Editor’s note: This commentary is by Judith Levine, a writer and activist from Hardwick.
“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,” as well as those of the Vermont Department of Corrections. So notes VTDigger about grievances coming out of the Camp Hill prison in Pennsylvania, where about 260 Vermont inmates are locked up (I refuse to use the conventional euphemism “housed” — a cage is not a house).
Never mind the ABA and Vermont’s DOC. If these allegations — which include sexual assault by guards, chaining of a mentally ill patient to the floor for days, and withholding of food and medicine — are true, then Camp Hill is violating every international human rights covenant going back to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Two months ago Vermont inmate Roger Brown allegedly died in his cell of cancer, in excruciating pain without medical attention. Any human rights lawyer would tell you that amounts to torture.
The only response from the Pennsylvania authorities to the prisoners’ allegations, sent to Vermont authorities, seems to be that the facility has an internal grievance process, which prisoners may use.
The situation is bad enough in itself. But it is even worse if you look at the chain of policy decisions and social conditions that led to these inmates getting shipped to Pennsylvania in the first place.
• Free-market incarceration. The for-profit prison company GEO Group canceled its contract with Vermont in December 2016, claiming there were too few inmates to continue keeping them in its Michigan facility. That sent Vermont corrections scrambling to find another private prison in which to put its overflow inmates. Negotiating in what Bennington Sen. Dick Sears called a “seller’s market,” the state took what it could get.
• Private immigration detention. The real reason GEO dumped Vermont was that it had bigger fish to fry. Shortly after Trump’s election, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would again begin placing detained immigrants in private facilities, which the Obama administration had ceased to do after they were exposed violating human rights. From before the election to February 2017 the value of stocks in private prison companies doubled. Perhaps looking forward to a bonanza of immigrant detainees, GEO celebrated by donating $250,000 to Trump’s inauguration festivities.
• Mass incarceration. In spite of a crime rate falling to historic lows, Vermont’s prison population has tripled for men and increased tenfold for women since 1985. Vermont has chipped away at its out-of-state population but it seems incapable of reducing its prison population by the last 270 or so, the number still overflowing its own facilities. There are many reasons Vermont — and the nation — have a glut of inmates. The basic calculus, though, is ever-longer sentences for ever-lesser offenses. Roger Brown, the cancer patient who died, was in for 15 years for three counts of “lewd and lascivious behavior” with a child, which can mean touching any part of the victim’s body for the purpose of arousing yourself or the child. A second offense can get you life in prison.
• Criminalization of poverty. Many of Vermont’s prisoners, particularly women, are locked up for relatively minor property offenses. In 2015, for instance, a 49-year-old woman arrested for stealing three shirts from a store died in the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility. Sick from opiate withdrawal, she was being held for lack of $750 in bail.
• Housing crisis. An average of 145 men and nine women — or 11 percent of Vermont’s prison population — are held past their minimum release date each month for lack of housing, according to a November 2017 DOC report. It is hard enough to find affordable housing without a felony. With a conviction, especially a sex offense, it’s nearly impossible. Burlington is now locking up more victims of the housing crisis by arresting homeless people for sleeping or relieving themselves outdoors — that is, for being too poor to afford a roof and a toilet.
Vermont cannot sit back and hope that Camp Hill cleans up its act. It must demand immediate investigation and action by Pennsylvania’s officials. Failing such action, Vermont must find ways to bring its inmates home. It can find room — and withdraw from the corrupt prison-industrial complex — by releasing the hundreds who should not be locked up anyway. For instance, long sentences mean that Vermont’s prison population is aging; in 2015, almost 100 inmates were over 60, and four were older than 80. These people are the least likely to commit crimes. They should be released. Ditto, women committing petty larceny to feed drug habits.
The solution to over-incarceration is not the one proposed by Vermont prisoners’ rights officer Seth Lipschutz and others: 24-hour electronic monitoring in the community, by ankle bracelet or implanted microchip. That’s still a prison — an Orwellian panopticon — just without the walls.
Instead, the state can reduce incarceration by reforming statute to restore proportionality to criminal definitions and sentencing. For almost all offenses it can use alternative responses such as restorative justice. And to reduce crime, Vermont needs most of all to address poverty and mental illness.