RUTLAND–Attorney general Bill Sorrell heard from Rutland residents this week about a resolution, that if approved, would set a new state policy to reduce incarceration rates.
Forty attendees and a panel of eight chaired by Sorrell considered alternatives to jail for people with mental illness, ranging from electronic monitoring to hospitalization.
The Rutland hearing on Tuesday was the second of three around the state. The first was held in White River Junction.
The panel got an earful about heartbreaks endured by family members forced to travel to Michigan to visit relatives in prison. Panel members heard about the benefits and lower cost option of addiction treatment facilities and re-entry housing, such as halfway houses, for released convicts.
The state’s prison population has grown by more than 300 percent since 1974, while the state’s population has increased by only 35 percent, according to statistics presented by Sorrell. Corrections spending, according to his figures, has multiplied 20-fold in the past 40 years.
Prison time in Vermont now costs more than $60,000 per inmate per year – $170 a day – according to panelist Keith Tallon, district manager for the Department of Corrections, who represented DOC commissioner Lisa Menard on the panel.
Keeping a convict for a year in an out-of-state private institution, such as the Michigan prison run by GEO Group, costs $25,900 a year, or $71 a day, according to Tallon.
Several participants said GEO saves money by hiring low-wage personnel and feeding inmates a diet of 1,200 calories a day.
Sorrell told the audience that Vermont is unlikely to eliminate the use of out-of-state prisons, but that Commissioner Menard “is committed to reducing the numbers sent out of state.”
Participants said the state could use social programs to keep at-risk individuals out of jail. Karen Davoren of Benson, whose son is serving 45 years-to-life at the GEO prison for murder, crystallized that message, telling the panel, “We wait too long to help.”
“I don’t understand why we don’t adopt Norway’s prison system. It’s a maximum of 20 years. . . . They learn a trade,” Davoren said. “They treat them as human beings,” she said, pointing to the need for an effective reintegration into the workforce after a convict serves time.
Eric Maguire, program manager for Rutland’s DOC-funded Sanctuary House, a long-term residence for adult men re-entering the community, called for more funding for housing for released offenders.
It costs $19,000 a year to keep an individual at Sanctuary House, he said. “Nineteen thousand dollars versus $61,000 [for incarceration]. That pretty much speaks volumes right there,” Maguire said.
“Weekend wake-up calls”
Local officials took pains to point out that community safety should not be sacrificed in a rush to give offenders a better deal.
“There are people creating chaos in our neighborhoods, and they may need to be in jail for a time,” said Scott Tucker, a Rutland Police Department captain.
Rutland mayor Chris Louras emphasized the community’s security needs. Speaking of parolees and probationers who stray from “social expectations,” he said, “If you don’t lock them up. . . you’re doing them an injustice, you’re doing the police an injustice, you’re doing the community an injustice.”
Repeating a euphemism that Marble Valley Regional Correctional Facility superintendent Phil Fernandez had used in his remarks to the panel, Louras alluded to a “weekend wake-up call” – a Saturday night behind bars – as a salutary means of keeping public safety considerations in the equation.
Sorrell said when he was the Chittenden County state’s attorney in the 1970s, he recalled “thinking harsher sentences would protect people more.” But, with the burgeoning rate of incarceration in Vermont and across the nation since then, he said, “I don’t honestly think we’re any safer.”
Hospitalization or incarceration?
Patricia Lancaster, attorney at the Prisoners’ Rights Office of the Office of Defender General, said the state has relied too heavily on incarceration for non-criminal behavior.
The criminal justice system has, Lancaster said, imposed adult sentences on minors; imprisoned addicts “because we didn’t understand addiction”; imprisoned the homeless; and used jails as “the institution of last resort” for those with mental health problems.
In Vermont and across the country, she said, “we shut down the hospitals and didn’t give [those with mental illness] the support they needed” in the community.
State officials are debating whether to create a new, secured facility for difficult mental health cases that often result in incarceration.
The last of the forums will take place at Burlington City Hall Dec. 14.
