Exporting Incarcerated Vermonters: The Quiet Return of a Failed Strategy

This week, Vermont loaded two more busloads of incarcerated Vermonters onto a for-profit prison pipeline and sent them 1,400 miles away to Mississippi. Their destination is a CoreCivic-run facility infamous for prioritizing profit over people. We contract with CoreCivic to house incarcerated Vermonters (currently only men) to alleviate the crowded conditions of our own facilities. Since I arrived at the legislature in 2023 we have consistently housed approximately 120 of our incarcerated population at this for-profit facility. As of this writing that number has increased to 153. I predict it will increase even further. The reasons offered are familiar: staffing shortages, rising prison population, lack of space. But l want to state it clearly.  What we’re witnessing in real time must not be reframed as merely a logistical response to a crisis. It’s the predictable result of decisions already made.

Governor Phil Scott appointed Jon Murad, the disgraced former Burlington police chief then rejected by South Burlington, as interim Commissioner of Corrections. That choice alone signals a chilling shift. With administrative departures across the Department of Corrections, especially from the mental health, education, and programming areas, the balance is tipping fast from rehabilitation to punishment. We’re reverting to the very conditions that created our over-incarceration crisis in the first place.

We’re not just shipping bodies. We’re dismantling progress. Among those being sent out of state are Open Ears coaches, peer mentors who provide critical support to their fellow incarcerated Vermonters. These are men trained in hospice care, mental health assistance, and dementia recognition. They are also leaders enrolled in Community College programs and contributors to reform initiatives like the Prison Research and Innovation Network. This is who we’re removing. These are our changemakers from within, our stabilizers, our hope. And many of these were being housed in honors housing. Creating vacancies in these areas of our facilities will not necessarily add space for the general population.

Is this what “healing” looks like?

As reported by Vermont Public, Jaye Johnson, General Counsel to the Governor, recently told lawmakers, ““Very often, the response is restorative justice rather than incarceration … We need to start to think a little bit about incarceration as a place where people have the opportunity to heal.” I challenge her, and the Governor, to explain how relocation to a distant for-profit facility with little to no rehabilitative infrastructure reflects anything remotely resembling healing.

And we simply must connect this crisis to recent decisions made to not approve zoning changes that would have allowed the construction of a new facility for women on land already owned by the state. If Vermont refuses to build new correctional facilities rooted in humane, rehabilitative design … if we continue to stall and delay out of political fear … we are actively creating the conditions that justify these out-of-state transfers. We are ceding our moral obligation to people whose liberty we’ve already taken. The result is predictable. The for-profit prison industry steps in more than willing to intervene on our unwillingness to invest in our own people.

Let me clearly state where this is headed. We’re already seeing a convergence of three predictable paths:

1. We leave women incarcerated in a failing, crumbling facility deemed unfit for human habitation,

2. We start shipping women out of state to private prisons, just as we’re doing with men, or

3. We displace even more men to create space for women, doubling down on a zero-sum approach to human dignity.

This is not inevitable. It is the outcome of deliberate choices. Choices that disguise regression as pragmatism. Choices that reward political expediency over long-term solutions.

I will repeat what I’ve stated numerous times. The tide is shifting at the Statehouse. More and more, a “lock them up” posture is being treated as reasonable. And if we fail to offer a credible, Vermont-based alternative, one built on dignity, rehabilitation, and public investment, we will be left with only the worst options.

Shipping our most engaged, most rehabilitative Vermonters out of state should not be a consideration for policy. It’s surrender.