[T]he Senate president pro tem has issued a challenge to his colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee: come up with criminal justice reforms that return all Vermont inmates to Vermont prisons — or move them out of prison — by 2022.
In a letter to the five members of the committee, Sen. Tim Ashe, D/P-Chittenden, asked for “special emphasis” on the issue this year.
“I am specifically challenging you to assemble a series of reforms with the goal of reducing our inmate population by no less than 250 inmates by 2022,” he wrote.
That would be about a 15 percent reduction in Vermont’s incarcerated population, which was at 1,740 as of December. About 230 Vermont prisoners are currently imprisoned in a privately run facility in rural Mississippi.
Gov. Phil Scott last session floated the concept of building a new prison campus in Vermont, in part to make room for the inmates being held out of state. But leading Democrats, including Ashe and Attorney General TJ Donovan, favor criminal justice reforms to make new in-state space unnecessary.
“The Committee will use it’s (sic) best judgement about how to set us on a path to meet this ambitious target while balancing public safety, accountability, and what can best be described as a simple belief in the power of redemption,” Ashe wrote.
Ashe did not get into specifics in his letter — or in a meeting with reporters Tuesday — on how to achieve that goal, but offered a few suggestions for where to look for potential reforms: furlough, detention, sentencing laws, restorative justice and transitional housing.
The Democratically controlled Legislature has been working on a number of those issues already, trying to reduce sentences for non-violent offenders, divert more cases to non-criminal court and bolster restorative justice programs that reduce recidivism. However, the results have been mixed across the state, depending largely on the practices and priorities of state’s attorneys.
Ashe congratulated his colleagues for their work in the past, and asked them for a renewed push. “If you succeed in meeting this challenge,” Ashe wrote, “the benefits to Vermont will be great — an elimination of the use of out-of-state beds, millions in taxpayer savings, and many lives improved.”
Senators on the committee said they would try to meet the challenge, though they weren’t confident they could get there.
“It’s ambitious for sure,” said Sen. Dick Sears, D-Bennington, the judiciary committee chair. “Whether we can do it or not, certainly it’s a challenge.”
Sears said one of the first places he would look for potential reductions is the detainee population — inmates who are awaiting trial or unable to post bail — which has remained stagnant at about 400 for years.
“It may require us having more community-based programs like we do in Bennington,” Sears said, adding that he was aware of at least 14 individuals living in apartments in his constituency who would likely be imprisoned in other counties.
Sen. Joe Benning, R-Caledonia, another committee member, said that without getting into the weeds on the particular reasons that particular prisoners are in jail, it would be difficult to know how certain reforms might impact the prison population.
“It’s a heavy lift, we just haven’t got that discussion going yet,“ he said, adding that there was a danger is setting a certain number to reach without knowing how reaching that number might tilt the balance between public safety and restorative justice.
“He can use all the numbers he wants,” Benning said of Ashe. “I understand it as a conceptual goal, not as a specific number to achieve.”
Benning said he would first look to drug offenders in considering how Vermont might incarcerate fewer people — noting that placing addicts with hardened criminals is “just making their situation worse.”
“Many countries around the world are handling drug offense in a completely different way,” he said, “whether we can move in that direction is anybody’s guess.”
Vincent Illuzzi, a former Republican senator who’s now the state’s attorney in Essex County, said Ashe’s goal was aspirational, and quite possibly impossible.
“It’s a difficult goal — there’s nothing wrong with striving to achieve that goal — but sometimes you can’t get there from here,” he said.
Illuzzi said state’s attorneys were “already employing every reasonable protocol and program to avoid incarceration.”
“We can always do better, but I don’t think we can set a goal of that nature in a vacuum,” he added. “There are some people who just belong in jail and you can’t just wave a magic wand and say they should not be incarcerated.”
