[A] coalition of mental health and prisoners’ rights advocates gathered at the Statehouse on Thursday to criticize a plan issued by the Scott administration in January for a 925 prison and mental health complex in Franklin County.
The plan does not appear to have enough support in the Legislature to pass this year, and its longer-term prospects are uncertain, at best. One part of the plan that has drawn the most ire is the idea that a private company would build the facility and lease it back to the state. State Treasurer Beth Pearce has said she has serious concerns about the implications of the proposal for the state’s long-term financial health and borrowing ability. And Republican Gov. Phil Scott has said he welcomes alternative proposals.
A coalition of groups including Disability Rights Vermont, Vermont Center of Independent Living, Vermonters for Criminal Justice Reform, Resilience Beyond Incarceration, the NAACP and Justice for All gathered Thursday to cast further doubt on the viability of the plan and push for alternatives.
Patrick Flood, former mental health commissioner for Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin and deputy secretary of the Agency of Human Services under Gov. Jim Douglas, explained why advocates have given the plan for a locked campus on the grounds of the Northwest State Correctional Facility poor reviews.
“We’re here to say, ‘OK, we’re all against this. What are we for? What should we be doing instead?’” Flood said.
For a start, the group called for the creation of a new commission that would develop “more humane and cost effective solutions.”
Flood said facilities need to be upgraded and the state needs smaller facilities to replace its current locked housing for juvenile offenders and a treatment center for offenders with mental health histories. But, he said, “They certainly do not need to be done by an out-of-state corporation.”
Instead, he and the other speakers called for money to be diverted away from the corrections system and into social programs designed to keep people from heading to prison.
Ashley Sawyer, who said she had done time in prison for property crimes and fraud and now is an advocate for social justice, said counseling programs in the women’s prison in South Burlington were not as strong as those offered to men in the stae’s other prisons. She called the idea of a new, 925-bed prison and mental health complex in Franklin County “way out of proportion” to the need for new beds in locked facilities.
Mark Hughes of the group Justice for All, which focuses on addressing racial inequities, joined Flood in saying that the state needs to address racial disparities that find African Americans significantly over-represented in prisons as compared with the state’s population.
Hughes zeroed in on a problem that Corrections Department officials have acknowledged: a shortage of affordable housing for inmates after their release.
For more than 150 inmates, Hughes said, “The only reason that they are in prison today is because the Department of Corrections says that the place that they found to live is not suitable. And that’s just not acceptable.”
More transitional housing is the answer, he said. Of the big new locked campus, Hughes added, “We’re offended at the proposition that it would be brought out as a possible solution.”
The groups also called for trimming the prisons’ population by allowing more low-risk pre-trial detainees to be released even when they can’t raise bail.
