The two prisons in the running to take in Vermont’s out-of-state inmates have faced problems over the past decade with understaffing, mistreatment of prisoners and inadequate medical services. One was found to have “critical issues” with inmate health care just last year.
Vermont announced earlier this year that it was looking to move more than 250 prisoners out of Camp Hill prison in Pennsylvania, where inmates were almost entirely cut off from communication with the outside world, given little time outside of their cells and allegedly subjected to abuse by guards and poor health care.
The Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Rhode Island and the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Mississippi are the only two prisons that submitted bids to Vermont for the contract to house its inmates. Vermont’s contract with Pennsylvania expires in October.
Vermont Department of Corrections officials visited the Mississippi facility in January and toured the Rhode Island prison this week.
The prisons are privately and quasi-privately run, and have failed to maintain sufficient staffing or uphold basic standards of inmate care in the past decade, according to news reports, internal audits and investigations by advocacy groups.
“I don’t know if they’re going to pick the least bad of the two,” said Barry Kade, a Montgomery-based lawyer and prisoner advocate who filed a public records request for the names of the prisons vying to replace Camp Hill.
Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility
The Tallahatchie facility is run by CoreCivic, the country’s largest private prison operator with 129 locations across the U.S. Audit reports from numerous states have found continual issues that CoreCivic has failed to resolve.
After Tyrone Madden, 30, a California prisoner being held at the Mississippi facility, died there in 2015, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation conducted an audit. It found that the medical care at the facility was “undesirable” and “not meeting the target performance benchmark.”
Another California audit in 2016 found the facility “failed to provide adequate health care.” The state’s 2017 audit on the facility said some medical staff had expired emergency response certificates and patients did not receive proper care.
“It is concerning that TCCF has failed to resolve the critical issues related to patients not receiving their chronic care medications in a timely manner,” wrote Don Meier, California’s director of correctional health care services, in a Jan. 5, 2018, letter to Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility Warden Martin Frink.
A 2017 audit from the Tennessee Department of Correction found that another CoreCivic facility, Trousdale Turner Correctional Center, operated with fewer correctional officers than approved, failed to meet contractual obligations, and staff falsified records to make it appear as though the facility was staffed when it was not.
The American Civil Liberties Union wrote a letter to lawmakers in Tennessee in December, highlighting concerns at CoreCivic facilities across the country. “Time and again, across the country, CoreCivic has delivered a pattern of abuse, mismanagement and violence at its facilities,” wrote ACLU Executive Director Hedy Weinberg.
Vermont has its own history with CoreCivic, which was previously known as Corrections Corporation of America. CoreCivic facilities in Kentucky and Arizona housed Vermont inmates until 2015. Eric Lambert, a prisoner in the Kentucky facility, filed a lawsuit in 2016 alleging that he was injured twice while serving his sentence in Kentucky. The lawsuit was resolved in 2017.
In January, CoreCivic lobbied lawmakers to build and lease a new, 950-bed facility to the state, part of Gov. Phil Scott’s plans to build a new $150 million prison facility in northwest Vermont.
CoreCivic Managing Director of Communications Steven Owen did not respond to requests for comment other than to say the Mississippi facility “is appropriately staffed.”
Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility
The other possible relocation site for Vermont’s out-of-state inmates is the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, a quasi-private prison overseen by a board appointed by James Diossa, the mayor of Central Falls, Rhode Island.
The Wyatt facility lost a contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2008, when 34-year-old Chinese computer engineer Hiu Lui “Jason” Ng died while an inmate there.
A autopsy found “his spine fractured and his body riddled with cancer that had gone undiagnosed and untreated for months,” the The New York Times reported.
“Guards ignored his pleas for help,” said Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island ACLU. “It was extraordinarily depressing to see how the people running this facility refused to believe he was in pain.”
The ACLU filed a lawsuit against Wyatt at the time and won a multimillion dollar settlement for the family.
In 2016, Wyatt again fell under scrutiny after an inmate escaped in December by climbing a basketball hoop. At that time Wyatt had 98 employees for about 525 prisoners, leaving 42 officer positions vacant, WPRI reported.
Wyatt Warden Daniel Martin said security has improved since the inmate escaped, but admitted staffing is still a challenge.
“It’s not just an issue with corrections in Rhode Island,” Martin said. “Agencies have to be as creative as they can.”
Wyatt has a capacity of 770, but has struggled financially since losing its ICE contract. While the number of inmates fluctuates every day, there were about 460 detainees at the facility as of this week.
Vermont would be the first state to send prisoners to the facility.
Martin’s contract includes a bonus for increasing the prison population. Wyatt’s largest contract is with the U.S. Marshals, which allows up to 500 prisoners. Wyatt also has a small contract with the U.S. Navy.
Albert Gardner, interim board chair of the Central Falls Detention Facility Corp., said staffing is adequate for the number of inmates currently at Wyatt.
“We would increase should we be awarded the contract with the state of Vermont,” Gardner said.
But it’s unclear how easy that would be. “Staffing is always a problem,” he said. Gardner added that officers use Central Falls as a “stepping stone” to go into other careers in law enforcement.
Jack Parlon of Fraternal Order of Police, a labor union, represents 108 police officers and 18 sergeants employed at the Wyatt facility.
After staff were found working 80 hours a week in 2016, Parlon said there have been improvements. Wyatt increased wages by $2 an hour for sergeants on Monday. He said officers and sergeants work an average of 10 hours of overtime now.
“They are doing a better job than they’ve been doing in the past,” Parlon said.
Vermont officials weighing the options
A six-person team led by Vermont DOC Operations Manager Shannon Marcoux visited Wyatt on Wednesday and were given a two-hour tour, Martin said.
“They appeared to like the facility,” he said.
Marcoux was not available for comment following the tour. He previously said he would make a recommendation following the tour.
Marcoux said earlier the availability of programs and access to health care would be an important part of his recommendation. He said he would not be available to comment further on the facilities, and their track records, until July 5.
Marcoux visited the CoreCivic facility in Mississippi in January before a bid was received. “It was a clean facility,” he said of the prison. “It offered a bunch of programs.”
DOC Commissioner Lisa Menard said she was aware of some previous issues at the Mississippi and Rhode Island facilities, and would take that into account during the decision-making process.
“I’m confident one or the other will be appropriate,” Menard said. “They are not going to stay where they are now.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Prisons vying for Vermont’s inmates have troubled pasts.