Bill Schubart: A new ‘women’s prison’ … or reentry domicile

One of the benefits of age is the realization that there are few absolutes and that being “right” is often relative.

When I was young, I was convinced I knew the “right way.” Truths were absolute: the Vietnam War was wrong. Nixon was a crook. Capitalism was bad.

In my dotage, I’ve come to understand that one must pursue elusive truths with curiosity, discussion and an open mind, and that the truths we seek often reside in a messy middle somewhere between absolutes. In ethics, there are absolute rights and wrongs but, as we’ve come to understand, there are also mitigating circumstances like childhood trauma. I miss the comfort of absolutes

As I’ve written in the past, I‘m not a fan of incarceration . But neither do I understand it as a yes/no issue. We have largely failed at our upstream social and economic gestures as a state and country to help people, families and communities stay well, and to prevent or mitigate the adverse childhood experiences that cause trauma and often lead to aberrant behavior. Sadly, rather than focus our investments upstream into education and prevention, we’ve chosen to criminalize the downstream results of our failures: substance use disorder, mental illness and poverty.

Now more than ever, we need a fair criminal justice system starting at the policing and prosecutorial levels and followed by the judiciary, an area where we’re failing badly .

The choice cannot simply be about whether or not we abolish prisons; it’s between a broken status quo or taking a major step forward in how we treat justice-involved individuals.

Here in Vermont, the Department of Corrections is planning to build a new women’s’ facility that focuses on personal and family support, networking and successful reentry into one’s family, community and the economy. If we don’t build this, then we continue as is and nothing will change.

The plan was recently presented to the Essex Town Planning Commission , where it was largely met with animated opposition. Some present acknowledged the need for and the wisdom of building a modern facility focused on reentry, but most Essex residents opposed the choice of their town for such a site.

The DOC took great pains to show community members graphically what they were planning and how critical it will be to taking the steps that most Vermonters support — building a new and more humane correctional system, focused on reentry and eliminating recidivism. But opposition prevailed.

I recently met a friend for lunch in Burlington. We saw people injecting drugs in public, something I’d never seen when I was younger. My lunch partner expressed horror and asked why these people weren’t rounded up and imprisoned. My silence evoked the question, “Don’t you agree?”

I risked our friendship by saying, “No,” and that “we need to be reminded everyday of our failures as a society and, hopefully, these tragic reminders might galvanize us into taking action.” That part of the discussion ended there and we had a nice lunch.

On the morning of August 12, the FreeHer campaign, which works “to decarcerate, decriminalize, and close the women’s prisons” in the six New England states, held a pot-banging demonstration in front of the office of local architects Freeman French Freeman who helped the DOC realize a conceptual rendering of a possible design for the new women’s facility based on principles established by the DOC and borrowed from Scandinavian and Maine’s reentry facilities.

My gut reaction was to grab a pot and spoon and go, but I then thought more about what the DOC is planning, the misery it’s replacing, and decided to learn more before I went. Also, I knew that there is no contract with them or anyone else for a final architectural design.

There’s a lot of good news. As one generally opposed to incarceration as we know it, I was pleased to learn more about the planned facility which builds on the remarkable successes of the Scandinavian systems and our neighboring system in Maine.

Some facts:

As of this writing, according to population data from the DOC , which can shift from day to day, 104 women in state custody constitute about 7.5% of the total corrections population. Twelve women are currently being held past their minimum for a furlough violation.

Thanks to our broken court system , many women under the care of Corrections are “detainees,” meaning they’ve been charged with a crime and the judge has remanded them to prison rather than granting bail. So, they’re in prison, even as they are, in principle, presumed innocent until found guilty in a courtroom. Forty-one men and women under Corrections care are currently detainees awaiting trial.

Only 30 women at Vermont’s current women’s prison, Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility, have been sentenced on felony/serious charges such as aggravated assault, aggravated sexual assault and murder. These are women from whom Vermonters should expect protection.

My opposition to prisons as I’ve known them is undiminished, but my understanding that people who have violated the legal boundaries of society, for whatever reason, may need a transitional support facility to help them heal, reconcile with victims and prepare them for reentry has only grown over the years. If you want to call it “punishment,” be my guest. I’ve come to understand it differently.

I am left with these questions: is this facility the best way to spend $70M, especially with all the empty dorm spaces in Vermont?

Do we need 128-bed capacity in the secure facility, given the DOC’s success at reducing incarceration for technical violations and the hope that the court system will recover and significantly reduce the number of women detained pending trial? And I would like to believe that some of the 128 beds planned for the secure facility could be shifted to the reentry facility’s 30-bed capacity.

And, of course, what might that money accomplish if invested upstream in trauma diagnoses and counseling, in mental health and substance use disorder treatment clinics, public housing and nutrition, and job-training.

Employers complain constantly that they can’t find workers to hire at any price. Twincraft and Rhino Foods have both been pioneers at working with formerly incarcerated people to give them a helping hand back into the community and, just as important, the economy.

We need to invest upstream and yes, downstream to help women (and men) return to society safely.

We can all do better.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Bill Schubart: A new ‘women’s prison’ … or reentry domicile .