Updated at 10:44 a.m. Monday to include a statement from the GEO Group.
The Vermont Department of Corrections is poised to abandon its controversial relationship with Corrections Corporation of America, which currently houses about 340 Vermont inmates in a Kentucky prison, in favor of an agreement with a different company, sources tell Seven Days.
The DOC is finalizing a new contract with The GEO Group, which would house Vermont’s overflow inmates in a prison it owns in Baldwin, Mich., sources say.
Citing ongoing negotiations, DOC Commissioner Andy Pallito declined to discuss whether he had selected CCA or The GEO Group, the two announced finalists for the inmate contract. CCA has been Vermont’s provider since 2005. Their most recent two-year contract, worth $34 million, expires in July.
“I am waiting for the contract to clear a few internal reviews and then will do an official announcement,” Pallito, who has the final authority over the contract, told Seven Days.
The Michigan prison is slightly closer to most of Vermont than CCA’s Lee Adjustment Center, in Beattyville, Ky., where most of the company’s Vermont inmates are currently held. While the DOC has been criticized for relying on CCA, industry experts say there is little difference between the two for-profit companies, which both house prisoners in dozens of facilities across the country.
Vermont inmates housed in Kentucky and a much smaller group held in Arizona would be transported to Michigan this summer, sources say.
GEO representatives told shareholders during a recent conference call that the company was finalizing a contract with Vermont, according to Grassroots Leadership, a national watchdog that opposes the private prison industry. “We are very concerned that the people who are currently housed out-of-state in Kentucky will be transferred to Baldwin,” Kymberlie Quong Charles, Grassroots Leadership’s criminal justice programs director, said in an interview.
Pallito initially said he would make an announcement in late March, and later told Seven Days it was pushed back to mid-April.
In late April, GEO announced it was “mobilizing,” the 1,740-bed North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin, Mich., which has been shuttered for several years. GEO said it was preparing to open the facility by July. “GEO does not currently have a contract to house inmates at the facility, but GEO believes that it may secure one or more contracts in the near future and expects it may need to activate the facility in the next 60 to 90 days,” the company announced.
GEO, a Florida-based corporation, recently posted several job ads for prison work in Baldwin, which lies in an economically depressed area four hours northwest of Detroit. The company has also asked the Michigan legislature for permission to house maximum-security inmates inside North Lake. Current law allows them only to house lower-risk inmates at the prison.
Such a move would be necessary to house Vermont’s out-of-state prison population. In addition to the inmates in Kentucky, about two dozen high-risk Vermont inmates — many of whom caused disturbances in Lee Adjustment Center — are housed at a CCA facility in Florence, Ariz.
“The states that we’re talking to have asked for more flexibility,” GEO Group consultant Cloid Shuler said, according to the MLive Media Group.
Though Vermont’s crime rate has fallen in the past two decades, its prison population has exploded, thanks to tougher laws and sentencing practices, particularly for drug offenses.
Vermont had roughly 1,000 inmates — about half its current prison population — in 1995. The population climbed steadily until 2004 and has remained fairly steady ever since. Meanwhile, crimes committed in the state dropped by more than 30 percent in the same period, according to federal statistics.
DOC has only 1,600 prison beds in Vermont, forcing it to rely on out-of-state providers. Most inmates sentenced to more than a year in prison are sent out of state.
As of March, DOC had 1,900 inmates, including around 350 housed out of state. The DOC, however, says it is making progress in reducing the inmate population: The out-of-state population hovered around 500 for much of 2014.
The GEO Group is CCA’s primary domestic rival in the private prison industry. And watchdog groups say little distinguishes the two companies.
Critics say private prisons, motivated by profit, often cut back on security and health expenses, leading to violence and substandard care. Lee Adjustment Center experienced a series of violent assaults in December 2013. At CCA’s Arizona facility, 13 Vermont inmates were placed in solitary confinement for weeks after a riot broke out last year. Guards quelled the riot using a chemical agent.
Detractors further say sending inmates out of state makes it difficult for them to remain in contact with loved ones, whose help they will need once released. The grassroots group Vermonters for Criminal Justice reform last year launched a campaign to persuade lawmakers to end the out-of-state program by reducing the state’s inmate population.
A shift from CCA to GEO would do nothing to allay those concerns.
“It’s more of the same. It’s basically a clone of CCA,” said Alex Friedmann, managing editor of Prison Legal News. “They have all the same problems, the same profit motive, the same business model of cutting costs. The only thing that’s going to change is the name and location.”
GEO declined to discuss the contract with Vermont, but touted their deep experience in partnering with governments.
“The GEO Group has established long-standing public-private partnerships with correctional agencies throughout the United States for approximately three decades,” GEO vice president for corporate relations Pablo Paez said. “GEO provides high-quality correctional management services in safe and secure facilities which operate under direct oversight from our government partners and pursuant to strict contractual requirements and industry-leading standards including those set by the American Correctional Association.”
GEO owns or manages 106 facilities worldwide, with roughly 73,000 beds in the United States and another 12,000 beds in Australia, South Africa and the United Kingdom. It reported $424 million in revenue in the most recent fiscal quarter, and its stock currently trades around $37.02 a share.
The Detroit Free Press reported that allowing GEO to reopen North Lake and house high-risk inmates would bring 150 jobs to the region. North Lake is a relatively new facility. It opened as a youth prison in 1998 but was closed in 2005. GEO Group briefly housed California inmates at the facility, the Detroit Free Press reported, but it closed in 2010 and has been dormant.
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It is time that Vermont got serious about reducing the prison population. The idea that sending offenders 1,000 miles away from their families and support people will help them in any way is draconian and the “leadership” of Vermont needs to climb down from their ivory towers and treat prisoners as human beings instead of cattle to be abused, shuffled around and discounted.
I would question whether the practice of sending prisoners outside the State’s Borders meets either State Constitution parameters or the actual sentence. Does the Sentence include language that a prisoner be turned over, chained, to some out-of-State Corporation? How does the DOC conclude that it has the authority to extend the State’s authority outside the State’s Borders? The authority of the State, including that of the police, the judges, the prosecutor, extends only to the land within the State’s borders. Once outside those borders, the prisoner is no longer under State control. In effect, the prisoner is now a chained slave of private interests – akin to the slave trade of four hundred years ago.
If a prisoner is chained and caged in Michigan or Arizona, by what authority does that Corporation place those chains on him? It cannot be by the authority of Vermont – that authority stops at the Vermont State Line. Perforce it must be by the authority of the State of Michigan. But, the State of Michigan has not made a representation, much less arrested or held a trial or issued a sentence, that the chained man in their midst being chained by some Corporation has committed some offense inside Michigan. The only logical conclusion that anyone can reach is that the corporation has committed an impressment into slavery. That should make for an interesting lawsuit – and if I were the DA in that Michigan town, I would arrest the enslavers on charges of slavery. My,my.
Out of the frying pan, and into the fire.
The rubes from Baldwin have zero experience in handling difficult prisoners, will get the same absence of useful oversight that CCA has enjoyed in Kentucky from the VT DOC. You can expect the same sort of results as the Arizona prisoners sent to GEO Group in nearby New Castle, Indiana, and who rioted weeks afterward.
I wouldn’t bet against the possibility of the millionaire GEO executives having paid someone in the VT DOC for the business, or given someone a promise of a quid pro quo, like a post-retirement mahogany desk in Boca Raton, Florida.
someone is paying someone to do such horrible stuff to our inmates, shame on you vermont lets vote these guys out of office,, who let this happen,,, take love ones away from their family,, and friends when they are needed the most,,,
Vermonters clearly endorse this practice because they refuse to support real, meaningful sentencing reform. Every time a particular crime catches the news cycle the public outcry to lock them up for life starts all over again. Those feelings have consequences, namely that legislators, state’s attorneys, and judges now endorse the idea that non-violent offenders should go to jail for every increasing sentences. That practice needs to stop but it simply will not.
Maybe a good solution would be to just send the non-resident Vermont inmates out of state to the far away prisons. Keep the Vermonters in Vermont and the gangsters out… just saying why introduce our incarcerated population to the “advanced” gang and drug culture so they can learn more about it and bring it back to our state.