The Vermont Department of Corrections announced Monday it would end its work crew program on July 1.
The work crew program, also referred to as “preapproved furlough work crew” and the “community restitution program,” allowed people convicted of crimes to serve a maximum of 15 work days within 60 days, thus avoiding serving prison time. During that time, people live in their communities and work on Department of Corrections-approved contracts for a limited time.
Haley Sommer, a corrections spokesperson, said more people who in the past would have received work crew sentences are now being sent to diversion programs or community justice centers — different forms of non-prison sentencing.
Sommer called work crew a “very nuanced sentence” that allowed people to “still live in their communities.” But if people missed their regular jobs to attend mandatory work crew, they could lose their jobs, she suggested.
The Department of Corrections has contracted with places like food shelves, town governments and the Vermont Department of Fish & Wildlife for work crew jobs, according to Sommer.
“Financially, it was no longer proving viable,” she said, in part because “not enough people were sentenced to work crew.” People serving work crew sentences will be able to finish their sentences, even though the program is ending, Sommer specified.
Currently, 62 people are serving work crew sentences, according to Sommer, and there are 152 active warrants for people who failed to complete their work crew sentences.
“So while work crew was primarily intended to mitigate an incarcerative sentence, these population numbers indicate that work crew is not serving its intended purpose,” Sommer said.
But not everyone within the justice system agrees.
Work crew “is an alternative. It’s not this probation-heavy option. It’s not incarceration. It’s a middle option,” said Timothy Lueders-Dumont, legislative and assistant appellate attorney at the Vermont Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs. “It’s an important option that all our prosecutors were in support of.”
Lueders-Dumont said his department’s executive director, John Campbell, has asked Sen. Dick Sears, D-Bennington, vice chair of the Joint Legislative Justice Oversight Committee, to request that the corrections department continue the work crew program until the oversight committee has the opportunity to hear more testimony about it in July.
Work crew helped “tackle the court backlog,” Lueders-Dumont said, because it was an option that both defense attorneys and prosecutors could sometimes agree on to resolve cases.
For a period during Covid-19, work crew was temporarily not an option, he said, but prosecutors have been using it again.
While diversion programs often work for nonviolent offenders, Lueders-Dumont said some people have failed to complete diversion programs in the past, and work crew provided a stricter option that still prevented incarceration.
Despite the Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs’ opposition to the decision, Lueders-Dumont said the department “empathizes with the staffing concerns” that may have led the corrections department to end work crew. He also said his department has a “fantastic working relationship with the Department of Corrections.”
Matt Valerio, Vermont’s defender general, whose office encompasses the Prisoners’ Rights Office, said he recognizes that there are “a lot of defense attorneys out there who say (work crew) is an alternative to incarceration.”
But that thinking, Valerio suggested, relies on an “antiquated” concept of incarceration.
Incarceration should not be a punishment, but a way to keep only the most dangerous people away from the public, he said. “It’s not like you go to jail and come out a better person.”
Those who have received work crew sentences are low-risk and should not be incarcerated, but work crew can — if missed — lead to jail time, Valerio said.
“Is it better to be doing work crew and not getting paid, or is it better to be working a job and getting paid … doing something productive for themselves, their communities and their families?” he posed.
“I fully understand why the Department of Corrections is doing this. I also understand why defense counsels are not keen on this,” Valerio said. “We have to end this paradigm of what incarceration is for.”