BY dave denison
From her office window on the second floor
of the Suffolk County House of Correction in Boston, Sheriff
Andrea J. Cabral '81 can look down on an enclosed open-air
courtyard where prisoners take exercise. There's a basketball
court at the center, a wide walkway at the periphery, and
concrete multistory buildings containing cell blocks on all
sides. The cells hold men (and in a separate unit, women)
who have been sentenced on drug-related crimes, or assault
and battery charges, or gang-related violence, or any number
of misdemeanors. Many are from the surrounding neighborhoods
of Roxbury and Dorchester, others from the working-class and
immigrant enclaves to the north: Charlestown, Chelsea, East
Boston, Revere, Winthrop.
The courtyard is empty now, in the dead of winter,
but Cabral looks through the window as if checking on the inmates. "The
world's worst basketball players," she reports with a bemused smile.
The first thing you notice about Cabral is that
she does not lack confidence in her opinions. That's lucky, for she
needs to project confidence—she is the first woman sheriff ever in Massachusetts,
and the department she heads has been plagued historically by scandal
and mismanagement and been a target of investigations by the local press.
A former prosecutor, 44 and single, Cabral
came to the sheriff's job in December 2002 with a reputation
for hard work and a no-nonsense attitude about locking people
up, especially men who resort to violence. Now she is seeing
the other end of the pipeline. Being sheriff in Suffolk County
means supervising about 1,750 inmates at the House of Correction
(built in 1991 to hold 1,250) and a few hundred pretrial detainees
at the Nashua Street Jail, also in Boston. Inmates at the
House of Correction usually serve two years or less before
going back out into the world. The minimum requirement of
Cabral's job—and others have failed at this—is to
make sure they are released without having been mistreated.
If inmates take advantage of programs on the inside designed
to improve their work skills or curb their violence, so much
the better. For all that rides on the job of sheriff, it is
an elected position requiring no prior experience. Cabral
has come to it mid-term, appointed by the governor in unusual
circumstances.
Looking down at the courtyard, Cabral
is reminded of a situation that bothered her (one of many)
when she took over the sheriff's department. During the previous
sheriff's tenure, only male prisoners were granted time in
the recreation yard. Women inmates—there are 100 or so
at the House of Correction—were barred as presenting
"a sight-and-sound issue," in prison-authority speak.
With women in the yard, there had been hooting from the men
in the cells above, Cabral was told, and some women had responded
by yelling back or even pulling up their shirts. Cabral's
solution was simple: Restore the women's recreation privilege,
and let them know it will be revoked as soon as someone acts
inappropriately. The women have exercised since without incident.
Cabral has many such stories, all told in the
same way, as if she's still amazed at how much was wrong here, and how
most problems could be put right with a little bit of common sense.
Since arriving, she has insisted on rigorous training for new corrections
officers, for example, whereas in the past someone with the right connections
could be hired right off the street. The six-week training academy through
which recruits now must pass emphasizes professional standards of civility
in handling prisoners. Her facility is a not a pleasant place to end
up, Cabral makes clear (she recently allowed an MTV camera crew into
the cell blocks in the hopes she could help "deglamorize" prison for
young people). But a word that comes up again and again in her discussions
of how work is to be done here is "professionalism." County corrections
is different from state prison, she notes. With people in for shorter
periods of time and more emphasis on rehabilitative programs, if the
job is done right, there is a chance that some of these inmates will
not eventually graduate to the state prison system.
FOR THE last several years, though, the House of Correction
has sorely needed its own course correction. Boston newspapers
have carried regular stories about indictments of corrections
officers for the use of excessive force. Two lawsuits have
made their way through the courts documenting cases of sexual
assault of female prisoners. At least one inmate was impregnated
by an officer. A special state commission led by former U.S.
Attorney Donald Stern was appointed to review conditions in
2001, midway through the previous sheriff's term. It found
"a deeply troubled institution" and made 75 recommendations
for change, some fairly basic: The sheriff should not appoint
unqualified cronies to top positions; the sheriff should not
solicit campaign contributions from employees. A new $14 million
facility built to house women prisoners was deemed unsuitable
and unsafe.
Shortly before the commission's report
was released, the sitting sheriff, Richard J. Rouse, a former
state legislator and career politician, resigned. The real
damage to Rouse's reputation had been done more than a year
earlier, when Boston Globe reporters secretly followed
him for six days and found him putting in four-hour workdays,
using a state vehicle for private errands, and scheduling
time on the golf course even as criminal charges were being
brought against seven guards for beating detainees at the
county jail. Rouse had also opened a swanky office for himself
at the county courthouse downtown, away from the commotion
of the House of Correction.
When Cabral was appointed by then governor
Jane Swift in autumn 2002 to serve the final two years of
Rouse's term, one of her first decisions as sheriff was to
operate from an office at the House of Correction. She wouldn't
be working four-hour days, and she wanted everyone to know
it. Now, she sits behind a large desk in a mostly unadorned
but spacious room. A dark blue drape covers the entire wall
behind her, as if to force visitors to concentrate on nothing
but her imposing presence. When she wants to be serious, she
can seem very serious. But she often breaks into a several-megawatt
smile and laughs in a way that makes her shoulders rise up
and her large six-foot frame relax.
"She's got a marvelous sense of humor, but she
can be very forceful," says Cabral's chief of staff and longtime colleague
from her days as a prosecutor, Elizabeth Keeley '76. "She's no shrinking
violet." Cabral has been described as "intimidating" in newspaper stories.
"I don't think I am," she says, going on to suggest that the comment
may say more about the person making it than about her. But it seems
never far from Cabral's mind that she is the state's first female sheriff.
She is intent on doing the job well, she says, so that "no one would
ever be able to say that a woman couldn't be sheriff in Massachusetts,
and that a black woman couldn't be sheriff in Suffolk County."
Cabral manages a staff of about 1,100
employees and an almost $100 million budget. Since her appointment,
she has insisted on interviewing every new employee hired
in the department, giving special attention to new officers.
That has helped to slow the hiring process, and the House
of Correction this winter was about 40 officers short of optimum
staffing, according to Superintendent Gerard Horgan, one of
Cabral's top managers, whose responsibility is the day-to-day
operations of "the house." But Horgan credits Cabral
with bringing in "high-quality people." A 17-year
veteran of the department, he describes Cabral as "an
extremely quick study" who leads by example. Two years
ago, he says, when Cabral appointed him to supervise the Nashua
Street Jail, she showed up first at the 6:45 A.M.
roll call to announce his promotion, then at the 2:45 roll
call, and then again at the 10:45 shift change. "She
basically had an 18-plus-hour day," Horgan says.
In an hour-long conversation in her office,
Cabral talks about the challenges of her job. The more problems
she describes—the lawsuits, the budget cuts, the guards
caught smuggling contraband to inmates—and the more one
looks around and tries to imagine coming to this place every
day, this dreary block of buildings set down in an urban wasteland
hemmed in by highways, the more one wonders: Why would anyone
want this job? "Do you like it?" she is asked.
"I do," she says. "This
is important. We run people's lives. We're in charge of other
people. And we're in charge of people that a court has decided
cannot live outside of these walls for a period of time. This
is like a little city. We bring education, food, medicine—you
name it, we bring it inside these walls. And it literally
runs like a city. Because it is so enclosed, because we're
dealing with a population that at least for a temporary period
of time very few people on the outside care about, bad things
can flourish here." She talks about the huge ripple effects
of crime—of how a single auto theft can affect the lives
and wallets of multiple people and companies. "If you
can keep it so that out of 10 people, two don't re-offend,
you've had a huge impact on society," she says. In fact,
Cabral expects better than that—but not by much. Studies
of recidivism suggest at least 50 percent of inmates will
run afoul of the law again.
For now, Cabral is the mayor of this "little city."
And she likes the position well enough that she's getting ready to fight
to keep it. This summer and fall, she will run her first campaign for
elective office. She will raise money, and she will talk about reform
and professionalism and the changes she's made in this place that so
few people on the outside care about. She will point to a 2003 year-end
report published by her office that contends, "We have addressed nearly
every recommendation made by the Stern Commission."
If things get rough, as they sometimes do in Boston
politics, her credentials, her integrity, even her race and gender,
may come under attack. If she wins, her reward will be a six-year term
in office. One of the Stern Commission's chief criticisms of the sheriff's
department was that not enough of its top officials had experience in
criminal justice. By the time Andrea Cabral was appointed sheriff, she
had logged 16 years in the Massachusetts criminal justice system.
Growing up in a suburban neighborhood
in East Providence, Rhode Island, young Andrea was one of
those children who chooses a future early—it was in fifth
grade that she announced she wanted to be a lawyer, her mother
recalls. "She always had a strong penchant for justice,"
Yvonne Cabral says. "She'd go to bat verbally for anybody
who required it, if she thought that person was right and
was not being properly defended." The Cabrals raised
three children—Andrea was the middle one—in the
raised ranch house where they still live today. Yvonne Cabral
worked for 18 years as executive director of the East Providence
Community Center. Joseph Cabral, whose parents came from the
Cape Verdean island of St. Nicholas, was a steelworker for
the Washburn Wire company in Providence. He was a union member,
now retired. On many Saturdays, both mother and daughter recall,
Andrea would be dropped off at the local public library. "She
loved to read, and the librarian just loved her to death,"
Yvonne Cabral says. "I would read six, seven, eight books"
in a day at the library, the sheriff remembers, "and
it was literally my favorite thing to do, and I did that for
years from a very early age."
Cabral carried her bookworm tendencies into college,
majoring in English at BC. After graduating in 1981, she went on to
Suffolk University Law School. In 1986, her first job out of law school,
portentously, was as a staff attorney at the Suffolk County Sheriff's
Department, where she worked on bail appeals for pretrial detainees
at the jail.
Having read, before high school, Vincent
Bugliosi's book Helter Skelter—in which the prominent
California D.A. recounts how he obtained murder convictions
for the Svengali-like Charles Manson—Cabral had her mind
set on becoming a prosecutor. She remembers the impression
the book made on her—the challenge Bugliosi faced in
convincing jurors to hold Manson guilty of crimes he directed
others to commit, the gravity of government's responsibility
to do the work to hold the guilty accountable. "I realized
that was what I wanted to do," she says. After five years
as an assistant district attorney in Middlesex County and
three years in the state attorney general's office, Cabral
landed in the Suffolk County district attorney's office. The
D.A. then was Ralph Martin III, who was winning attention
as one of the few black Republicans in state politics. Martin
appointed Cabral to head a newly created domestic violence
unit.
The Massachusetts system for dealing with domestic
violence was changing in the 1990s, and Cabral was part of a new trend
of aggressive pursuit of batterers. Cases had been notoriously hard
to prosecute, because victims often backed away from legal action. "At
some point, the law collectively woke up and said, 'This is an
assault and battery,'" Cabral recalls. "If this guy
walked up to a stranger on the street and beat them up, there'd
be no question that you would arrest him and he'd be prosecuted.
Why is it any different that the person he beats up, he lives with?
"In the five years I was head of that unit,"
says Cabral, "we spent a huge amount of time training prosecutors,
victim witness advocates, and police officers to approach the cases
differently, to understand that they needed to make some good decisions
at the scenes of these crimes, justify their actions in their police
reports, write good police reports, and shore up our cases in other
ways, because the victim could at some point walk away and not show
up to court." In more than a few cases, Cabral proceeded without
the victim's presence in the courtroom. "And the law allowed
us to do that. We really became very proficient at it." In other
cases, it was important to "redefine winning," she says.
The victory might not be an immediate conviction in court; it might
be spending enough time on the phone with a victim that she would know
where to turn if the battering continued.
By the late 1990s, when Ralph Martin left the
D.A.'s office, Cabral says, he was encouraging her to run for
the position. "I laughed and said absolutely not. Because I've
never liked politics, or what I perceived as politics." Her aversion
came "from a certain amount of cynicism," she says, about
"the political game," the glad-handing and the backslapping.
And she didn't like the modern scrutiny of political candidates,
the idea that "you sacrifice a certain amount of your private
citizenship to be a public figure."
On top of all that, there was the obvious
question of how a black woman, a political unknown at the
time, could put together an organization in Suffolk County.
Success in urban politics comes from having a base. Where
was her base? Not in heavily Irish-Catholic South Boston or
Charlestown. Not in the prosperous Back Bay or Beacon Hill
districts. Perhaps she could start by appealing to Suffolk
County's African-Americans, who account for 22 percent of
the population. But voter turnout is often weak in African-American
wards, and the city of Boston—which has never had a black
mayor—does not have a good track record of embracing
black political leaders.
POLITICS, HOWEVER, caught up with Cabral. With the Suffolk County Sheriff's
Department in disarray in 2002, Governor Jane Swift was hearing from
fellow Republican Ralph Martin that Cabral would make a good sheriff.
Swift liked the idea of appointing a competent woman to the job, but
there was a hitch: Cabral was not a Republican. As she readily admitted,
she thought of herself as an independent and would prefer to stay that
way. As Swift would have it, that wasn't an option. To win the
appointment, Cabral agreed to join the GOP and promised Swift she'd
run as a Republican candidate in 2004. It was a decision she would come
to regret.
The Cabral appointment was one of Swift's
last official acts—a lame-duck governor, she had been
muscled out of the 2002 gubernatorial race by Republican Mitt
Romney. After Romney's inauguration, Swift went home to western
Massachusetts, leaving Cabral with a morass of inherited problems
at the sheriff's department and without a friend in high places.
Cabral meanwhile faced an immediate and
pressing worry—in the amount of $5 million. A lawsuit
on behalf of 1,500 women who were illegally strip-searched
at the Nashua Street Jail in the 1990s had resulted in a judgment
of $5 million against the city of Boston and $5 million against
Suffolk County. The city had paid its share. The county's
payment—for which the sheriff's department was fully
responsible, since actual county government structures have
been practically abolished in Massachusetts—was due the
week Cabral started her job. She soon found out it hadn't
been paid, nor was money set aside to pay it. Somehow she
had to come up with $5 million.
The court had no patience with the argument that
the department simply didn't have the funds. And the longer the
debt went unpaid, the more costly it got; the interest penalty was $50,000
a month. Cabral went to Boston mayor (and Democrat) Tom Menino's
office for help and came up empty. She placed calls to Governor Romney's
office and was told by his aides (rather abruptly, it seemed to her)
that the state could not help. In early May, Cabral finally got her
meeting with the governor, but no assistance. In the end, Cabral did
the only thing she could. Owing almost $5.3 million, she directed in
May that the settlement money be paid out of the sheriff's department's
general operating budget. As a result, the department ended the fiscal
year last summer in deficit. Through it all, Cabral grew frustrated
that she had been unable to develop a working relationship
with the new governor. Word got out that she was upset enough
to consider switching parties. And if she were going to switch,
she faced a deadline—she would have to be a member of
the Democratic Party for one year in order to declare her
candidacy as a Democrat in the spring of 2004 for a run at
the November election. A week after her disappointing meeting
with Romney (at which the matter of her party status did not
come up), Cabral traveled to Washington, D.C., for a meeting
with Democratic senator Edward M. Kennedy and a public announcement
of her decision: She would register as a Democrat. Newspaper
coverage played it as a setback to Romney's efforts to bolster
the Republican Party in the state.
Was it opportunism? One doesn't have
to spend much time with Cabral to understand why she decided
she would be happier as a Democrat. She remembers thinking
highly in college of President Jimmy Carter and of being alarmed
by Reagan Republicanism. Indeed, the opportunism question
turns not so much on the switch—which brought her in
line with her own inclinations—but on the original promise
to Governor Swift that she would run as a Republican. Recalling
it now, Cabral says she wishes the hiring decision had been
made strictly on who could do the best job at the sheriff's
department. She made her calculation that the job was more
important than party affiliation. "If I had said, I won't
run as a Republican, then the opportunity to help would have
been lost. And I had to think about it." What kind of ambition did her decision
reveal? To hear Cabral tell it, there was more than desire
for a political appointment—there was a sense of outrage
that an important part of the local justice system was not
being professionally and competently managed. Government authority
was failing at one of its most basic responsibilities, and
she knew she could put it back on track. Before she announced
her decision to switch parties, she called Swift to explain.
That conversation remains private, and Swift declined to comment
on Cabral's decision for this story. In the end, Governor
Romney's apparent disinterest in Cabral's decision gave her
an out. As chief of staff Keeley puts it, "She was receiving
no support from the Republican Party. She was essentially
ignored." Cabral talks about her time as a Republican
almost in terms of a temporary confinement. "Four months
and 30 days," she says. "That's how long it lasted."
IT'S A BITTER cold Friday night in January and Andrea Cabral is hosting
a graduation ceremony at the Morse Auditorium at Boston University for
15 new corrections officers who have made it through the department's
six-week training academy. She wants them to regard this as a momentous
event. After about 70 relatives and friends are settled in the auditorium,
members of the sheriff's honor guard escort Cabral and her top
deputies to the stage, one by one. The new officers then march in, dressed
in sharp navy-blue pants, crisp blue shirts, black neckties, and black
caps. With ramrod posture, directed by a Lou Gossett–like lieutenant,
they take their position in the two front rows. As civilian hands go
over hearts, the officers pledge allegiance to the flag with a white-gloved
salute.
In Cabral's view, it is her hiring policies
that will truly define whether she succeeds in this job. By being a
hands-on manager, by weeding out the wrong kinds of officers and bringing
in well-trained professionals, she can create an institution that emphasizes
corrections along with legitimate punishment. Cabral has met each of
the officers individually, in hour-long interviews in her office. Now,
in her keynote address, she exhorts them to remember that they are part
of "a new day in this department" and that "with great
authority comes great responsibility." She reminds them that "sometimes
you will be dealing with good people who have done bad things, and sometimes
you will be dealing with bad people who have done bad things and will
continue to do bad things." And then she leaves them with a story
from her days as a prosecutor: She was working on an aggravated rape
case and the accused was one of the most violent men she had ever prosecuted.
She ardently wanted to see him behind bars. But while she was involved
in selecting the jury, something disturbing happened. One of the prospective
jurors, having been interviewed by Cabral and the defendant's
lawyers, winked at Cabral on his way out of the room. She understood
the wink to mean, "I'm with you." If she had kept
that knowledge to herself, it would have meant one sure vote for conviction.
But, she tells her new officers, that's not how the system is
supposed to work; jurors must hear the evidence before taking a side.
So she told defense attorneys about the wink and the prospective juror
was dismissed. "You cut corners once, and it is so easy to cut
corners a second and third time," she tells the new officers.
(In the end, Cabral got the conviction anyway.)
After her remarks, the audience is shown a video
depicting scenes from the boot camp–like training the officers
have just been through. There are early-morning calisthenics, and simulated
attack-and-restraint practice, and an especially challenging routine
where an officer gets pepper spray in the face and has to fight through
noise and near blindness to call on a hand phone for assistance. From
the stage, Cabral studies the video intently as she fingers her pearl
necklace. The film ends with a still shot showing the words "Suffolk
County Sheriff's Department, Andrea J. Cabral, Sheriff. Integrity
Matters." The slogan has been used throughout the sheriff's
department and will be used, as well, in the upcoming campaign. "Integrity
Matters" is already printed on Cabral's bumper stickers
and giveaway caps.
FEW CANDIDATES get far, even in local electoral politics, without having
their integrity questioned. In fact, Cabral got an early taste of what
is likely to come when she switched parties. She had received good press
from Boston's two major papers upon her appointment. After her announcement
in Senator Kennedy's office, though, information leaked to the Globe
that she had defaulted on student loan payments. Both BC and Suffolk
Law School had won judgments against her in the late 1980s, for a combined
total of $6,478. Cabral told the press she was "not proud"
of the record but that she had struggled financially early in her career
because of low-paying public sector jobs and had repaid her loans in
1994. The news of her defaults set her up for a public flogging by the
Herald's harshest columnist, Howie Carr, who called her, among
other things, a "student-loan scofflaw."
Most political observers have reserved
judgment on the political savvy of Cabral's party switch.
Would she have stood a chance of getting reelected had she
run as a Republican in Suffolk County, where Republicans are
about as numerous as Yankee fans at Fenway Park? (To be exact,
9 percent of registered voters.) It isn't impossible—Cabral's
mentor Ralph Martin proved as much when he won a contested
race in 1996 as Suffolk County D.A. But Martin spent a lot
of time making the rounds at community meetings around the
city, and his suave, almost nonpartisan style went over well.
And, too, a D.A. has an easier time than a sheriff making
the news as a crusader against crime. If Cabral faces a strong challenger in
the Democratic primary for sheriff in September, the thinking
goes, she could lose her job. Primaries in Boston generally
draw low turnout, a fact that favors candidates with established
organizations. As it happens, such a candidate is contemplating
a challenge to Cabral—and he would seem to have a strong
motive to run for Suffolk County Sheriff. Boston City Councilor
Stephen Murphy was considered by former Governor Swift for
the sheriff's appointment in 2002. But he declined to switch
to the Republican Party and lost out to Cabral.
Now, says Republican consultant Charles Manning,
it's not hard to imagine the kind of ad someone like Murphy could
use against Cabral: "She first cut a deal with Republican Governor
Jane Swift. Then, when she thought she could cut a better deal with
Democratic leaders, she switched parties. Can you really trust Andrea
Cabral?" How might that play in Democratic strongholds such as
South Boston? Manning wonders. "I don't think most people
see Andrea as a partisan figure," he concedes. But in a Democratic
Party primary, that's not necessarily a winning suit.
If Murphy decides this spring to bypass the race,
Cabral's life will be easier. Still, she will have a Republican
opponent: Shawn Jenkins, a former budget director in the state's
public safety office. Cabral's campaign manager, Matt O'Malley,
says the campaign will need about $350,000 to run a strong race, and
had raised about $50,000 by January. Cabral hired O'Malley after
he made a credible run for Boston City Council last year at the age
of 24. "We represent a lot of what the new Boston political landscape
looks like," O'Malley contends. He envisions a coalition
of young professionals and blacks and Latinos who can move city politics
beyond the old ethnic and racial divisions. "We're going
to build our own organization from scratch," he says. Cabral, too, sees a "new landscape."
She says she's grown more comfortable with the idea of being
in politics, because she sees how a leader can bring about
real change. Her mission is to bring something new to Boston
politics: "The bottom line is, I am the first black sheriff
in Suffolk County, and I'm the first female sheriff in the
state. And that means that I bring a certain perspective that's
never been held by any other sheriff, and a perspective that
is held in only limited fashion on the political landscape
in the city—because there just aren't very many black
female politicians."
And yet that doesn't mean she envisions
a campaign built around what is sometimes dismissively called
"identity politics." It will be obvious enough to
voters that Cabral isn't the stereotypical Boston pol. What
she most wants them to respond to has nothing to do with race
or gender: It's her mantras of integrity and professionalism.
"People vote on their perception of how professional
a person is," she says. So even as she will talk about
the reforms she's brought to the "little city" she
presides over, she knows that the conditions behind these
walls only directly affect a small percentage of Suffolk County
voters. "It's not a reform campaign, it's a professionalism
campaign," she insists. That means appealing to voters'
concerns that their tax dollars are being well spent, that
prisoners are supervised by well-trained officers, and that
the officers are supervised by experienced managers. If she
can get that message across and win, Cabral says, it will
be "a turning point in Boston politics." Why? It
won't mean that race and gender are no longer factors—only
that she was not disqualified because of them. Cabral responds
with typical confidence when asked what that would mean for
her long-term political career: "I assume it could go
anywhere."
Dave Denison is a freelance writer based
in the Boston area.
Photos (from top):
Andrea Cabral with Deputy Tom DeRosa in the
female booking area at the Nashua Street Jail. By Gary Wayne Gilbert
Cabral at her swearing-in as sheriff by Governor
Jane Swift, December 3, 2002. Courtesy of the Suffolk County Sheriff's
Office
Cabral at age seven, left, and at
her graduation from BC in 1981. Courtesy of the Suffolk County
Sheriff's Office
On their two-month anniversary of
employment, new officers meet with Cabral at the Nashua Street
Jail to provide feedback. By Gary Wayne Gilbert
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