Correctional officers pulled in major overtime in 2022: Bristol County's top 100 salaries
An analysis of 2022 salaries from across Bristol County shows the Sheriff's Office employs about two-thirds of the top 100 earners — and nearly half of the top 100 are correctional officers who earned almost $2 million in overtime.
Nearly another third of the top 100 employees work for the Bristol County District Attorney’s Office, including the county’s highest-paid worker, District Attorney Thomas Quinn III, who took home $191,000 last year. In all, those involved in maintaining law and order account for 93 of the top 100 employees in Bristol County.
But there’s more to county government than courts and jails — let’s take a closer look at the numbers.
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Who works for Bristol County, and what do they do?
Bristol County comprises 20 communities, including the cities of Attleboro, Fall River, New Bedford and Taunton, the county seat. The county and its functions could be considered very limited compared to state or municipal governments — especially since many employees who work at the county level, such as the Sheriff’s Office and the District Attorney’s Office, are actually state employees.
County departments include the commissioners, a three-person elected board that governs the county and serves as its personnel board; the county treasurer’s office; the registries of deeds, the offices that maintain public land records; county-level courthouses in Taunton, Fall River and New Bedford; the Bristol County Print Shop, a taxpayer-funded printing service available for public use; and Bristol County Agricultural High School.
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Who is Thomas Quinn III?
District Attorney Quinn is the county’s top law enforcement official, its chief prosecutor. Quinn's father and uncle were both judges, his grandfather an attorney, providing the template he'd follow. He graduated from Dartmouth High School in 1978 and earned degrees at Holy Cross and Suffolk University Law School.
Quinn spent eight years as the county’s first assistant district attorney under then-DA Sam Sutter. In 2015, when Sutter left the DA’s Office to become Fall River mayor, Quinn was appointed to fill the remainder of Sutter’s term. Quinn has since been re-elected to the post three times.
Quinn began his tenure as DA overseeing one of the most notorious trials of the 2010s: prosecuting New England Patriots player Aaron Hernandez for the murder of Odin Lloyd. Quinn has cited the creation of an elder abuse unit, an expanded cold case unit, and an initiative to test a backlog of rape kits. More recently, Quinn’s office has launched investigations into potential misconduct at the Fall River Police Department and obtained a conviction against former officer Michael Pessoa for police brutality.
The district attorney’s job also involves managing the office’s staff, including a fleet of assistant district attorneys, many of whom also made the top 100 list.
Big overtime numbers in Sheriff's Office
In 2022, the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office was led by longtime sheriff Thomas Hodgson — but he was not the highest-paid employee. That title went to Lawrence Oliveira, the department’s chief financial officer. His base pay of over $145,000 was supplemented with nearly $37,000 in a buyout and extra pay, bringing his annual pay to over $182,000.
Oliveira joined the Sheriff’s Office in 2011, having previously been the New Bedford School Department’s head of finance since 2004.
Hodgson was appointed sheriff of Bristol County in 1997, and re-elected to four consecutive six-year terms, losing to Paul Heroux in 2022. Hodgson, who earned a reputation as an outspoken political figure and faced criticism for inhumane conditions at the Bristol County House of Correction, earned $171,900 in 2022.
In Bristol County, the sheriff position largely is responsible for managing the county prison facilities, the House of Correction and the Women’s Center in Dartmouth and the Ash Street Jail in New Bedford. Out of the top 100 wage-earners, 42 of them were correctional officers who staff those facilities.
As with employees of the police and fire services, the base wage for correctional officers aren’t enough for a six-figure salary; they work substantial amounts of overtime. In some cases, the overtime approached or even exceeded their base pay.
The correctional officers in the top 100 earned just under $2 million in overtime. According to numbers obtained from the state comptroller’s office, in 2022 all Bristol County correctional officers earned $6 million in overtime alone — more than the total salaries for all staff at Bristol Aggie combined.
In the heated 2022 campaign for Bristol County sheriff, several candidates noted that correctional officers were working forced overtime shifts due to a lack of staffing. Since being elected, Heroux has proposed closing the Ash Street Jail in part to consolidate his staff and reduce overtime costs.
Below are the top 100 Bristol County employees:
Dan Medeiros can be reached at dmedeiros@heraldnews.com. Support local journalism by purchasing a digital or print subscription to The Herald News today.
This article originally appeared on The Herald News: DA Quinn leads Bristol County top 100 salaries; prison guards earn OT
