Last month, the Vermont Department of Corrections signed a two-year contract to continue sending inmates to a for-profit prison conveniently located in Mississippi (a mere 21-hour, 1,400-mile drive from Montpelier. Great for family visitation, no?

The news filled my head with numbers and questions. The biggest is revealed in the above chart, provided by the Corrections Department: Vermont’s inmate population has plunged by nearly half since 2009, from a high around 2,400 to 1,331 (population average since January 2019 per DOC).

So if the prison census has dropped so dramatically, why can’t we keep all our inmates right here in Vermont?

Well, the short answer is, we probably could. Especially if we enacted some basic criminal justice reforms. But the Scott administration doesn’t take kindly to such ideas, and our Democratic Legislature tends to be extremely skittish about them. So, contract extension with everyone’s favorite prison profiteer, CoreCivic. Yay?

At our prisoner-shipping peak, we sent about 700 inmates to other states. Right now, that number is only about 125, and although the new contract allows for up to 300 beds, Corrections officials say they don’t foresee any big changes.

A bit of basic math. When we had 2,400 inmates, we sent 700 out of state. Now we have 1,000 fewer inmates. There haven’t been any significant changes in DOC capacity. And yet we have to send more than a hundred to Mississippi? It doesn’t add up.

Well, maybe. During the Jim Douglas years, Vermont had a prison overcrowding problem. Here’s a 2005 piece from the late lamented Vermont Press Bureau (written by reporter-turned-bureaucrat Louis Porter) about overcrowding at a time when the inmate population was 2,100 and we were sending about 400 people out of state. Seems safe to say that while our correctional system could accommodate 1,700, it could not do so safely or comfortably.

And you don’t want to be at or very close to capacity because inmates aren’t interchangeable widgets. There are men and women and T’s and Q’s. There are seniors and youth, there are people with mental illness and addiction issues and other medical needs. There are violent and nonviolent offenders, and some who are big-time security risks. You also have to have capacity to handle the unexpected, such as a serious infrastructure problem at a facility.

According to DOC, the system contains just under 900 “general population beds,” not including the infirmary and restrictive housing of various sorts. So it’s not nearly as cut-and-dried as comparing raw numbers for the system as a whole. The CoreCivic space is entirely “general population,” so having that extra capacity may be a necessity given our justice system’s current laws and policies.

Which brings us to the policy choices our government has made, choices that needlessly inflate the number of people we are confining against their will.

Bail reform by itself would more than eliminate the need for a contract with CoreCivic, not to mention free a lot of people who are now behind bars for no good reason. A rather shocking number of inmates are actually pretrial detainees — roughly half of the total population. That number increased during the Covid pandemic, because the court system was shut down and/or greatly restricted for a long time and is still catching up.

Some detainees should be behind bars, but not all of them. And a system that has so many people in pretrial detention simply isn’t working as it should.

Did you know that on a per capita basis, Vermont has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country — which, in turn, has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world? According to the Robina Institute of Criminal Law and Criminal Justice at the University of Minnesota, Vermont has the 45th highest incarceration rate in the U.S.

Does that surprise you? It stuns me. I mean, Vermont is a rural, relatively low-crime place. Why do we have so many people behind bars? The most obvious answer is pretrial detention, and there’s an equally obvious solution: bail reform.

Here’s a question that, as far as I can tell, has never been studied: How does out-of-state incarceration affect recidivism rates? At a distance of 1,400 miles, a Vermont inmate serving time in Mississippi will rarely get any in-person family contact. That can’t possibly help. In fact, as punishment goes, it seems downright cruel and unusual.

We’ve been sending inmates to for-profit institutions that are prone to scandal since 1998. It shouldn’t be standard operating procedure, but that’s what it is. And the answer isn’t to build more capacity. Instead, we should be examining our justice system from top to bottom and figure out why we’re imprisoning so many people.

Some do need to be imprisoned for our safety and their own. But not all of them. Let’s use incarceration as a tool of last resort. And let’s bring all our inmates home.