WATERBURY — Nick Deml, Vermont’s outgoing corrections commissioner, wants the public to know that more and more is being expected of Vermont’s prisons, both from federal immigration authorities and the state’s human services landscape.
“Today, the expectation is that the corrections agency does everything,” he told VTDigger in a wide-ranging interview this week. “That’s a good thing for the most part, but we’re expected to provide education, we’re expected to provide substance use treatment, we’re expected to provide the community standard of health care.”
Deml plans to step down Aug. 15 after almost four years leading Vermont’s prison system
Former Burlington Police Department Chief Jon Murad will take the reins, overseeing the state’s six detention facilities, more than 900 employees and almost 1,600 incarcerated individuals.
In an interview with VTDigger, Deml discussed the learning curve inherent in taking over the department as an outsider without previous prison experience. He detailed the challenges facing corrections, like improving working conditions in order to retain security staff and working with a population of incarcerated individuals in need of more care than they were prior to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Deml also addressed some of the more public struggles the Department of Corrections has faced, from replacing the state’s ailing women’s prison, Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington, to the increasing burden of working with federal immigration authorities.
After leaving the department, Deml said he plans to begin consulting on projects related to corrections as well as his past work in national security. He did not rule out a return to government work, but did swat away rumors of a run for office.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
VTDigger: Why did you take this job?
Nick Deml: It’s an interesting question, because when I took the job — before and even since — people say ‘this has got to be the hardest job in state government,’ or maybe the Department for Children and Families Commissioner, which I actually think is probably harder.
It can be kind of thankless. There’s a couple of things that motivated me to do the job. One, I wanted to work in Vermont. (Two), I wanted to stay in government and public service, and I think you’d be hard pressed to find another role in Vermont that can have the impact that you can have as the commissioner of Corrections. The number of lives you touch, either people in your custody, people in the community that you’re serving.
VTD: What do you think you didn’t understand about the job going in?
ND: I didn’t come from a corrections background, and so there was certainly a learning curve on the front end, as there would be with any job, particularly a job of this scope and scale. But I think I underappreciated the complexity of corrections. I think initially I didn’t understand the scale or scope of the workforce crisis, the staffing crisis that we were experiencing.
And then I think we all were on a learning curve, but by myself chiefly among us, to understand how much we changed during the pandemic, and particularly looking at our incarcerated population. I think we expected health trends to rebound and we’d go back to kind of 2019 levels of everything. And that was not the case. In fact, coming out of the pandemic, the folks that were coming into our system in particular were much sicker than they were in 2019, and that hasn’t abated.
VTD: Do you think being an outsider made it more challenging to deal with the rank and file and have some of those workforce conversations with the union?
ND: I don’t think it made it harder to talk to our folks on the line. What I heard when I went out, especially initially, for those first, you know, year, 18 months, every time I went to a facility and met with folks, they would say, ‘It’s been a long time since we’ve seen a commissioner. I’ve not met a commissioner before.’
That opportunity to connect with them at their worksite, where they’re working, where they’re doing the mission, I think that is what enabled me to connect with our workforce really closely. And I think that wouldn’t matter if I was a career corrections officer or somebody off the street. You need to find ways to connect to those folks, and they’re yearning for that. They’re the folks on the ground doing the work every day, and we drifted a little bit, I think, from them. And so our mission over the last four years was really to build back that trust with our workforce, show them that we care. And I think we did that.
As it relates to the union, I think it cuts both ways. On the one hand, I don’t think they really knew what to do with me, because I wasn’t the commissioner they were used to. And on the other hand, I think they didn’t give — I don’t know, ‘respect’ is too strong of a word — but I don’t think that they were willing to engage me the way they would have somebody they’d known for a long time.
VTD: The workforce crisis has gotten better but hasn’t completely abated. There’s still mandatory overtime. (Officers are sometimes required to work 16-hour shifts.) What has worked, and what hasn’t worked?
ND: Vermont has a workforce crisis writ large. We’re an aging state. We have a decreasing number of working-age adults, and so there’s just fewer and fewer people available to do the work.
Then you bring that down to corrections. Corrections nationally is having this staffing crisis pretty much everywhere in the country. We were at a high vacancy rate in our security ranks of 32% vacant. Today, some of the corrections agencies around the country are over 50%.
We’re down now to 15%, and that’s great, but there’s mandatory overtime. The work-life balance isn’t there yet. Folks are stressed, it’s a tough job on its best day, and then you add the extra hours in, and it becomes very, very difficult.
So what’s worked? I mean, we took the opportunity early in my tenure, but I think about a year into my tenure, to really go out and do focus groups, do surveying, meet with staff in the facilities to talk about, what are the pain points for them? Why would you continue working here? Why would you consider leaving? Instead of trying to decipher what we thought the problems were, we got really salient, really fairly consistent results across the entire system. And that was, ‘I’m not getting enough time away from the facilities. Work life balance isn’t there. The facilities are hard places to work. I’m not getting the supervision I’m seeking.’
What we didn’t hear is, ‘I don’t get paid enough.’ So it’s really for me, when we started to diagnose the workforce challenges, it’s about the experience of staff working in the system, and if we can improve that experience, we’re more likely to keep folks. Now, we did increase pay. We put more than $30 million into additional compensation over the last three years for correctional staff. We’ve added other benefits. We have a great partnership with the Community College of Vermont providing free community college education to staff. Until we can materially change the experience of a correctional officer on a day-to-day basis, going to work and having work-life balance, we’re going to continue to suffer here.
VTD: To change staff’s experience, I imagine you need to change the facilities themselves — what they look like. There’s been an ongoing struggle to build a new women’s prison. Are we as a state still capable of building a new human services property, of siting a new facility?
ND: I mean, I hope so. At the end of the day, one of the primary functions of a state government is to provide human services. If we are going to continue to face very difficult situations trying to build new human services facilities, then the state won’t be able to deliver on its mandate.
But I do think there’s hope. I think that we will build a new women’s prison. I think it will be a significantly different experience at that facility than hopefully any facility in the country, but certainly any facility that Vermont has ever had.
But we’re not going to replace all the men’s facilities, certainly not in the next short period of time. I think it’ll be decades before we do that. So what do we do with the facilities we have? And that’s where we’ve tried to focus in, to improve the staff experience, by creating spaces that are dedicated to staff so they can decompress, recoup, take breaks. We’ve tried to change paint schemes and things like that just to soften the facilities. And we advocated very strongly for HVAC systems for our correctional facilities. So we’re on a multi-year project to put air conditioning throughout the system.
VTD: You’ve described the communication breakdown or a stalemate with the town of Essex in trying to build a new women’s prison. What can change in that process? Does the state need to throw its weight around more? How does this get done?
ND: I think Vermont as a community really leans into collaboration and partnership, and so I think that’s the space where I hope we can make the most ground up.
I understand folks don’t want the concept of a prison in their backyard, and I appreciate that. And yet, I think if you talk to the neighbors around the Chittenden facility, the current women’s facility in Vermont, they would say, ‘We like having them as our neighbors.’ I know that because we’ve talked to them, and that’s what they say. The police chief, the fire chief, local businesses have appreciated that facility being there. We’ve been good neighbors to them. They’ve been good neighbors to us. And it is part of our community, whether people want to acknowledge that or not.
I think the situation in Essex will get better. We’re trying to build a complicated human services facility in a community that hasn’t had that in the past, and so, you know, they’re going through iterations too, and there’s going to be some growing pains. But I have confidence that the town leadership will continue to advance this project. We don’t want to get to a place where the state is trying to exert control, because that’s not going to get us the best outcomes.
VTD: Compared to commissioners past, you’ve been a more ubiquitous face. People see you on the news. Your department has taken a different media strategy than others. What’s the thinking behind that approach?
ND: I’m a firm believer in transparent government. We’re here to serve our communities, and to do that effectively, communities need to see us and what we’re doing.
I do think we’ve really benefited from transparency. It’s helped us to re-establish credibility where it was lost. It’s helped us to elevate the work. I mean, we have almost 1,000 staff in the Department of Corrections, and they’re public servants. They’re doing really hard work every day. And I think in general, people either don’t think about it or don’t respect the profession. And I wanted to change that as part of my work here.
VTD: Do you want to run for political office?
ND: I’ve been getting this question a lot lately. I have no interest in running for office. You know, the interesting thing about that, I mean, there’s nothing about running for office that is appealing to me. But doing these jobs, having the opportunity to serve the public and being able to do the work is what’s appealing. And so, you strip the politics away from it, the government work is, I think, the important part.
VTD: It seems like in the last couple of years, the governor and his team have pushed for what might be labeled ‘tougher on crime’ policies (like a public safety package in 2025 and new crimes targeting drugs and retail theft in 2024). Your department has pushed for more progressive approaches to problems like substance use. Do you feel like you’ve been working at cross purposes?
ND: I mean, I don’t think so. You’re right, the corrections agency doesn’t get to decide who comes to us. So our job, our mandate, is to receive whoever is sent there and take care of them as best we can. So that’s care, food service, health. And helping folks go back to the community to be successful.
And while we’re doing that, certainly I think the communities that I’ve heard from are really struggling to adapt to the substance use crisis that’s been kind of plaguing Vermont over the last several years. These kind of low-level repeat crimes over and over again — what do you do with somebody like that? And so that public policy debate has been going on, but it’s really outside the scope of the department. Our job is to take care of the folks when they come to us, and I think we’ve done a good job with that.
We see population changes over time. I think we’re on a bit of an upswing right now, and I don’t exactly know what the cause of that is, but our job is to try to figure out, how do we provide for these folks in our custody as best we can for the period they’re with us.
VTD: At the beginning of your tenure, there was a string of deaths, particularly at Southern State, a rate of deaths that data would indicate outpaces the national average. With that, there’s been a lot of attention put on the health services provided in Vermont’s prisons and the various contractors that provide those services. Is prison health care broken, and what can make it better?
ND: Yeah, I think prison health care is definitely in a tough spot. I hope it’s not broken, because I do think that there are ways that it can improve.
States are in a difficult place. There’s kind of three general models for this. You have a private, contracted health service, that’s what we do in Vermont. You have an in-state, in-government service that’s provided. That would be like if the Department of Corrections hired nurses, doctors, and they would be department staff. Vermont used that model about 20 years ago. And then a third, you have a partnership with a hospital system in your state. Often those are tied to universities, but not always.
A state like Vermont, I think, suffers additionally from its size, in that we can’t create economies of scale in the way that a state like Texas can, for example. So Texas has its own hospital system within the correction system, massive multiple actual physical hospitals that they can utilize. They’re all corrections patients. I mean, we couldn’t afford something like that here.
And that’s the model that we used 20 years ago. I wasn’t in the space 20 years ago, but talking to colleagues who were, including the defender general and others, they would say that wasn’t better than what we have now.
VTD: Do you think an improved system would have prevented some of these deaths?
ND: I think it’s pretty difficult to say.
We looked at each individual death that occurred in our system in the last four years. We did that. There’s also multiple other investigations that take place under state law. And then we also tried to look at trending analysis.
Our numbers are pretty small, so it’s hard to extrapolate trends out of the small numbers. But there weren’t things that were immediately apparent that were major consistencies between the deaths. That’s tough for us, because we want to solve the issue, but if there isn’t a consistent issue to solve, it makes it more difficult.
I’ve been happy — happy may not the right word — but happy that the deaths by suicide numbers have definitely gone down. That’s a space where I do think there’s different ways for us to intervene and try to pick up on signs earlier, do everything that we can to prevent that outcome from happening. And I think we’ve taken steps to do that, and hopefully that continues.
That leaves us with folks who are dying of some type of medical issue or substance use, and those are more difficult to manage and intervene in. That’s, I think, where we want to focus.
VTD: What are the biggest challenges facing your successor?
ND: He’s going to continue to have to grapple with the workforce challenge. That’s the biggest existential threat to the success of corrections agencies across the country.
He’s going to have a population that is continuing to age, continuing to present with very complicated medical issues. And you know, in Vermont, we have a unified system, so we have the sentenced population and the detained population. That detained population is presenting to us much sicker than they ever have in our history. And that’s really challenging.
If you get somebody on a Friday night brought in by law enforcement, and an hour later they’re overdosing and need to go to an emergency room, that puts a corrections system in a really complicated place.
VTD: Have you seen eye-to-eye with Gov. Phil Scott on the department’s work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and border patrol?
ND: That is a really complicated issue
Vermont’s always had a relationship with ICE, or at least for a long time. Historically, it was folks who were coming across the border allegedly without authorization to do so, and they were detained by border patrol, brought to us temporarily because there’s no other detention space in the state, and then they’d be moved on and adjudicated through whatever federal immigration process existed.
That’s changed a little bit, as we testified to recently. There’s folks being brought from other states and other spaces. It’s not just those folks who are doing the illegal border crossings. We’re just at the beginning of unpacking what this means.
But certainly I see eye-to-eye with the governor on — our obligation is to help people that are coming to our system. And I can affirm to the governor that if somebody comes to our correctional system, they will have access to the courts, they will have access to health care, they will have access to food, and we will try to provide them with any of the needs that they have in our system.
VTD: Did any of these challenges or frustrations about collaborating with federal immigration authorities influence your decision to leave the department?
ND: No. Certainly there’s been a lot more work with ICE in the last six months. But no, my decision predated that and I was pretty confident that this was roughly the timeline I was going to be on when I was going to leave.
VTD: Was it your decision to leave?
ND: Yeah.
VTD: What are you most proud of from these years?
ND: Philosophically, we reoriented this department. Our goal, and hopefully we’ve accomplished this, was to reorient this department to the people it’s supposed to be serving. So on the one side, that’s our staff. They deserve to have a department that’s invested in them, who care about them, who want them to have meaningful careers with lots of impact, mission focused, and we know that this job extends beyond the walls of our facilities, and we need to take care of them outside of there, too. These are really, really tough jobs,
And we have people in our care and custody that are counting on us to keep them safe, keep them fed and healthy, and take care of medical issues for them. And we, I think, reoriented the department to that work as well. In particular on the health side. That was the greatest body of work where we could make a huge impact and continue to improve on that system.
And so we redesigned our health system. We’re about to onboard our first ever manager over nutrition to really target, How do we improve people’s health by giving them good food? Can we locally source food? Can we grow our own food so that it is the best food available for the population? I mean, just a year or so ago, we went to fluid milk across our system in partnership with the Agriculture Agency here in Vermont, and we’re using local Vermont and upstate New York milk to provide to our population.
It’s a basic premise, but if folks are healthier when they leave, they’re more likely to be successful when they go to the community. And so it’s good for public safety, it’s good for the state and it’s just simply the right thing to do.
VTD: What do people not understand about the Department of Corrections? And what do people maybe even within the Vermont Agency of Human Services not understand about the Department of Corrections?
ND: One thing that we’ve been trying to highlight to folks is — as other systems across the state, across the country aren’t able to serve folks, as we have a lack of available medical care for folks, or mental health care, substance use treatment — what happens is those folks all end up kind of at the end of the line. The end of the line is either they’re unhoused, they’re in an emergency department, or they’re in a correctional facility, and often they’re cycling between the three.
I think the other thing, though, particularly in Vermont, but other places too, more and more is expected of the corrections system. Thirty years ago, largely the expectation was that somebody would be incarcerated for a period of time. You’d keep them safe, you’d stop them from fighting, and then you’d provide health care and food service and those things. And then when they got out, they got out.
Today, the expectation is that the corrections agency does everything for that person. And I think that’s a good thing for the most part, but we’re expected to provide education, we’re expected to provide substance use treatment, we’re expected to provide the community standard of health care. And all of that is good, but more and more is layered on top of the corrections agency as the one-stop-shop that can do all of that work while we have a staffing crisis, while there’s pressure for us to close facilities and decarcerate, and new resources aren’t added in.
Frankly, corrections agencies can’t be good at everything and shouldn’t be good at everything. Our approach to that was to turn to community partners and try to bring more folks into our facilities to help. But I do think that that is kind of an untenable position that corrections agencies are being put in, and particularly as other community support systems collapse or recede from their ability to provide services.
