The Chittenden Correctional Facility is about five people away from having filled all of its beds. The full house can be attributed to the number of detainees in the state — people who have been charged with a crime and are being held in prison pending their court hearing — which is on the rise. On Monday, there were 458 people detained in Vermont.
The average daily number of detainees has typically fluctuated between 300 and 400 during the last decade.
Since the start of the year, detainee numbers have been “holding pretty steady,” according to Judge Amy Davenport, the state’s chief administrative judge. The population averaged just under 400 from January through June, but it jumped in July, averaging about 415.
“This is the highest I’ve seen it,” Corrections Commissioner Andy Pallito said, referring to Monday’s number.
Davenport said it’s typical for detention numbers to rise during the summer months so the jump didn’t come as a big surprise to her. She pointed out that Monday’s number had already fallen to 441 on Tuesday — a reflection of courts getting back to work, processing cases held over from the weekend. What’s more surprising, Davenport said, is the number hardly went down at the end of last summer. Usually there’s a dip during the winter months, but the number stayed right at about 400, and that, Davenport said, “is definitely concerning.”
The correctional system has very little wiggle room to accommodate additional detainees. Pallito said the department is drawing up a contingency plan but they don’t have all the details worked out.
“It’s not that simple. It’s pretty complicated actually,” Pallito said.
If all the beds fill up at the Chittenden facility, additional inmates — typically ones with lengthy sentences — will get sent out-of-state. The state contracts with a private prison company, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), and it already houses some inmates at Kentucky prison as part of that arrangement.
But sending more inmates to a CCA facility will raise the state’s bill. Just one month into the fiscal year, Pallito is already preparing to ask for the Legislature for another $3 million for the mid-year budget adjustment process takes place.
In addition to sending more inmates out-of-state, Pallito said the department may have to do some serious reshuffling of in-state inmates. That may mean transferring some of the women at Chittenden to a men’s facility elsewhere in the state, something Pallito is loath to do. The state doesn’t run any co-ed facilities and when they’ve had to house women and men together in the past “there were a lot of incidents,” Pallito said. “It’s not recommended.”
Neither Pallito nor Davenport can pinpoint what’s driving the uptick in detainees. The number of felony charges has also been high— the average monthly number of charges was 339 in July — and that can lead to a larger number of detainees, Davenport said. Felony charges hit “peaks and valleys,” Davenport said, but in 2012 they began to follow a gradual uphill incline.
Another possible explanation behind the large number of detainees lies with the court system. If courts are grappling with backlogs, that can create a buildup of people awaiting trial in the correctional system, but Davenport said she doesn’t think that’s the case. She said she regularly emails clerks and judges working in the criminal division of Vermont’s courts to make sure detention cases aren’t falling through the cracks. They’ve assured her that those cases are on track, she said. Courts prioritize cases that involve detainees, but they’re often complex —involving charges such as sexual assault, homicide, or domestic violence — which makes them more time-consuming to process, according to Davenport.
But if backlogs aren’t part of the problem right now, they could be if the upward trend continues. “It could well mean that we could get backlogs,” Davenport said. “It’s always a worry.”
