A group of about 150 current and former inmates at a Massachusetts prison who accused correction officers of brutal abuse will receive about $6 million in a settlement, according to details of the agreement released by plaintiffs’ lawyers.
The settlement with state officials, which was approved by a federal judge last week and includes several reforms aimed at preventing the use of excessive force in the state’s prisons, ends years of legal wrangling in the class-action lawsuit. The case stemmed from what inmates described as a weekslong campaign of violence they endured in 2020 at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, the state’s only maximum security prison.
Margo Schlanger, a law professor at the University of Michigan, said that the settlement was notable because excessive force lawsuits against correction officers carry a high burden of proof, requiring plaintiffs to show that the officers’ conduct was malicious.
“They’re very, very hard cases to win,” Ms. Schlanger said.
The prison, roughly 50 miles west of Boston, has been the site of several fatal incidents over the past two decades. In 2003, the disgraced priest John J. Geoghan, who was convicted in one of the first publicized cases of sexual abuse in the Boston Archdiocese, was strangled by a fellow inmate. The former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, incarcerated in Souza-Baranowski following his murder conviction, died by suicide there in 2017.
According to the complaint by inmates in the settlement, the violence began on Jan. 10, 2020, when a group of inmates attacked correction officers at the facility, injuring several of them.
The men who perpetrated that attack were rounded up and sent to other prisons, but the altercation triggered a crackdown at the facility that was sanctioned by top-level officials at the Massachusetts Department of Correction, the plaintiffs said.
Correction officers beat and kicked inmates, gouged their eyes, grabbed their testicles and smashed their faces into floors or walls, the complaint said. The inmates also said officers used Tasers and pepper ball guns and ordered dogs to menace or bite them.
The plaintiffs in the case filed their complaint in January 2022. U.S. District Court Judge Margaret R. Guzman allowed the class-action lawsuit to proceed in September of last year, and the Department of Correction agreed to a prospective settlement in May.
Now finalized, the $6 million settlement will be divided among the plaintiffs, who will each receive an average of $40,000, according to a statement from Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts, which represented the inmates involved.
“This settlement aims to bring justice to the many incarcerated people injured by extreme and unlawful use of force by officers,” said David Milton, one of the lawyers representing the inmates. He added that the settlement was about holding the Department of Correction accountable for a “culture of violence” at the prison.
Among the reforms included in the terms of the agreement are the creation of an anonymous tip line for correction employees to report misconduct by prison staff, increased officer training and a requirement that officers in the department’s special operations unit, which responds to high-risk situations like altercations or lockdowns, wear high-visibility name tags.
In a May statement, the Department of Correction said that it had enacted several reforms on its own before the settlement, including tightening its policies governing the use of force.
“The DOC did not wait for settlement discussions to act,” said Shawn Jenkins, the Massachusetts Department of Correction commissioner. “We proactively amended use of force regulations, updated policies on K-9 deployment and disciplinary investigations.”
The department also said it had implemented a policy requiring correction officers to activate body cameras when responding to or witnessing critical incidents.
Chris Hippensteel is a reporter covering breaking news and a member of the 2025-26 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers.
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