REMAINING TRUE TO HER VALUES

There are a little over 3,000 Sheriffs’ in the United States. Of that number only 60 are women. Sheriff Donna Buckley of Barnstable County, Massachusetts,(also better known as Cape Cod) is the first female in the County’s 331-year history to hold this office. Sheriff Buckley will tell you that running for Sheriff in 2022 was not on her bucket list, but still, she saw an opportunity to use her forty year background as an Attorney in Criminal Law and Government to build a new path forward for the incarcerated population at the Barnstable jail. As the Sheriff herself states, ‘there is no script to being Sheriff’, but in her role, she believes it is her solemn responsibility to those incarcerated, their families, and the community to provide pathways to a better tomorrow. Sheriff Buckley’s jail houses both men and women but one of her priorities is to cut down the generational incarceration, especially with the women who are under her watch. In a recent survey, the number of her incarcerated women with children, was as she stated, ‘unsettling’. Her 95 incarcerated women, many victims themselves, equated to 103 children.