MONTPELIER — In the span of five years, the intricate web of sheriff’s deputies, prison staff and judges that orchestrated the transport of people to and from court hearings has upended.
“The whole infrastructure of our transport system that existed for 100 years doesn’t exist anymore,” Matt Valerio, Vermont’s defender general, told lawmakers on Tuesday.
The Joint Legislative Justice Oversight Committee, composed of Vermont legislative committee leaders and other lawmakers, were discussing the nagging issue, which returned to the spotlight in late August. At that time, the Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs decided to stop transporting people released from the Southern State Correctional Facility in Springfield, phasing out entirely a practice that had been cut due to a lack of resources.
Instead, people would leave the rural prison on foot, left to find their way.
While issues like rising crime and criminal justice reform tend to attract more legislative and media attention, the bureaucratic underpinnings of the legal and carceral systems, like prisoner transports, have a quieter but daily impact on those navigating them. Spurred by Covid-19 practices and fewer transport resources, the state has increasingly relied on virtual court hearings as a solution. Valerio and others have decried that switch as jeopardizing the rights of criminal defendants.
Post-release transports — the type the Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs began during Covid and ended last month — make up a small fraction of the work conducted by state-paid transport deputies, according to Tim Lueders-Dumont, the department’s executive director.
Scarcely more than 200 of the 4,000 rides these deputies provided last year were for people leaving prison, he told lawmakers on Tuesday. But cutting the rides reveals the fraying and overburdened system.
Before the pandemic, the Vermont Department of Corrections provided occasional post-release transports. And when sheriffs had more resources, their overall volume of rides was far larger. According to Lueders-Dumont, the hours that county-paid deputies, rather than state-paid, have spent providing judicial transports has dropped from about 20,000 to 3,000, while the state-paid level has remained consistent at about 20,000 hours annually.
“We are feeling so pinched,” he said.
So thin is the department’s staffing, Lueders-Dumont said, that he’s had to sometimes push back at judges’ transport orders, asking them to reconsider the need. He joked that he’s so far avoided being held in contempt of court — but only narrowly.
When people are released from Vermont’s rural prisons onto the streets, they will do what they need to do to survive, Valerio told lawmakers. In rare past instances, that’s meant starting fires to stay warm, he said.
To fix the decayed transport system, Valerio urged lawmakers to increase funding for both more sheriff’s transport deputies and for Department of Corrections transport staff. At the same time, he recommended restricting the use of remote arraignments — the first hearings in a criminal case — so that when people are released, they’re in their home county rather than a prison in another part of the state.
But money may be hard to come by. Last year, Lueders-Dumont asked the Legislature to fund six new transport staff. Instead, he received only an extra unfunded position. And this year, the House’s budget writers are warning their peers it will be a penny-pinching session, driven by federal cuts.
