Editor’s note: This commentary is by Dan DeWalt, an artisan and activist interested in democracy and the Constitution. He writes from South Newfane.
The reckless disregard for Vermont prisoners by the Scott administration not only is a travesty and disgrace, it is also a sign of systemic white supremacy that is at play without the administration, apparently, even noticing.
CoreCivic, with which the state has contracted to imprison Vermonters convicted of crimes, has failed miserably to do due diligence in its custodial care of human beings. Covid-19 has swept through its facility in Mississippi and poses a grave risk to scores of Vermont inmates.
Yet, James Baker, commissioner of Public Safety, has indicated that he is prepared to renew CoreCivic’s contract with the state for at least another year, starting in October, and the governor has not voiced any objection, if he has even noticed.
The briefest internet search reveals that CoreCivic is a troubled company that has been condemned and admonished in investigation after investigation, whether by state entities, or investigative reporters. In fact CoreCivic is a new name created to try to hide from the company’s past despicable record of abuse when they called themselves the Correction Corporation of America. It was inexcusable that the state originally decided to abrogate our responsibility for our own prisoners, but it is even worse to now continue that contract when the facts about abuse and mismanagement at CoreCivic are now commonly public knowledge.
But perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the state’s failure to house our own prisoners is the administration’s complete lack of understanding of the special jeopardy that some prisoners face in the CoreCivic prisons-for-profit system. Vermont, due to biased policing and a biased court system already incarcerates Black Vermonters at a rate highly disproportionate to their numbers in the state. And, of the number of prisoners who have been moved to Mississippi, an even higher proportion of them are Black than is representative of those locked into the Vermont prison population.
Baker and Gov. Phil Scott apparently haven’t had the interest or time to investigate just what fate awaits our prisoners, especially prisoners of color, as they are shipped off to the Deep South. CoreCivic has been cited in multiple instances for sexual abuse of prisoners, for racist conduct, for brutalizing and dehumanizing policies, and guards that inflict cruel and unusual punishment on a regular basis.
Scott and Baker haven’t considered the extra risk this poses to Black inmates? They haven’t even considered the injustice of the skewed numbers of Black prisoners we have in the first place? They are willing to continue this injustice and magnify it by sending these Vermonters to a hotbed of racism and coercive control?
The governor has shown some sensitivity to the Black Lives Matter concerns. He has supported people’s right to demonstrate and has made some admirable statements about the value of every person in this country. But his policy of blithely shipping Black prisoners to a dangerous institution where racism runs freely is a racist policy. It doesn’t really matter if the governor is not a racist if his policies continue the white supremacist paradigm that targets people of color and leaves them, once again, as second class citizens, more susceptible to abuse, sickness and death than their white counterparts.
The only just act that Scott can do is to bring all of the prisoners home.
He always talks about what we cannot afford. It’s asking too much of Vermonters to pay for more prison beds. It’s too much to ask Vermonters to rethink who we incarcerate, and why we incarcerate them. It’s too much to really face the consequences of perpetuating a white supremacist system. But it’s just fine to subject Black Vermonters to extra danger, extra stress and to the extra risk of coming home in a box?
We can no longer allow these sorts of calculations to go unquestioned. No longer can Black bodies pay the price of white bodies’ stinginess and callous disregard. It is time for all white bodies to say NO MORE. We will not be part of daily systemic racist policies that put our brothers and sisters of color at risk.
Scott has the ability to make a dramatic change in the status of our oppressed Black inmates.
Does he care enough to act?
