Got A NEWS tIP? news@sevendaysvt.com
and the intended recipient of the magazine are notified, and the inmate has an opportunity to appeal the decision. Is the state abridging inmates’ First Amendment right to look at legal material? Allen Gilbert, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont, says a state may have a sound basis for denying some prisoners access to certain types of material. “You could argue that with sex offenders, this is the kind of material you want to keep away from them,” Gilbert remarks. “Some sex offenders have issues involving dominance and control over women, and pornography can suggest that. It wouldn’t be considered consistent with rehabilitation objectives.”
PRISONS
Ashley Sawyer and her daughter Emmie
S E N. tIm AS h E
“upstream,” with the goal of preventing rather than responding to homelessness. He talked up the state’s rental subsidy program. It costs between $7200 and $7500 per family per year, Giddings said.
Disclosure: Tim Ashe is the domestic partner of Seven Days publisher and coeditor Paula Routly.
LOCAL MATTERS 19
vouchers, the federal rental subsidy offered through BHA, is five to seven years. At the state level, Giddings said the state is trying to shift its focus
SEVEN DAYS
cRISIS maNagemeNt, NOt cRISIS PReveNtION.
12.05.12-12.12.12
The sTaTe’s approach has been skewed Toward
While that price tag is slightly higher than an 84-day motel stay, the difference adds up to another nine months in stable housing. It might be slow going, but Giddings said the state is firmly committed to shifting spending from crisis management to prevention. “I really believe that if you invest money in preventing a family from becoming homeless, it’s a wise investment,” he said. “We are definitely continuing down that path.” What happens to families like Sawyer’s after their motel stays expire? It’s hard to say. The state is doing little tracking or data collection about families who end up in motels, and where they go after their stays. “At present, it’s a little bit of a Wild West,” said Ashe. “People will scrape and scrap to survive.” Sawyer said she’ll make it work. She just doesn’t know how. But on day 83 of her motel stay, as she made plans for a makeshift birthday party for her daughter, she insisted she’d get by. “The bottom line is, I will figure it out,” Sawyer said. m
SEVENDAYSVt.com
Even if organizations can’t agree about how best to fund homelessnessprevention programs, there’s little disagreement about the motel program itself. “You wonder, what are we actually getting for this other than the obvious value of a safe and warm place to stay?” asked Ashe. “Once we make that one-night investment, that money’s just gone.” Homeless individuals such as Knoll and Sawyer are equally skeptical about the usefulness of the motel money. Knoll suggested spending the funds to build transitional housing, while Sawyer said it could be better used for rental subsidies. “That money could be used in a permanent sense,” she said. In the short term, however, it’s not clear where else the homeless could go. Affordable housing is in short supply, and Markley said 25 families are waiting for space in the 15-bed COTS family shelter. COTS closed a second family shelter earlier this year after Champlain College — which temporarily loaned the downtown building to COTS — began construction on new student housing. The waiting time for Section-8
earlier this year in a Slate.com article headlined, “Free Willy: Should prison inmates have the right to masturbate?” In Gilbert’s experience, directives from the DOC “aren’t uniformly applied at all facilities,” and Wright agrees. Often, both men say, officials at local jails will ignore or misinterpret a state corrections policy. Today, Lawhorn says there should be no confusion at local lockups about the standards and procedures for allowing or banning publications. Officers at the women’s prison and all other corrections facilities in Vermont were given “extensive training” soon after the policy was decreed, Lawhorn says. “I’m pretty certain that every one of our facilities understands the process now,” he says. m
to “a bunch of bullshit,” in Wright’s estimation. “Is harassment or rape in our prisons going to be stopped by a ban on porn? Please.” Wright argues that there’s no correlation between access to pornography and incidents of sexual assault. He says studies show that, if anything, sexual aggression becomes less common if such material is made available to prisoners. “A lot of the nation’s prisons are run by evangelical Christians,” Wright says. “They can’t stop the rest of the country from having abortions or reading porn, so they stop inmates from having abortions or reading porn.” Court challenges have been initiated in Connecticut and other states against bans on sexually explicit materials in prison, a controversy addressed
MATThEw ThORSEn
Shelters Full « p.15
Gilbert notes that prison inmates do not have the same rights as unincarcerated Americans. “There’s certainly no right to privacy in jail,” he points out. “You get searched pretty regularly.” But Paul Wright, cofounder and editor of the Brattleboro-based national publication Prison Legal News, sees bans on newspapers and magazines as justifiable in only limited circumstances. “There are certain things [prison authorities] have a legitimate interest in censoring,” says Wright, a former inmate who launched PLN 22 years ago. “Examples would be information on how to make bombs or how to escape from facilities.” Defending a ban on sexually explicit materials by referring to the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 amounts