Gov. Phil Scott met with local officials in Burlington last month to discuss persistent crime and disorder in Vermont’s largest city. Soon after, he unveiled a plan that he said would help the Queen City “turn the corner.” The plan laid out 14 action points, including ones that call for increased enforcement and prosecution of quality-of-life crimes.
The proposal was applauded by residents and business owners who have grown increasingly frustrated by the perception that repeat offenders go unpunished in Vermont. But locking those people up, in some cases before they’ve even been convicted, will run into a hard reality: The state’s prisons are already full.
Vermont’s prison population hit 1,648 this month, the highest it has been since 2019, before the numbers plummeted during the pandemic. The strain recently forced corrections officials to send two busloads of men to a privately run facility in Mississippi to make room for new detainees. And the transfers might not be the last.
State leaders say busier prisons are an unfortunate but inevitable side effect of the promised crackdown. But the newly crowded conditions may exacerbate long-standing problems for the Department of Corrections, including prison staffing, the need to replace an outdated women’s prison and the desire of some lawmakers to end the practice of shipping Vermont inmates out of state.
Vermont’s prison population has reached its highest point in more than five years, and the correctional system is feeling the strain.
The recent pendulum swing from a more rehabilitative approach to a punitive one has triggered criticism from civil liberties advocates.
“We need to think about how we can be more effective at supporting folks in the community and diverting people away from the criminal legal system, as opposed to sending more people in,” said Falko Schilling, advocacy director of the ACLU of Vermont.
Vermont’s prison population — which includes federal and state inmates housed at six in-state facilities, plus those in Mississippi — peaked at around 2,200 in the mid-1990s, when about 700 people were being held out of state.
The prison population fell steadily in the 2000s and 2010s, thanks in part to efforts to divert more criminal cases away from the court system. The pandemic further reduced the ranks by disrupting court operations and prompting the release of many inmates to prevent the spread of COVID-19 inside prisons. By 2021, the number of inmates was down to 1,100, including slightly more than 100 out of state — the smallest overall prison population in decades.
But the population ticked up after the pandemic waned and then this year jumped by 250.
Some of the increase has been attributed to more federal detainees, including those scooped up by immigration authorities. But the bigger driver has been pretrial detainees: people who have been accused of a crime but not yet convicted.
About 550 people in Vermont prisons were awaiting trial this week, double the count in 2019. Most are accused of violent crimes, but about one in three are nonviolent offenders.
Several factors are likely contributing to this trend. Judicial vacancies have been filled, meaning more cases are getting heard. And lawmakers recently gave judges more discretion on how and when they can order someone to be held in pretrial custody. A bill passed last year, for instance, removed the $200 cap on bail for certain minor crimes if the offense was committed while someone was on pretrial release. Accused offenders, unable to post the higher bail, are then jailed instead.
Prosecutors and judges have been under increasing public pressure to hold these accused offenders accountable by locking them up. That pressure has come directly from elected officials, including Scott.
“When those who victimize others are put back on the streets hours after being apprehended, only to reoffend again and again, Vermonters question law enforcement, prosecutors, our courts, and they question the wisdom of the work done here in this building,” Scott said during his 2024 State of the State address.
As part of his recently unveiled plan to help Burlington, the governor created a new court docket focused on repeat offenders with five or more pending cases. Coined “accountability court,” the docket will operate for up to four months, after which it may be expanded to other parts of the state.
“We need to start to think a little bit about incarceration as a place where people have the opportunity to heal.”
Jaye Johnson
The docket is designed to bring swifter resolutions to cases that may otherwise languish for years. While that often will mean connecting offenders to treatment, it may also mean sending them to prison, Jaye Johnson, general counsel for the governor’s office, said during a legislative hearing last month.
“We need to start to think a little bit about incarceration as a place where people have the opportunity to heal,” Johnson told lawmakers.
Whether the accountability docket will result in more frequent pretrial detention is not yet clear. It’s currently focused on about 120 people and has been moving through cases much more quickly than the rest of the court system, which is still digging out from a pandemic-induced backlog.
More frequent hearings might actually help keep some people out of prison, according to Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George, because it makes it easier for them to remember when to show up.
Many defendants “don’t have housing, don’t have phones, or alarms, or calendars, and are struggling every day to meet their basic needs,” George wrote in an email. Scheduling hearings months out sets people up to miss court and land in prison, something that costs “taxpayers an enormous amount of money.”
The status quo “feels a bit like a self-fulfilling prophecy,” she wrote.
Even a slight jump in the number of people being held before trial could be difficult for Vermont to handle. All six in-state prisons have recently had at least one unit filled beyond capacity.
The situation has been particularly acute at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility, the state’s only women’s prison. Long condemned as outdated and unsanitary, the facility in recent months has held upwards of 180 women despite having only 164 beds. That’s forced some inmates to sleep on plastic “sled beds” on the floor, officials say.
The overcrowding has come as the state contends with a chronic shortage of prison staff that union officials say has created unsafe and unsustainable work conditions. At the state’s largest prison, the Northern State Correctional Facility in Newport, only about 50 of 80 officer positions are filled. That’s forced the Department of Corrections to resort to mandatory overtime shifts, fueling burnout.
Gov. Scott’s accountability campaign has neglected an important piece of the puzzle, according to Steve Howard, head of the state employees’ union: “safe staffing in the actual facilities that keep people off the streets.”
The Department of Corrections says it has increased workers’ pay by 36 percent over the past three years, to the point that Vermont ranks in the top five states in terms of correctional officer compensation. But Howard said it’s not enough when vacancy and turnover rates remain stubbornly high.
“Our members believe that we are teetering on the edge of a major incident,” Howard said. “And then the governor is going to be dealing with trying to get control over a correctional facility. He’s ignoring it at his own peril.”
The Department of Corrections has no say over who gets sent to prison, and so the only way it can alleviate pressure on its facilities is to move people out of state. Vermont has a contract with CoreCivic, a private company, to provide up to 300 beds at its prison in Tutwiler, Miss. After this month’s transfer of 28 inmates from Springfield, the state now has 153 prisoners in Mississippi, the highest out-of-state population in years.
Tim Burgess, who advocates for prisoners as executive director of Vermont CURE, said corrections officials may have a compelling argument for sending people to Mississippi given the current overcrowding. But he is bothered by the choice of prisoners the department sent south.
They included men who had been deeply involved in prison programs aimed at rehabilitation. Some were taking community college classes, and four served as coaches in a peer support program known as “Open Ears.”
“These guys have no opportunity to do anything for programs or to help them reestablish their reentry routine while they’re in Mississippi,” Burgess said.
In a statement, the Department of Corrections said it tries to keep people in state when they are involved in programming. But, the department said, it sometimes has no choice: Only inmates without future court dates are eligible for transfer out of state. That usually means people serving longer sentences who, in turn, are more likely to be taking part in rehabilitation programs.
The department says it may need to make future transfers, too. But that won’t solve the problem at the women’s prison, since the Mississippi facility only accepts male inmates.
Instead, the department is focused on plans to construct a new women’s correctional facility to replace the one in South Burlington. The state received some bad news on that front last month when the Town of Essex denied a zoning change for a site there. The proposal had received pushback from prison abolitionists and local residents opposed to a prison in their backyard.
The verdict discouraged Rep. Alice Emmons (D-Springfield), chair of the House Corrections and Institutions Committee. She dismissed the argument that a new prison will encourage courts to lock more people up.
“They’re already filling up beds we don’t have right now,” she said.
She had even less sympathy for the NIMBY pushback. “The public wants folks to be locked up, but they don’t want to house facilities in their community,” she said. “You can’t have it both ways.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Maxed Out | Vermont’s prisons are full again. A crackdown on repeat offenders raises the question: Where will they go?”
This article appears in Nov 19-25 2025.
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