Prosecutors in one Vermont county are being pressed by their boss, Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah Fair George, to think really hard about what it means to sentence someone to six months or a year in prison. That sounds basic, but George told The Appeal’s Daniel Nichanian that all too often it doesn’t happen, that “it’s never been stressed that they should also fully understand what prison means, and what a jail sentence means for these individuals.”
“As prosecutors, we get very comfortable with just throwing out numbers as an amount of time. We say six months or two years, and don’t really have to think about what it means for the person, that six months for one person could be detrimental to their entire lives,” she said. This is to the benefit of the communities incarcerated people come from and go back to, George argued, calling on prosecutors to “imagine how this might impact somebody who is [in prison] for six months or a year, and how this impacts them as a community member when they get back out. Is there a way that we can avoid that entirely, and not risk them coming out a more violent person, or with some type of trauma having been in jail? Can we find another way?”
George is requiring the prosecutors and staff who work in her office to visit and tour the Northwest State Correctional Facility. She’s also looking for ways to go beyond that—like actually talking to people who are or have been in prison about their experiences—because “I fully acknowledge that us going on a two-hour, three-hour tour at DOC is going to be what DOC wants us to see.”
Asking prosecutors to understand what they’re sentencing people to is such a small thing, yet in the context of the U.S. criminal justice system, almost a revolutionary one. But it’s also the sort of advance we’re seeing more and more as the tide starts to turn against a relentlessly punitive criminal system.