Vermont sees decline in number of female inmates

Programs have been designed to keep female criminals out of prison.

ST. ALBANS, Vt. (AP) — For about a month the status board at Northwest State Correctional Facility read zero. The last male inmates were gone, scattered among other Vermont prisons.

This month, the prison that once held some of Vermont’s most notorious criminals began housing the state’s female inmates, women who are more likely to be behind bars for writing bad checks than for sex crimes. But the prison, once Vermont’s largest, is holding fewer women than previous trends had anticipated.

About 140 beds will be empty, partly because fewer women are in prison.

In the last two years, the number of female inmates in Vermont’s prison system has dropped 40 percent, thanks in part to programs specifically designed to keep them out of prison.

State Sen. Richard Sears, who chairs the Legislature’s Corrections Oversight Committee, is surprised at the lower numbers, which he calls dramatic. Credit should go to those who made a variety of treatment and social programs available to female offenders, he said.

The St. Albans prison is designed to help address the special issues women face.

Programs will teach them skills that include construction, a program that migrated from the Southeast State Correctional Facility in Windsor, where most women had been held. A section of the prison is devoted to mentally ill inmates and women will be able to work in the garden, greenhouse, print shop and other vocational programs.

Between the departure of the last man and the arrival of the first woman, the Northwest staff was trained to handle female inmates with specific physical and emotional needs.

“Women can be as dishonest as men, deceptive and confrontational,” said John Perry, the Department of Corrections’ chief of planning. “Women offenders are more verbal and more overtly emotional and less physically violent. A problem a male inmate might try to resolve by anger, violence or refusal to comply, a woman inmate might cry and might scream that you are abusing her.”

Switching the St. Albans prison was part of a package of changes designed to decrease prison costs.

The Dale Correctional Facility in Waterbury, where about 50 women are now held, will be closed. The Windsor prison will become a work camp for less dangerous male inmates. The men who had been held in St. Albans are now spread through the rest of Vermont’s prison system.

For decades, the number of women in Vermont’s prisons hovered in the mid teens. They were held in a section of the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in South Burlington.

In the 1990s, that began to change. The reason: heroin, according to Perry.

About a decade ago, when the all-women Dale Correctional Facility opened with a capacity of 45, the state had about 75 female inmates. Then corrections officials converted the Windsor prison into a women’s camp.

At its peak, about two years ago, Vermont had almost 190 female inmates, said Corrections Commissioner Andy Pallito. As of mid-December, 116 women were in custody, the lowest number since August 2002.

Female inmates are more likely to be in prison for writing bad checks — for men, it’s sexual assault on a minor — and they are more likely than men to suffer from mental illness and face serious substance abuse issues, Perry said.

A variety of treatment and social programs overseen by several agencies helped the Corrections Department reduce the number of women offenders — programs that help women fight alcohol and drug abuse and find places to live in the community.