Advocates for Vermont inmates housed in private out-of-state prisons told lawmakers today that they have little access to the facilities and limited ability to respond to inmates’ concerns and conduct investigations.
Defender General Matt Valerio and Prisoners’ Rights Office supervising attorney Seth Lipschutz said that they rarely visit prisons in Kentucky and Arizona that are owned by Corrections Corporation of America and house nearly 500 Vermont inmates.
Whereas investigators from the Defender General’s Office are inside Vermont prisons daily, they visit CCA’s prison in Beattyville, Ky., where most of CCA’s Vermont inmates are held, two or three times a year, usually in response to assaults or other critical incidents.
“They’re constantly visiting [Vermont] facilities, talking to inmates, talking to the staff, kind of being the watchdog,” Lipschutz said. “We don’t have that in Kentucky. We don’t go down there often and it’s harder to solve problems. That is a legitimate issue that I have tossed and turned in bed over. The place is 1,000 miles away. It’s really hard to keep tabs on it.”
Valerio and Lipschutz were invited to testify at a time when some lawmakers and critics have begun to question Vermont’s relationship with CCA and have begun to push the DOC to lower the inmate population and eliminate the need for the out-of-state program.
The DOC says it is significantly cheaper to house inmates with CCA than in Vermont. Critics of CCA said the company keeps costs down by skimping on security and programs for inmates. In testimony in Vermont earlier this year, CCA officials told lawmakers that their guards in Kentucky make $8.35 an hour, less than Vermont’s minimum wage.
“I want to know that between the DOC and the Prisoners’ Rights Office … given the reality that we’re sending Vermonters a thousand miles away, that we have enough eyes on the ground to know the staffing … is sufficient and adequate for the safety of Vermonters shipped out of state,” Rep. Bill Lippert (D-Hinesburg) said during a meeting of the Joint Corrections Oversight Committee.
“I don’t think that we do,” Valerio told him. “There’s no chance that we do. There’s no way we can do that. We deal with complaints that come to us. We do not have the resources, the people, the time to monitor whether CCA is being compliant with its staffing requirements or anything like that. To me, that’s DOC’s responsibility.”
Vermont is in the second and final year of a $34 million contract with CCA to house Vermont prisoners. DOC recently solicited bids for a new contract, which would take effect in July.
In an interview after the hearing, DOC Commissioner Andy Pallito said that two private companies have submitted bids. Both would house inmates out of state. Pallito declined to say whether CCA was one of the bidders.
Both Valerio and Lipschutz said that they did not believe that assaults and other critical incidents are more frequent in CCA prisons than inside Vermont’s prisons.
But they said that because of limited staffing, CCA prisons don’t offer much treatment or other programs to keep inmates occupied and prepare them for their eventual release.
“So they have a lot of time on their hands,” Valerio said. “It’s a financial situation. You don’t buy a $19,000 car and expect it to do the things a $50,000 car can do. It’s the same thing with CCA. It will get you where you want to go, but you’re not looking at a lot of treatment or programing.”
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
This excellent article still misses some crucial points.
I visited the Lee Adjustment Center prison in Beattyville, KY, not long after the September 2004 riot. It caused an enormous amount of damage to the community. Low paid CCA guards ran for their lives and left the riot to be quelled by the state of Kentucky DOC SORT team, state and local police and deputies, EMTs, firefighters, etc. Inmates rolled up poorly constructed fences like Venetian blinds and used yard gates and the timbers from a guard tower they’d torn down as battering rams. It was a miracle no one escaped that time though many had previously..
Prisoners had been treated so badly, they “voted with their matches,” their only alternative to the failure to curtail abuses within the prison by both Vermont and the state of Kentucky. The Commissioner of Corrections in Kentucky, appointed by the notoriously corrupt and later indicted governor, had come directly from a CCA Vice Presidency. He only fined CCA $10,000 for the expenses borne by the Kentucky taxpayers.
To get some better understanding of the context, CCA operated a state prison in Idaho for over a decade. They deflected any interest in true ovoersight by giving the governor $20,000 in campaign contributions.
One reporter from the Boise AP was able to establish that the guards were in collusion with white supremacist gang members in smuggling, and that they allowed the neo-Nazis to be their “enforcers,” savagely beating any inmates who informed on them to authorities, or who even refused or were unable to pay “rent” for cells.
She aired a video showing the horrific beating of a Muslim prisoner, in for attempting a robbery with a fake gun, in which a skinhead beat him so badly, within a dozen feet of three CCA staffers, that his assailant had to sit down midway through the beating to catch his breath and to take a drink of water. The prisoner was effectively lobotomized
She pressured the state to reveal its books for inspection and it was found that tens of thousands of hours supposedly spent by employees on the lightly staffed night shift during a single year were completely fabricated. CCA had claimed their guards were doing 32 and 48-hour shifts.
This was going on, not 16 hours and 1,000 miles away (the distance from Montpelier to Beattyville), but right under their noses in Kuna, 18 miles from the state capitol in Boise.
CCA was finally thrown out of the state, but fined a token amount and the governor and his cronies waived most of that.
If Vermont thinks it is getting what it is paying for in Kentucky, it’s dreaming. CCA guards have sodomized its inmates and brutalized them, with little repercussions from the company. As you can imagine, though, the fate of these male prisoners were far better than what was experienced by Hawai’ian women in its Otter Creek, Kentucky, prisons, where CCA maintained a “rape room,” and even the chaplain joined in the sexual abuse.
Eight years ago, CCA guards there were being paid $7.65 hourly while the CCA CEO was making almost $2 million a month. That $8.35 paid to guards now, when controlling for inflation, is actually much less in real dollars that what those guards were making in 2005.
Vermont needs to lower its prison population, not export inmates to a larcenous and mendacious for-profit corporation, far from family and friends, churches, employers and support systems, and almost certain prescription for recidivism.
No matter how you package it CCA and facility’s like it are taking tax payers money out of Vermont. Put’s an undue hardship on the innocent family members of the inmates, in affect legally victimizing them by not having the access to family that they would if they were in state. Yes I know all the arguments, if they hadn’t done what they did and all but tell that to their children and see how understanding they are. They don’t do anything to rehabilitate the inmates that we put there, I mean isn’t that what the DOC in Vermont is supposed to be about, rehabilitation? The DOC in Vermont with all it’s flaws is far better than CCA and facility’s like it.
Vermont has shipped its out of state prisoners to the long vacant GEO Group facility in Baldwin, Michigan. This prison should never have been built, save for likely corruption of state officials back in the ’90s. It is the mirror image of the CCA prison in Beattyville, Kentucky, where Vermont prisoners rioted to protest the horrific conditions. There’s “not a dime’s worth of difference” between the two.