The state Department of Corrections has agreed to a new contract to continue to send those it says it doesn’t have the room to hold in Vermont jails to a privately run prison in Mississippi for at least two more years.
The corrections department announced Tuesday the new deal with CoreCivic, a giant in the private prison industry that has held the contract with Vermont since October 2018. For the last several years, the company’s initial two-year contract has been operating on one-year extensions, the last of which was set to expire next month.
Currently, 126 Vermonters are being held in CoreCivic’s Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in northwest Mississippi, according to the department.
The new two-year deal with CoreCivic, according to the department’s announcement, allows for two additional one-year extensions. The corrections department sought bids for the new contract earlier this year, with bidding closing in March. CoreCivic submitted the only proposal, according to the corrections department.
“While the State would prefer to house all incarcerated individuals in Vermont,” Nicholas Deml, commissioner of the Vermont Department of Corrections, said in a statement, “CoreCivic has adapted their system to meet the Vermont standard of care and custody for our out-of-state population; we look forward to our continued partnership.”
The Vermont chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union as well as other civil rights groups have long opposed sending incarcerated people to an out-of-state prison run by a for-profit entity, arguing, in part, that profit margins will outweigh the needs of those who are incarcerated.
The new contract, the corrections department stated in its press release, sets a “maximum allowable cost” of $21,463,095 for up to 300 beds, if needed, over the course of two years. Of those 300 beds, according to the press release, 150 may be used by incarcerated individuals on Medication Assisted Treatment, or MAT, used to treat substance use disorder.
“Barring any major operational incident resulting in a facility closure,” the release stated, “the Department does not plan to significantly increase the number of incarcerated Vermonters at TCCF and expects the out-of-state census to remain around 125.”
Issac Danyo, a corrections department spokesperson, said the two-year, $21.4 million “maximum allowable cost” would be the result of the corrections department filling all 300 of the contracted beds, which the department doesn’t expect to happen, barring an unforeseen event. Accordingly, Danyo said, the actual cost to the corrections department is expected to be much lower than $21.4 million. The current appropriation for fiscal year 2024 is $4.13 million.
The per diem cost for a regular bed at the CoreCivic facility will increase from the current $82.16 to the new contract’s first-year cost of $89.54, and from the current $95.66 for a MAT bed to the new contract’s first-year cost of $102.83 for a MAT bed.
The contract calls for yearly increases in those figures. By year four, the contract calls for a regular bed to cost $100.54, and a MAT bed $115.67.
Asked for the per diem cost to house an incarcerated person in a Vermont prison, Danyo, the corrections department spokesperson, stated in an email Tuesday that “we don’t compute a State cost per diem.”
The corrections department has been sending a portion of its incarcerated population out of state since 1998. Years ago, that number totaled more than 700 but has since dropped to around 125.
More than a dozen prison operators, from governments to private entities, have held the contract over the years, from as close as Massachusetts to as far away as Arizona.
