MASSACHUSETTS
MassLive
By Kristin LaFratta | kristin.lafratta@masslive.com
The super maximum security prison where Aaron Hernandez took his life in the quiet of night is a rough place — even for a prison.
The Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center holds the worst of the worst. And it has a history of violence since it opened 19 years ago, named after two corrections officers who were killed by inmates. And while most prisons are far from immune to fighting between inmates, the high-tech facility at the border of Lancaster and Shirley and just north of Route 2 seems particularly troubled by the irrepressible felons it collects.
Perhaps the prison’s name forebode the violence that was to come. In July of 1972, James Souza, 29 and Alfred Baranowski, 54, were shot by an inmate whose wife had smuggled in handguns into what was then the Norfolk Prison Colony. Forty-five years later, the state prison named in their honor has seen attacks on its staff, suicides, fighting between inmates and an anarchic riot that could only be stopped by an emergency back-up unit.
The prison on Harvard Road has housed some notable figures, including Aaron Hernandez, Red Sox commentator Jerry Remy’s son and convicted murderer Jared Remy and a defrocked Catholic priest.
John Geoghan, a sexual abuser and former Catholic priest, was murdered in the prison in 2002. Geoghan was strangled and stomped to death by Joseph Druce, who was reportedly in prison for murdering a man who had made sexual advances toward him.
Geoghan had been sentenced to Souza-Baranowski in 2002 on charges of sexual abuse, after it was uncovered that he had molested many young boys in parishes around Boston. Some questioned why, considering their sentences, Geoghan and Druce were placed in the same protective-custody unit at the high-security facility.
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