In a 14-month period starting in January 2018, inmates filed over 1,400 grievances about the prison and its staff. The Department of Corrections has denied VTDigger’s requests for those records, citing inmate confidentiality.
In the meantime, lawmakers have been discussing how to move forward. “Whether people like it or not, we need to replace the facility,” Rep. Alice Emmons, D-Springfield, said at a meeting of the House Committee on Corrections and Institutions last week. H.543, the capital spending bill, includes $250,000 to study the construction of a new facility.
Criminal justice researchers have found that nationally, reform efforts have not curbed incarceration rates for women as effectively as they have for men. Women “have become the fastest growing segment of the incarcerated population,” said Liz Swavola, who has studied the gender gap in correctional facilities for the Vera Institute for Justice. (While Vermont Department of Corrections data shows the population at CRCF is lower now than it was in 2014, the annual average number of inmates there has stayed level or increased since 2016.)
Swavola acknowledged that it’s challenging to enact reforms when existing facilities are both deteriorating and overcrowded. But, she said, “when you are focused only on construction, what happens is you build a new facility, and almost immediately it’s over capacity. Because you haven’t addressed the underlying systemic changes that need to take place.”
On this week’s podcast, Amanda Sorrell describes the physical and emotional impact of her time in Vermont’s women’s prisons. Liz Swavola reveals how broader trends in women’s incarceration rates are affecting conversations about reform. And VTDigger’s Kit Norton details the debate in the Statehouse about what happens next.
If you could just introduce yourself for the recording—
Amanda Sorrell: Sure. I’m Amanda Sorrell, and I’ve been under the supervision of the Department of Corrections since 2004, currently on parole, but I spent a lot of time incarcerated, well over 10 years, of that time incarcerated for nonviolent crimes.
How long have you been out of the facility?
Sorrell: Almost a year, which is a record for me. Most women, most people incarcerated, usually, last less less than 90 days upon release before being returned to the facility for some reason. Myself, prior to this, the longest I’ve stayed out, I think was five months. This is definitely a record, and making parole was — is huge. Something that I, for a long time, didn’t think I was capable of. I kind of reserved myself to the idea that I was sort of stuck in this really crazy cycle of using and incarceration for using.
Amanda went to prison in 2004. She robbed a store to pay for drugs, then ran away from a police officer at a court appearance. Over the years, she would get released and then arrested again for violating the terms of her release.
Sorrell: Which just ended me up with a total of a 20 year sentence for essentially stealing $400 and running.
Over those years, the state was moving its female prisoners around to different locations. In 2011, they landed at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility, or CRCF, in South Burlington.
Within six months, advocates started reporting that the conditions there were alarming.
Sorrell: I’ve been to every facility that women have been in in Vermont in the last 15 years. So that’s Windsor, Dale, Northwest and South Burlington. Up until CRCF, the other facilities I have been in, have all had a real focus on real-world skills, giving women skills to go home with job training, education, and really trying to keep women connected to their children. CRCF is the only facility that I’ve ever been in that basically has none of that.
We have a saying: “if you weren’t a criminal when you got here, you will be when you leave.” You come in sometimes for a really minor infraction, and you come into jail and you’re stuck there for months, around people who, like me, who’ve been in the system for a long time. And suddenly you start to create more offenders. Like, some of these kids come in there, and they stole $100 worth of stuff, and they leave there learning how to get away with selling drugs. So many things that can happen in that system, because there’s nothing but time on their hands.
When you were first moved to that facility, what were your first impressions like? Do you remember going in there for the first time?
Sorrell: I was actually in the facility in Swanton the day they were supposed to move to the new facility in South Burlington. I was getting released. I literally got out the same day. And I remember I was working with one of the women in the domestic violence — she worked in the jail, but I was seeing her when I was on the street. I asked her a few weeks after the move, I said, how is it? And she said, it’s a pit of despair.
It broke my heart. I knew I’d have to go there. And that was scary.
When I went there, she was right. That place is like, just when I think about it my stomach drops. I feel sick. I’ve done a lot of time, and jail doesn’t usually scare me, but that place scares me. It’s very — I’m not sure what the drastic difference is between that and the other places, the other jails are, but for some reason, CRCF is really just — oh man, it’s really kind of a house of horrors. For a lot of reasons, I think.
When I first went there, I was appalled at the condition. I was appalled at the plumbing, the way everything’s falling apart, the lack of access to medical care, the food, it just seemed like everything was the bottom of the barrel. It was the worst, the worst of everything. And every time that I thought I’d seen, like, God, it can’t get any worse than this, then I would go to the next thing, and it would be just as bad and I’m like, what is going on in this place? That it’s this bad?
What’s a typical day like in there? What would you do on a given day?
Sorrell: In other facilities, it isn’t like this, but in CRCF, it’s very limited. You will get up in the morning and you will go to breakfast with your unit. And you’re not allowed to socialize with any other units. If you see anybody outside of your unit while you’re in the hallway, you can talk to them, and you will go to breakfast, you will have about 20 minutes to eat your breakfast and then as a group, you will all go back to your unit, where you will then be locked in the unit with anywhere from 15 to 30 people depending on the size of your unit.
There’s a lot of fighting. There’s no fresh air. You can’t open a window. If you try to complain that it’s too hot or too cold, the officers are like, “too bad.”
The bathroom facilities are not enough for everybody. I think there’s, in house two, there’s one bathroom with two toilets and another bathroom with three for 35 people. And then there’s four showers where you can only shower, only two of them more. So you’re talking like 30 something people are sharing two showers. It gets to be really crazy.
You’re basically living on top of each other, up to four women in an 8 by 10 cell, and it breeds a lot of, like I said, a lot of fighting, a lot of bickering and arguing and unnecessary drama. Because there’s no outlet. There’s no ability to get off the unit, go mingle with other people, go to a class, go learn a skill, go outside. She was right. It’s like a pit of despair. People get really, really depressed, people get, some people get really agitated, and have to be heavily medicated to even be able to stay there. People kind of go crazy.
Earlier this year, we learned about a new wave of complaints about the conditions at CRCF. We found that in the 14 months after January 2018, inmates filed over 1,400 grievances, or formal complaints. We’ve tried to get copies of those records, but the Department of Corrections has withheld them, saying they include confidential information.
In the meantime, lawmakers are aware that the facility is in bad shape. But they’re finding that there aren’t easy answers on what to do about it.
Rep. Alice Emmons (Chair, House Institutions and Corrections Committee): So we’ve been looking at replacing the women’s facility for a number of years, knowing that the Chittenden County facility in South Burlington is not adequate for males or females. So now we’re at the point where we need to replace the facility, whether people like it or not.
Kit Norton: So the capital bill in general has a lot of different state building, state agency, funding pieces to it. And within this, it has about $250,000, which is going to go towards planning for construction of a new facility, a new women’s prison facility.
Our reporter Kit Norton has been following the capital bill in the House Institutions Committee.
Norton: And folks who say this is necessary are saying, well, the one and only women’s prison that is in the state is really in tough shape, and needs to be upgraded, needs to be updated desperately.
Alice Emmons: So right now, starting to replace the Chittenden County facility — before we even open a door for allowing anybody in, we’re seven years out right now. It doesn’t get built in a year. We have got to start the wheels rolling.
Norton: And so this is what this money was put forward for, in order to plan for a new construction site, etc. However, what the ACLU has said, and other advocates, including the Attorney General and others, was: listen, we first should be putting money towards a study of what they call incarceration alternatives, which is basically rehabilitation programs, ways of making sure that some of these women are able to heal from some of the traumas that they’ve experienced during their life that may have caused them to end up incarcerated, and are really attempts at cutting down the prison population in Vermont in general.
James Duff Lyall: The ACLU, our supporters and allies have expressed concerns that this legislation would commit a quarter million dollars towards evaluating new prison construction before fully evaluating the other available options, including step down facilities, treatment and counseling. In short, planning for new prison construction or evaluating prison construction before fully examining or implementing those policy reforms still on the table, policies that will determine the scope and need for new prisons, in our view, puts the cart before the horse.
Norton: And so this is really the main debate. You have these folks saying, listen, this prison’s in really bad shape, we would be doing a disservice to the people who are already incarcerated if we did not put this money towards studying a new facility. And then you have folks on the other side saying, OK, that may be true. However, we really desperately need money to go towards a study that will look at ways of cutting down in the prison population in Vermont.
That seems like a tough spot, because it seems like both of those things can be true at the same time: that they would love to see money go towards fixing up this facility that’s falling apart or building a replacement, and also reducing the number of people incarcerated. Those two things theoretically could happen at the same time, if they had the money to fund it?
Norton: Exactly. You know, it always comes down to how much money you have and how much money you’re willing to allocate. And this is where I think it is a really difficult debate, because you have folks going well, this is the priority right now. We have X amount of money that we can spend on this right now. What’s the priority?
It’s such an emotional debate as well, which is really illustrated in that whole discussion that was in the committee about how on both sides — with the ACLU, and then also with lawmakers — how personally they take one, prison issues, and then also attacks or perceived attacks on what either advocates are doing or lawmakers are doing.
Emmons: I’m sorry, but I take this kind of personally, because we’ve worked really hard in this committee to decrease our prison population. And some of the folks who are sitting around here have seen this. If it wasn’t for this committee for the past 10 years pushing to get people out of correctional facilities and into a better environment, you’d have 1,000 more people incarcerated than you do now. So help us.
Lyall: Yes. I mean, again, I acknowledge and thank you and appreciate all the work that has gone into this project. And again, no offense intended. And there’s still more work to be done, as I think everybody recognizes.
Norton: James Lyall says this, in terms of: we have the same goal, it’s just, we may disagree on how to get there.
How did the committee members respond to that sentiment? I mean, do they agree that they’re working towards the same goal?
Norton: Well, you know, it changed throughout that hour. In the beginning, it was very much, talking to the ACLU: your tactics are not what we would strive for. But then towards the end and after Lyall spoke, and then also after each committee member really had their say and kind of aired their frustration, the committee chair, Alice Emmons, who’s a Democrat from Springfield, said, I do believe we have similar goals here and that we can work together. And really the importance of working together on this and not working separately.
Emmons: When we keep getting flack back and forth, we stop making progress. And we’ve got to start making progress before something drastic happens to one of our facilities.
Norton: And since then, James has been in the Statehouse, and he’s been speaking with Alice, outside of committee, as well as in committee. He’s testified again, I believe twice again this week. So you know, already since that happened on Friday last week, dialogue seems to be going forward, and it seems to be productive.
Vermont isn’t the only state dealing with this kind of debate. Researchers say overcrowding in correctional facilities is raising similar questions around the country, but especially when it comes to female populations.
Liz Swavola: In 2016, some of our researchers compiled all of the data that the federal government has received from jails across the country. And when they were compiling all of this data in one place and looking at it in the aggregate, the rate for women really jumped off the page.
This is Liz Swavola, a researcher at the Vera Institute of Justice who’s studied the gender gap in correctional facilities.
Swavola: The growth of women in jails has been incredibly dramatic since the 1970s. The number of women in jails has increased 14-fold compared to fivefold for men. And so we were really struck by just how dramatically that growth had been happening. Women in jails, and in prison as well, have become the fastest growing segment of the incarcerated population.
And what are some of the factors that lead to that? I mean, why is that happening?
Swavola: So we wrote a report in 2016 called ‘Overlooked: Women in jails in an era of reform.’ And we set out to answer that question of why. Why this dramatic growth in the number of women in jails. And what we found is that there’s been very little research and very little data collected.
What we do know is that law enforcement has increasingly come to focus on lower level offenses. What is defined as a crime has really expanded in our legislation over time. And so as that has happened, women who tend to come into the system on lower level charges, things like drug offenses, property, disorderly conduct and other public order crimes, they have been swept into the system, and then when they get there, a lot of the processes and protocols are not designed for them, because they do make up a smaller portion of the incarcerated population. They’re encountering a system designed for men. And that disadvantages them in many ways. Even things that may seem gender neutral, like assigning cash bail in order for a woman to be released, can disadvantage her, because women tend to be financially more marginalized than men coming into the system. And then things like pretrial supervision and probation, again, are not designed with women’s particular needs in mind.
I’m curious, once you’ve isolated those trends, what then are the consequences? When you’re looking at that nationally, what are the consequences both for the women who are in that system and for their communities?
Swavola: Women are coming into the system with a lot of needs. They have experienced significant trauma, almost universally, women in jails and prisons have experienced sexual violence, domestic violence, childhood abuse. And so their needs are pretty great. They have higher rates of serious mental illness than men. And they have very high rates of substance use. And so when they’re coming into the system, they already have needs and then incarceration is incredibly destabilizing and often fails to meet those needs, and exacerbates the disadvantages that women are bringing with them into the system.
They’re also largely mothers. So women in jails, about 79% of them are mothers, and often they’re single mothers, and it’s about 60% of women in prison. When they are incarcerated, because they are often the primary caregiver of their children, custody needs to be figured out and it either falls to a family member or to to foster care. That separation can be equally devastating, and after a time of incarceration, may prevent women from reuniting with their their children altogether.
Amanda said this was a major factor that kept her in the system.
Sorrell: We do have a different connection to our children than men do. And most women, myself included, once we are separated from our children, that creates a wound in and of itself, a trauma in and of itself. And then, I’ll speak for myself, I continued to self-medicate, to use drugs, simply because I couldn’t be with my children.
If they had found a way for me to repay the system, so to speak, for my crime, while allowing me to continue to be with my children and be in their life, even if it’s on a supervised situation, I don’t think I would have gone down that — I know I wouldn’t have gone down the path I went down. I continued to dive headfirst into drugs, because I couldn’t be with my kids. And that’s the case with a lot of women. It just, it destroys us. It breaks us. It does.
The system sort of convinces — especially women — that we’re defective, that we have some sort of moral deficiency, that we’re terrible mothers, daughters, wives. You adopt that as your identity. It becomes really suffocating. And you start to feel like, maybe I am that person. Maybe I’m not worth anything better than that. And it takes other people outside — that’s what I found anyway — takes other people outside of myself, to show me that I’m worth more than that. That I deserve better than that.
I asked Liz how she thinks policymakers should go about changing that system when they’re also dealing with aging facilities.
Swavola: A lot of the facilities were built in the ’70s and the ’80s. And you know, in 1970, 73% of counties reported having zero women in their jails, and now with this dramatic, dramatic growth, many jails are reaching crisis point because they just don’t have the space for women. And so they’re considering: do they send women to other jurisdictions? Do they use a different facility, sometimes it’s a juvenile facility, for women? Or do they build more beds?
I think the very first step in the process has to be understanding the population, how it has changed over time, what the growth has been like, what’s been driving that growth. Understanding what charges are bringing women into the system. How long are they staying? Are there ways to move their their cases more efficiently and more effectively?
One caution that I often offer to jurisdictions, when considering new jail construction, or new facility construction, is that often the the tendency is to build bigger and to create more space because our jails and our prisons are overcrowded. And so the first instinct is to build, and then it’s to build bigger. And I do acknowledge that many of our facilities are in really deplorable conditions. So we need to also be thinking about how to improve conditions. But when you are focused only on construction, what often happens is you build a new facility and it’s almost immediately over capacity, because you haven’t addressed the underlying systemic changes that need to take place. There’s always room for reform. And there are most likely people in your facility who absolutely do not need to be there and could be safely managed in the community. So we can’t build our way out of the the mass incarceration crisis.
Kit, what is the outlook for this section of the capital bill right now?
Norton: It really looks like it’s set. But that being said, the ACLU has been discussing ways of really looking at this and bringing up ideas about studying the best way to look into cutting the prison population. So even though this funding looks very much set in stone, it’s again been very proactive in this House committee at looking at possible ways of moving forward on this plan of cutting down the prison population and looking at programs also for in the prison as well, that they can incorporate into their prison design within this funding as well.
Gotcha. But we’ll know, with the session ending probably about a week from now, we’ll know pretty soon exactly where that lands.
Norton: Yes.
But there could be more conversation about this, and probably will be more conversation about this, in the future.
Norton: I think based on what’s happened this session, if that did not happen, I would be shocked.
Thanks, Kit.
Norton: Thanks, Mike.
