DOC commissioner urges competency restoration services be provided in corrections custody

Commissioner John Neurad of the Department of Corrections told the House Judiciary Committee he supports S.193 and that competency restoration services are best delivered to many defendants while they remain in secure DOC custody. "We are already in possession of a lot of those people with regard to custody," Neurad said, adding restored competency helps ensure due process.

Neurad framed the proposal as a modest expansion of services rather than a change in housing. He said DOC would rely on clinical providers to deliver therapy and would typically place participants in segregated wings rather than build a new hospital-style facility. "The therapy is the provision of the services, and those can be described better by others such as our health care provider, WellPath," he said.

Why it matters: supporters and victims' advocates said a targeted forensic program could let some people proceed to trial and address gaps in the current system, which the Act 27 working group identified as disadvantaging victims and delaying resolution. Jennifer Pullman of the Vermont Center for Crime Victim Services told the committee the center "strongly supports the establishment of a forensic system of care and competency restoration" and urged the panel to preserve and expand victims' notice and hearing rights in the bill.

Committee members pressed officials on oversight, staffing, costs and the physical setting. Neurad said Vermont's unified corrections system already houses a mix of pretrial detainees and sentenced people and that the competency cohort would likely be small — "half a dozen or so" individuals on average — so service expansion would be modest relative to system-wide costs. He reported the department's average operational cost at about $300 per person per day and said WellPath accounts for roughly $44,000,000 of a $244,000,000 departmental budget; an increase of about $5,300,000 from the prior year was already included in the provider contract.

Opponents and some committee members pressed whether a correctional setting is appropriate for therapeutic work and pointed to research and anecdotal reports from other states about outcomes when competency services are delivered inside correctional facilities. Neurad said DOC would coordinate with the Agency of Human Services and the Department of Mental Health when cases require cross-agency clinical oversight and that operational and legal safeguards already govern custody and treatment distinctions between detainees and sentenced people.

The committee also questioned DOC about a temporary outage of public population dashboards. Neurad said several dashboards were down for a month or two due to changes in data inputs and offered to report back with specific restoration timelines and causes.

The committee did not take final action on S.193 during the morning session; members continued to weigh questions about facility design, provider oversight and victims' procedural protections.