Keeping your community covered. We're committed to producing high-quality, fact-based news and information that gives you the facts in this community we call home. If our work has helped you stay informed, take action, or feel more connected to Windham County – please give now to help us reach our goal of raising $150,000 by December 31st.
Keeping your community covered. We're committed to producing high-quality, fact-based news and information that gives you the facts in this community we call home. If our work has helped you stay informed, take action, or feel more connected to Windham County – please give now to help us reach our goal of raising $150,000 by December 31st.
The Vermont Agency of Human Services has proposed a large psychiatric and prison facility for Franklin County. It has been proposed that this facility be built and maintained by CoreCivic, formerly Corrections Corporation of America, a scandal-plagued private prison contractor.
This secure facility would consist of some 925 beds for male and female prisoners and would serve youth, forensic, and geriatric patients. It purports to offer a solution to a perceived crisis in the mental-health system in which those reporting to emergency departments of hospitals are held for long periods of time while waiting for a bed at an appropriate facility.
This proposal illustrates an increasing trend that conflates a lack of access to psychiatric care with a threat to public safety and public health.
This thinking ignores that there is already significant overlap between the criminal-justice system and the mental-health system. The further intermingling of these systems could very well end badly both for people who are imprisoned and people who are receiving psychiatric treatment.
