Sheriff race pits Cousins against former jail guard

MIDDLETON – Incumbent Essex County Sheriff Frank G. Cousins Jr. proudly says the regional correctional programs under his domain for the past 14 years are run fairly and efficiently.Democratic challenger and political newcomer Damian Anketell, 38, of Peabody, a former Essex County jail guard, contends nothing is further from the truth.The two will square off during the Nov. 2 election.Cousins, the 52-year-old Republican from Newburyport, was initially appointed to the post in 1996 by then Gov. William F. Weld after the former sheriff was indicted for bribery and removed from office.Cousins won a second term in November 2004. During a campaign visit to Lynn on Wednesday the sheriff said he looks forward to beginning a third term, “God willing.”On Monday, Anketell filed a complaint against the sheriff with the state Attorney General’s Office and the Massachusetts Ethics Commission, alleging Cousins violated the law by disclosing misleading information about Anketell’s injuries, which resulted from an inmate attack.Cousins said the information was public and requested by an area newspaper.”The payroll and salary information was released to a newspaper about him being paid worker’s compensation and not being in work, which is fine. He collected $180,000 during that time. Although he was asked if he wanted to come back to light duty, he chose to resign,” the sheriff said. “There was a settlement with the state and he did not come back to the jail.”Anketell said that by releasing the information, Cousins “smeared the reputation of an injured worker and violated the public trust.”Anketell was a corrections officer at the Middleton Jail from 1995 to 2005. He was injured in January 2002. He worked for another eight months before going out on workman’s compensation for the remainder of his corrections career.”I was offered the option of returning to light duty and I agreed to it. I signed on in Sept. 29, 2003 and worked eight months before I had surgery to repair my neck and shoulder injuries,” he said.Cousins said his track record speaks boldly of his abilities as sheriff. He cited the rate of recidivism as an example. “The number of people not returning to jail is about 67 percent right now. It was 65 percent a couple of years ago, so another two percent of the inmate population not going back is a positive step.”The sheriff’s numbers put the rate of recidivism at 33 percent, but Anketell claims it is closer to 45 percent.Anketell also criticized Cousins for an incident that occurred earlier this month at the Topsfield Fair, when an inmate who was part of a supervised work crew attempted to steal a sweatshirt from a vendor. “No one got arrested. The inmate was supervised by a correctional officer. He got caught trying to take something that didn’t belong to him. He was returned to a higher level of custody.”Cousins said he has run the Sheriff’s Department with its 550 employees and nearly 2,000 inmates despite the loss of $5 million in state funding over the past 18 months.”The challenge is to maintain the level of service with these budget cuts,” he said. “We have worked very hard over the past 18 months to live within our means.”The Essex County jail system has the lowest per-inmate cost among sheriff-run county jails statewide, he said, commending Michael Marks of Lynn for earning national accreditation as supervisor of the Middleton Jail.The sheriff oversees the Middleton Jail, the Lawrence Correctional Center, the Women in Transition Program in Salisbury and three satellite correctional centers in Lynn, Lawrence and Salisbury.Anketell has slammed Cousins by contending the sheriff’s rehabilitation programs do not stop recidivism.Cousins retorted that Anketell is wrong. “He has no knowledge about our rehab programs, which have been proven to work. When he was here as a correctional officer, he was never involved in programming, GEDs or batterers’ intervention.”Our Women in Transition Program has been held up as a model. We have 48