[T]wo months after a Vermont inmate died in a Pennsylvania prison of stage 4 lung cancer that went undiagnosed until his final days, concerns about medical care and other conditions at the facility near Harrisburg persist.
Three recent inmate letters to VTDigger, coupled with interviews with Vermont state officials, point to a situation in which more than 260 Vermonters are housed at Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution at Camp Hill in conditions that do not meet the standards of Vermont’s seven in-state correctional facilities.
One six-page inmate letter told of a Vermont inmate being sexually assaulted by a Camp Hill staff member; another inmate, who suffers a “severe functional impairment” due to mental illness, was chained by wrist and ankle to the floor of his cell for more than three days.
The letters follow the Oct. 15 death of Vermont inmate Roger Brown, 68, of Brookline, who, according to diaries kept by him and his cellmate, spent his final weeks in excruciating pain and could not get needed care from prison medical staff.
“The people of Vermont really need to know what’s going on with Vermonters in Pennsylvania,” one inmate wrote. “The people need to know how their tax money is being spent. It’s not worth the pain and suffering that Vermonters are going through at Camp Hill!”
Health providers at Camp Hill have “arbitrarily removed and/or changed many Vermont inmates’ Chronic Care meds (diabetic, heart, thyroid, arthritis and mental health) without explanation,” one letter said. “One has had more seizures here than (in) all previous years of incarceration.”
VTDigger agreed to conceal the identities of the inmate letter writers to spare them possible retaliation by staff at the Pennsylvania facility. The longest of the letters, six hand-printed pages, came from an inmate described by Seth Lipschutz, director of the state of Vermont’s Prisoners’ Rights Office, as a “reliable informant.”
If that inmate’s allegations of the sexual assault and a chained prisoner are true, they appear to violate the American Bar Association’s standards for treatment of inmates. A senior Vermont corrections official said Vermont uses “best practices” that include a blend of those standards and others issued by the American Correctional Association.
The letter listed 32 complaints, many of which would appear to violate the standards, which requires correctional authorities “to protect prisoners from physical injury, corporal punishment, sexual assault, extortion, harassment, and personal abuse, among other harms.”
In addition, correctional facilities “should not withhold food or water from any prisoner.” The letter claimed there had been “multiple instances of officers withholding food (meals) as punishment.”
VTDigger has posted the list with this story after transcribing it from printed form into typed text, in order to protect against identification of the anonymous writer by handwriting analysis.
Amy Worden, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections, said this in an email when told of the inmates’ concerns:
“The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections has an internal grievance process for inmates to use to express their concerns or dissatisfaction. VT DOC inmates are aware of how to submit grievances, how grievances are processed/answered and the grievance appeal process… The PA DOC only will address inmate grievances submitted using this grievance system.”
Worden provided web links to the Pennsylvania system for reporting inmate grievances, sexual assaults and staff misconduct.
Mike Touchette, deputy commissioner of the Vermont Department of Corrections, said in an email that “as with any complaint or concern we receive, we have forwarded this list PADOC officials and have requested these areas be looked into and responded to.”
In an interview, Touchette also questioned the veracity of some of the complaints. For example, one of them described an incident in November in which a Pennsylvania corrections officer “threatened physical violence against a whole section of Vermont inmates, actually removing his belt to enter cells and get in inmates’ faces.” Touchette said the incident had been investigated, and he was satisfied that the officer did not remove his belt.
Lipschutz said he ascribed a higher degree of credence to many of the complaints, because similar versions of events had come to him from more than one source.
But he added, “That’s the most troubling part of my job” as head of the Prisoners’ Rights office, “trying to figure out when the complaints are legitimate and when they’re not.”
Rep. Curt Taylor, D-Colchester, a member of the House Corrections and Institutions Committee, said he had visited Camp Hill. Taylor was allowed to meet with inmates privately and did not hear the stories detailed in the inmates’ letters to VTDigger.
Taylor said he did hear one complaint described in more detail in one of the letters, which said inmates are locked in their cells for an average of 19 hours a day. Taylor said that stemmed from the fact that many sports and other activities at Camp Hill are oversubscribed, and inmates who can’t be accommodated on a given day are required to stay in their cells.
Taylor and others pointed to big cultural differences between Vermont’s seven correctional facilities, each of which houses no more than a few hundred inmates, and Camp Hill. That prison’s population of about 3,400 dwarfs Vermont’s entire system, which has about 2,000 inmates.
Pennsylvania uses Camp Hill as a gateway to the rest of its system, officials said. New inmates – other than the Vermonters – stay there for brief periods while they are assessed and then sent to a longer-term placement in one of Pennsylvania’s two dozen other prisons.
The inmates were moved to Camp Hill in June after the company that operates a private prison in Michigan ended its contract with Vermont. Sen. Richard Sears, D-Bennington and vice chairman of the Legislature’s Joint Justice Oversight Committee, said Vermont officials faced “a sellers’ market” when looking for new out-of-state housing for inmates that Vermont’s system could not accommodate.
The federal government recently has been taking up beds managed by private prison industry with immigration detainees, Sears said. That’s what prompted GEO Group, the company that runs the Michigan prison where Vermont’s out-of-state inmates had been before camp hill, to pull out of its contract with the state, officials said.
Vermont had more say about prison conditions and programming when negotiating with a private company. Under its interstate compact with Pennsylvania, that state has complete control over the conditions under which the Vermonters are housed, Sears and other officials said.
Lipschutz joined other criminal justice reform advocates in saying his preferred solution would be for Vermont to reduce its inmate population enough to keep all of its prisoners in-state. Many inmates could be kept in the community with tracking devices, he said.
Modern technology would render incarceration obsolete in many cases, Lipschutz said. “Give them a choice: You can either go to prison or you can have a chip in your arm and we track you 24/7,” he said.
