LYNN — Clinical social worker Virginia Leigh is in the running for the next sheriff of Essex County — promising to reimagine the role for the 21st century.
Leigh, who has lived in the city for the last six years working in community mental health, said she believes the role of the sheriff has changed drastically since its inception, removing the need for a sheriff with a law enforcement background.
“The reality of the matter is that the sheriff’s office has changed a lot over the past 250 years. But our assumptions about who should hold that office have not,” Leigh said in an interview Friday afternoon. “The sheriff’s role is really the program administrator, the administrator of the jail, at the county level, the steward of all of the prisoners, responsible for their care, their custody, the rehabilitation, and then ultimately, their re-entry back into the community.”
“Although the role has changed drastically over time we continue to … elect sheriffs who either have law enforcement backgrounds or are career politicians, but actually don’t possess what is essentially the experience that I believe is needed for a setting like that … clinical experience,” she continued.
Leigh’s opponent, Kevin F. Coppinger, the current sheriff, has served in the role since 2017, after working in the Lynn police department for more than 30 years, eventually becoming chief of the department. Coppinger’s election website highlights his law enforcement experience.
“Kevin Coppinger stands out as the candidate who has the experience, ability, and skills required to be an effective Sheriff and bring positive change to the Essex County Sheriff’s Department.”
But, Leigh said, Coppinger and previous sheriffs who have come from similar backgrounds, have failed to achieve the necessary results of lowering suicide and recidivism rates.
“The leadership of the people who’ve led it heavy-handedly focused on the control and the punishment side of incarceration. We can literally look and see how well, giving that job, to law enforcement officers and to career politicians, or to used car salesmen even has gone for us, it has really produced the situation that we are now having to manage and deal with,” she said.
Coppinger’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Leigh noted that 30 percent of all deaths in prison are caused by suicide and that the county’s recidivism rate, or the number of people arrested who go on to commit crimes again after being released, is approaching 50 percent. (The most recent recidivism rate available on the county sheriff’s website is from 2019, and lists the rate as 46.62 percent, a decrease from the previous year).
Much of Leigh’s platform centers around the idea of jails becoming clinical treatment centers, in an effort to address mental health issues. She said this transformation is already underway, and if elected, she would begin the process by examining the services currently available in jails and determining what has been effective.
“The first thing that you do is you start using … evidence-based practices, which include data collection and reviewing of the operations, to see really what’s happening on the ground, what treatments are being effective, what services are effective, what services are, you know, wholly ineffective,” Leigh said. “There’s going to be a lot of strategic planning, a very focused effort at a needs assessment [and] strategic planning inside of the department.”
She said she was confident in her proposed solutions because of her 12 years of experience as a social worker.
“I’ve done some of the very evidence-based treatments and been trained in that, that I would seek to employ,” Leigh said.
Leigh said that experience was critical to taking on the role of sheriff because she has worked to understand crime on a deeper level.
“As a clinician, I think all day long about the ecological factors that lead to behavior, the underpinnings of crime, because that’s what I’ve been trained to do,” she said. “That’s why I think that I am the best candidate for the job.”
Charlie McKenna can be reached at [email protected].
