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| Spike in detainees squeezes corrections budget |
| By timesargus.com |
| Published: 09/12/2011 |
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MONTPELIER — Reducing the number of Vermont prison inmates and lowering the Department of Corrections budget has been one of Gov. Peter Shumlin’s priorities since taking office in January. But in the last two months a spike in the number of “detention status” inmates who are in prison awaiting trial is undermining that effort and has the corrections budget on track to be millions of dollars in the red. “It’s the detainee numbers that are killing corrections right now,” said Susan Bartlett, a special assistant to Shumlin who works on corrections issues. The detainees are defendants who have been arrested and are in prison on bail but haven’t been convicted. In many cases detainees were released on court-imposed conditions of release after their arraignments but violated those conditions, sometimes by failing to appear at hearings. In recent weeks, state officials from all three branches of government have studied the detention inmate population growth. The Corrections Oversight Committee met Aug. 30 and reviewed the problem, though not all members of the committee or officials who were scheduled to testify made it to the hearing because of the flooding from Tropical Storm Irene, said Sen. Dick Sears, chairman of the committee. The committee plans to meet again Sept. 13. Officials agree it’s a vexing problem. “If I had the answer, we wouldn’t have 399 people detained,” Bartlett recently. When lawmakers and the Shumlin administration wrote the budget this year, they set aside money for 300 detainee inmates. The number of detainees fluctuates but has hovered around 400 recently. Just over two weeks ago it reached 406, six prisoners shy of a record set in 2009. Based on the current detainee level, the corrections department is on pace to exceed its $140 million budget by $2.5 million. “We budgeted for 300 detentions, and if there are 400, that’s a tremendous increase for the Budget Adjustment Act coming in January and also doesn’t bode well for the whole budget when we get to next year,” said Sen. Dick Sears, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Corrections Oversight Committee. The recent flood damage means the state will have even less money to spare, Sears noted. The impact on the budget could be worse than $2.5 million, Bartlett said, because taking funds from other areas of the Agency of Human Services to fill that hole would reduce the state’s ability to leverage its money to bring in federal money. At the current trend, Bartlett said, the worst loss the state could face would be $6 million in both federal and state funds. “It would mean significant reductions in the state budget,” Bartlett said, “which is why we’re trying to figure it out and why getting the detainee population under control is really important.” But it isn’t easy. Lawmakers and the Shumlin administration set policy and budget goals, but judges are the final gatekeepers who decide whether to impose bail or hold a defendant without bail, so the administration and the corrections department have a limited ability to address the detainee level. Amy Davenport, Vermont’s administrative judge, has been trying to see if Vermont judges have been too quick to impose bail that many defendants can’t pay, resulting in imprisonment. That doesn’t appear to be the case, she said. Many minor charges About 100 of the detainees are held on $10,000 bail or less, she said recently, a sign their charges are relatively minor. Davenport delved into the details of about 35 of those cases, she said. “I didn’t find any blatantly low-level offenses where you ask, ‘Why is this person in jail?’” said Davenport. Some of the cases appear to be minor, like property crimes or drug crimes, and the defendants are jailed on small amounts of bail, said Davenport. But in every seemingly low-level case, said Davenport, there was more to the story. The defendants failed to appear in court, for instance, or violated their court conditions, in some cases by having contact with an alleged victim in a domestic assault case. In one case, a defendant had one underlying crime and then accrued 17 charges of violating the conditions of release, said Davenport. “At that point, the judge throws up their hands and says, ‘I’ve got to set bail,’” said Davenport. If judges allow defendants to flaunt requirements to appear at hearings or obey curfews, said Davenport, it erodes the court’s authority in a community and can put alleged victims at risk. It’s unclear what’s driving the increase in detainees, but Davenport said judges have told her offenders have shown riskier behavior this summer. She used the example of a domestic assault in Addison. The charge was a misdemeanor, “but in this case the defendant allegedly poured gasoline all over the porch of the complainant and said he was going to burn her house down,” said Davenport. “That’s just not a run-of-the-mill domestic assault, that’s the kind of domestic assault that makes you go, ‘Uh-oh.’ The behavior itself is elevated from what you normally see.” As the Shumlin administration tries to reduce the prison population, it has focused on trying to jail fewer non-violent offenders. Read More. |
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