Administration officials, lawmakers and union representatives all say a staffing “crisis” in Vermont’s prisons is causing harm to corrections officers and the incarcerated individuals in their care. But while state leaders agree on the severity of the problem, they disagree on how to solve it.
Peter Maes lives in Windsor with a wife and three young kids that he doesn’t see nearly enough of.
“My oldest just turned 11 yesterday,” Maes said at his home recently. “Missed that birthday.”
He missed the birthday because of a mandatory overtime shift at Southern State Correctional Facility, where he’s served as a correctional officer for about a year. It’s not uncommon for Maes to work three consecutive 16-hour days. He’s lucky if he gets 5 1/2 hours of sleep in between shifts.
“By the third day it’s very difficult to kind of have the mental and physical strength to keep going, but you try to muscle through,” he said.
Maes, who emphasized that he’s speaking only for himself, and not on behalf of the Department of Corrections he works for, left a steady job in health care IT to pursue a new career in corrections.
“Really wanting to help these people who’ve made a mistake and are sitting in cells daily, help facilitate their needs to overcome this and get back into society,” he said.
He said he’s found the purpose he was searching for. But it’s come at a severe cost to his emotional and physical well-being.
“Individual tried to end their life, and afterwards I was dealing with flashbacks of the room, what I saw in there,” he said.
Maes said he got the help he needed from a peer-support group, of which he’s now a member. But not all corrections officers have the same outcome.
The life expectancy of a prison worker is 59 years, according to one study. Other research shows that their rates of suicide and post-traumatic stress disorder are higher than military veterans.
Steve Howard, executive director of the union that represents correctional officers, said the mandatory overtime that employees like Maes have been forced to endure are compounding the pressures of an already dangerous job.
“They tell me — one of their biggest fears — is that they’re going to plow into somebody,” Howard said. “They’re going to fall asleep and plow into a minivan full of kids.”
The reason so many correctional officers have to put in so much overtime is that the Department of Corrections doesn’t have enough prison staff. The vacancy rate at the prison where Maes works was 48% as of November, by one department measure. Statewide, the vacancy rate is closer to 17%.
How do you run the system with fewer people? And that’s the work that is incumbent on us to do that.Commissioner of Corrections Nick Deml
“We have a staffing crisis in corrections,” said Commissioner of Corrections Nick Deml, in a recent interview. “And I don’t want people to shy away from saying that, because we need attention on this issue.”
It’s not just a Vermont problem. Nationwide, according to The Marshall Project, the number of correctional officers has fallen by 10% since the coronavirus pandemic. The average staffing vacancy rate in U.S. prisons is about 25%.
The problem got so bad in New York and New Hampshire recently that governors deployed National Guard troops to serve as prison workers.
“That’s something Vermont never wants to get to. We’ll do everything we can to prevent that,” Deml said. “But I don’t want to disabuse people of this idea that there’s not a huge crisis in corrections right now.”
Deml said his department has recruited aggressively to alleviate the problem. He regularly appears in TV ads on network television, touting the benefits of a career in corrections. And they’ve increased workers’ pay by 36% over the past three years.
Those efforts have increased the number of new guards walking through prison doors. But 26% leave within the first year. And Deml said workforce demographics in Vermont put a ceiling on the number of future hires.
“We’re never going to get back to 100%. So how do you run the system with fewer people?” he said. “And that’s the work that is incumbent on us to do that.”
Union head Steve Howard isn’t opposed to finding operational efficiencies. But he said the corrections department also needs to increase the number of officers. And he said the administration could make that happen relatively quickly by increasing pay even more.
“We’ve got to get around the idea that these positions need to be compensated at a much higher level in the initial phase of stabilizing the situation,” Howard said. “Money alone will not solve this problem, but money will stabilize the situation.”
If you understaff a prison, if you overwork the corrections guards, public safety can suffer dramatically.Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth
Deml said Vermont has already exhausted the hiring potential of increased pay. He said employees in prisons where vacancy rates are lower report good work-life balances and high levels of job satisfaction.
According to the department, first-year correctional officers made an average of about $60,000 last year, including overtime pay; the average pay across all COs is closer to $75,000.
“People aren’t leaving our system because they’re not paid enough,” Deml said. “People are leaving our system because the experience of working here is really difficult.”
On the question of whether higher pay will solve the problem, Senate President Pro Tem Phil Baruth sides with the union. He said he’s told Deml and the governor that the Legislature is prepared to use its power of the purse to support any contract negotiations that result in higher pay.
Baruth said the public safety agenda in Montpelier tends to focus on the uptick in quality-of-life crimes. The current situation in prisons, he says, is potentially more urgent.
“If you understaff a prison, if you overwork the corrections guards, public safety can suffer dramatically,” Baruth said. “You can have incidents in the prison where people are injured, or God forbid killed. And that can theoretically spill over into the rest of Vermont.”
The shortage of corrections officers is also bad for the people held in the state’s six prisons. Defender General Matt Valerio heads the state office that provides public representation to incarcerated individuals.
He said more people are spending more time in prison as a result of the staffing crunch, because prison workers no longer perform the administrative functions needed to resolve his clients’ cases.
“For example, in the past, you had a plea agreement that you needed to get signed — you could fax it up there, and then a caseworker would grab that and get it to the client and the client would sign it and they’d fax it back,” Valerio said. “That stuff doesn’t happen anymore.”
Valerio said he doesn’t begrudge the Department of Corrections for the staffing shortage. He said he also struggles to fill desperately needed positions in his own department.
“You could throw $5 million more at the defender general’s office and say, ‘Look, hire 20 more public defenders.’ I wouldn’t do it because there aren’t 20 more public defenders to hire,” he said. “I think DOC is running into the same thing.”
The union is worried that vacancy rates will plummet even further without some kind of crisis intervention. One correctional officer, for example, recently quit after putting in 11 consecutive 16-hour shifts, according to the union.
“I used to like doing the work — but now it's money, really,” said Matt Fuller, who's worked in Vermont prisons for 19 years.
Fuller, the chair of the corrections unit bargaining team — who also said he was not speaking on behalf of the department — said he’s watched colleagues deteriorate in real time as they try to keep pace with the grueling overtime schedule.
There was a time, Fuller said, when he planned to work in his job until it was time to retire. Now, he’s keeping track of the days until he’s 20 years in, and only partially vested.
“Yep — it’s actually 14 months and 23 days,” he said.
After which there will be one fewer employee in a Vermont prison, and more hours for other people to cover.
This audio story was produced by Peter Engisch.
