Bristol County: Incarcerated - New Bedford Whaling Museum

Bristol County: Incarcerated

Bristol County: Incarcerated

New Bedford Whaling Museum

October 24, 2025 - December 2026

As the original seat of Bristol County, Taunton held the first “gaol” (jail) in our county, which opened in 1749. After complaints from southern towns within the County about the distance to get to Taunton, New Bedford was granted a “half-shire” status. In 1829 the New Bedford Jail on Court Street opened (currently the Civil Processing building), with the New Bedford House of Correction opening soon after. The Ash Street Jail construction began in 1888 with 287 cells, completing a corrections complex that now fills a city block. The Ash Street Jail became the primary center for housing prisoners within Bristol County for most of the 1900s. Still operating today under the management of the Bristol County Sherrif’s Office, Ash Street Jail claims the moniker of the oldest continuously operating jail in the nation.

Bristol County: Incarcerated features items related to life in the Ash Street Jail, both for its residents and its employees, and those related to Bristol County’s history of incarceration. In this exhibit you can see the Taunton gaol’s book listing debtors as early as 1785, ledgers and logs dating to the 1890s of daily activities at the Ash Street Jail, Lizzie Borden’s mittimus in 1892, photos of people booked into Ash Street Jail in the 1920s, and a patch representing an anti-suicide inmate support service program run in the late 1990s. In 2023, the Bristol County Sheriff’s Office donated an estimated 6,700 negatives and thousands of more photographic prints of intake photos from the early 1900s to the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Recently, BCSO has lent the museum materials from its own archives to be available to researchers and exhibited at the museum.

Local jails, county- or city- run facilities where a majority population is awaiting trial, play a critical role as “incarcerations front door.” Being in jail does not indicate guilt. The majority of people in jails today cannot afford to pay the bail set to secure their release pre-trial. This further criminalizes people from under-resourced communities. The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any independent democracy on Earth and every single state in the country incarcerates more people per capita than most nations. In 2022, across the country, about 469,000 people entered prison gates, but people went to jail more than 7 million times. As of October 2025, there are 118 humans housed at the Ash Street Jail, 87 of which are pre-trial.