Meet Dave Rini

Q: Dave, you are the Executive Director of Prisoners’ Legal Services of Massachusetts. What does the organization do, day-to-day?

Prisoners’ Legal Services (PLS) is the state-wide legal services provider for people held by our fourteen county sheriffs and the state Department of Correction (DOC). Our role is to protect the civil rights of people incarcerated across the Commonwealth and make sure the conditions of their confinement follow our laws. We also advocate strongly for people to be able to come home from prison and jail if they are no threat to public safety (as many elderly or sick prisoners are).

Q: Can you share an example of a case or issue that illustrates the impact of the organization’s work?

In 2025, we sued the Essex County Sheriff’s Office for its failure to provide medical treatment to prisoners with Hepatitis C. Hep C is one of the most common, and dangerous, infections in prisons and jails across Massachusetts (and the country), but it’s also one of the most well-understood ones too. 

There’s a pretty clear medical standard for how to treat that illness, and we learned through our clients that the Sheriff’s Office wasn’t providing that treatment - sometimes at all; sometimes not using the right medicines or the right doses, and sometimes not for the right length of time. Our laws don’t allow that - when someone’s incarcerated and they get sick, we have an obligation to make sure we treat them effectively. 

The lawsuit is ongoing, but the sheriff has made big strides in moving the right direction. 

Q: What are some of the biggest challenges your clients face right now?

Unfortunately, we still see a lot of the same concerns that we’ve seen for a long time. Insufficient or negligent medical and mental healthcare are amongst the most common issues we’ve seen; we’ve sued both the DOC and the sheriffs over the years for failing to provide care at even a rudimentary level at times. 

Violence against prisoners is also a common problem.

Last year we settled one of our largest cases ever, about a particularly vicious incident in our maximum security prison a few years ago where staff used chemical agents, dogs attacked people, and prisoners were subjected to a pretty horrific level of violence for about a month. I wish those issues were less common today, but we still see issues like that.

Q: You are doing such important work. Can you share a little on your career journey? How did you come to be leading an organization working to protect prisoners’ rights?

My career was not the one I thought I’d have when I first graduated college! I thought I was going to be a writer when I was a college student, but I realized I was more drawn to advocacy causes. 

My first big step in that direction was volunteering with the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center back in 2007, which led to an 18 year relationship with the organization. Sexual violence prevention is still a really big passion of mine, and I worked for about 10 years for BARCC, creating and running its project working with survivors of sexual violence who were incarcerated.

That obviously got me heavily involved in the correctional system, and over that decade, I did a lot of crossover work with PLS. When they started looking for a new ED in 2025, I was recruited by a search firm to talk with them.

Q: What has surprised you most about this work compared to what you expected early on?

I’m still pretty new in my role - it’s only been just over a year since I came onboard as the executive director - but I think the biggest eye-opener for me is how important basic, day-to-day things are for running any organization. Making sure folks feel supported, making sure we have good processes and procedures in place, making sure we’re connecting regularly and authentically with the people we serve - all of those are really, really essential. 

In my mind, I worried I’d be spending a lot of my time talking with bigwigs at fancy foundations to try to fundraise - and fundraising is an important part of my role! - but I’ve found out that my responsibility is much more about day-to-day operations than I originally thought.

Q: Is there much collaboration with similar organizations in other states, and if so, how does work? 

There’s definitely some! Prisons and jails are such a state-level issue, though, that how much direct work we can do together is a little more limited. Most of what we all do together - and there are a couple of other similar organizations across the country that do things like we do - is information sharing. We track what’s happening in the law across the country and in the different federal circuits; we share information about good experts we might want to talk to in different cases, or discuss common issues we’re all seeing no matter where in the country we are. 

The correctional field is a really, really big one and they have some major lobbying agencies and professional associations that share ideas all the time. There’s a pretty good chance that if one state prison system is trying a new technique to, for example, restrict access to books or something for prisoners, that other states will know about that technique and might try it out pretty soon. 

Q: In what areas is Massachusetts doing well on prisoners’ rights—and where does it still fall short compared to other states?

One area where we’re ahead of the curve, although often I think it has more to do with luck than a lot of skill or legislative willpower, is that our correctional system is pretty small. Massachusetts has less prisons and less people incarcerated than most other states our size, and per capita, we’re pretty high up on the list with the lowest incarcerated population. Granted, we’re still way ahead of comparable European countries, but it’s a start. 

That said, we have a lot of people under state supervision, even if they aren’t all in prison or jail anymore. Where we still see a lot of challenges here are in things like operations - we still overuse solitary confinement, compared to a lot of other states, and we don’t have great accessibility for programs or work release compared to a lot of other states.

 We also keep more people at more restrictive levels of security than we need to, meaning it’s harder for a lot of folks to come home directly from prison or jail directly because they didn’t get the chance to gently ease back into having more autonomy before they hit their home communities.

Q: What are the major initiatives or priorities Prisoners’ Legal Services is focused on at the moment?

We have five priority areas that guide our work: medical and mental healthcare; violence against prisoners; conditions of confinement; ending solitary confinement; and racial justice. We have projects in all five of those areas, but right now, we’re spending a lot of time trying to challenge insufficient mental healthcare in a lot of the systems. In the DOC, there have been a really worrying number of suicides and suicide attempts over the past eight months, and we’re working to ensure that they change their policies to prevent any more of those from occurring.

Q: Where do you see the greatest opportunity for meaningful change in the next few years?

I’m lucky that I have an incredible team, and we have a couple of big irons in the fire that would really make a meaningful change for folks in custody (and for the taxpayers all across Massachusetts). Amongst the most important would be overhauling our medical parole system and instituting an elderly parole system. 

Right now, we have one of the oldest, and sickest, incarcerated populations in the country. This is the group of people with the lowest recidivism rate, the lowest risk to the community, and the highest cost to care for and supervise. If our current legislative efforts in that area get passed, we could really see a big change for sick folks in the system. That would also save the Commonwealth a lot of money that we could use for other more effective public safety initiatives!

Q: How can people in the community learn more about your work or get involved?

Our website is probably the easiest way to find us and find out about what we’re doing - www.PLSMA.org. We also have a great legislative list-serv that folks can hop on to get updates about the things we’re doing, and an active facebook page that provides very regular updates about issues we’re seeing and projects we’re working on.

Q: What’s the biggest misconception people have about incarcerated individuals or the legal system that you wish more people understood?

There are two. The first is a hope that the legal system, especially the criminal legal system, is objectively fair and that the people who are in prison and jail all “deserve” to be there. We know from a lot of evidence and research that there are a whole host of reasons why some folks get caught up in the system and other people don't, and those reasons have a lot more to do with access to money, resources, and connections than they do justice or public safety. The majority of folks in the system are cycling through a county jail or house of correction on low-level substance use or quality of life crimes that are connected to things like poverty or homelessness - locking them in a concrete box doesn’t actually address any of the issues of poverty, insufficient medical care, or not having a place to live. 

The second is the idea that once we put someone in a prison or jail, society as a whole doesn’t have to think about them or deal with them again, and that’s just not true from a moral or a practical angle. Nearly everyone who is sent to prison or jail is going to come home at some point - that’s how sentences work - and if we’ve spent 3, 5, or 10 years conditioning them how to live in a prison but not how to come home and actually be able to live life in their community again, we haven’t improved public safety for anyone at that point.

Q: Is there a book, idea, or influence that has stayed with you throughout your career?

There are a couple of big heavy hitters in the field who have affected me, like probably everyone else who does this kind of work. Bryan Stevenson and Just Mercy, or Michelle Alexander who wrote The New Jim Crow. 

But one of the more foundational ideas came from the book American Furies, by Sasha Abramsky. I got the book from one of my best friends, who was in a PhD program for criminology at the time. It’s a great book, although incredibly depressing, and one of the core ideas in the book is that our correctional system is really following a historical legacy of punishment, not public safety. That’s what these systems were built to do - not move us towards safer communities with less crime or less harm - and it shouldn’t be shocking that that’s what they keep producing.

Q: Dave, let’s turn to you. What brought you and your family to Watertown?

My wife is from here! I’ve lived in the Boston area since coming here for school 25 years ago, and I’ve lived all around greater Boston - Allston, Brookline, Cambridge. When my wife and I were expecting a few years ago, we knew that our tiny apartment in Cambridge wouldn’t be workable for a family, so we moved back to the family home where we had a little more space. Since then, it’s been a really great place to raise a kid.

Q: What do you like most about living here? Is there anything about living in Watertown that’s been unexpected? 

I love it here. I was nervous about moving out of Cambridge - I’ve been a deeply urban kid my whole life, and every time I’ve moved a little bit further out of Boston, I’ve worried that I’m not going to be able to stay active in the wonders of the city. But I’ve really found that Watertown gives us this great way to both feel like we live in a real community where I can get to know folks a bit without feeling too far away from the cool things that Cambridge and Boston have to offer. 

I didn’t expect to find such good seafood here, though! We’re definitely a big Celebrities family!

Q: When you’re not working, how do you like to spend your time? What hobbies or activities help you recharge? 

I’m a pretty big soccer fan, although I don’t get to see that much of it now with my current role! We’re really excited about bringing our daughter to see the new professional women’s team when she’s a little older, and to the Harvard Women’s games when we can. 

Right now, I’m personally getting pretty pumped for the World Cup this summer. I didn’t get tickets, unfortunately, but I’m excited to check out some of the fan zones and of course watch some games in our local establishments!