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On a blustery morning in November, Kathy Fox steers her car through snow squalls to the Southern State Correctional Facility in Springfield, Vt. She and her co-pilot, Abigail Crocker, wear matching green t-shirts with the words “University of Vermont Justice Research Initiative” across the front. They wear them every time they visit the 370-bed prison.

“Everybody knows there is a problem with our carceral system, but no one knows why because it’s such a black box,” Crocker says from the passenger seat.

The two �պ����� professors have spent the last five years trying to crack that box open. They are part of a transformation effort funded by the Urban Institute to improve prison conditions and test innovations in reform through partnerships with corrections departments in five states, including Vermont. The project, the Prison Research and Innovation Network (PRIN), began in 2019 as Crocker, a biostatistician, and Fox, professor emeritus of sociology, worked with incarcerated individuals and corrections staff to create a series of annual surveys piloted at the Southern Facility that would serve as the backbone for spurring change.

“This is how change happens—grounded in the voices of the people it is supposed to impact,” Crocker says. “We want justice reform in a data-driven way.”

And there is a lot that warrants changing.

Early PRIN surveys showed low morale among staff, most of whom flag high turnover rates, staffing shortages, and mandatory overtime as issues. Staff also reported concerns about inmates having too much idle time. And while over 80 percent of corrections staff say that prison should help people make changes to have a better life, about half say the prison doesn’t help incarcerated individuals develop the skills they need to exist on the outside, and most believe the prison doesn’t adequately prepare inmates for release. Surveys of incarcerated individuals echoed these sentiments. Additionally, over 80 percent of inmates say they don’t have many opportunities to be productive or feel proud. 

When developing the PRIN surveys, Crocker included Adverse Childhood Experience Scores (ACES), a measure from a landmark public health study in the 1990s that found the more traumatic life events a person accumulates in childhood, the more likely they are to experience depression, substance abuse, or premature death. PRIN surveys have repeatedly found about 40 percent of inmates had a previously incarcerated parent, and ACES scores of four and higher—significantly more than the general population.

Crocker likens prison reform to the changes made possible in healthcare using analytics. But data is transformative once we understand the measures that matter and why—something the PRIN team is still trying to pinpoint.

“People are frustrated because nothing has changed,” Crocker says. “We are in it for the long game now.”

Photo by Chris Dissinger

Relics of a different era

Isaac Dayno sees pathways for improvement. After serving as a National Health Corps fellow where he worked with indigent and formerly incarcerated populations—many with drug problems—he viewed prisons as a place where public health and vulnerable populations intersect. Dayno, executive director of policy and strategic initiatives for the Vermont Department of Corrections, knew change would be hard, but he didn’t realize so many barriers existed.

Corrections may want to change, but often finds itself fighting itself, he says while seated in the lobby of Vermont’s Agency of Human Services.

Consider the prison architecture: They are relics of a different era. Most buildings were not constructed with rehabilitation in mind, Dayno explains. “CRCF was built as a detention center; it was not ever meant for long-term housing.”

That means facilities have few conference rooms and expanding rehabilitative programming is constrained by physical spaces that make even tiny changes complicated. For instance: towel hooks. Inmates at SSCF told PRIN’s innovation committee, a group of corrections staff and incarcerated individuals, that they wanted to keep wet towels and jackets off the ground. But renovating the cells with hooks that meet safety standards was exorbitantly expensive. Improving disruptions to healthcare has similar head-smacking challenges.

“Prisons were designed to separate inmates from the general population,” Dayno notes. “That includes receiving services like Medicaid.”

People on Medicaid before incarceration may no longer be eligible for certain medications or treatments in prison. While the department lobbied Vermont’s congressional delegation to support the 2023 Re-Entry Act to improve Medicaid access and allow greater continuity of care for incarcerated people nearing release, the bill is stuck in a congressional committee. But progress is being made to close these gaps. In July, Vermont was one of five states awarded a waiver from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to enroll incarcerated individuals in Medicaid 90 days prior to their release.

“You’re always fighting an uphill battle,” Dayno explains. “But what we are trying to do in Vermont and nationally is novel. Obviously, we serve a basic security public safety role. That is the baseline. Really our mission is to help people who are in a state of crisis with transformation.”

That is why the department signed onto PRIN. It was an opportunity to use data as a guide to improvement.

“Vermont is a state that prides itself in its progressive thinking and at DOC we want to be a leader in forward thinking,” Dayno says.

The early PRIN surveys identified issues that Vermont’s corrections can fix, such as investment in career development and appreciation for staff input. The 2024 final PRIN survey released in August showed upticks in these areas—a sign these efforts are working.

Crocker and Fox view prison as an ecosystem. In theory, as positive changes occur at the staffing level, they should ripple into the incarcerated population. But a 17 percent vacancy rate for corrections staff makes moving that needle especially difficult. Staff may want inmates to participate in more activities during the day, but staffing shortages mean nice-to-haves get shelved when people are needed on the floor for security—the department’s primary responsibility.

In short, Vermont’s corrections department does the job it was mandated to do. It just may not be the job incarcerated people need to thrive when they leave. Because corrections is not college, a job training center, or counseling facility—even if reform advocates wish otherwise.

Data from PRIN surveys is also why corrections is trying to increase involvement with community partners like Turning Point of Rutland “to bridge the historical gaps,” Dayno says. 

Nearly two-thirds of Vermont inmates receive medication-assisted treatment for opioid abuse and most need to continue receiving it upon release. Since 2016, Turning Point has brought recovery services to incarcerated individuals at the Marble Valley Correctional Facility in Rutland through group meetings and one-on-one coaching. The Department of Corrections was recently awarded $1.5 million by Vermont lawmakers to expand similar programs across other state prisons. The hope is that by building trust with people inside, they will have somewhere to go to buoy them in difficult times upon release. (The National Center on Restorative Justice, where �պ����� is a partnering agency, and Crocker serves as research director, has funded Turning Point to lead training efforts).

When Dayno considers highlights of PRIN he points to the honors units created at SSCF and Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility—special units where inmates hold each other accountable for their behavior and track their own whereabouts in the facility. The honors unit was created as an opportunity for incarcerated individuals to feel good about themselves and add responsibility back into their daily lives without officers watching their every move.

“These folks have developed a really amazing social contract,” Dayno says.

“But PRIN has not been a universal success,” he continues. “It’s very difficult to give folks who are incarcerated agency.”

It’s not how prisons were designed.

The Southern State Correctional Facility in Vermont is a pilot site for a multi-state prison transformation effort funded by the Urban Institute involving a partnership between corrections staff and �պ����� researchers. (Photo by Chris Dissinger)

Cracking the black box

Kathy Fox became committed to rethinking prisons after studying corrections programs in Vermont. Until her retirement in May, she headed �պ�����’s Liberal Arts in Prison Program, which brings students inside prisons to work with incarcerated populations.

“I saw a lot of human potential that was wasted,” she says. “People in the community have no idea what they are like. It is hours and hours of idle time. Everybody needs a sense of purpose, and it is very difficult to find a sense of purpose when you are incarcerated. I don’t know how they do it.”

By “it” she means – how they live there. Imagine a better future—particularly when the centerpiece of your room is the toilet you share with a roommate. When the highlight of your week is a brief visit with family or your attorney.

Advocates for prison reform often cite Scandinavian models that try to replicate life on the outside as much as possible, explains Fox. “American prisons are very much focused on safety and security and that is how we measure our success. Prisons right now warehouse people.”

They don’t, by design, transform them.

With PRIN, Crocker and Fox were excited for the opportunity to investigate a system that has historically been difficult for researchers to get inside. With PRIN they could “crack that black box” wide open. But what they found was a complicated system already stretched thin. One where many workers inside feel as though they are also doing time. But how do you change an entire system when the public can’t agree what prison is even for?

And who has the time to transform a system with chronic staff shortages and an incarcerated population plagued with broken childhoods? The effort can feel Sisyphean. But flickers of changes have been made. There are new coffeemakers for staff and Shutterfly accounts for incarcerated individuals, Fox says. But is transformative change really about coffee? Or does change start with a cup of joe?

Our first stop inside SSCF is Good Spirits Café—a coffee shop run by inmates that started in 2022 as an innovation spurred from PRIN surveys results. It made headlines when it opened as a humanizing experience where corrections staff and incarcerated individuals can gather in the same space on more level ground. Anthony “Gio” Giordano, the facility’s volunteer service coordinator, leads us to the café where inmates swap coffee cards issued for good behavior for hot beverages and pastries.

We wanted to get creative about how staff and inmates engage with each other, Giordano explains. “It’s something we all share.”

Good Spirits Café creates a sliver of normalcy in prison and aims to both reinforce positive behavior and provide work experience for inmates running the business. One incarcerated individual, Perry, serves as general manager, and is convinced it’s working. He just doesn’t have the numbers to prove it.

“It really is an incentive for good behavior, and you see that,” he says.

Perry explains how the café reminds people of a time before prison when they didn’t feel a need to put up walls, he says. “To remember a time when they weren’t antisocial. … It gives people an incentive to grow.”

We finish our coffees and head to the honors unit. It consists of two floors of cells with metal slabs for beds, one window about 15 inches wide and covered in metal wire. Three men assemble a flower puzzle on one of five tables bolted to the concrete floor.

One incarcerated individual, Jeremy, works in the café and is worried that people on the outside don’t know about the honors unit. He knows it was in the news a year ago but has probably faded from people’s minds.

“That’s how things go away,” he says.

Jeremy emphasizes that even without officers peering over their shoulders the inmates haven’t had conflicts they weren’t able to resolve. He is proud of the unit. And while he doesn’t expect legislators to prioritize the needs of incarcerated people, he doesn’t want them to be forgotten.

“It’s not like we can drive up to the State House and have coffee with them,” Jeremy says. “They can come here and have coffee with us.”

When he looks around at his cellmates, 
he considers what they need to thrive on 
the outside.

“Education is a key and self-esteem is 
a key,” he says. 

Jeremy sees opportunities for inmates to learn needed trade skills and know they can do something important, he says. “They need someone to look up to. Someone they can trust, and have their self-esteem built back up.”

Being in prison doesn’t exactly make you feel good about yourself. But in the honors unit, incarcerated individuals can put down their guard knowing no one wants to ruin it for everyone else.

“I feel safer in here than I do 
anywhere,” he says.

Kathy Fox (center) and Abby Crocker (right) view corrections staff and incarcerated people as part of an ecosystem where changes in one group are reflected in the other. (Photo by Chris Dissinger)

“Stuck on a shelf”

Giordano leads us to a meeting with the prison’s innovation committee, of which he is a member. He pauses to let a group of inmates walk outside from the cafeteria. Giordano gives off the no-nonsense air one might expect from someone with over 16 years of experience in corrections. One who has been attacked and had feces thrown on him. But Giordano thinks about things like assembling baskets of supplies for incarcerated individuals who have less than $10 in their commissary accounts.

Giordano appears to be someone who sees things for what they are and what they could be. He has witnessed promising ideas get shot down for “security” reasons. “Anything can become a weapon,” he says. “The answer doesn’t always have to be no.”

Over the years Giordano has also watched incarcerated individuals come and go and sometimes return. When someone is leaving “I hope that they will follow through on the things they tell me when coming out the door,” he says.

We step outside to the stinging cold. A line of inmates in bright orange hats and coats walk in circles around the perimeter of metal fencing looped with razor wire, getting nowhere.

Giordano steers us to a conference room with a circle of black plastic chairs, a cross on the wall, and a mural of the Mad Hatter and Alice in Wonderland in the background. Once the inmates arrive the question of what innovation means surfaces.

For one individual, Tyler, it means—”to get the ball rolling,” he says.

It means graduating to higher levels of personal accountability and could begin with something simple, like doing your own laundry.

“Just getting up and having a job every day,” Tyler says. “When people have nothing to do, a lot of people want to get high.” As someone who has suffered from addiction in the past, he understands this feeling. “When I think about innovation it’s opportunities to motivate and to build, not just be lost in the paperwork, lost in the facility somewhere stuck on a shelf.”

An older inmate wearing black orthopedic shoes is frustrated with the slow progress of the innovation committee. He says the idea of the PRIN project has been noble but argues the committee has “accomplished zero.” He points to the difficulty of being an incarcerated person and going back to your unit to people who expect changes that don’t come.

“We do answer to some people,” he says. They want to know “what are you doing with PRIN? The inmates in this room can’t a do a thing without someone driving the truck.”

A man named Richard steps in. His glasses and a small notebook are tucked in the breast pocket of his shirt. He serves as a mentor to other incarcerated individuals and has been involved with PRIN since the beginning. Richard argues that some changes need to happen at the legislative level. He believes the public needs to determine what they want from corrections. Right now, their mandate is to keep people inside safe, he says.

But when he considers the inmates who fail to succeed on the outside, he believes Vermonters need to reassess what we are trying to accomplish. If the main job of DOC is warehousing people, Richard says, “then the taxpayer is being robbed. I was a taxpayer for a lot of years. People have no idea how money is being spent. … We need DOC to be in the socializing business.”

An inmate named Christian voices his concerns about healthcare in the prison. People come in with medical issues they are treated for on the outside but get dosed down or their meds changed, and it can take a while to stabilize them, he says. And often the solution is putting them on what they were on before.

“If you ignore our problems then they become bigger,” Christian says.

He is talking about healthcare. But it feels like a metaphor for the entire carceral system.

Photo by Chris Dissinger

“A lot to celebrate”

One hot July morning, members of PRIN’s executive team—a mix of corrections personnel, nonprofit and government agency leads, Vermont legislators, and �պ�����’s research team—sit in Commissioner Nicholas Deml’s office to review the final round of survey results. A wooden block etched with the words “hard things are hard” rests on a table. It seems a fitting description for the last five years of work.

“I think there is a lot to celebrate collectively,” says Jesse Jannetta, senior policy fellow in the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute from across a video screen. “No way was it assumed that we would have so much participation of inmates and staff.”

Highlights of Vermont’s portion of the multi-state study comes from the high completion rates of surveys—likely a function of the community-engaged research methods that centered the voices of those being studied—and the independence of the research team.

“The data has to mean something,” Jannetta says, praising corrections for supporting “the integrity and the independence of the research. … You are going to see a lot critical and painful stuff, but the willingness to have that data be out [there] was a strength.”

Both Crocker and DOC leadership aim to 
take the surveys statewide—not just at the 
SSCF pilot site.

“The point of these data were to identify issues inside the facilities and use that for action,” Crocker says as she presents the findings. “There hasn’t been a lot of change since 2021. It highlights to us … it’s hard to do change.”

While the data shows improvements since 2021, the primary staffing issues remain problematic: staffing shortages, employee turnover, and mandatory overtime. It’s possible the department is returning to a baseline before the COVID-19 pandemic, when issues of concern were amplified.

“For effective solutions we need to understand the why,” Crocker says. “You are seeing shifts in the right direction.”

The long shadow of COVID bears out in the data. The 2022 surveys show the highest rates of mental health issues for staff, when suicidal ideation jumped from 10 percent in 2021 to 30 percent before falling to 26 percent in 2024.

“Corrections staff have worse mental health outcomes than firefighters and police,” Fox says. “It’s a problem—a genuine one—that I think needs to be addressed about what it is that makes it worse for correctional staff.”

Surveys of incarcerated individuals are no better. Inmates suffer even higher rates of suicidal ideation. They also continue to flag concerns over preparation for release. Michael Groner, a case worker at SSCF, describes the difficulty of getting inmates connected to community groups prior to their release.

“We have to get these resources into the facilities,” he says, identifying Turning Point in Rutland as a model for other groups.

Groner has worked in corrections long enough to see what happens when people are not prepared for life outside. They go from having little autonomy to having a laundry list of people they need to cold call and appointments to make or face penalties. People from the community need to meet incarcerated individuals beforehand and let them know they expect to hear from them.

“It’s overwhelming,” Groner says. “They 
circle the drains so to speak. That is not a 
recipe for success.”

With PRIN winding down at the end of the year, Deml aims to continue the work indefinitely through a partnership with �պ����� to continue conducting research in Vermont correctional facilities. PRIN has shown “maybe not be design, but by accident,” the power of having a group from outside think about problems and solutions, he says.  “The throughline is the research. There is an anchor to the work that … gives the committee something to focus on. The PRIN model is proactive.”

The team met once more in October to develop a plan for the PRIN executive team’s work to continue after the study concludes.

“We do look at this as a brain trust we can tap into and rely on,” Deml says.

It’s also a signal of the department’s commitment to make positive changes.

“We all appreciate the humanity of the incarcerated and the need to improve things,” says Karen Tronsgard-Scott, executive director of the Vermont Network Against Domestic and Sexual Violence and a member of the executive team. “Being incarcerated is the punishment. And there is no need to punish the people who work in it. For me, that is the pivot. It shows us how to work for something you want, not fighting against.”