This commentary is by Jonathan Elwell of Brattleboro, an educator and writer who organizes with FreeHerVT.
On March 25, Rümeysa Öztürk was held overnight at the ICE field office in St. Albans. She had been abducted earlier that day in Somerville, Massachusetts, by masked ICE agents. Öztürk was targeted because of her participation in the Palestinian liberation movement at Tufts University, where she was a PhD student.
Then on April 3, Ethan Weinstein reported on the increasing use of Vermont prisons to hold people detained by ICE. The Vermont prison system — especially Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans and Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington — has been used by ICE to hold immigration detainees for over a decade and the number detained per month recently reached a two-year high.
The political motivations behind this rise — seen clearly in the case of Rümeysa Öztürk — are deeply alarming.
But it is crucial to recognize that the entanglements of Vermont’s prisons and police with the violence of U.S. imperialism are not unique to this moment. These escalations by the Trump administration are, rather than a wholly new phenomenon, the intensified, targeted deployment of what scholar Orisanmi Burton describes as “institutions of low-intensity warfare that masquerade as apolitical instruments of crime control.”
For Burton, the American prison system “has everything to do with class warfare. On one side of the bars, prisons function as receptacles for society’s outcasts — the racialized poor, the unemployed, the mentally ill, gender rebels, what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels called the ‘relative surplus population.’”
How does this map out onto Vermont history? What role have Vermont prisons played in colonialism and managing those dispossessed by capitalism?
Early colonizers built courthouses and jails to enforce their claims over contested land. Poor farms and, later, asylums absorbed those disabled or dispossessed by the exploitation and instability of 19th-century capitalism. When Vermont’s eugenics movement gained power in the early 1900s, these institutions and the prison system aided and legitimized the drive to surveil, segregate and sterilize particular surplus or undesirable populations.
Decades later, Jack Shuttle, an incarcerated organizer at what was then the state prison in Windsor in the early 1970s, wrote in a prison newspaper that “if you have money you do not have a worry in the world. The only crime on earth is being broke. Justice is what you can pay for it.”
Then as Vermont’s prison population boomed in the early 1980s, DOC policy dictated greater incarceration of people with family histories of psychiatric hospitalization, family policing, welfare and imprisonment. Today, unsurprisingly, the violence of incarceration disproportionately impacts those who are racialized, poor, disabled and psychiatrically labeled.
In 2021, when the DOC was seeking new leadership in the midst of outcry around drug abuse, sexual misconduct and repeated premature deaths, the state did not choose a Commissioner with social service or healthcare administration experience. Instead they appointed Nick Deml, fresh off seven years as a clandestine intelligence officer at the CIA — the preeminent federal institution for counterinsurgency and low-intensity warfare.
A perhaps even more direct thread of imperialism can be seen through the origin and organization of the Vermont state police.
According to ExplorePAhistory.com, the Pennsylvania State Police was created in 1905 “to supplement but not replace the Coal and Iron police forces that had kept unions from emerging in the Pennsylvania coal fields and steel mills.” The organization was “modeled on the Philippine Constabulary,” a military force which occupied the Philippines after the Spanish-American War and executed counterinsurgency against independence movements through scorched-earth tactics and brutal repression.
In 1937, a commission created to investigate the possibility of a state police unit in Vermont wrote that the Pennsylvania force “has become the model for almost every state police department created since that time” and recommended a similarly modernized, consolidated structure.
A decade later, the Vermont State Police was founded on “a semi-military basis” under the guidance of longtime Marine General Merritt Edson. The new organization, according to sympathetic historian and former state trooper Michael Carpenter, utilized “military rank and discipline,” issued “orders in a military format,” and wore uniforms that “strongly resembled the uniform of the United States Marine Corps.”
This was clearly not, to return to Burton’s phrasing, an apolitical instrument of crime control, but a domestic military designed for low-intensity, modernized occupation.
This history matters because it helps us see that the increasing use of Vermont prisons for ICE detention is neither an aberration nor an accident. Instead, it is a logical development for a system that has been designed, from its earliest beginnings, as a mechanism of imperial control and class warfare.
This understanding demands a deep solidarity with Rümeysa Öztürk and all those targeted by the ongoing wave of ICE abductions. And it demands a stern, principled and class-conscious resistance to these systems of violence globally and locally.
I wrote an op-ed last spring opposing the state’s proposal for a $97-million women’s prison and arguing that well-intentioned reforms have a history of actually expanding the reach and harm of incarceration in Vermont. The two institutions I highlighted for their reformist roots — NWSCF being imagined as a Youth Center “where people can grow” and CRCF being promoted as the “Most Progressive Correctional Center in the U.S.” — are now not only traditional prisons; they are the two Vermont institutions most frequently utilized for detention of immigrants.
In this country, investment in policing and prisons has always been an investment in the tools of warfare. And in the early days of Trump’s second term, it is increasingly and terrifyingly clear how we can expect tools — even those created by well-intentioned reformers — to be utilized.
Free Rümeysa! Free them all!
