MCI-Concord prison shuttered, around 300 inmates relocated

BY BAILEY ALLEN, 7 NEWS WHDH

JULY 17, 2024

CONCORD, MASS. (WHDH) - After nearly 150 years as a prison, MCI-Concord shut its gates Wednesday and relocated around 300 people who were incarcerated at the facility.

In January, the Healey-Driscoll Administration proposed the prison’s closure. The Massachusetts Department of Correction cited MCI-Concord’s expensive maintenance, old age, and excessive space as reasons for the facility’s shutdown.

“Built in 1878, MCI-Concord’s aging infrastructure became too costly to maintain and would have required significant investments,” the DOC said in a statement.

In addition, the state’s historically low prison population and ongoing recidivism reductions have made the closure possible, the DOC said. 

The people incarcerated at the prison were reassigned to other facilities based on the appropriate security levels, services, and programming for each individual, the DOC said.

MCI-Concord employees were also relocated, which “positively impacts the department’s staffing capabilities across the correctional system,” the DOC said. The department noted that security position vacancies dropped 48 percent, from 702 to 340 vacancies when the prison was closed.

The now-vacant 37 acres of land and 18 buildings are set to be available for non-prison use and redevelopment, according to the DOC.

“We’re saving annually about $15 to $16 million a year by closing the facility, and more importantly, we saved ourselves about $190 million in infrastructure costs that were going to be needed to continue to make the facility usable,” said Shawn Jenkins, the interim commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Correction.