Suffolk sheriff launches jail program to curb gun violence
Suffolk is testing a jail classroom in Yaphank to see whether confronting inmates with gun violence's toll can change behavior outside the cellblock.
Suffolk County Sheriff Errol D. Toulon Jr. rolled out Project Safe & Sound at the Suffolk County Correctional Facility in Yaphank, a jail-based course meant to push inmates to confront the long-term consequences of gun violence. County officials and Northwell Health’s Center for Gun Violence Prevention described it Tuesday, June 2, as the first gun violence prevention course of its kind in a jail in the country.
The move gives Toulon a new tool in a county where shootings have remained a stubborn local problem. News 12 reported in August 2025 that Suffolk had six more shooting incidents involving injury, seven more shooting victims and seven more shooting deaths than at the same point the year before. State reports from the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, published monthly through the GIVE initiative, continue to track firearm activity and shootings across New York, underscoring how closely Suffolk’s numbers are watched.
Toulon has run the sheriff’s office since January 1, 2018, and is now in his second term. He also became Suffolk County’s first African American to be elected to a nonjudicial countywide office. That history makes the new course more than a routine corrections announcement: it is being presented as an effort to interrupt the cycle of violence before people leave custody and return to Suffolk neighborhoods.
Northwell Health is framing the work as public health intervention, not simply punishment. The health system says its Center for Gun Violence Prevention treats gun violence as a public health crisis and promotes evidence-based firearm injury and mortality prevention strategies. Northwell has also held its Gun Violence Prevention Forum annually since 2019, bringing together physicians, researchers, policy experts and health care executives, which places the Yaphank effort inside a wider medical and prevention network.
The sheriff’s office has already paired with Northwell and the Suffolk County Police Foundation on another prevention step, distributing personal gun safes to graduating Suffolk police recruits. Together, the storage effort and the jail course show a county trying multiple pressure points at once, from safe storage to incarceration-based education.
What remains to be seen is whether Project Safe & Sound can show a measurable effect on recidivism or on the gun violence numbers Suffolk residents see in their own towns. For now, the burden is on the new course to prove that a lesson delivered in Yaphank can change what happens next in Suffolk County.
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