The Senate on Tuesday morning approved a bill clarifying the defender general’s role in investigating prisoners’ complaints in Vermont.
In essence, S.296 codifies the way the investigatory process worked up until about a year ago, Defender General Matthew Valerio said Tuesday. That includes interviewing prisoners, guards and inspecting Department of Corrections documents.
Valerio’s office by law has the authority to investigate complaints of anyone in Department of Corrections custody.
Those investigations primarily concern conditions of confinement, Valerio said. They are done by investigators in the Defender General’s Prisoners’ Rights Office. Findings can lead to policy changes, he said.
For more than 10 years the Department of Corrections has collaborated with Valerio’s office on these investigations, he said.
But for the past year or so, it has been harder to get information from the Department of Corrections, Valerio said, because an interagency shuffle gave the Department of Human Resources some control over DOC investigations.
“When we were asking for things, it wasn’t forthcoming,” Valerio said.
The friction became particularly clear last summer as Valerio’s office tried to investigate the suicide of inmate Robert Mossey at the Northern State Correctional Facility in Newport, the defender general said.
Corrections Commissioner Andy Pallito has said he also supports the bill.
Last month, Pallito told the Senate Institutions Committee that the Department of Human Resources attorneys forbid DOC to release information, even to the Corrections Oversight Committee, about the suicide.
Meanwhile, Disability Rights Vermont, a statewide group that is part of a national program, under federal law has the same right to investigate prisoner complaints as the defender general.
The Department of Human Resources Tuesday did not respond to a request for comment.
The bill was the first vote of newly sworn-in Sen. Michael Sirotkin, who replaced his wife Sally Fox, a Chittenden Democrat, after her death in early January from lung cancer.
