The closing of the state prison in Windsor
The current incarnation of the prison, the Southeast State Correctional Facility, was closed last week at the direction of the Vermont Legislature for financial reasons: It was the most costly prison in the state to operate per-capita, at $83,000 a year for each inmate. While the decision is understandable, it’s important to recognize what may be lost as well as what will be saved. What will be saved by the state is some money; what may be lost is the opportunity for inmates to do useful work while gaining the skills and self-respect they need to reintegrate successfully into society when they are released.
“We offered a lot here,” Superintendent Kat Tkaczyk told Valley News correspondent Patrick O’Grady. “They weren’t sitting in their cells 24 hours a day. Inmates were given a lot of opportunity (for self-improvement).” The prisoners were responsible for sanding, plowing and shoveling in the winter; for cutting, splitting and stacking wood for the heating system; for helping in the kitchen; for making hundreds of toys every year for the Toys for Tots program.
Inmates were also welcome visitors to area communities as part of work crews that performed a variety of tasks — including painting, light construction and landscaping — at low cost for nonprofits and town governments, allowing them to save thousands of dollars and the inmates to earn a small amount. And Hartford Police Chief Phil Kasten had it just right when he observed that the work crews offered their members an opportunity “to ease their way back into the community. It is important. Equally important are the interpersonal relationships between the inmates and the community.” When community members have contact with inmates in such settings, they are more likely to recognize that many offenders are not bad people, but rather people who made a bad decision and deserve a second chance to get it right.
This progressive tradition apparently goes back to the opening of the original prison on State Street. An early observer wrote a few years after it opened in 1809 that for the inmates, the prison was “a school in which they had such lessons of industry, economy and sober habits as will be of infinite service to them the remainder of their lives.”
The large parcel of agricultural land off County Road where the prison was most recently located was long worked by inmates in various ways: as a dairy farm; a sugaring operation; and a piggery, according to retired Superintendent Mike Coxon. (Could the acute shortage of farm labor Vermont is now experiencing be alleviated by giving inmates expanded training opportunities in a setting such as Windsor or on working farms around the state? It’s an intriguing question.)
What happens to the 100-acre prison property is anybody’s guess at this point. The Legislature directed the Department of Corrections to put together a plan to repurpose the property as transitional housing to prepare inmates for re-entry into the community (which sounds very much like what was already being done in Windsor). In any case, the department estimates that $1.3 million in renovations would be needed and that it would cost about $6 million a year to operate the facility. The idea did not appeal to residents and officials interviewed by O’Grady, who feel strongly that Windsor has done its part and more over the years, and it’s time for the town to move on from the corrections business. Maybe so, but in retrospect the community can be proud of the role it played in rebuilding lives. As Tkaczyk said, “It is not always popular to have a prison in your backyard, but by and large we always had community support.”