by Elizabeth Hewitt vtdigger.org Lawmakers are looking to prioritize accommodations that will be needed to house Vermont’s aging prison population. A panel of legislators toured the Southern State Correctional Facility in Springfield on Thursday, with an eye toward the supports available for inmates with serious mental illness and complex medical needs. The medical needs of Vermont’s prison population are increasingly complex as inmates age and the portion of incarcerated people with mental health conditions grows.
Rep. Alice Emmons, D-Springfield. File photo by Amy Ash Nixon/VTDigger
“I think we’re all a little sobered,” Rep. Alice Emmons, D-Springfield, said as the Joint Legislative Justice Committee reconvened after their visit to Vermont’s largest prison facility.
“They’re sicker, they’re older,” Dr. Dee Burroughs-Biron, health services director for the Department of Corrections, told lawmakers of the prison population. “We do have a lack of coordinated services in the community.”
The medical needs of the aging population will be funded out of the state’s budget, Emmons said, as Medicaid does not foot the bill for incarcerated individuals.
Southern State is Vermont’s newest prison facility. Completed in 2003, it was designed with an eye toward accommodating the health needs of the incarcerated population — particularly those with mental illness.
According to Southern State’s supervisor, Mark Potanas, the Springfield facility is host to 59.4 percent of the prisoners in Vermont who are classified as seriously functionally impaired, or SFI. That designation exists only inside prisons and includes a broad range of conditions, from dementia to serious mental illness.
Meanwhile, as the prison population ages, the DOC is serving increasingly complex health needs. The Southern State facility recently expanded to include a dialysis unit, so inmates can be treated on-site.
Lawmakers asked DOC officials about developing other options for inmate medical care.
Burroughs-Biron said that she has reached out to nursing homes to find alternative care for older inmates, but that many facilities are reluctant to take in people in the corrections system because of the stigma associated with incarceration.
Nursing home accommodations are complicated, too, by the fact that many of Vermont’s older inmates with significant care needs are sex offenders. They would need to register their residence at the nursing home with the sex offender registry — which could be bad for business.
“They don’t want to get that little red dot over their facility,” Burroughs-Biron said.
Rep. Mary Hooper, D-Montpelier, said that the statistics show that the demands on the prison system are going to change in the coming years.
“Clearly, we’re going to be having pressures on the system that we need to be doing planning for,” Hooper said.
Lawmakers also raised questioned about the services for Vermonters in the criminal justice system with serious mental illness, and how much of those services should be the responsibility of the DOC.
Hooper said that this may be the time for an evaluation of who the state should be incarcerating.
“Are there people with mental illness who should be in jail or should they be someplace else?” she said.
Rep. Maxine Grad, D-Moretown, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, said after the meeting that state lawmakers should continue to scrutinize the corrections system.
“I think we need to continue to look at our sentencing structure and how we’re using our facilities and whether or not we are incarcerating the correct people,” Grad said.
This was not the first time Emmons, who chairs the House Corrections and Institutions Committee, has visited a correctional facility, she said after the meeting. But this visit was different than previous trips, she said.
“The complexities and the severities of the situations we’ve seen with offenders is much, much different than four or five years ago,” Emmons said.
Mental health and dementia are more prominent in the prison population, she said, and that prompts reflection.
“We say as a society that we do not want to institutionalize folks with mental illness,” Emmons said. “Well, we are institutionalizing them. We’re institutionalizing them in a corrections facility that is inappropriate but it is out of sight so people do not think it’s existing.”