inspector general’s initial report, this is due to the vague and archaic statutes which originally created our sheriffs’ departments.
As legislators rein in the needless spending, let’s hope they also revisit the antiquated laws concerning our sheriffs and their role in the state’s criminal justice system.