This commentary is by John G. Perry, who was director of planning for the Vermont Department of Corrections for 27 years before retiring in 2009.
As Vermont emerges from the pandemic, not unscathed, but more successful than nearly all of the other states, it is to the great credit of Gov. Phil Scott and Mike Smith, who with Dr. Mark Levine have gotten us nearly through some perilous times.
They did so by relying on science, yes, but also on the bravery and ingenuity of Vermont health providers, and school and community leaders, business owners, essential workers, and citizens who hunkered down and took care of others who were in need.
Now we are confronted with a challenge of rebuilding our economy, our education system and our communities, to build back stronger and return, not to the “old normal,” but a new, Vermont Strong normal.
With a massive influx of funding from the federal government, our communities, institutions, businesses, schools and government at all levels have the opportunity to reinvent ourselves. We have learned new ways to do our work, communicate, teach and govern ourselves. We should not make the mistake of abandoning these new learnings but apply them as we build back better.
Another thing we can and should do is to reinvent our justice system. I do not mean defund the police; I mean reinvent the paradigm. The Vermont justice system, as in most western democracies, is predicated on punishing people who break the law. The more serious the crime, the stronger the punishment.
The power of the state is so great that our Constitution provides for protection of the accused through the process of trial.
This creates a couple of problems.
First, it takes too long. In fact, 95% of criminal convictions are achieved through plea bargain, not a jury trial. That leads to the eventual sentence having extraordinarily little to do with the harm done by the offender, and often little to do with the risk to the community.
Second, it is an ineffective response to crime. It leads to thousands of Vermonters (nearly all men) being incarcerated, usually for short periods of time (less than 30 days), which is not long enough to allow any substantive or effective rehabilitation, but just long enough for the offender to lose his job, become estranged from positive relationships, and discover a whole bunch of new friends who feel the same way about what their community has done to them, and make a whole new set of connections to self-destructive behaviors.
They also learn that they do not matter to us. Their lives do not matter. More importantly, from a cost standpoint, our system of restraint on the power of the justice system means that there is no such thing as swift justice. It takes months, or years, to wind through the mill. In the meantime, the offender is detained in jail.
When I was working in the Department of Corrections, we had 105,000 names on our database. Ninety percent of them were men, who were incarcerated during their 20s or 30s. Nearly all of them committed their crimes in Vermont and were born in or grew up in Vermont. Very few committed serious violent felonies.
Roughly one in four Vermont males has done time in a Vermont jail. If you were male and dropped out of high school, odds are about 50/50 you will be in jail before you are 35.
Perhaps paradoxically, the crime rate in Vermont is going down. It has been going down for 30 years. The reason for that is the same reason the number of children in high school and college has been going down since the 1990s. It is the demographics.
The baby boomers (acknowledgement: I am one) who came to Vermont in the 1970s are now going to senior centers for lunch (or takeout). We, and our progeny, doubled the number of young men in the Vermont population during the last two decades of the 20th century. With that came more crime. And more fear, stirred up by politics and the “war on drugs.” And more enforcement. And incarceration.
The thing is, you see, is that what we have been doing does not work. We know that. Everybody knows that.
So, what does work? What can we do that increases community, decreases hostility, and transforms us into a community of hope? I think we can learn from the pandemic.
What works is community. What works is delivering groceries to seniors who are shut in and checking up on them. What works is Zooming with our friends. What works is working in collaboration, not competition, in our neighborhoods.
With our justice system, I think Vermont has a head start on most other places. Vermont is a national leader in restorative justice. Thousands of Vermont citizens participate in Community Justice Centers, and Vermont is home to the National Center for Restorative Justice at Vermont Law School, which was funded largely through the efforts of Patrick Leahy and Bernie Sanders. In 2001, our Legislature made restorative justice the state policy. The “policy goal is a community response to a person’s wrongdoing at its earliest onset, and a type and intensity of sanction tailored to each instance of wrongdoing.” (28 V.S.A., Sec 2a)
Let us use the opportunity to launch a renewed effort to transform our justice system into a means for people who do wrong to be held accountable by their communities, to acknowledge responsibility and repair the harm they have done, make amends to their victims, and learn how to add value, become competent, and rejoin their communities as productive, not despairing outsiders who have nowhere to turn but to drugs.
Increasing the number of prison beds in Vermont may well be the worst idea ever. The pandemic has reduced the number housed dramatically. We now have 1,223 inmates in 1,700 beds. That means nearly 500 beds are empty. Now is not the time to add 500 beds. Perhaps the reverse.
Have we not learned from the eugenics debacle that institutions not only do not work, but make everything worse? Have we not learned that the reason for the amendments to the United States Constitution was to restrain the power of the state over its citizens? Have we not learned from Black Lives Matter that Jim Crow and white power are fundamentally destructive to all of our lives and our democracy?
Vermont can do this. We are Vermont Strong. We can Restore Vermont.
