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Analysis Area 1: Analyze crime trends, including recent increases in all categories of violent crime, to help the state understand the impacts of these trends on the prison and jail populations, as well as other parts of the criminal justice system.
Background: Despite having lower crime rates than most other states, Vermont’s crime rates have been rising in recent years. Vermont’s 2017 property and violent crime rates were both second lowest nationally, but between 2007 and 2017, the violent crime rate increased 33 percent, which was the fourth-largest increase among states. Although this increase represents a modest rise in the volume of crimes (less than 400 additional reported violent crimes, driven by increasing aggravated assault and rape totals), it does indicate a concerning trend. Due to data analytic limitations, Vermont is not able to determine the extent to which these increases in violent crime may drive prison populations in the near and long term, as well as their impact on other areas, including law enforcement and victim services.

During the first working group presentation in August, CSG Justice Center staff presented national arrest and crime reporting data. While Vermont’s violent crime rate rose between 2007 and 2017, the state’s property crime rate dropped by more than a third, falling in all categories. National arrest data indicate an overall decline in drug arrests across the state, but analysis of state-level data will provide more information. Working group members noted that decriminalization of marijuana likely contributed to the decline in drug arrests and expressed interest in looking more closely at certain types of violent offenses, especially domestic violence offenses.

Update: Although CSG Justice Center staff have not yet analyzed crime and arrest data, in September and October, the prevalence of domestic violence was consistently brought up by social workers who respond to behavioral health crisis calls, DOC facility staff, probation officers, and housing providers during conversations with CSG Justice Center staff.

Analysis Area 2: Analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of community supervision to understand the causes of recidivism and technical violations that result in jail and prison admissions, and identify possible alternatives to incarceration for violation sanctions.
Background: Vermont’s probation and parole populations have decreased considerably since the state first engaged in JRI in 2007. The probation population has fallen 33 percent, from 6,862 people in 2008 to 4,570 in 2018, and the parole population has decreased 20 percent, from 1,049 people in 2008 to 840 in 2018. Although Vermont has a history of stable recidivism rates (the three-year return-to-prison rate), the recidivism rate has slowly and steadily increased between 2010 and 2015, rising from 43 to 52 percent, respectively (for cohorts released between 2010 and 2015). However, with limited data analytic capabilities, the state is not currently able to identify more refined metrics of recidivism and revocations, including how many people on probation are revoked to jail or prison, for what types of violations, and for how long.

Supervision revocations impact most state prison populations. Recognizing that Vermont does not currently have the capacity to track revocations, CSG Justice Center staff began early discussions in August with project champions to develop an engagement strategy that will allow for more in-depth assessments of supervision practices and outcomes across the state.

CSG Justice Center staff conducted a qualitative analysis of community supervision in preparation for the mid-October working group meeting and found that the community supervision system has evolved through policy and statute to become highly complicated and potentially undermined by the number and variances of legal statuses by which people are supervised in communities across the state. An example of this is the many furlough legal statuses available to DOC to furlough people from their sentenced period of incarceration for integration into the community. There are seven major categories and sub-categories of furlough with varying conditions and levels of supervision for each category.

Update: CSG Justice Center staff conducted an initial supervision practices assessment in early October and will be completing the assessment following a second site visit in early December. Initial takeaways include that probation and parole officers appear to be limited in delivering evidence-based practices by complicated legislation (various furlough statutes with varying conditions and supervision conditions) and DOC polices; the availability and intensity of DOC’s risk-reduction programming may not be aligned with the population they are serving; and overall, probation and parole officers are demonstrating strong skills in building rapport and relationships with clients on their caseloads.

Analysis Area 3: Assist the state with developing a DOC population projection to inform Vermont lawmakers’ discussions on how to ensure that limited prison space is prioritized for people who are convicted of the most serious offenses.
Background: Vermont’s corrections system is unified, and DOC is responsible for all pretrial, sentenced, and supervision (probation and parole) populations. As a result of JRI and other changes in policy and practice, the state’s corrections populations have largely decreased over the past decade. Between 2008 and 2018, the state incarceration population decreased 16 percent, from 2,053 to 1,724 people. However, during the same period, the state’s pretrial population increased 30 percent.

In FY2018, Vermont’s prisons were operating at 138 percent of capacity: 1,513 people were being housed across 7 prison facilities with a total design capacity of 1,100 beds, and approximately 230 people were serving Vermont DOC sentences out of state. Vermont’s correctional facility system is aging, and five of the seven facilities are in need of either replacement or significant maintenance improvements. In particular, the DOC is struggling to deliver appropriate and costly health care services—including mental health and addiction treatment—to an incarcerated population that is spread across several small facilities.
Vermont leaders are interested in ensuring that jail and prison space remain prioritized and available for people convicted or charged with serious offenses, but without more information about trends and drivers behind crime increases and revocations to prison among people on supervision, the state cannot reliably achieve such public safety-focused corrections planning.

Update: No update.

Analysis Area 4: Assess the state’s response to people under correctional control with behavioral health needs, particularly opioid addiction, and identify opportunities for improving treatment access and quality.
Background: Vermont has been hard hit by the opioid crisis. Between 2007 and 2017, Vermont’s drug overdose death rates increased 115 percent, from 10.8 deaths per 100,000 residents to 23.2 per 100,000 residents. Deaths due to opioid-related overdoses are rising each year, from 56 deaths in 2011 to 110 deaths in 2018—a 96-percent increase. Understanding the prevalence of opioid use and addiction among people in Vermont’s criminal justice system and ensuring that they receive access to withdrawal management, treatment, and recovery services tailored to their unique needs is critical to ensuring that the state is able to uphold both public safety and public health.
During the first working group meeting, CSG Justice Center staff highlighted Vermont’s Care Alliance for Opioid Addiction, or “Hub and Spoke,” which is a national model that identifies behavioral health needs, ensures access to effective treatment and services, and establishes strong collaboration between hubs of opioid addiction experts and more rural spokes of primary care. Through this Hub and Spoke model, the number of people across Vermont who have accessed medication-assisted treatment (MAT) for opioid addiction has steadily increased, indicating a strong need for MAT statewide. DOC facilities are considered a spoke within this model, and DOC facilities have significantly expanded access to MAT for people in its custody. However, initial conversations with DOC’s MAT program staff indicate that many people coming into DOC already have active MAT prescriptions, suggesting that people in the justice system with addictions might have other complex needs, including criminogenic, that might not be addressed when receiving the currently available array of supervision, treatment, and services.
Update: During October conversations with DOC health care staff, case planning leadership, community supervision officers, and MAT directors of Hubs and Spokes in both rural and urban areas, CSG Justice Center staff have identified several likely gaps in how people with behavioral health needs are identified and then connected to treatment. There are challenges with sharing information regarding identified mental health and co-occurring needs between the DOC’s health care contractor and DOC staff, an issue DOC is actively trying to resolve in the latest contract negotiations. Getting MAT referrals to Hubs and Spokes for people who leave DOC appears to be going well, considering how fast the DOC MAT program has expanded. However, many people with mental health and co-occurring needs may not be connected to services, based on initial conversations with MAT directors and supervision officers.
Analysis Area 5: Evaluate Vermont’s data systems and capacities and identify sustainable opportunities to help policymakers access information they require to make safe and critical policy decisions.
Background: When Vermont first led JRI in 2007, the CSG Justice Center provided the state with new and critical analyses of corrections populations that continue to inform decision-making related to supervision best practices and other policies. However, since then the state has encountered data challenges, including limited staff within DOC dedicated to research and data analysis and siloed data collection and reporting across state agencies that prevent a more comprehensive understanding of the whole system. The Vermont DOC has migrated to a new case management system in recent years, and while basic analytics have been sustained, it is far more difficult for DOC staff to conduct in-depth research projects that require custom case-level data exports. As a result, key public safety and system measures, such as supervision violations and revocations, remain difficult to access and analyze. As mentioned earlier, Vermont is unable to even produce a prison population projection, which would help inform policymaking and future planning. Instead, the state is only able to look back at projections that were produced during the first JRI effort, which do not reflect new pressures and realities associated with the opioid crisis and other systemic drivers.
In conversations with both the working group and other key stakeholders in Vermont, there is strong interest in improving the data collection and analytical capabilities to help the state understand major criminal justice trends. A specific area that working group members flagged is the need to create consistency across different criminal justice agencies in how race and ethnicity information is collected to better track this sort of demographic data.
Update: The upcoming November presentation includes data analysis that will help CSG Justice Center staff facilitate constructive conversations with the working group about existing data systems and data analytic capacities.