Massachusetts

The Massachusetts Department of Correction (MA DOC) runs the state’s prison system — 13 institutions holding roughly 6,300 people, almost all men (one prison, MCI-Framingham, holds women). The system has shrunk by about half over the past decade, which led to the recent closures of MCI-Cedar Junction (2023) and MCI-Concord (2024). The Department’s materials generally use the word inmate; this site uses neutral terms.

Where a person is held turns first on the sentence. People serving state prison sentences (generally 2.5 years or more) are held in MA DOC prisons; people awaiting trial or serving shorter sentences are held in a county jail or house of correction run by one of Massachusetts’s 14 elected county sheriffs — a separate system that sets its own visiting, mail, and phone rules and is not covered here.

Newly committed people are processed at a reception center first — men at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center and women at MCI-Framingham — before transfer to a permanent prison. Massachusetts has no death penalty (the last execution was in 1947, and the death-penalty law was struck down in 1984), so there is no death row or execution chamber. Several facilities have special missions: Bridgewater State Hospital (secure forensic mental-health care), the Massachusetts Treatment Center (treatment for men with sex offenses and those civilly committed as sexually dangerous), and the Massachusetts Alcohol and Substance Abuse Center (MASAC) at Plymouth (substance-use civil commitments — a facility the state has begun closing).

Two things set Massachusetts apart for families. First, prison phone calls — and video and electronic messaging — have been free statewide since December 2023. Second, Massachusetts has no comprehensive public online inmate locator: to confirm where someone is held or their custody status, families use VINELink or call the DOC. Incoming personal mail goes to the prison (Massachusetts does not use an off-site mail vendor). Use the guides below for the statewide rules at Massachusetts prisons, or go straight to a specific facility.