This commentary is by Jayna Ahsaf of Colchester. She is FreeHer Vermont campaign director for the National Council for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, a steering committee member for the Vermont Freedom Fund and on the board for the Will Miller Social Justice Lecture Series.
We stand at a pivotal moment where the investments we make now could decide the fate of many vulnerable Vermonters. Despite the challenges our state faces, lawmakers are proposing to spend $70 million on a new prison.
In late 2023, government officials identified more than $600 million needed for flood recovery and future mitigation. In addition, school repairs and construction will amount to an astounding $6.3 billion over the next two decades, and Vermont’s unhoused population grew by nearly 5% from 2023-2024. Yet, as in other states, we are not driving the decisions about prison construction.
Further, the Maine prison model the state aims to mimic is already being dismantled. Linda Small, the Executive Director of Reentry Sisters, was incarcerated at this prison. She wrote in an email to me, “I experienced the trauma of incarceration and its impact on my family. The recent dismantling of women’s services in Maine, the facility Vermont is modeling the new women’s prison after, has meant the removal of the Chief Administrative Officer for Women’s Services, leaving only white male senior staff, a limited number of women in prison education programs, and a cultural shift away from gender-responsive and gender-sensitive services and supports.”
Some also want to duplicate elements of the Scandinavian model, a system with good press despite having severe limitations. In 2015, researchers interviewed people incarcerated in Denmark, prison staff, and experts, finding that: “regardless of ‘humanizing’ elements of normalization and humanity, prisoners and staff may experience the power of the carceral state in Denmark in ways similar to those under more obviously harsh confinement regimes, as exist in the United States.”
A fancier prison does not change the culture that has led to the rampant abuse of women in Vermont prisons and across the country. Annie Ramniceanu, the addictions and mental health systems director for the Vermont DOC has agreed that incarceration negatively impacts health. The idea of a trauma-informed prison is a liberal myth. Let’s be clear that building a new prison maintains the status quo while dangerously aiding the DOC in rebranding their “services” as care.
Shifting to a root cause approach would represent a real change to the status quo. We can address the underlying issues leading to incarceration while simultaneously increasing public safety. It does not need to be an either/or decision — we do not erode public safety by choosing to fund the community; communities that have access to social supports are safer.
The American Public Health Association states, “Deploying the carceral system largely remains the default policy approach to societal concerns. Yet, this continued investment in a punitive paradigm was, and continues to be, avoidable.”
In Vermont’s own system, with around 1,400 people incarcerated, we see that cycles of incarceration are most often fueled by poverty, substance use and mental health struggles: around 466 people are being held pre-trial, detained for ICE, or on a federal hold; around 684 are receiving medication-assisted treatment; about 881 people are on the mental health caseload; only 13 women had more than five years until their minimum release date as of May 2023, and 95% of the women in our prisons have experienced violence. The people we incarcerate are victims themselves who do not have access to safety nets. We need alternatives that break these cycles rather than continue to reproduce them.
We have community solutions available to us that are humanizing, holistic and less expensive than incarceration — they just need to be expanded. We can invest directly in neighborhoods through the reimagining communities model. We can also proliferate housing-first models that reduce harmful behaviors, as recovery and healing are only possible when we feel stabilized, and our housing needs are met.
Additionally, housing can serve as an immediate way to decarcerate. As of June 2023, 63 incarcerated Vermonters were held past their minimum release date due to lack of housing, and FreeHer VT receives numerous letters from people who have been held as long as 18 months past their release date due to no available approved housing.
Pathways VT is an excellent example of what else we could support — and how addressing root causes can be more effective and fiscally responsible than prisons. Pathways’ housing-first programming daily costs per person are around $53 compared to a daily cost of $260 for incarceration. Since 2010, they have supported over 150 individuals reenter the community, with 66 people who were being held for lack of housing in prison being transitioned out of incarceration into the community, and 81% of program participants not returning to long-term incarceration.
Jenna’s Promise is another tangible example of healing-centered programming we can expand instead of defaulting to incarceration. They provide essential services such as transitional housing, employment, family reunification and support with medical care and mental health. Jenna’s Promise helps formerly incarcerated women step into their power by addressing reentry holistically, by engaging the whole of a person — physical health, mental well-being and substance use.
It’s clear that prisons cannot bear the weight of our societal challenges. The spectrum of human needs — pain, trauma, redemption — defies monolithic solutions. We must embrace a multifaceted approach and remember that our toolbox is not limited to just prisons.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Jayna Ahsaf: Investing in community and upstream solutions, not prisons.