Under an agreement reached on May 21, 2025, Massachusetts will pay $6.75 million to settle claims by a group of some 150 current and former state prisoners who accused guards at Souza-Baronowski Correctional Center (SBCC) of carrying out a systematic campaign of retaliatory beatings, following a disturbance in early 2020 that left three other guards injured. It is the last to be settled of three suits filed over the violent staff response that targeted non-white prisoners.

The underlying incident unfolded on January 10, 2020, when the state Department of Correction (DOC) said that a group of six prisoners attacked the three guards. Surveillance video showed that the group targeted one of the guards and then swarmed the rest as they jumped in to help. All three guards, who were not named, were reportedly hospitalized, though the extent of their injuries was not reported.

What was widely reported—to prisoners’ friends and family, as well as Prisoners’ Legal Services (PLS) of Massachusetts—was a campaign of retaliatory violence that guards initiated that day and carried on for nearly a month. As one unnamed prisoner told WBUR, guards “just started tasering me, beating me, punching me, calling me the n-word—and I went to the outside hospital.” Though he was not in the area where the three guards were injured, the prisoner added: “I got stitches. I have a black eye, busted lip and my hands are still shaking.”

In the immediate aftermath, the Massachusetts Correction Officers Federated Union (COFU) blamed the violence on a 2018 prison reform law. PLS shot back that many of the law’s reforms—especially to solitary confinement practices—had yet to be implemented. “The major reform in the prison was supposed to have been around solitary confinement,” said state Sen. Jamie Eldridge (D-Middlesex/Worcester), who co-chaired the Legislature’s judiciary committee. “But the prisoners who attacked the correctional officers were in general population.” He added that it was his understanding “they were part of a gang. And so I think that much more has to do with the DOC management than anything we passed in the criminal justice reform law.”

Two Lawsuits Already Settled

A group of prisoners sued DOC, alleging that they were denied “attorney visits and phone calls for almost three weeks” after the guards were injured. The complaint quoted one guard who said, “If you put hands on an officer, you will all pay.” The Suffolk County Superior Court granted Plaintiffs a temporary injunction in February 2020, forcing DOC to let them keep legal paperwork in their cells and stop limiting opportunities for attorney phone calls and visits during business hours. The suit reached a settlement in February 2023, with DOC agreeing to a host of restrictions on staff to protect prisoners’ legal activities, as PLN reported. 

As PLN also reported, a second suit was filed by prisoners Robert Silva-Prentice—who was also a plaintiff in the first suit—and Dionisio Paulino, alleging that guards restrained them in an area without surveillance cameras and “then proceeded to terrorize, beat, taser, and kick them, pull out their hair, and slam them into concrete walls and a metal doorway while hurling racial, ethnic, and sexual slurs.” They were subjected to a K-9 attack, and their efforts to file grievances over the incident were thwarted. Worse, they added, they were not involved in the attack on the three guards. Rather, they said that the beatings’ true goal was “payback for the acts of other Latino and Black prisoners and to create an atmosphere of terror.” [See: PLN, June 2023, p.14.]

That suit reached an undocketed settlement in July 2024, under terms that the parties refused to divulge. The prisoners were represented by Boston attorneys Patricia A. DeJuneas of DeJuneas Law, LLC and Bridget A. Zerner of Markham Read Zerner LLC. See: See: Silva-Prentice v. Turco, USDC (D. Ma.), Case No. 1:21-cv-11580.

Last Settlement Reached

The last case to settle was also the largest—a class-action involving some 150 prisoners who alleged that they were targeted in the same way that Silva-Prentice and Paulino said they were targeted: Just for being Black or Latino, like the prisoners who attacked the three guards. The nine named Plaintiffs—Dwayne Diggs, Demetrius Goshen, James Jacks, David Jackson, Raphael Rebollo, Luis Saldana, Davongie Stone, Xavier Valentin-Soto and Danavian Daniel—said that guards continued to attack them for weeks, “gouging eyes; grabbing testicles; smashing faces into the ground or wall; deploying Taser guns, pepper ball guns, and other chemical agents; ordering K9s to menace and bite prisoners; and excessively tightening handcuffs and forcing prisoners’ arms into unnatural and painful positions, among other positional torture tactics.”

Following three years of discovery, the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts granted certification on September 30, 2024, to a damages class consisting of “all individuals incarcerated at [SBCC] who were subjected to uses of force from January 10, 2020, to February 6, 2020.” An injunctive class with the same definition was also certified. The long discovery process involved interviews with more than 100 prisoners, as well as former DOC Commissioner Carol Mici and 17 other Defendants. They produced over 99,000 pages of documents and 450 GB of surveillance video recordings.

Under the terms of the agreement that was reached, which is pending final approval by the district court, the state will pay $5.75 million to the class members, including $25,000 to each of the nine class representatives. The remaining $1 million in the settlement fund will pay fees and costs for attorneys from PLS; they provided class counsel, along with attorneys from Hogan Lovells US LLP in Boston, though the latter did not seek any fees for their services.

In addition to the payouts, the agreement provides injunctive relief in the form of DOC policy changes, including tighter restrictions on K-9 use; dogs on patrol must remain muzzled until an “imminent threat” is detected, and they must be re-muzzled once a prisoner has returned to his cell. Forcing prisoners to kneel for any reason or length of time beyond what is needed to apply restraints is now forbidden. Any guard on a Special Operations Response Unit (SORU) found to use excessive force must be removed and may not return to SORU duty for three years. All SORU guards must wear name tags, too. Any use of force must be documented with photographs of the prisoner, whether or not he has visible injuries. In addition, use of racial slurs by guards is prohibited and must be disciplined.

DOC also committed in the agreement to working with the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice “to improve culture at DOC facilities.” That echoes what PLS Director Liz Matos said about SBCC in the aftermath of the 2020 violence: “This specific prison has a long history of violence and a toxic culture.” The language also refutes the snarky retort she got from COFU Spokesman Kevin Flannagan: “The culture is the inmates … They’e there because they’re bad.” See: Diggs v. Mici, USDC (D. Ma.), Case No. 1:22-cv-04003.

Most of the prisoners’ complaints in these suits could have been more easily evaluated with better documentation than surveillance cameras can provide. A pilot program issued a body-worn camera (BWC) to each SBCC guard in 2022, over the strenuous objection of COFU’s Flannagan, who vowed: “Over my dead body will this anti-labor proposal be implemented during my tenure.” Reflecting that animosity to oversight, guards are apparently wearing the BWCs but then refusing to turn them on; doing that now will subject them to “progressive discipline” under the new settlement agreement.  

Additional sources: Boston Globe, WBUR

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