A 62-year-old Vermont man serving time for aggravated sexual assault died Saturday night at Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Mississippi.
Cecil Vivian of Brattleboro was found unresponsive at 8:31 p.m. on Saturday, according to Ryan Gustin, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, the for-profit company that owns the prison. Emergency responders and prison medical staff tried unsuccessfully to revive Vivian, Gustin said. Vivian was pronounced dead at 10:19 p.m. before he could be transported to the hospital.
Vivian was convicted in 2012 of aggravated sexual assault and was serving a 30-year to life sentence.
He was one of 181 Vermont inmates in the Mississippi prison, which houses the state’s overflow inmate population in one wing.
The death is not considered suspicious, and Vivian did not have Covid when he died, according to Vermont Department of Corrections spokesperson Rachel Feldman. The cause of death has not yet been determined, she said.
Vivian was not in his cell when he died, Feldman added, but she did not yet have details.
The state plans to conduct an administrative and medical review of Vivian’s death, going over medical records as well as the circumstances of his death, according to Mike Smith, secretary of the Agency of Human Services. An independent medical investigation is also planned, Smith said.
CoreCivic is cooperating with all investigations, Gustin said.
Sending Vermont prisoners out of state has been a hot topic since the 1990s, when there was a surge in inmates and the state ran out of space to house them. At one point, about 700 prisoners were shipped out of state.
The Mississippi correctional facility has come under scrutiny in recent months. This summer, about 80% of the inmates from Vermont tested positive for Covid-19 as the virus spread rapidly through the prison.
In December, another Vermonter, 59-year-old Roberto Vargas of Newport City, was found dead in his cell. An investigation ultimately determined that he died of natural causes.
CoreCivic owns and manages private prisons and detention centers and operates others on a contract basis, with more than 90,000 beds in 19 states and the District of Columbia. Company revenues exceed $1 billion a year.
Much of that is from federal contracts, which President Biden plans to phase out in coming years, refusing to renew the agreements, but Biden’s plan doesn’t apply to state arrangements like Vermont’s.
