[A] new report reveals the racial disparity in Vermont’s prison population has changed little in recent years.
During the last legislative session, lawmakers passed a measure calling for the formation of a committee to gather demographic information on the state’s prison population and to submit that report by Oct. 15 to the Joint Legislative Justice Oversight Committee.
That report has recently been posted on the Vermont Legislature’s website and it is expected to be presented to the oversight committee at a meeting set for Friday at the Statehouse.
Latest Census figures show blacks make up a little more than 1 percent of the state’s population, but the report issued last week reveals that blacks made up 8.5 percent of Vermont’s prisoners.
That number compares to a 2016 national report based on 2014 numbers by the Sentencing Project that showed that blacks were incarcerated at a rate 10 times that of whites in Vermont.
Tabitha Pohl-Moore, president of the NAACP’s Rutland chapter, said Monday that “at first glance” she wasn’t surprised by the report’s findings.
“It’s a start,” she said of the data gathered in the study. “My next question is going to be ‘What are you going to be doing with this information? How are you going to change this?’”
She added, “My hope is that this is their acknowledgement that yes, this is a major problem, and we’re going to put major investments of time and resources into addressing it.”
Lisa Menard, commissioner of the state Department of Corrections, added Monday that the report confirms what the state knew, but lacked current numbers to show.
She added that the department has not compiled reports on the racial makeup of the prison population in the past as detailed as this one.
“We, all of us, want to understand this better,” the commissioner said.
For example, the study looked at county breakdowns, seeking out “statistically significant” differences.
“For Chittenden County, the observed number of incarcerated Black individuals was lower than hypothesized by the county distribution,” the report stated. “For Franklin County, the observed number of incarcerated Black individuals was higher than hypothesized by the county distribution.”
A total breakdown of the 5,769 people incarcerated in 2017 in Vermont shows:
• White, 4,909, or 85.1 percent
• Black, 488, or 8.5 percent
• Hispanic, 9, or 0.2 percent
• Native American/Native Alaskan, 3, or 0.6 percent
• Middle Eastern, 1 percent
• Unknown, 291, or 5 percent
The report does not look at why the racial disparity exists.
The committee that came up with the recent report included Menard, commissioner of the state Department of Corrections; James Pepper, of the state Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs; David Scherr, of the Vermont Attorney General’s Office; Lt. Garry Scott, of the state Department of Public Safety, Vermont State Police; Monica Weeber, corrections administrative services director; and Elizabeth Scharnetzki, corrections research analyst.
The study regarding incarceration rates in Vermont follows a separate report conducted by Vermont State Police regarding racial disparity in traffic stops in the state.
In 2016, troopers searched black drivers during a traffic stop at a rate of 2.6 percent, that report found. That figure decreased to 2.15 percent in 2017.
The search rate of white drivers was about 1 percent in 2016, and that fell to 0.79 percent in 2017, the data shows.
Pohl-Moore spoke Monday of the need for greater training for both police and court personnel around issues of racism and bias, as well as seeking out answers from those parts of the state where the numbers have shown improvements.
“We should definitely be moving to more of a community-based approach at looking at this,” she said, adding of the report, “I’m hopeful they will use this as a baseline to get better.”
Document cloud link – Report