A proxy war over criminal justice reform will move into the Senate following the Vermont House’s passage last week of the capital bill, H.493, the biennial spending legislation that pays for state construction projects.
Gov. Phil Scott’s administration, lawmakers and criminal justice reform advocates have for years debated what to do about the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility, Vermont’s only women’s prison. Journalists, advocates and attorneys have documented unsanitary living conditions at the South Burlington facility, and state officials have long promised action.
The state hasn’t selected a site for a new prison, which officials have estimated would cost at least $70 million, and construction is not expected to begin within the two-year cycle of this capital bill. But a $15.5 million proposal from Scott to use the legislation to start saving money for a women’s prison and re-entry facility has reignited a long-running debate about whether to build one as soon as possible or prioritize more aggressive strategies for decarceration.
The bill that passed out of the House slightly reduced the money earmarked for a new prison to $14.5 million. Partially heeding calls from advocates, it would also require the Department of Corrections to submit a report to lawmakers in November detailing “the proposed size and scale of replacement women’s facilities.” The report would include the expected numbers of correctional and re-entry beds, bed types for specialized populations, and data to back up the department’s plan.
Corrections Commissioner Nick Deml said he’s glad to oblige. The department is already engaging with stakeholders and exploring industry standards to answer questions the bill would ask, he said.
“It’s easy for us then to just write that down on paper and send it to the Legislature so they’re aware as well,” he said.
But Falko Schilling, advocacy director for the Vermont-ACLU, said that the civil rights group thinks much more needs to be done to “step back and be more thoughtful before we commit millions of taxpayer dollars to new prison construction.”
“Many of the things we call for did not end up in that bill,” Schilling said, “and we still think that there needs to be more work to be done to examine how many people we actually should be locking up as a state and what type of facilities would be appropriate in the future.”
While the Senate now has possession of the capital bill, House lawmakers aren’t done considering the matter. The chamber’s Committee on Corrections and Institutions is now debating whether to create a stakeholder group to advise the Department of Corrections on plans for a new prison. (A likely vehicle for this is S.14, a Senate criminal justice data reporting bill that is now before the House.)
Sarah Robinson, deputy director of the Vermont Network Against Domestic and Sexual Violence, came before the committee Tuesday to suggest charges for the stakeholder group, such as ensuring that plans for the prison’s replacement are “trauma-informed” and that its size and scale be “data-driven and aligned with Vermont’s justice reform goals.”
Robinson began her testimony by crediting the Department of Corrections for regularly meeting with a group of service providers and advocates to get their input. She was skeptical when officials first reached out, she said, but has since been pleasantly surprised.
“I’ll be very blunt with you that my expectations were quite low,” Robinson told lawmakers. “I did not know what the meeting was going to be like. I didn’t exactly know what the purpose was, what the openness to feedback was going to be. I just have to say that our expectations have really been exceeded.”
While the process has so far been productive and transparent, Robinson also argued the working group should be codified into law to more clearly delineate its composition, scope and mandate.
Schilling said the ACLU supports the working group. But he argued the proposal “falls short” because it would not “provide legislators with all the information they need to make informed decisions about new prison construction, specifically what changes could be made to further reduce Vermont’s prison population and transition to a system with more community-based alternatives to incarceration.”
Deml hesitated to endorse Robinson’s idea, saying it might be “duplicative” of ongoing efforts, although he didn’t outright oppose it.
“Sometimes these working groups and reporting requirements become really burdensome and start to detract from the process and we don’t want to see that,” he said.
As for the ACLU’s insistence that the state needs to further explore strategies to reduce Vermont’s overall prison population, Deml argued it “fails to capture the reality of the situation in the state of Vermont right now.” He pointed to the fact that over 50% of the approximately 100 women incarcerated in the state are “detainees” awaiting trial.
“The Department of Corrections has no discretion over that population. We have to hold them,” he said.
The ACLU also points to that statistic — but as evidence of the potential impact of further criminal justice reforms, such as the abolition of cash bail for low-level offenses.
“The biggest driver of incarceration in Vermont since the beginning of the pandemic is the number of people being ‘detained’ in prison before being convicted of a crime,” the organization wrote in a letter to lawmakers in March. “People are forced to wait in prison for months and years for their cases to be heard — many simply because they cannot afford to pay bail.”
Sen. Dick Sears, D-Bennington, who chairs the upper chamber’s judiciary committee, said he agrees with advocates that a new facility should be much smaller than previously proposed and better focused on re-entry services. But he bristled at the suggestion that the process should slow down in any way.
“We’ve already studied to death this whole process, in my opinion,” he said.
Other notable projects in H.493, which would appropriate $122.8 million in bonded dollars, also include:
- $7.6 million for HVAC renovations at the Statehouse, plus $250,000 for design documents on an expansion
- $2.75 million for a roof replacement at the Brattleboro Courthouse; $2 million for a renovation at the county courthouse in White River Junction; and $750,000 for the one in Newport
- $1.3 million for a roof replacement at the Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans and $2.75 million for projects at the Northeast Correctional Complex in St. Johnsbury
- $15.9 million for various clean water initiatives
- $6 million for the Vermont Veterans’ Home, including an elevator upgrade and an emergency generator a boiler plant replacement
- $3.6 million for the Vermont Housing & Conservation Board
