Debtors' Prison Updated

With a successful housebuilding business in Burlington, Vt., George J. Chicoine figured to be able to meet the modest $150-a-week child-support payments that were due his estranged wife. But he eventually fell $2,550 behind. Brought before Judge Robert W. Lar-row, Chicoine claimed he did not have the money. The judge said that there was evidence he had $90,000 stashed away, and ordered him to pay. Chicoine refused. That meant that he was in contempt of a court order, and Judge Larrow threw him into jail. Chicoine has been an inmate ever since--for a total of five years and four months.

Contempt of court is the one offense in U.S. law for which a person may be jailed simply on the order of a judge. When a person refuses to do what a judge lawfully tells him to do, he can be held in civil contempt and locked up. The theory is that he holds the key to his own release; the minute he convinces the judge that he will obey, he has purged his contempt and will be freed. By the same token, if he never obeys he never gets out.

Last week Chicoine, 57, took his case to the Vermont Supreme Court, where he conceded that originally "he had sufficient assets to pay the support payments." But after he was jailed, a court-appointed trustee liquidated all his property (at prices far below what Chicoine thinks it was worth). In any case, his support debt currently amounts to $40,000 and he says that he is now destitute. Chicoine contends that his continued imprisonment amounts to the old, discredited catch-22 of a debtors' prison: he could pay if he could work, but he cannot get out to work until he pays. He now is trying to persuade the court that he is willing to pay--if he ever can. The state supreme court sent his petition "forthwith" back to the trial court for a hearing on whether he should be released. Meanwhile, it costs the state as much as $14,000 a year to incarcerate him, plus welfare costs for his wife and three of his nine children who are still minors.

Last Christmas Chicoine earned a furlough to see his family, whom he is still close to. That only adds to the irony of his status as something of a celebrity at Vermont's maximum-security prison. Only five men now in Windsor have spent more time imprisoned there, and three of them are murderers.

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