150 Inmates Cash $6M Reality Check From Weeks-long Campaign of Brutal Retaliation by Prison Guards

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In one of those courtroom endings that looks like a mix of procedural drama and municipal budgeting, roughly 150 current and former inmates at Massachusetts’s Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center will divide a settlement of about $6 million, give or take — after alleging a weeks-long campaign of brutal retaliation by corrections officers in early 2020. 

For headline writers, it’s a tidy sum; for the men who say they were beaten, tasered, bitten by K-9s, had faces slammed into concrete and bodies forced into “stress positions,” it’s the kind of compensation that reads better on paper than it feels in hand.

The settlement — announced after years of litigation that began with a complaint filed in January 2022 and a class certification ordered by U.S. District Judge Margaret R. Guzman — pairs money with a list of behavioral rules for a corrections system that, plaintiffs’ lawyers say, had been operating like an unruly summer camp with fewer accountability standards. 

The remedies are a pretty standard institutional recipe: anonymous misconduct tip lines, body-worn camera requirements, muzzled K-9s unless things go truly sideways, banishing “stress positions” to the dusty file cabinet of bad ideas, and making Special Operations officers wear name tags in case anyone wants to leave a Yelp review.

David Milton of Prisoners’ Legal Services — one of the lawyers who pushed the case forward — put the moral plainly: the settlement “aims to bring justice to the many incarcerated people injured by extreme and unlawful use of force by officers” and to hold the Department of Correction “accountable for the harm it causes by perpetuating a culture of violence.” 

That phrase — “culture of violence” — is the kind of sentence that can make agency spokespeople sigh and policy teams schedule a meeting.

The Department of Correction, to its credit (and its legal advisers’ relief), insists it has already been doing its own version of self-repair. 

Commissioner Shawn Jenkins framed the agreement as “a final step in a series of actions,” noting that the DOC “did not wait for settlement discussions to act” and that officials “proactively amended use of force regulations, updated policies on K-9 deployment and disciplinary investigations, and implemented a Body-Worn Camera policy.” 

Translation: the agency says it fixed what it could while the lawyers fixed the rest.

Legal scholars watching from the sidelines — and yes, some of them wear sensible shoes for this sort of thing — noted the settlement’s significance because proving malicious, unconstitutional force by prison officers is notoriously difficult. (As Professor Margo Schlanger observed, those suits are “very, very hard cases to win.”) 

That makes this outcome feel less like a fluke and more like a rare, blunt instrument of accountability finally finding its mark. 

The monetary part of the deal, meanwhile, will leave many plaintiffs with modest individual payments — real, but hardly restorative for people who describe trauma that doesn’t fit neatly into a spreadsheet.

So what’s the satirical (but practical) takeaway? 

Institutions often treat reform like patching a leaky roof with a memo: it’s comforting in assembly, but it doesn’t always stop the drip. 

This settlement pairs dollars with structural changes — video teams, reporting mechanisms, and training — that actually matter if enforced. 

If future generations of administrators want to avoid sequel litigation, they’ll have to treat accountability like more than a press release bullet point. 

Until then, headlines will keep being written, lawyers will keep doing the heavy lifting, and the folks whose lives were injured will keep counting both scars and dollars — and hoping one day those sums finally add up to something that looks like justice.


Please Help Find These Forgotten Girls Held at Male Juvenile Prison for Over a Year!

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#SouzaBaranowski #PrisonReform #JusticeDelayedNotDenied #DOCSettlement #EndStressPositions #BodyCamerasNow #K9Policy #PrisonersRights #AccountabilityMatters #DavidMilton #ShawnJenkins #ClassActionWin #CultureOfViolence #JudgeGuzman #PLSVictory

Sources: Settlement and reforms details from Prisoners’ Legal Services and reporting; judge approval and payout reporting from the Boston Globe; state DOC statement and commissioner quotes from the Massachusetts press release and related coverage.

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