Vermont legislators are reviewing a wide-ranging prison equity bill that, if enacted, would make the Vermont Department of Corrections (VDOC) the first to pay incarcerated workers minimum wage. H.294 would also make all available forms of communication—not just phone calls—free to incarcerated people and their loved ones, and cap the prices of commissary items. The bill is currently with the House Committee on Corrections and Institutions, where it was discussed in a hearing on April 17. Due to time constraints some portions of the bill, including minimum wage, are being rescheduled for an upcoming hearing.
Currently the forms of communications authorized by VDOC, other than USPS letters, are phone calls for $0.06 per minute; video calls for $0.025 per minute; and electronic messages for $0.25 per message.
Those prices were set recently, in order to come into compliance with caps imposed by landmark federal regulations in 2024; previously they were a bit higher. Video and messaging are available through tablets, which not everyone in VDOC custody has.
VDOC is transitioning its communications contract from ViaPath to ICSolutions, which will take over in June.
VDOC is currently in the process of transitioning from its longstanding communications vendor, ViaPath Technologies (better known in some systems by its former name Global Tel Link, or GTL) to ICSolutions, which will take over in June. Assuming ICSolutions doesn’t pull out, it’ll be contracted through January 2033.
Video calls will drop to $0.16 per minute under ICSolutions; messaging and video costs will remain the same.
“We had a term limit [with ViaPath] and we’ve already exhausted all of the extensions,” VDOC Deputy Commissioner Kristin Calver explained during the hearing. “So we had to go out for a bid.”
Current commissary vendor Keefe is remaining in place through the transition. Up until February it was subcontracted through ViaPath, but now contracts with VDOC directly; that contract will also last through January 2033. (Keefe Group, the parent company of Keefe Commissary Network, is also the parent company of ICSolutions.)
If the bill passes, commissary items would be capped at 10 percent of their market value in the free world. Calvert attributed a recent increase in the price of Honey Buns—one of the most popular items in VDOC as well as many other United States prison systems—to $2.25 to “a supply chain issue.”
Vermont minimum wage is $14.01, but the bill only requires federal minimum wage, which is $7.25.
A handful of states force people in their custody to work for no pay. Most jobs in most states pay a few cents per hour; more than $1 per hour is rare. But statistics like these often obscure other barriers, like the fact that states might cap the number of hours someone can get paid, no matter how many hours they work. And mainly, that there are invariably many more prisoners than there are available jobs.
Vermont minimum wage is $14.01, but for the wage portion of the bill all that’s required would be the federal minimum, which is $7.25. However, according to the bill the wages would not go directly to the person who earned them, but into a separate fund where VDOC will first take a cut “to defray part or all of the cost of offender maintenance.” Further mandatory deductions cover victim funds; child support if applicable; a savings account accessible upon release; approved books; and “necessary purchases from a commissary.”
Most of this wage-garnishing language is borrowed from Vermont Correctional Industries (VCI), and common across prison correctional industries work contracts in general. These house the better-paying prison jobs—$1.35 per hour at VCI—including the small fraction that, under the Prison Industry Enhancement Certification Program, are supposed to pay federal minimum wage.
VCI was downsized dramatically in 2023. The most recent VDOC data show a prison population of 1,455 (including those housed out of state). During the hearing, when the subject of prisoners already getting paid for their labor came up, it was suggested that there are probably not more than 200 jobs.
Connecticut, California, Minnesota, Colorado and Massachusetts are currently the only states to have made prison phone calls free. But only Connecticut and Massachusetts have made all forms of communication free. In February, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont (D) proposed a budget that would reinstate fees for everything except phone calls. Massachusetts was referenced several times throughout the hearing as a sort of cautionary example of potential costs to the state if it made prison communication free.
“Well, that to me indicates we are not providing what would be a fair access to what many, what I certainly consider a basic human need, which is contact with our support systems,” one lawmaker said during the hearing. “So this graph that you showed us, the Massachusetts spike, to me indicates that need was remarkably suppressed up until 2023. And then when we unsuppress it, yeah that costs money, but … we’re just fulfilling needs.”
Per the recent federal regulations, corrections departments no longer collects kickbacks, AKA “site commissions,” for phone calls—but can still collect reduced kickbacks for each video call and tablet message, as well as on commissary items. These kickbacks go to a recreational fund that Deputry Commissioner Calvert said during the hearing VDOC “goes to support activities for incarcerated folks.”
As the Rake reported in a 2022 investigative series on costs of being incarcerated, there is “no oversight or publicly accessible documentation showing how these fees are used in practice, and there is no explanation as to why the state of Vermont would not otherwise include these recreation costs in the DOC’s yearly $160 million budget.”
VDOC commissary kickbacks appear to be set at or near 32 percent. One legislator asked if that was something prisoners wanted, or if they’d rather just have the prices be lower, and “whether it’d be possible to get testimony on the flow of that money.” This will ostensibly be discussed at the next hearing.
Images (cropped) via Vermont Committee on Corrections and Institutions/YouTube
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