The forum at Southern State Correctional Facility marked the beginning of an effort to help the state’s 1,448 prisoners better exercise their voting rights.By Derek Brouwer
Published October 30, 2024 at 10:00 a.m.
At the first-ever election forum held inside a Vermont prison, the moderator wanted to know: How would the candidates take on the opioid crisis?
Gerald Malloy, the Republican hoping to unseat U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on November 5, answered first. Dressed in a white collared shirt and black blazer, he looked out of place in the painted cinder-block room at Southern State Correctional Facility in Springfield. Prison officials had pushed aside the wooden carrel desks used for family visits to make space for 22 prisoners and about as many staff, advocates and local media.
Unlike most people in the U.S. who are incarcerated, Vermont prisoners can still cast ballots.
Restoring public safety, Malloy explained, would be his top priority. He would vote in Congress to secure the country’s borders. Malloy would also support law enforcement and seek to end the “progressive prosecution” that aims to reduce the country’s high incarceration rate but which Malloy contends is failing to hold criminals accountable.
“There has to be a deterrence for folks who are actually committing crimes,” he said.
Malloy’s audience, wearing blue prison garb with labels such as “WORK CREW” and “KITCHEN” across their backs, listened politely. A few nodded in agreement.
Unlike most people in the U.S. who are incarcerated, Vermont prisoners can still cast ballots. The state is one of two, along with Maine, where criminal prosecution has no legal bearing on any resident’s voting rights. But candidates running for office have rarely, if ever, asked for their support. It’s one of the many reasons that turnout among incarcerated people is extremely low.
Last Friday’s forum at Southern State marked the beginning of an effort to help the state’s roughly 1,400 prisoners better exercise their voting rights, according to Corrections Commissioner Nicholas Deml.
“It is our job to make sure that they have access to that opportunity,” he said.
Deml also acknowledged that the forum fell short of that goal. It drew only three candidates and was held so close to Election Day that prisoners who waited until the forum to vote by mail don’t know for sure whether their absentee ballots will arrive in time to be counted. And the department didn’t provide a way for prisoners at other facilities to tune in.
Malloy was joined by Democratic gubernatorial candidate Esther Charlestin and U.S. Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.). Their respective opponents — Sen. Sanders, Republican Gov. Phil Scott and long-shot GOP House challenger Mark Coester — did not attend.
Asked why the governor skipped the event, Scott campaign manager Jason Maulucci cited “substantial time commitments for his day job.”
Prison system officials cast the forum as a kind of trial run for what they hope will become a more prominent election-year tradition. Deml said he’d like to host forums at more than one prison and “a little earlier in the cycle, so that there is opportunity for voting afterwards.”
Just 8 percent of Vermonters imprisoned on felony convictions cast ballots in the 2018 midterm elections, according to an analysis by Massachusetts Institute of Technology political scientist Ariel White — far below the statewide turnout of 55 percent that year.
Outside advocacy groups have spent decades trying to raise that number by informing prisoners of their voting rights and helping them register to vote. This year, Tina Hagen of Disability Rights Vermont has helped 50 or so inmates at Southern State obtain ballots. Prisoners must register using their last community residence, then request a ballot be sent to their prison mailing address.
Hagen said the department has “come a long way” in ensuring prisoners understand their voting rights and the cumbersome logistics, but many prisoners tell her they don’t know enough about the candidates. Prisoners aren’t bombarded with campaign mail, nor do they have access to candidates’ websites or online news sources.
“Probably one of the biggest concerns and issues we hear is just having that information to make informed decisions while they’re incarcerated,” Hagen said.
Holding candidate debates inside prisons can help bridge that information gap, according to academic experts who study disenfranchisement. University of Vermont political scientist Alec Ewald, who is currently surveying Vermont prisoners about their political attitudes, said direct appeals from candidates may help counter the sense of civic alienation that often accompanies incarceration.
“It’s saying quite directly to the incarcerated people that their experiences matter and their ideas matter and that their voices and their votes matter,” Ewald said.
White, the MIT researcher, said prisoners who are able to maintain ties to civic life while behind bars could also have an easier time transitioning back to life outside.
A county jail in Flint, Mich., has hosted numerous election forums in recent years. Organized by a nonprofit advocacy group, the events have provided inmates a chance to hold the microphone and pose questions directly to mayoral candidates. At one earlier this year, attendees vocally complained when a sitting U.S. congresswoman sent a surrogate instead of showing up, according to local media coverage.
The Vermont forum was closely controlled. The Department of Corrections allowed prisoners in Southern State’s general population units to sign up to attend, a spokesperson said, and solicited questions through inmates’ prison-issued tablet computers. The forum was moderated by Deputy Secretary of State Lauren Hibbert, a former public defender in New York City.
The questions, officials said, were drawn from topics that Southern State prisoners submitted. Hibbert asked broadly about mental health care access and affordable housing, criminal justice reform, and strategies for keeping young people out of prison.
Asked how the candidates would expand voting access for incarcerated people, gubernatorial hopeful Charlestin told the audience that she’d like to set up polling places inside the prisons.
“That would be incredible,” she said.
Malloy stuck to his law-and-order message, criticizing the “defund the police” movement as a “big step back.”
Balint pitched herself as a public servant on a mission to “alleviate suffering at all different levels.” She called for more diversion programs that keep offenders out of prison, as well as investments in housing and school services.
The congresswoman’s comments intrigued an attendee named Jeffrey, whom Seven Days agreed to identify only by first name as a condition of attending the forum.
Jeffrey, who has been detained at Southern State since September, blamed his criminal behavior on drug addiction and a lack of stable housing. He said he wants to get treatment and feels that the prison environment is only making his problems worse.
“A lot of people are sitting here [in prison] who should not be here,” he said.
Jeffrey hadn’t cast his ballot as of last Friday afternoon but said he still intended to do so.
The candidates’ closing statements were met with applause, and Deml, standing in front of a Prison Rape Elimination Act poster, closed by saying he was grateful to get the candidates “in front of some Vermont voters.” Afterward, some of the prisoners shook the candidates’ hands and chatted with them for a few minutes.
As prisoners returned to their units, Charlestin retrieved her driver’s license from the same check-in station that family visitors use each day. The forum, she said, felt “super formal.” She wondered whether it could be structured differently, in a way that meets prisoners on their terms.
“Instead of asking them to enter our world, how do we go into theirs?” she said. “How do we make it so we are uncomfortable?”