 a lot of this spreadsheet that we got from upstairs yesterday, about whatever day it was last week. There is almost a billion dollars from the equipment revolving long fund to start an IT revolving fund. They're saying that money is in BGS. I want to find out, is it in BGS? Because BGS is saying they don't grant this fund. So I don't care if it's going to look at this. And if it's 945,000 being taken out of it, what's left in that fund? Mary, do you have any insight into this? Mislabeling, it is not in BGS. It was moved in 1915. Eric's so good he's got to the information already. Is that the one we did with the treasurer? No. You moved it over into the Secretary of Administration's office. It's managed by finance and management. So the Secretary's office, there is some money in the revolving long fund for equipment. They're proposing to add an additional 945,000 for information technology projects that departments have been entering into lease contracts for, which they should not be doing. So this is not, I want to buy a computer screen or stuff, but it's slightly larger things that they would be entering into lease contracts. And as you know, you don't want people to be doing that. So this is a way to help pay over a short period of time. But you may want to look at what the details of that are to make sure you're satisfied with it. Well, I guess it's real confusion, because this is transfer to the BGS. The BGS, the criminal revolving fund, to capitalize on IT revolving funds. So where are you transferring from? From the extra money that we had on the bottom line. So it's not coming from another fund. From a fund to another fund. Well, it's coming from the general fund. So there was excess cash. So the criminal revolving loan fund would have a carve out for IT. Incapitalized, they're proposing that 945,000. And I think we've already taken testimony that that's probably about 200,000. That number may need to change to the amount that goes into there, just because there may not be that much on the bottom line. They had extra money. There was money on the bottom line. There is this need. The question is, do you agree with the notion of having a capital IT fund? Not a capital, an IT revolving fund. So you're looking more right now to see if we would agree to carve out an IT revolving fund. Within the equipment revolving fund. If you look at Bulletin 7.14, which you can probably find on our website as we ask to see it. You'll see the details of how it's administered. So what will be now agreed? They're asking for money. We have not made the decision. We just know that as we were going through some of the other funds that it looked like there was a need somewhere else to spend some money. So that may be reduced. But we need to. And so the question is, to you all also, is what should they now be? I don't know. You know that. We have no clue. No one knows that. You do that in Marko. Yes. I mean, some of this is just balancing the bottom line. We lose. OK. So the other question that maybe that we can answer is, is this a good idea? Is this a good idea? Yeah, yeah. And I particularly remember that back when I have with you guys, there were some questions about the equipment revolving on how it was administered. So look at Bulletin 7.14, rewritten in 2015 to look at these. We'll do that in our free time. We'll do that in our free time. Thank you, Mary. So it's not BGS. That's not BGS. OK. So let's shift to DOC. We're going to have a room full and an acronym full of DOC. We're going to start first off with a spreadsheet to really hear about the increased recommend on hep C and MAT treatment. Did that be with you, Commissioner? Or is that going to be more? Or do you want to start off and then transition? You want me to do that for the folks that don't know me and we can start there and then jump into it? For the MAT and the hep C. I don't want to get into chitinin yet. So why don't I have Max and Andy come on to talk about? OK. And I'll fill you in when I come back. OK. We're going to talk to you about the numbers. And I'll talk to you about behind that, the HCP sign. Very well. OK. I'll give it to you. OK. Let me see. I'm going to chair Emmons before our commissioner steps down. We are very at-limited knowledge about what's in the BAA. And we're here more as subject matter experts. So who would have the. So I can talk to the dollar shooters. They can talk to the program. OK. Let's talk about the dollar figures. And there will be questions about the program. There is 1.6 million that's being requested for an increase to hep C and MAT treatment costs. And then there's also an increase in the out-of-state beds from about 1.3 million. So that's what we're looking at. And that's the first thing we're going to do with corrections and get that out of the way. And then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about what's a partner corrections update in a real conversation with a new commissioner. And continue our discussions with what we talked about last week with Priya and the whole picture. So we have a new commissioner, an interim commissioner, Commissioner Jim Baker. And Commissioner Baker spent a lot of time in this committee. 10 years ago, 12 years ago. It was 10 and 1 half years ago I retired in the state police. So whenever we had any state police issues, like building new barracks or any issues, Commissioner Baker would come in and testify before us. And then in the interim, you've done a lot. Maybe just update the committee a little bit. Yeah, so I'll do a little bit of that. Get the numbers out. Let Amy and Max talk to the program and piece of this questions around that. And then we can come back to my approaches to corrections. So as the chair has said, my name is Jim Baker. My background, I was with the state police for about 31 years. And I retired in 2009 as the director of the Colombo and I was the highest-ranking member of the state police. I took a little bit of time off and doing some consulting work. And then I stepped into the Vermont Criminal Justice Training Council, the executive director's position in an interim role. And a little bit of history there. I know that Representative Shaw and Emmons remember this well because of their work at the academy. But it was a suicide of a staff member. And some issues that were going on at the academy. Governor Douglas was the governor at the time. And I had just left the state police. And I was asked to come back in an interim role at the police academy. I was there for about a year and a half. And got some classes from the academy and left a report behind with some recommendations that I think the current director, Rick Gothar, has been following over the years. I then went back to doing a little consulting. Then my phone rang again in December of 10. And this time it was the Rutledge City Police Department. And I went in there as an interim role, thinking I was staying for six months. And quite honestly, I fell in love with the city. I fell in love with the people there. And I fell in love with what the city was about. And I stayed three years. And that was a challenging time in my career. I know Representative Shaw, you were there for part of it. And out of that came Project Vision, which still stands. And this kind of ties into the MAP program. We still have a methadone clinic in the city. And I got a lot of credit for dragging down the crime rate. Burglaries dropped about 80%. But it does not take a mathematician to figure out if you put 400 people into treatment, 250, 300 are doing well. And each of them were committing about $70,000 a year in crime, and the crime rate's going to go down. And so I left there. I went to Washington for about three years. I worked on the executive staff at the International Association of Chiefs of Police, where I had oversight over a couple of significant programming to include the DRE program nationally. And also the Center for Officer Safety and Wellness and the Center for Community Policing. And I left there to do some consulting. And I've been doing some consulting. And then two weekends ago, my phone rang again. And here I am as the Interim Commissioner for 120 days. The gift that keeps me. You can't keep a job. They said she can't keep a job. That is true. I can't keep a job. And if I went through this and you did the MAP, I was colonel for three years, chief for three years, and an IACP for three years. Now you've got three years ahead of you now. And I'll do respect that. If my wife was here, she'd tell you it's not going to be good. Well, we say from Southern Vermont, it's the gift that keeps giving. So let me just touch on. I'll touch on the hepatitis C funding first. And again, this is my sixth day. I did get briefed up on these budget numbers. And I'm going to give you the best I possibly can of why corrections came back in for a budget adjustment. On the hepatitis C, it's a simple issue of we originally started out with one or two patients. And now we're at 25 patients. And the original price of treating a patient was about $60,000 per person. That has significantly dropped to about $15,000. But the number significantly went up. And as I understand it, that was one-time funding. I'm not sure the source of the 20s budget. But that's the reason for that number to go up. On the MAP cost, that was, again, one-time money. We're now at about 700 people that were treating in the population for opiates. So as I understand it, no one anticipated that number to go to 700. And I'll let the folks talk about the medical piece of it. And I'll be more than happy to talk about what I've been asking for questions inside the agency about this. We do have some challenges there. And then the 309,000 in change for health care services, that simply represents the cost, additional cost of the contract with our vendor because of the increase in the number of patients owed for that and had to take a seat. It takes more time of the medical staff to deal with that. Well, let me jump over to the medical piece. Let's ask the medical piece first questions. So of the 1.6 million, 1.6 includes, you now have 20 patients of 15,000 per person. What do you find patients at 15? 25. And then MAT, you've got 700. How much is that per person, do you think, MAT? It's going to vary depending on what they're receiving. But is there a ballpark figure? There are too many variables, and I don't have that number on the top of my head. Buick and methadone have different prices. People are on all different doses. Obviously hubs are more expensive in some regard because of the transport and the security impact. Also depends on whether we're continuing them or whether we're initiating. Whether we're taking them in for reassessment. There are separate costs for assessment, reassessment. We can obviously continue dosing and monitoring. So it really is all over the map. Some people could be on bup and then transfer them at the dome. I think you can adjust. So I'm trying to break down the 1.6. You said that 309,000 is the additional cost to the vendor. So where's the other 1.3 million between hep C and MAT? That would be the increase for more patients being on there. It says also increase in health care staffing. Would there be an increase in staffing here? Is that the 309,000 for the vendor? As it was explained to me by Matt, that's the increase of the 309, 198 staff. It's a big process to put people through the line for the MAT program. I mean, it's a high security issue. And we are dealing with some diversion as a result of that. Questions? I can see Kurt and I can see Carl. Carl first, because he's got his question. Just doing the good afternoon culture. How are you? Thanks for joining us. Just doing the quick math here, it looks like the hep C funding is about 375,000. Is that sound ball rate? So that leaves about 900,000 plus on MAT. It leaves about a million. No, no, no, you're losing me. So our budget adjustment, we're asking for 880. It's 1.6 million. We've got 1.6 million on our spreadsheet. We've got 1.6 million on our spreadsheet, which would be an increase in hep C and MAT treatment costs, including increased health care staffing under the contract. There's also an increase in pilot funds pursuant to X72 for 6,000. That's 6,000. Right. So I didn't add these up. I'm assuming the Excel spreadsheet, I haven't finally calculated that correctly at 1.625 change. 1.625, yep. So we're just trying to never do math in public, but that's what we're doing. So it's 1.625. Yeah, it's almost a million. Is that for the MAT? 1 million, or 900,000. Yeah, this is natural to be able to bail the out. I wasn't involved in that particular calculation, but I can say as far as hep C treatment goes now, we are initiating treatment for about a half dozen people per month. That's an average over the past six months. And after the initial treatment of a larger population of people who are already in our custody, that's like an expected to be ongoing situation. That can range anywhere from 75,000, 80,000 a month to 120,000, 130 a month, depending on what course of treatment those six people, again, an average would need, which varies by their clinical presentation. So I would say that a larger percentage of that money that you're looking at is going towards hep C and then MAT at this point. If you do the calculation as far as what we've had for the past six months. Yeah, is it not broken out in this portion? No, we just have about 0.625. But 6,000 of that is for increase in pilot times. So just multiplying 25 patients by 15,000 doesn't, that's not getting us to the right. Yeah, I'm not sure what the 25 patients number is. We get the monthly cost data and clinical data from our contractor. And what I'm seeing is anywhere from four to eight a month are being initiated on that treatment. We pay the full course upfront to ensure that that patient gets the full course of treatment. And so if you look at that moving forward, that's been consistent for five or six months now. It's really a larger number of patients for the next year. The next year being the end of this fiscal year. So if you look at, let's say, if there's an average of six per month for six months, that's not more than like 25. That gets us more than 600,000 range. Right, fine. Yeah, okay, got it. And I apologize. No, that's fine. I thought you had a spreadsheet that was broke out, because that's what I'm looking at. I apologize. No, that's fine. And those numbers, the numbers, that's just the cost of the medication itself. It doesn't include staff time for workup, outpatient treatment, consulting with the UVM specialist. And that number's not, that's not captured in the 309 for the long term. About 941. Yeah, I don't know about, I think probably all inclusive in the number that was presented, but what I just said, the like 75 to 120 a month, that's just the medication. Okay, got it. All right, thank you. Thanks. Thanks, Max. Yeah, sure. Thank you. Many? Kurt? Maybe you could clarify it. The program started, and didn't we do a budget adjustment with one time money before? Haven't we done a $2 million one? One time at C or M-A-T? M-A-T. When we first started it, it was really one time money, and they were hoping for savings. Was it in the Medicaid budget that we'd be offset? That's when we first started. To pile up. That was like two or three years ago. Because they were hoping there'd be savings in another part of their budget, particularly for services on the outside for folks with M-A-T. And I think it was looking more at the Medicaid. And then they could ship some of those savings for the initiation of M-A-T. And they don't think the material is. I don't know. But if we look at the program in general, I mean it started out to be estimated at the beginning of like $100,000 or something. Very small. And then we had a one time money of a couple million, I thought, at one point. All right. Now it would have been a year or so, two years ago. When I testified, any way to see under department budget, when we originally were developing the bill beyond the initial stages of the pilots, we were basing our estimates on the Rhode Island model and estimating they were coming in at like one point four million, I think. And so that was the number we had for a while. That was part tobacco money. And then I can't remember. That was something. There was a savings element. Somewhere that we were short. And then something else. Now we've shifted, we got some money from the health department, some SOAR money from the health department. And we use that to make up. I can also speak to the staffing issue, possibly. But again, we weren't part of Matt's discussion and prepping with the commissioner. What I'm trying to figure out is there's a lot of one-time money in here. What's the ongoing, I think the ongoing is going to be base budget. And how much is that amount going to be for MAT for 700 in there? But does the base budget include the one-time money? No. No, so we're going to disconnect? No, we're moving. You now move into that one-time money. We started the program, okay? So that one-time money is now gone. But the program is still existing. So it becomes a cost to your base budget of DOC. That's what happens. So because we're hiring staff and things like that, which is going to have to continue? But also the medication. You're purchasing more medication. So how much for 700 inmates is the MAT program in the DOC? How much is that? My best recollection of reviewing this with Matt was that it was like 1.6 annually. So we're not off base from the 1.4? No, no, I mean, it's close. And the staffing issue is again, meeting the community standard. We've worked closely, obviously with the health department and ensuring that we're achieving that. And we increased the staff and not just on the security side to address what the commissioner talked about in terms of managing security in the MAT line, helping to prevent diversion, but also in regard to the actual medical providers. We've replicated the health department state plan community-based spokes, which basically creates a metric of one MAT clinical case manager and one MAT RN per 100 patients. So also, and player to this, we are also looking at going out to bed for new vendor, because our contract with the current vendor expires this summer, right? February? June 30th. Is this Centurion? Centurion. So DOC is now in the process of going out to bed for a vendor. Could be Centurion, could be somebody else at the end. We don't know yet. Their contract is expiring. Centurion's contract's expiring. Because we've been with them for, what, five years? But on these costs, the 1.6 million we're talking about is above and beyond the vendor costs. Anything else about their adjustment piece for MAT and Hep C? Okay, out of state beds, we've had an increased cost. When we do, when the budget is done, they really look at projecting our out-of-state bed needs and then budget accordingly. And every budget adjustment, there's always an adjustment to the out-of-state appropriation. Sometimes the out-of-state beds have decreased in use and sometimes they've increased in use. So I'm gonna, again, Mr. I'm gonna try to do the best I can in six days in this. You're fine, you're fine. As I was brief, we budgeted in fiscal year 20 for 220 average of 225 beds. And we've been averaging this fiscal year about 273. And as I sit here today, the report that I get daily, we're at 268 in the facility in Mississippi. And as a result of that, that's the request of the budget adjustment for the 1.3 million. The difference is we've been averaging about 273 versus the 225 that was budgeted. Commissioner, there's maybe a question you can't answer, but do you know if we have anybody out of state now as a result of construction going on with either Springfield or Newport or someplace like that? I was told the answer to that is no. No. Okay. I can double check that. I guess I just, I'd add to that question and other facility work, like what was going on in St. John's very good. There was some, there was some this summer. There was some from St. Jay or shifted to Newport. All right. And the folks in Newport had to move to out of state. And then there was also pretty strong. You know, I think I remember hearing that they didn't have to move anybody out of state. They were able to shift people around enough because people in the state, I think we heard that this one. How much do we pay in bed out of state over here? Is it 20,000? 30, we have to 30, 28, anybody know? We're putting you on the spot. Yeah, but I'm gonna say this and I'll double check it. But I think it's either 70 or 75 a day. I would double check that. It's in that law park. I probably should ask that question before I left, but I believe it's between 70 and 75 a day. How much we can do about that until we figure out what we're doing in state? Carl. Kurt, Kurt. It's okay, still. Yeah, excuse me. Probably might as well check it through some more if you're... The contract, does it have a minimum number of... Are we setting it in the minimum with this addition? No. What is the minimum is? Two and a quarter. 200, is it 150, 200? It was over 200. Is that right, 200? 225 jumps into my head. You know my last year's notes, Kurt? No, no, no, that's okay. I just wanted to make sure this wasn't changing the minimum. You know, you'd have to negotiate that in the contract, but you do have a maximum, too. You have a minimum of max. I think it's either two or 225 again, please don't hold me. So it's the cost of doing this? So we'll have further committee discussion in terms of what I recommend will be upstairs with the folks, because they're gonna be doing mock-up and they will look to us for some direction. Anything else from any of them? Nothing, well that was easy. I'm gonna go back to work. We'll have you in for a longer term. I'll try to chat. I'll try to chat, let's be setting it. So let's transition to the bigger issue when it gets more public attention. It's the ongoing situation within corrections, within the Chittenden facility, but also system-wide within DLC. And this is an opportunity for the commissioner to share with us, to welcome him on board, if you want, our condolences. And also, you said you've been on the job for about a week, and our? Seventh day. Seventh day. Oh, you can rest? You can rest the seventh day. Well listen, I'm just trying to figure out how long I can write this, right? Let me see. So we'd like you just to give us an update in terms of what you've been seeing or what you've been thinking. So let me... Pass forward. Let me start with just a couple of general comments here. I know corrections are of big interest to this committee, obviously. I think it's important that you all, I mean, some of you folks know me fairly well. Other folks don't know me at all. You know, first of all, you heard what I'd done for work. And when I went into the academy at the Royal City Police Department, I never met with the Department leaders or anything like that. And there's no reason for that. And I won't get into it because I don't want to be doing, you know, talking to someone's character. But I went into a very bad leadership situation in both of their situations. And I went in and tried to figure it out at my own, with the assistance of other folks. In this case, I had never met Mr. Duchet before. We had never met before. And the week before I started, I had a meeting with Secretary Smith to talk about the process moving forward. And that same day, I met with the commissioner for two hours. And Mike Duchet's a good man. In two hours, I learned a lot from him about how to run a correctional system and some of the history. And I want to say this publicly that I believe that Mike Duchet was heading in the right direction. And he shared that with me. And I think he will find with me that my thoughts around the criminal justice system, even though I come from a law enforcement background, and some of this was shaped in my experience in Rotland, and some of it was shaped in my experience when I was in DC, is not much different than what Mike Duchet looked at the correctional system. Our job is to create good citizens that good it is. And we should be doing that with dignity and respect for everyone involved in the system. And that is something I've been talking about. When I walked into Waterbury a week ago yesterday, and I had my first senior staff meeting with the senior staff in Waterbury, what I found is a group of leaders that are totally demoralized. There was a lot of emotion in that room. This is within central office. It was in central office to see the new team. I know there were some tears shed. What the secretary's asked me to do was not come to corrections and make enormous changes in four months. What he's asked me to do is stabilize the staff, provide leadership to the staff, and I'm going to defend the staff when the staff needs to be defended. And I think some of the staffs in the room will tell you that one of the things I've repeated over and over again is we need to start telling our own story because there's some unbelievable stuff that goes on inside corrections every day, especially when it comes to dignity and humanity. And so I recognize that the reports that are coming out of South Florida are serious allegations. And I think Secretary Smith did the right thing in bringing in an outside group to conduct an investigation into those allegations. And that's happening over here. And I will be working very close with Chris Gottman and his team from the law firm investigating those allegations. And I was at the meeting when the secretary told him he has the keys to all the other institutions as well. He thinks he needs them to take a look at what's going on. At the same time, my job is to run the agency and get people to be focused. And I started that by getting my arms around the staff in the central office last week. I was in South Burlington on Friday, meeting with Superintendent Stone. And she's doing some incredible work there. And she's doing some incredible programming work with the women that are housed there. And I also have to say publicly that I've got a 40 year relationship with corrections over the years. I remember early on as a young trooper bringing people to a facility and you didn't know who the inmates and the guards were. And I've watched the evolution of that agency over 40 years develop into an agency where there's a lot of folks that work there that I have a deep amount of respect for that really care about the folks we serve and really understand that we play a role in keeping communities safe. And there are very good employees inside corrections. And I have to say in front of this committee as I'll say in other committees, I know some of them personally, I've known for a long time. I just watched this morning a video of an assault of a corrections officer in St. John'sbury last night. These are very, very dangerous jobs. And the work that they're doing takes an enormous strain on the staff. I'm hearing stories of people being forced to work 16 hours straight, taking six and eight hours off, sleeping in their car, coming back to work at another 18 hours. It's not safe, it's dangerous. It's not the way to run a system. And so, my focus over the next four months, guess it's a little less than that now, my wife actually has an app on her iPad. Counting the days. Counting the days down. My focus is to get my head under the hood and try to leave behind some suggestions on what I see in conjunction with what Triscoff and Teeps come back with, to try to move corrections to the next level. But I gotta repeat again, that the staff that's around me in central are all career folks. This has been their life. And I think we're having a better week this week. And I'm hoping to have a better week next week. And we're dealing with issues as they come up, especially issues around investigations and discipline. So I wanted to kind of set that frame and I'm certainly open to any questions or comments or feedback. I do think that Representative Evans and Representative Morrissey and Representative Shaw didn't know me well. This is not meat pong to my chest. I am a no nonsense guy. I come to work every day, I come to work. And I have a very high standard for public service. And I have a very low tolerance for people who don't serve the public the way they should be served. And I consider the folks that, by statute I'm now a response before, you know, in the custody of the commissioner of corrections, I take that role very seriously. And I take the folks that we are entrusted with very seriously with the understanding that there are some very dangerous people in jail. And, you know, I'm excited about some of the conversations you're going on around justice reinvestment. You know, I'm probably letting the cat on the bag early, but I'm in troops, so let me say it. You know, we were just awarded a grant from the Urban Institute and the Arnold Ventures Foundation to take a look at the culture, not only the culture of the employees, but the culture of the population that try to figure out how we can do better. And that's going to be focused on one facility and how we for the pressure needs to come out. Those are the kind of forward-thinking things that are going on inside corrections. These things that happen shouldn't be happening. And they'll be dealt with as long as I'm sitting in the chair as the interim commissioner. So I'm hoping that helps in the background. So you have a 40-year perspective in terms of it's an outside perspective, being from law enforcement, bringing folks to facilities. What's your take now in terms of what you saw back then? One, you said there is a real difference in correctional officers now to then. Are you picking up any differences in terms of what the M.A. population is? Yeah. So I think, you know, and yes. Let me frame your question a little bit. My experience in Rowland changed my entire perspective. I was probably at one time, even as the colonel, one of the people that would throw ice balls over at corrections, right? The guys on it for all my, you know, all that kind of stuff that goes on. I had a different perspective when I was involved because we had a corrections community corrections officer embedded inside the police department. And we worked very closely with corrections. And we really focused on the folks that were doing the most harm. And I got to see the inside of corrections, the way they look at those offenders and how they cooperated with us. And it was a big piece of the way we trove the crime rate down in Rowland. Going back to the offenders, you know, one time as I was briefed the other day, we used to supervise 12,000 people in the community in all different forms, probation, parole, furlough. You know, and I'm getting caught up on the number of designations that we have for people in the community. I mean, we have to employ an entire team to figure that out, right? And that's a conversation for the future when I understand it better. But we used to supervise 12,000 people in the community, we're down to seven. A lot of those folks got deflected away. You know, this is the DWI2 guy who gets into, you know, gets into treatment or just realizes it's not a good idea to be driving. Those folks are no longer around corrections. You know, and even within the last week reading daily reports, you know, the population we're supervising in the community, some of us driven by the opiate crisis, some of us driven by the amount of trauma that people have been through in their lives, these are very complicated individuals. And I don't mean that in a disrespectful way because none of us in many cases would have wanted to live the life that they live. And I have been spending a lot of time getting to understand the population in South Burlington because that's been the target of the conversation. And you know, when I visited with Superintendent Stone the other day, you know, we got talking about what sort of population look like. You know, a lot of those women have been victims of crime. They've been exposed to a lot of trauma in their life. And coping with what we all cope with every day becomes very difficult. So for us to supervise them becomes very challenging. So I think that's the difference in the population. I also think who's inside the facilities, you know, I don't mean this in a very disrespectful way, but my 40 years, you know, if you're in jail in Vermont there's a lot of chances given to you ahead of time. And there's a lot of sad stories in the jails, I can get that, but I think the population is a little bit different. You know, down in your neighborhood, representative, you know, we had a question officer taking a hostage three weeks ago, four weeks ago. You know, I saw the video of that. I saw the video of the assault last night. And it's important for us inside facilities to maintain security and order. And we do that through those people who work out. So it is a little bit more challenging than what it was when Jim Baker was wandering around as a road trooper back in the 70s and 80s. You remember me, don't you represent the words? I do. So that sort of leads, and that leads to a lot of different questions, both on the inmate side in terms of the dynamics that's happening there. And also on the staff side too, the correctional officers that even back 20 years ago, going in and visiting a facility, it was very clear that the goal was for security of that facility. It's based on security. Put them in jail, lock them up, put them in jail. And it seems like some of that is now changing for the correctional officers that yes, it's still security, but there's so much human needs in terms of mental health issues, in terms of opioid issues, in terms of trauma issues. And I'm talking for both male and female inmates. Yeah, on the trauma piece, I'll just give an example of the self-proclaimed facility fight. Trauma's a big piece of what's going on inside of the facilities. All facilities. And I'm wondering how can we help the staff, correctional officers, and even shift supervisors, case workers, superintendents, expand or grow into a different culture. We got work to do on this, okay, but let me tell you this, Heather Simons is over here. She's one of our senior leadership team who's a response for the academy. I'm going to the academy next week to meet with her recruits who are in the academy. And I'm going to deliver a message to them about what I said to you, about setting a standard and setting a bar. I think we're moving that way. The challenge is, I don't know about anybody here, but I'm not sure I'd go into a facility or work with some of the forest over time at 18 parks an hour. We have to have a bigger conversation about who we're hiring and how we're hiring them. And again, under Heather's leadership, we just took two folks and started a recruiting unit. I'm just starting to get my head wrapped around that. So let's get loose. They're taking the lead in being coached, my friends at the state police, about how the state police recruit. I haven't quite had the time to get my head into the hiring process. I do see issues already with the winged hire. I was running late here because I've been all morning staffing disciplinary issues with employees. And again, it's a little discouraging to walk out of there because I even started buying it to everybody, but it's not everybody. As the HRP, I talk this through it, it's reoccurring issues with folks. And I think this goes to your point about the turnover happened so quickly. And I'm gathering this already, I'm not giving you a definitive view of this, but I'm starting to gather this from watching and talking to folks. We are promoting folks into first line supervisor roles so quickly that they don't have a lot of experience in first line supervision. Now, I don't understand corrections the way I understand law enforcement. I understand systems pretty well. And everywhere I've been, where I've been asked to come in, at the end of the day, it's first line supervision. Those are the folks that hold folks accountable. You know, I remember when I was a colonel of the state police, I got asked to go do a presentation at Green Mountain Coffee to an in-service class about leadership. And before the class, I was talking to the gal that did the leadership, and I said, what's your problem? She said, our first line supervisors, hey, me too. It's where it happens. It's where when I'm home at dead, at night, they set the standard inside the facilities. And I think we have work to do around that. But I gotta tell you, in the last three to five years, based on what I was briefed by Commissioner Tuchette and Heather and other folks, a lot of effort is going into exposing people to leadership training and setting a new standard. We gotta stop the turnover in order to get staff stabilized so we can build that level of experience and expectations that would hold people accountable in the right way, if that makes sense to you. So, if you talk, you know, I have court officers that live in my district and you see them in the stores or in your neighborhood. And I make an effort to reach out to them and ask questions, because they're off the clock. And what I hear quite often is they feel that they don't have, nobody has their back. They don't have the backup. I ask that, specifically, who doesn't have your back? Who do you feel doesn't have your back? Is it central office or is it within the facility? And they'll say it's within the facility. It's either the shift supervisor or the superintendent. And you dig in a little deeper than that and you hear, well, you know, you're really, after, you know, you're dealing with inmates and you can try to change some of the behavior. So you issue DRs and those get grieved, they get resolved one way or another, issue another DR. And finally, you might get pressure from the higher ups in the facility, hey, don't do that anymore. And they say, well, what are we supposed to do as correctional officers? The people who are in charge don't even back us up. So that's contributing to feeling demoralized. And the overtime feeds into that. When I was told the price of overtime this year, they had to lift me off the floor. It's not healthy. No, it's not. It's not good. I mean, never mind as taxpayer money, I get that. It's the morale of the staff. Look, sleep deprivation is a serious thing. It's a very serious thing. And I've done a fair amount of research and work on that when I was in DC, I understand it. It's very serious. Let me touch on something, Representative Edmond, saying, we're talking about the superintendents and the district managers will be in the office on Friday and I'll be visiting with them and talk about my expectations. Now look, I run the risk of, they may have on their iPads a program counting down the days that I'm gone. I understand that. But I'm a pretty persistent guy, as you know. I've been to the South Point facility already and I'll be going to the Academy next week and I'm gonna be doing a site visit at every institution and every district office to include focus groups with the employees by the end of February. And to get a sense from them, but you got a sense. And that, when I do the focus group, it'll be without local management in the room. I do think, and I'll say this, I've said this a couple of times, is some folks in the building are already privately, I would just caution you about, this is a serious challenge of state government. Very serious. The work that's done is very serious work. I think the type of inmate and folks that have taken our custody, that's not gonna get any better. I mean, you all know this. You know what the opening of crisis is doing. You know the level of trauma that's introducing and the families. We know what's happening inside schools. So we've got to get better at our programming and I had this conversation the other day. It's not gonna get much better. And we're gonna have to find ways as an organization to figure out a new form of program that deals with folks that are in those situations. Because at the end of the day, and I'll go back to my relevant days, you know the folks that we were working with in conjunction, we said tomorrow, why you do well in the community, we're here to give you everything you need to do well, best we can, if not, there's consequences. And I do think that in the mid management level, I'm gathering day six already, there is a certain amount of fear amongst them to do their job just because of the kind of pressure that is system to system about how many do we have inside? How many are in Mississippi? What's the overtime cost? I was just causing you that as we move forward and have this discussion during the session, please don't look for political answers to a systematic problem. A political answer is not gonna result, this is gonna take the can down the road. And some of the staff is still in the room, I've heard me say this several times, that a political answer will not produce a long term in an outcome that's gonna produce better citizens and not better inmates. And we gotta get really serious about, and it's gonna cost money. The type of folks that were programmed back in the community on furlough, we're using modalities as far as clinical support, that's from 50 years ago, and we have to rethink that. And that's why the criminal justice reinvestment, we're all in on that, corrections is all in. We wanna find a way to do better. And at the same time, we gotta hold our folks accountable to have made messes for our organization. Well, the DOC is not an isolation. DOC is not an isolation. It is part of bigger picture, it's part of our community's systems. Sorry, and it's not just corrections that issue to resolve this, you may have heard Secretary Smith already say this, but I'll say it for you. This is not just a DOC issue, it's an AHS issue. Mental health and addiction and DCF and kids, it's a system-wide problem but that's gotta be looked at, system-wide. It's too early to have you answer this, I'm sure. In the overtime piece, you spoke about quite a few a lot because it does create problems within the correctional, within the correctional officers and the people within the facility. A few years back, we were using a large number of temporary employees and we authorized some more positions, and I'm assuming now that those positions are currently unfilled, plus more. Well, no, we're getting, I mean, I think we're getting better. I mean, the problem is we're getting folks in the door. It's what's going on at the back door. And I think we got, I mean, I'm gonna say this again, you know, Heather's here, I wanna credit her for this. This piece about the way we're gonna recruit is gonna be a big part of, it's a career. It's not a place just a system. So what do we do to bridge through this process? That we've got people working way, way too many hours. You know, how, have you thought about it? It may not have yet. How do we bridge to, till you get the new calorie coming in? Yeah, I'm thinking a lot about it, but I wish I had the solution. I don't already know. Okay, I expected that answer. But I gotta tell you, when it comes to the staff, it's my biggest concern. It's just not safe for me. If there's any change that occurs in the world, staffing world, we're gonna need buy-in from the current staff. And that may be difficult because of each other job is done. There's a fine balance in advocating for them, which I will all the time, and hold them accountable. I would love to get by the time I get my heads around. Work performance, misconduct, issues is sleep deprivation. I know in my law enforcement days, there's a direct correlation between conduct of police officers and sleep deprivation. There's a very clear connection there. You think there's also sleep deprivation from the inmates, from the inmates, too? Or not? It's hard to say. Hard to say, but again, you know, they're human beings. It's pretty stressful being in you. I've already seen a bootle of emails from moms worrying about their children in jail. And how much are our facilities in the shape of our facilities and layout of our facilities contributing to some of this? I don't claim to be an expert, but you all know this, your institutions, corrections, that self-building facilities, something's gotta happen. I think we have to be cautious about not building a building for a sake of a building. You know, I was in one of my first meetings and I said, well, at least we got a new facility in Springfield. And they all looked at me like, new facility that's 20 years old. Is it that old already? 20, is it correct, Heather? 20 years old? Yeah, I didn't get in, it's 19. So, you know, I think it's a bigger, I don't have the answer to that either, but, you know, again, if you're gonna shift to that kind of work that I talked about, the modality of support that needs to be done, you need the facility to be able to do that. And as I understand it from talking to staff, you know, moving people inside a facility that's not designed to move people, requires staff. It requires staff. And so when you start talking about overtime, you can't cut corners on what you've got for staff, because you can't lose control of the facility. Questions? Kurt, Kurt, Kurt. I'm gonna get him a hat. I'm gonna call him Taylor, I had to call him Kurt. Yeah, you know, I'm gonna wear this. There's a solution we could just switch. I'll be part of it. Um, can you, what is the role of a corrections officer? How would you write a job description for a corrections officer? I'm not trying to pun on this, sir, right? But six days, I mean, I think this is one of the challenges we have because the job sounds like it's a simple job, but it's not. And what the old version is, where I think some of the culture it bleeds into is jails, and our jails are built this way. Jails were built to put people in jail and hold them. And so guards were nothing more than what the title is, right, a guard. Crescent officers today, I mean, just because of the difficulty of the type of situations that we have, they have to have de-escalation skills. They've gotta be quick on their feet. They've gotta have a certain level of courage, not only facing danger, but courage when it comes to making sure boundaries, the lines don't get disappeared through the relationship between staff. They need to understand the law. They have to, I mean, I know that the staff has been in talk to you about career. They have to understand the boundaries of that. It's fairly complicated and, you know, the trouble is the job market. I have to be careful because I do represent the administration, but the job description of what we pay people is challenged. And I think it's gotta be a bigger conversation because, you know, to go back to my law enforcement days, it kind of like helped me think the way I think about this. Well, it used to be what a trooper was in 1978 when I came on. You spent most of your class doing self-defense. Moving forward, police agencies, and I know this from my work in the country, are, they're a social services delivery system now. And that takes an entire different individual to shift from that warrior mentality to that guardian mentality in the community. And if I could wave my wand to straighten out the situations that we have that are hurting us, I would want the people in the guardians of the people in the responsible for it, the warriors where they need to be, and social workers when it comes to that as well. So, how do you do that at $18 an hour? It's a challenge, but I gotta tell you that this staff has built a very solid six weeks, Heather, five weeks of academy. I think, you know, we'll have to look at expanding academy. And there's some great training that goes on there to start building that. And we do get good candidates from the door, but, you know, we usually do not retain them. It's not that we're losing everybody, but that we use some good talent at the door. So, if I had that answer, I would implement it. And I'd be gone before April 30th, but I mean, I think we gotta work that out. And I do think getting guidance from folks, stakeholders that have an interest in what we do is important. Questions? Well, this is unusual. Well, we're giving him a break so we can get at least get his feet on the ground. Yeah, I can't wait to come back two weeks from now. So, what are their committees? I know you're going over to the Senate of Ops. What are the committees on the House side? Well, I mean, I think there's a certain element of the House going on, so. A whole. I mean, clearly, I'll have my turn to hear all of them in a month in appropriations. Because we can't do this in this committee alone. No, and I think we're, I mean, I want to re-emphasize this right because that, this is not just a questions issue. It's a systematic issue that has to be looked at systematically. And yes, there's these nuances about staff and who you hire and how you train them and how you retain them. You know, as difficult as that is, that's kind of in the big scheme of things, that's annoying to fruit, in the big scheme of things. It's about a systematic approach to, you know, an entire different version of how we transition people back into being productive citizens. So, I mean, mental health is the big piece of this. How about gang activity within the facilities? Is that starting to surface? And again, as you know, because you've been doing this longer than I have, it's our concern about out of state, right? You know, and look, I listen to the stories of the folks that have the national picture inside corrections that know what corrections agencies and other states look like. And I'm not saying I'm going to lower the bar to the standard, I'm not. We're doing pretty well with the way our staff handles things and the level of professionalism that they do their business with. And those are those outlier staff that have embarrassed the agency and we need to deal with. Because in some states, you know, organized crime runs rampant inside facilities. We do have concerns. And you know, I think in the future, we need to talk a little bit more about there's a lot of diversion going on. You know, I think we have to revisit that. You know, I talked to Senator Sears about that a little bit about potential adjusting the legislation. I'm all about treatment. People need treatment. But we got to be careful. Diversion starts to become criminal activity inside a facility. And then people gain power as a result of that. And you know, bad things can happen. So we have to be careful about that. So I'm assuming you will be developing some initiatives that would need legislative, important legislative help and direction. So I would say our door's open. My door's open as well. Yeah, and please. And I'm not hard to find my email because pretty much the standard email james.acre at the month I go. And the folks that know me know that I have a deep respect for this process. I have a deep respect for what goes on in this building. I understand all of that. I just ask that we work collectively together to try to work with some of these issues. And if you have legislation or thoughts, I think it would be really important because all committees work in silos. Say we don't want to, but it's the nature of the beast. But we could help in working with our colleagues, be it in judiciary committee in the house, be it in government operations, be it in appropriations, to have them to work with them to see the bigger picture. Also human services committee because they oversee the agency of human services. And we might be able to be the conduit. I'm thinking this is DOC's problem and only DOC and it is not. And the more we make it that, it's the more the political answer that I said before. It's not the systematic change. And the more we do that, the more pressure there is on the system inside the elections. And we're not a family. I'm not saying it's going to happen tomorrow, but a couple of facilities are going to be a lot of pressure staffing-wise and I'll have a better idea of that as I travel around the state. Kurt? I think I'm not allowed to ask questions. We already know the answer to it, based on the floor. But anyway, do you feel you have the resources that you need to do your job? And I'm not answering this because of why you think I'm answering it. Okay, good. I didn't want you to answer the way that I thought you might have. You know although the governor's address hasn't come out yet, I worked for the governor. I don't know the answer to that. I'll give you the answer I gave when I went into Robinville. You know, and I think Representative Shaw could back up. Things were so bad there that they would have gave me a helicopter, a hundred cops. I could have had a bulletproof car or a driver. And this is what I said to the mayor and the board of all of them. I don't know yet. I'll let you know. And I'll say the same thing to you. I don't know. And it could end up that where we need help isn't in the obvious place. It could be in places like better understanding data to make better decisions. I'm a huge guy on data. And that may not be a fancy thing. And I'm just using this as an example. I'm not saying it's the answer. I may say we need another data person at the central office. Because the data person will help us better manage the system which takes pressure off the system. Takes pressures off the importance. Cuts down on our older time. I'm just using that as an example. I don't have the answer for you today. Okay, else? Not today, huh? Thank you, commissioner. It's good to see you. Yeah, you're welcome. Anytime. No, I'm sure. And we'll have you back. At least let you have a chance to get your legs under you. Thank you. Thanks, all of you. Thank you. Thank you. Do we want to take a quick break before we transition? Some air in the room? Yeah. Yeah. Chains of air. I have our conversation about PREA again. One thing is, I heard back from Eric Piscatric, we talked about the definition of PREA, the definition of rape, sexual assault. We have a definition on the books in Vermont, sexual assault. And PREA, there's a definition of rape. We wanted to see if they were defined differently or the same. And Eric responded back with me yesterday and said yes, they are defined the same. And on PREA and federally stated. That was one of our questions last week. So, Heather, Heather, Jen, Heather. Heather. Yeah, Heather. Jump right in. Sure, well, sort of. One thing that we talked about with both Jen and Heather is a broader review of PREA on the state level, folks. And then also working down through certain topics within PREA. And we thought also it might be good to start because there's so much interest from committee members about the audit. So we would start there, but there'd be more conversations at a later date with all the other issues within PREA. So I'll turn it over to you, Heather. Okay. And you can meet us on. All right. Thank you very much. My name's Heather Sainz. I work for the Department of Corrections and the Director of Training and Professional Development. And thank you to the committee and Chair Evans for allowing me to spend this time talking about not just the PREA audits, but the process for which these standards for the Prison Rate Elimination Act were developed. And I know last week we started to take a bit of a dive, deeper dive into the dynamics around victimization and trauma, addition to the climate in terms of how that impacts the population that lives in residences, facilities especially. We know through the audit process that these standards apply not just to our facilities, but also to Woodside and any confinement housing. So we're gonna have more discussion about that as time goes on, but really what my assignment was for today was to take some time and review the background and the process and do an overview of how the Prison Rate Elimination Act post-ERICS briefing on each standard attaches itself to operations and corrections facilities and correctional environments. And part of that discussion would be around literally what is the culture of a corrections setting in regards to the Prison Rate Elimination Act. I said it last week and I probably will say it every time I'm invited here if I'm invited back after today, but again, the spirit of this work and the standards were written in the most important statement which is that Prison Rate should never be considered part of a sentence and that we know that the cultural aspects of the work we have to do is gonna be what drives everything else no matter what laws we have, no matter how many policies we create, this needs to be leadership-owned and culture-supported. And to speak briefly about what Commissioner Baker was talking about, all of those things would be considered pre-related matters, recruitment, retention, backgrounds, corrections fatigue, which is a term that has been coined that captures a different kind of burnout that's not compassion fatigue, but that envelops what an officer or another staff person might experience over their career. It might be considered primary trauma in that you have an incident that you're part of or it could be secondary trauma, which is really kind of what we've been talking about, the slow erosion of what happens when you work in this business for a long time. And I'm barely scratching the surface, but these are topics that are also related to the Prison Rate Elimination Act in that we can't pay attention to one thing, we have to pay attention to everything. And that's a tall order, particularly if we're shy on resources or shy on staff. From the audit perspective, we review the audits, it's been a while, we have another set of audits starting in February at Chittendom. What I decided to do today, because it would take us literally all day from one line by line through each facility audit, what I wanted to do is tell you what the topics are that are considered in the way they do the audit and then touch on the challenges because that came up last week, some of the areas where we may have not met the audit standard, but then remediated in that 180 day window and fixed what the challenge was. So how pre-audits are a little bit different is that it's not just a paper audit, it's an audit of policy, it's an audit of training, of inmate education, health services, equipment, security, staffing, and it's also not just a paper audit in that we upload all of our documents ahead of time. So before a federal auditor comes to visit us, they will ask for all of our proof documentation is what it's called, that shows that we follow each of the standards. And I think there's roughly like 40, the two or three actual PREA standards and then there's a ton of substandards underneath that. We will show each area from a PREA audit survey that's sent to us. We will have to show proof before the auditor gets here that we are doing what we're supposed to be doing. So in other words, if we're supposed to be delivering specific training, we'll show documentation that we are, but when the auditor is here and visiting a facility, he or she will arbitrarily stop any staff person of any rank and ask a question related to that section of the PREA audit. So it's also a live audit. And that includes focus groups and random questions to the offender population. That's the most basic overview and you can please stop and if you have questions as we go. What I'd like to do now is review some of the areas where we were remediated so we could talk about the complexities of what might happen if we're missing the mark on one or two of the standards. So are any of these documents have been submitted and posted up here pertaining to your testimony right now where you're headed? Yes. And I'm just not checking on the... Maybe. Yes, so that's not it. Are we good? Okay. So at the top there, you can see, these are the start dates of the first round of audits. Started in February of 2017. All of our facilities pass the audit. This is important to note. We were one of the few states that were able to show that we completed and passed all of our audits. There are some states and a large number of facilities in this country where they haven't even started the process. Also, that this work is daunting. So how many, what your inmate population is, that's really good to matter. So if you're, I have a colleague who I train with, her name is Kathy Allison and she's the Undersecretary Department of Corrections in California. We've had many discussions about the process for PREA audits, PREA standards and how to manage that. Well, she's in charge of 155,000 inmates. So it's a little bit different game. So when I talk today about how we fit culture into this process, I'm also gonna bring you some perspective from some folks that I've worked in and some prisons that I've visited. Yes. On some, I also do consulting for the National Institute of Corrections and have trained PREA in other states and had some other experiences in terms of how challenging and complex this can be. For example, I've done some training at Rikers, for example, and that's a different experience than it might be in Vermont, but the audit process is the same. They, for example, have just barely begun and we are going into our second round of second audit cycles and we feel pretty confident today. If you go down to number one, 11513, that is the standard number. This is not one facility. What we did is we took all of the areas where we had challenges so I could give you kind of a sound bite of what this conversation looks like and explain what the process was. So supervision and monitoring. This requires that we use video monitoring. During that first round of audits, our auditor said that we had specific line spots in our facilities and we needed to make changes with our cameras. This is not new news, particularly for anyone who's visited places like Windsor, line spots, or the theme. So it's not that we were avoiding putting cameras in places, but these items also are not covered by grants. So there is grant money, it's not used for equipment, it has to be used for sustaining training and capacity. So Heather, let me interrupt right there, just so we can read the chart based on your statement just now about the camera, line spots, and Windsor. So... That wasn't Windsor, I'm sorry, I just... I know, I went up with it just right up when I'm looking. So in Chittenden, there was an onsite audit, look C, February 27th, 2017, the onsite inspection completed March 1st. And then the interim report was 330, 2017, and I'm taking it that full compliance was reached in August of 2018. So there was some remediation that needed to occur within that timeframe. Is that the way to interpret that? Or is it in the same with Southeast State, March 31st, 2017? Was the completion, was the interim report, and then the full compliance was August 1st, 2017. So that timeframe, that difference between the interim report date and the full compliance, is that to be interpreted, there was some remediation that needed to occur or not? There was remediation in every facility, but our superintendents are all business. So it's quite likely that the second they knew that there needed to be remediation, they fixed their problem, but the final report might not have been submitted, reviewed and approved until August of 2018. And that's what you're looking at is that 180 window, which is why all those dates are different, because each audit started and ended up at a different time. In terms of the three-year camera plan addressing needs for 14 additional cameras, that was just, that literally was find the money and get the cameras. Keep going. Okay. That is a typo. The first one should be 2017. That is my mistake. Oh, August 7th. It was August of 2017, that is an error. Oh, I didn't even catch that. I realized it when Chair Emman said it. I was like, that is supposed to be 17. It did not take us over a year to fix that. So the chin should be 2017. Thank you for not embarrassing me. No, that's fine. Math in public, is that what you said? I said, don't you math in public? 1514, youthful offenders. This requires sight and sound separation between youthful offenders and adults. Bottom line is, it's very hard to separate youthful offenders from adult offenders. So the provision for this is that we have to have direct supervision. Meaning we have to have staff eyes on a youthful offender if they're going to be in a mixed population. A mixed population obviously means an adult. The design behind this is that we also have to pay very close attention to make sure that youthful offenders don't miss anything because of this. So if you don't have enough staff that doesn't mean they miss education, they don't miss recreational services. They don't miss religious services. This standard is important. And you'll see other standards where we are reminded, when you fix your problem, you cannot fix your problem at the expense of the resident. So can I interrupt again? Sure can. Youthful offenders, what age group at this point in time was this covering? So the PREA standard is 18 and Vermont State Youthful Offender understanding is 21. Well, it's moving into 21. Okay. So if we should close Woodside, and we have 16 year olds, 17 year olds, that may need a secure unit. You may not be the person to answer this question. We may need a secure unit. And what I have heard through the grapevine from the end of November and through December was, oh, well, we can probably place them at a facility, correctional facilities as long as they have sight and sound separation. If we're already having trouble with this, with youthful offenders who are 18, 19, who are charged as an adult and treated as an adult and convicted as an adult and serving their sentence in an adult facility, though they're considered a youthful offender, how are we gonna do this with a 16 or 17 year old? Long-term and in an ideal way, I don't think I should be the one weighing in. And it's not because I'm afraid. But I really don't think on the subject matter. But that could be in violation of our pre-standards. It's a consideration. In this particular case, Dan, can you talk about what we did with it? We covered the window, right? Yeah, in this particular case, there was a window in the unit and it allowed other inmates to be able to see. So they covered the window and had a curtain. So the youthful offender was within that? Correct. And couldn't look out? Correct. And then because there is not sound separation, they had to be on constant observations by security staff. So then that puts pressure on our staffing because I don't have that staff person can't be used elsewhere in the unit. So if we close both sides and use corrections as a fallback, just put the thought in focus. 150, 15, limits to cross-gender viewing and searches, cross-gender searches of females, only to be done in exigent circumstances. This is a very meaty discussion across the country. We have to be very specific about what we mean by exigent circumstances. Not having enough staff is not an exigent circumstance and we will not pass our audits if we say that's the reason that we're not doing cross-gender searches properly. And this is, again, it doesn't matter what facility and what state that I visit. This has been a conversation across the country. We just always don't have enough staff and so we better figure that out. Cross-gender searches being done on intake due to lack of female staff. So what we did is we changed the policy stating that lack of female staff is not an exigent circumstance. We changed the policy, but the solution also is complex. So what do we do? Sometimes the inmate may have to wait in fairness. I think there's been times where they haven't been searched. When we do, make sure that and we do make sure that we have females doing searches on females. This is just food for thought. There's an impact on our workforce as well. So in an organization that has much fewer women than men and you're always the female officer, always doing searches, it can be burdensome and it's not, I would say, not exactly fair and something for us to think about. Also note that this is not a flip standard so females can search males. And to go back to exigent circumstances, we do need to pay attention to what we mean by that and that's usually something very imminent and it has to be an imminent security risk. So an imminent security risk for a female staff person to search a male offender. That doesn't need to be exigent for a male to search a female. Those exigent circumstances would be like, you feel very confident that there's contraband. So if you're a male correctional officer, you could search a female offender inmate if you had a strong feeling that there was contraband. Well, I probably shouldn't use the feeling. You need to be able to explain what your evidence is, what you are seeing and what is making it an urgent matter right at that time. It can't be, I just felt like it or thought she should or did. So what is the proof that that officer had that whatever, you pronounce it, exigent circumstances? Is it the officer's word or is there a witness to that? Well, let me, do you have a few examples, right? Can we get one? Yeah. Just to be clear, when Heather says contraband, she's not talking about tobacco, which we know in a correctional facilities column. It could be a weapon, it could be drugs. But it has to be directly connected to safety. So just because someone has a small amount of marijuana, that's not necessarily a safety risk. The PREA standards are very clear that it has to be a safety risk. So if a staff member is witnessing something that's a safety risk, either they just watched a person swallow contraband or insert contraband or they had intelligence that said that the person had a weapon. Then at that point, they're going to be calling an emergency over the radio because we have a protocol for that. And so they're not, an officer, I'm not just going to walk up to Heather and say, I think you have something that's unsafe and do a search. Our protocols would say, we have to notify the supervisor, it's a group response, and there would be then witnesses for that entire occurrence. So it would never just be a single person's word. So in that kind of a situation, which is rare, it's going to be rare. In the women's facility, there might be a female officer that would, when the call goes out, it'd be a female officer maybe that also would come to that unit. So it would be incumbent on that female correctional officer to do the search if needed. Correct. If there isn't a female correctional officer at that point, then because of the circumstance, it comes to that level, then a male officer could do the search. Is that the same in a male facility where say the only officers that show up are female and there are no male officers, would the female officer then do the search on the male offender? Yeah, because the pre-standards don't require same sex searches in male facilities, same sex in female facilities. Oh, I can make a comment, but I don't have time. So Felicia has a question. Yes, a quick question. Just on that section, do you keep records of how many searches were done under accident circumstances? Do you know how many have been done since the mediation? No, I mean, we can find out. I'm pretty sure if you ask me any questions that say, do you know how many, I just won't have it, but we can get it. Yeah, I'd be really curious, not at all to imply any mistrust, but just seeing how effective the new policy was and how well kind of abstractly we can. Yeah. Kind of keep an eye on that. Yeah, so effective in making sure that the population is safe. As well as our staff, in a big way. But I'd just like to know kind of how many instances are we in a case where it's, certain cases where they have to be searched now, where it is of threats themselves or others. Yeah. Just curious to do that. Yeah, we'll just get that, right? Yes, okay. Thank you. So as you continue, if you could just scroll up, because it's behind you, Heather, and then, yeah, that's fine. That's fine. Okay, we have another question. We have another question, Heather. Yes. Thanks. So cross-gender searching, et cetera. Is there any time when anybody is searched with, by just one correction officer, male or female, they had to do a search? Just regular search, yeah. Yeah. So there's never two. Yeah, that's regular, yeah. Okay, so there's never two officers, unless it's a female that's being searched, and there's only a male. No, one female officer can search one female. But can one male officer search one female? I can't imagine what the circumstance would be, because if it's as a student, it means that it's a security risk, and more people will be involved, but I need to, okay, yeah. Just to, because I'm curious, because you said it doesn't the same, it isn't the same thing for males as it is for females. That's right. Okay, and staff announcing? Staff announces, yeah. So before we go to that one. Does PREA allow, you have the federal standard of PREA, which the state has to adopt and carry out. Can the state go stronger than the federal PREA? Yeah. We can. Yeah, depending on that. Can't go below it. Correct. We can go stronger. Correct. To the cross-gender searches, and then I'll get announced, this is a process, and again, I'll continue to refer to things like this as a national discussion, because it's controversial. It doesn't seem equitable that women can search men, but only women search females. I think from a workforce perspective, it seems sort of obvious that the female staff are getting kind of robbed either way, right? Because you're gonna do them at the male facility and you're gonna be the one doing all of them at the female facility. So that has been, and I'm not weighing in either way from a value statement perspective, but has been part of what the impact is on the culture. So when you go backwards and talk about things like recruitment and retention efforts, what makes this job appealing to women, for example, that's part of the conversation. Also, the reason why cross-gender same sex searches is required is obviously because of trauma history, and the trauma that women have experienced and the research that's been done in terms of what that might trigger for them, and oftentimes the perpetrator, their trauma has been male, and so that, I mean, it's much more complex than that, but that's really at the foundation. To continue that conversation in terms of what we all across the country weighed in on in this area is that for some women, working with a male officer in a facility who's good and professional and has his compass set in the right direction, this may be the first pro-social, positive, safe male authority figure that they have experienced, and that experience can be very powerful, and so there is, I mean, there is a legitimate mindset with professionals who don't totally agree with the same sex supervision and same sex searches for those reasons, that we are missing an opportunity to cultivate a culture where men are trusted and can be trusted and should be trusted because they are trustworthy and good, and you know, would look a lot like other professions where the medical profession, your doctor, might be male, so I just want to, the reason why I am weighing in on this is because nothing is this simple in terms of meeting, exceeding, or not meeting standards. So we have some more questions. Sarah, I'm going to start. So I'm, since this was based on 2003, I mean, the law. Well, 13. And then when that went 2012. I guess my question is coming from this cross-gender. We have, for inmates or officers who might identify as LGBTQ, how does, is that factored in IA, or how does that factor into this, or how does that land on the folks who are implementing it, or is it an issue in the facilities in Vermont? It is. I wasn't going to go too far into it today because I think what might come out today is that we'll talk about some other topics, but the care and custody of LGBTQ offender population should be its own presentation, I think. Jen Spranky is our lady's trainer tonight. Would you hear? A lot of questions. Yeah. We have Jen. Yeah, but that, on the most basic level, we have to incorporate those standards, but also the cultural implications of that. And that is not just for the offender population, but also we need to be more inclusive in terms of how we recruit and how we educate and keep up with their policies. It'd probably be, I should probably stop there, though. Thank you. I get it. I'm interested in another time. Just a quick question. If we're talking about pat-down searches rather than script searches or such, are we talking about usually being in an area where there's a camera? Yes. All searches always with a camera. Oh, no. Okay. Even just pat-down searches are not necessarily in an area where there's a camera. The desired is usually to have them in a hallway, but again, it depends on the key. There is no direction to staff that says that you must complete the search in view of a camera. Okay. I can't imagine, but maybe you do a strict search in the hallways, you wouldn't be doing a strict search in the hallways. No. I was, pat-search. Pat-search you would put a strict, so that strict search, male or female, offends an email. Is that done where there's a camera or not? Not necessarily no. Is there another officer there witnessing? So it's just an officer in the email? If that's a strict search. Right. If it's pat-down, that's something different. It could be done explicitly and it could be more people around to defend their inmate in its staff. Yeah, the strict searches aren't always done on the video camera for, I mean, people deserve some version of privacy. Privacy. So there's a balance there in terms of the inmate privacy versus inmate security. Does Prius speak at all to those searches being done a strict search, it's a tongue twister, being done in private or not? Are they sign on on that? Is Prius sign on that? Do you know? I don't think so. That's left out more to the state and the policy of the department. The thing that would speak to it is the privacy, that the standards have an overall flavor of to keep things as private as possible in regards to anything. Exactly. Okay, George. You might jump in front of anything. I don't think so. You jump her? Jumped in. So is it good policy to do a one-on-one script search? Is it good public policy to do a one-on-one script search out of the eyes of the camera? I think it's safer. For whom? I assume that it may be safer emotionally, but I don't know. The reason why I am giving you all of the perspectives that I know about is that I can't weigh in on the camera situation. That I don't think I should, I just don't know enough. I think what might be helpful is if you quickly, just, Jen, if you don't mind, just sort of name the circumstances where we would be doing past searches, like transfers coming back from CORE, coming back from the hospital, some pretty standard stuff. Anything else? Transferring out of units, coming out of the chow hall, if there's concern people are stealing food. If you've got intelligence that said something may have been passed in a program, things like that. That's for Pat, then. That's for Pat. So my concerns are not so much with Pat down here. They should be, but it's not as easy as script search. It's script searches. And I think I heard earlier that you could do a male-female script search. Male, as a male CO? Only in a male can only strip search, it works both ways. A male can only strip search of female in an exigent circumstance, which the way our policies are written. If it was exigent, there's a supervisor involved, there's probably a handheld camera involved, because there is a full-scale situation of safety. So there'll be, there probably is a use of force. Policy, then, to have that happen. If the inmate is a female, but not necessarily a male. Correct, female officers can do strip searches on males that would not necessarily be emergent. So you wouldn't need those other safeguards in place? And I'm just thinking safeguards for actually are inmates, but also for employees as well. We have a search as directive. Okay. It's not on me. No. See, this is what I was saying to the committee. It's really important to know what's in place within DOC policy and directives, because it's your directives that determine your policy and your directives that determine how PREA's carried out. There, you're gonna find that pretty much we'll have a standard and or a directive that follows each of these standards, because we're audited on our policies that back these standards up. There's, has been a lot of updating over the last decade on some of these. Some either didn't exist, or some needed to be written from scratch. Like our PREA directive, which is I think on the agenda for Thursday, with reporting and investigating, the PREA directive 40909 is, how many pages? 40 lots, 30, 30, yeah. I sent them to Butch. Yeah, 10 years, she said, read this. So what would be helpful, possibly, in advance to when you come in next and talking about those specific directives? It would be really helpful if you could electronically forward that those directives to fill so that he could post that. You can see them as a committee. Just so folks can see how your directives are laid out, because I think for a lot of folks, other, our colleagues, the general public, there's no knowledge of directives within DOC. It's like one of those. But that's what you're, that's what the operation of DOC is really, I don't wanna say based on, but that's how you, how DOC carries out the policies. It's usually a directive. That's correct. And you have, and DOC has directives for everything. Yes, yes we do. They do. Yes, they do. And some need to be updated and some have been updated. And we absolutely will do that. And as this unfolds, we have some sense of where we should go next after today, but also by having been here last week was anticipating a lot of really good questions and thought that we may change that based on the questions that were coming in. I had, wasn't planning on reviewing any directive today. We kind of decided to go to the end and go backwards, which I really appreciate from this committee. That's our final exam. When I start talking about the corrections culture, formal and informal in default, what you'll hear is that that pre-audit survey that we do before auditors come, that's really our formal process. And by the time the auditor gets here, that should be our test of our culture. Because when you're walking through a facility and you're asking people questions on the fly and they're comfortable and fluent with the language, then we're feeling a lot better about whether this has been embedded. And that's what we're shooting for. Do you want me to keep going with these bullets? Okay. And again, if this isn't working, let me know. I just wanted to give you an idea of something. These are areas where those boxes were checked, did not meet standard, and we wanted you to see that it's a little bit complicated, but none of this is huge and unfixable. Staff monitoring cameras, we covered this just a little bit already in terms of privacy when bodily functions are being performed. So essentially what happens here, it's for us, it was about moving cameras and that took some time. So if you have male and main control etch it in, I think what the remediation was in the beginning, Jen, if I recall, it was, we covered, did we cover the camera? We covered the monitor. We covered the monitor. We covered the monitor for the female officer. And the facilities, it's called bathrooming, right? So we either cover the monitor, we eventually will move the camera, so it doesn't need to be right on, but it could be just a little bit above the stall. And the idea is that you see what you need to see to keep the building safe. You don't need to see more than that. And so that's what's behind this. So just to remind committee members, when in our capital budget, when it has that general appropriation for DOC, not specific towards a facility, but for upgrades, we did fund some of these cameras. Just to make that connection over the years. 1.1533 is inmate education. Eric reviewed this the other day. Education for inmates is a very important piece of the standards and the audits and that we need to be, they need to fully understand what their rights are, what their reporting mechanism is, the avenues for which they can report. They need to understand what PREA is, what it means. We need to deliver content that's understandable in a way that's understandable, so it's not always in writing. There's an orientation packet. There's a survey that is filled out, I don't think, but ultimately this section of the audit, we did not pass, we were, oh, I'm sorry, please, thank you. Oh, too far. Too far, too far. You want to sit? Okay. So we were completing the orientation, the inmates were getting all of the education that they needed, and then there's a form that they sign off on, acknowledging that they completed what they needed to. When we uploaded the documents to the PREA auditor, we only scanned one side and the signature side didn't go through, so we did not meet that standard. So we scanned the other side of the form and met the standard. That was an easy fix. Yeah, it was a fun to tell you, but yeah, it was an easy fix. I think lineouts are a little different, right, because I took more. So, okay, screening for risk of victimization and abusiveness and asking the inmates directly if they identify as LGBTQI. When they first wrote the standards, and I think this was originally crafted as far back as the prison rate commission maybe waited on it, the standard was that they could tell us how they identified and the standard is now that we need to ask how they identify. The screening tool basically just changed and we needed to update it. And again, this is not as easy as just changing a form. This is a discussion. Is it any of our business? And does a person want to tell us? And are they obligated to tell us the truth? And if they don't tell us, I will tell you that the auditors are encouraging us to maybe guess, and here's why. We have got to make sure that we are acknowledging people who we think might be vulnerable and this population is vulnerable. And there are other categories of what we would consider a vulnerable population. I sort of liken this to the discussion that BSP has had to have over the years over the tickets and barren and partial policing and identifying rates and things like that. We're not always, not everyone's on the same page. I don't honestly know where I sit with this, whether it's sort of my, it's got to be my idea, whether I tell you how I identify the purposes of keeping people safe. This is where they landed with the standard. So we changed the form. 1552, exhaustion of administrative remedies. This was, we were tracking grievances. We switched over from paper over to OMS. I think you've heard about OMS, our funder management system. It's been a little bit of a process, a little bit clunky, it took some time. I think in this particular case, the facility had some grievances on paper and had not entered them. The auditor reviewed the grievances, their grievances were all there. They were all filled out properly. We didn't need that standard, that particular difference. They hadn't entered yet and it was understandable. Not, I mean, you know what I mean. Okay. Oh, same standard was inmate, resident handbook needed to be updated. And this is about inmate rights with regards to grievances, which is why it's in the same section, AMU-7. 8, 1562, reporting to other facilities. A superintendent where the allegations may must notify the superintendent of the facility where it allegedly occurred. So if inmate Jones from St. Johnsbury goes to Northwest and he reports to staff person at Northwest an allegation of some kind of sexual abuse. At the previous facility. At the previous facility. That superintendent is required to communicate. In all cases where there's been a report that's been taken in from the receiving facility, that communication happened. But in some cases it was between the pre-director and the superintendent or the assistant superintendent might have called the other superintendent. But this is really clear for checks and balances. We need to show proof that the two superintendents email each other or speak to each other. 1, 1564, staff first responder duties. There were two incidents during the reporting period where this was not followed. Staff awareness that perpetrators and victims are to be advised not to shower, brush teeth or perform bodily functions in order to preserve evidence. Jen, I think in this case it had been done and not documented and needed to be uploaded. It was, the facility had done it. The staff that were interviewed were unsure that it was a requirement. That's right. That's right. So that was one of those on the fly. Questions to staff from the audit are walking down the hallway. Do you understand the protocol for this? And they forgot the steps and they were not even necessarily involved in that, right? Yeah. So in a situation like that you may not recall and this isn't the fingers of anybody or anything in particular, but for the staff to not be aware or not recall the protocol, is it mostly new staff that come on board that have that or not? I'm just trying to... I think it's under test anxiety. It's like white coat anxiety. It's not, I think when you, if you spoke to Melinda Allen, she'd say the sentiment in the facility is that people know what to do. They are willing and they're informed and they're basically pretty fluent and her know to reflect that overall. And in this particular case, I think we just forgot. Protection from retaliation, 1567. Thank you, Jen. I'm having test anxiety. Thank you. Retaliation monitoring in terms of documentation. Retaliation monitoring means that once a report is made that we need to check in with a person who has made a report and make sure that there are no issues, that there's no perceived backlash, no unnecessary pressure. If there is, we need to know about it. The 90 days is the window that we watch for it. And from their perspective of staff, they're also involved in this too. If they report something and they experience something that they think might be in some way putting pressure on them because of an allegation, we monitor that as well, site by site. In this particular case, we needed to change weight. We had forms that either someone refused to sign. Do we have some refusals? No, that's the next one. Oh, sorry. This is that it was being done but the forms weren't filled out. No documentation. There was no documentation. Yeah. And whose responsibility was it to fill it out? The officer or the inmate? Oh, the staff has to fill that out, yeah. I don't have a creative answer for that one. We fixed it. We fixed it, you know. Yeah. How do you know it's fixed? Well, because it's 90 day, we have to go back and we have to review. We do mock audits ourselves to get ready for audits. And all those, again, if it's asked in that audit survey, we have to show that we've been doing it. We don't want to find out we're not doing something from the auditor, but I think in that particular case, we did. Is anybody besides CEOC taking a look at those mock audits to kind of give you a fresh set of eyes or is it the auditor? No. The mock audits, you guys do yourself? Oh, because anybody else take a look at those or is it just a guy in siloed inside CEOC? Like anybody in the H.S.? Right, no, I'm pausing over the word silo. I think we are practicing in good faith, but that's a good question. We don't pull in other agencies to help us with getting ready for an audit. But we could, yeah. I mean, I think it's a personal perspective that an audit kind of helps you see your blind spots because I don't think that anybody's intentionally missing out on any of these criteria. But with the kind of mock audits or public audit, you might not be seeing your own blind spots, which is what independent audits are kind of there to help you with. So you don't know if you ever utilized another person at the H.S. or something. I don't think we have. We switch facilities is what we do. We what? So for example, if we were doing an audit at Marble Valley, we would bring in a PREA coordinator from St. John's Berry to go do the audit and miss it, but we wouldn't, we don't bring in them. That's a good point. But we haven't, I should say. Won't, but we have not. Thank you. Thank you. So on the internal audits, which I think is a good idea, do they do a report at least to report back to you of what they found? Yes. And who does it go to? I felt that coming. Yeah, I have that pushed to make people feel. So our PREA director would organize practice audits with the facilities. And it may be literally just a one page pay attention to these areas. But I would have to. Like a find it. Yeah, but I don't know if we have like a form or something standardized. That's okay. But I'm saying it's not a practice audit. It's actually like an internal audit. But does it happen only when you're getting ready for the audit or does it happen at different points in time? Oh, that's a good question. So we're always getting ready for an audit because we pretty much, we do two, two re-air during an audit cycle. But no, they don't happen just before an audit. One, we wouldn't have, we wouldn't have time if we were trying to do like an all nighter before the term paper kind of thing. But the idea is that audit should not be a scrambled. I think they were the first round I would say they were a lot of pressure because we hadn't experienced that kind of audit. But by the time this next round comes, it shouldn't be a scramble. So I'm the pre-coordinator. I come in and I do my internal audit to, and then I give you a memo on the findings. Yeah. Who am I handing that memo to and who will then act upon it? The superintendent gets it, the facilities exec gets it. I believe the deputy commissioner and the commissioner get it, but I'd have to check whether that goes out at the same time or whether it goes to facilities exec and super. And then up the chamber. Who's the facility exec? Right now it's Al Cormier. Okay. Who's the person who oversees the facilities? The facilities. And then how do they act upon it? Do we know if they act upon it? I know they do. How do you know? Because we passed. No, but no, no. We're talking about the findings. We're talking about the internal memo that says A, B, and C. So how do you know that those are active? I can't, I couldn't tell you, but I think- Could you find out? Yes. Okay. Thank you. I could actually answer that, if that would be helpful right now. Oh, sure. So on the PREA Resource Center, all of the audit materials are available. So we actually have a few different documents that the auditors use, including literally the entire audit form. But this is the internal audit. Right, but the mock audit is based off the audit. So for the simple reason that we're going through and making sure that we're meeting those standards. So for example, we might do an audit on document tracking. Are we keeping all the paperwork that we're supposed to be doing? So we're literally following what's on that audit tool and then indicating on the audit tool where we didn't meet the standard. And where is that posted? The internal? That would go to me as the PREA director, because as well as the facilities exec and- So you get that, and then what do you do? I would save it. And then I would review with the superintendent or the PREA coordinator. Review with the superintendent. Yep, for the PREA coordinator, as far as depending on what the issue is and how we would be addressing those issues. And then if they are addressed or they're not addressed, what's the step before the actual audit happens? I think that's a good question. So I would say I don't think we have a directive process for that. But that's, because I think that might be what you're getting at, I don't know that that protocol is interactive practicing for an audit. And then the PREA office is a resource office, right? So if I'm the PREA director, I'm going to report what I need to report up the chain. And I don't think I might not necessarily, I might not know what the conversation is between the facilities exec and the superintendent. But I will probably know that something's been fixed or maybe they need more coaching or they might need some help on it. So that loopback might not necessarily happen unless they needed some help. OK, so I'm going to interrupt him for a pleasure. So you're the PREA office. That's the PREA office, right? One. One of you, yeah. The PREA office. So if there's a concern or a complaint or something comes up that staff at a facility feels was for, you know, they went to the PREA office with a concern, then it's coming on the PREA office to report that to either the facility exec or the superintendent of that facility or whatever. How, if it's resolved or there's a process to be resolved, number one, does the office know the process is going to be put in place to resolve it? Are we talking about complaints or audits? Complaints. OK. OK, gotcha. Does the PREA office know how it's going to be resolved? Not necessarily. So does the person that filed the complaint, it could be a correctional officer or something within a facility? Does that correctional officer or the person who filed the complaint to the PREA office know how it was resolved? When you say a complaint, what do you mean by a complaint? An allegation? An allegation. So the PREA standards actually require that the person gets notified a person who made a report or the victim. And who would notify that person as a PREA office or is it the facility exec superintendent that resolved it? It would be the site PREA coordinator or myself. So you would get word back from the superintendent and the exec of the facility how they would proceed to resolve? So the local PREA coordinators are responsible for all of the incidents that are sexual victimization in nature. So they have a process per the directive that they follow. And part of that process is that the reporter and or victim is notified of the conclusion. So the facility determines the conclusion of the incident. And then there's a form that we have that is given to the reporter or the victim. And there are times where the staff reported an allegation where there were no actions taken and they just staff felt that there was no action. Just came to a stop. Staff reporting an allegation of inmate on inmate. Inmate on inmate or staff on inmate or something. And they felt that no action was taken. I'm sure yes, because they are investigations. And I mean, I don't know where to start with that one. The question is, does that feel like there are times where people aren't following up? Yes. I believe that's the answer to that is yes. Alicia. Great. Are these mock audit records not where they set the statute? I'm sorry. I didn't hear your question. If I were to fill out a public records request to the PREA office saying, I would like a copy of all of the mock audits you've done. Tell the subject to the public records act. Yeah. And if not, where in statute are they specifically set? They can be pre-muched. I don't know. I'm never going to know the answer to where. In any sense, it starts as where in statute is it. She's not at that level working with that. The question is, are those mock audits? Subject to the public records law. We don't have an answer to that. And if they're exempt, why are they exempt? It's a privileged information. Therefore, they're exempt. OK. Because I would presume that names could be taken out very easily. But that could be really helpful. That's how the public records law is. It's very complicated. Yes. We went through that here for inmate files. And sometimes they're privileged and confidential. So you'd have to talk to the public records legal staff that we have here in Lutch Council to have them do some work. It's not Helena. It's whoever they place. No. It's Tucker Anderson. Tucker Anderson. Well, you know, I'm sure for us, we'll start working on this. Brighten up all. Just checking. Just checking. I've probably already have filed one. And that has to work through the process when you have public records replaced. That has to work through the process. If it works. Isn't it 70 to 30 hours with a possible extension of 10 days? Just never know. You never know, dude. All right. Let me see. Retaliation. So Jen just covered reporting to inmates. If they have reported something, we need to get back to them. We've received this. And we have to make sure that all the written forms are completed. In some cases, the victims weren't notified that we received the complaint and were pursuing it. And I think in some cases, books refused to sign the form. And there's a variety of reasons for that. And that happens sometimes. So those are inmates? No, staff. Right. So what would be some of the reasons why an inmate would refuse to sign the form? Just plain ordinary. No, sometimes. Sometimes. Bad day. And we need to ask again on another day. Maybe mental health issues. Maybe a particular beef in another area. Maybe they're afraid and missing any. They don't agree with the outcome. That's an obvious one, yes. They don't agree with the outcome. And they don't sign the form. What is the recourse then for the inmate? They don't agree for the outcome. There's no recourse. If I'm understood, recourse is like a consequence, right? No, what can they do? Where would they appeal? Oh, what can they do? Yeah. And they could use a grievance. They could write to a superintendent. They could contact an attorney, prisoner's rights. I mean, they can pursue it any way they wish. Those are? We missed the very last one. Oh, I thought that was sexual abuse, incident reviews. That was updating the procedure. Is that right? We had to update the form. So these incident reviews need to happen within 30 days. And that's with, this is the SR team. And that is the superintendent, health services. I'm looking at Jen. Who else is on that review team? Security, management, mental health, medical, case management, program staff, and if there's any other party that would need to be. And they need to be, those meetings need to happen regularly. They would be discussing all things, including retaliation, monitoring. And we needed to show documentation that that was happening. And we did. I think in most cases, if I recall, it was that they were happening, but not within 30 days. It was outside of 30 days. So these are all the areas in the audits, the last audits that were done at all the facilities. And these are areas where there needed to be some remediation. And this is how they were, the way that I was remediated. Was some of this more in one of our facilities or two of our facilities? Or was it pretty broad across all facilities? Is there anything that really rises to the surface here? This is pretty broad across the facility, all of them. We discussed the areas where it might be a little more complicated to solve, like Chittenden, that those issues are going to be a little more complicated. For the most part, if we met a standard, most of the facilities met the standard. So it might be the standard around documentation with regards to reporting, or a standard within health services, or training, for example, is one area where we, I think we had roughly four or five standards where we exceeded expectations. And training was one of them. The investigation process was another one in terms of making sure that there was follow-through. But this general theme was basically the same. So if we need to update a form for screening, we need to update a form for screening across the board. None of these had one facility that jumped out in a specific area. So how does PREA play across the spectrum? How does it play across the supervisory personnel? Maybe you're going to get to that in culture. You know, the correctional officers in the inmates, is there one that would hope that the superintendents would buy into it quickly, but maybe they don't? So yes, one would hope that. And the superintendents buy into it now, and they have for some time. But again, we started. I think I attended my first staff sexual misconduct training that was in DC at American University in the 1990-1992, that was the beginning of the conversation. This was pre-standard. And this work was coming out of advocacy groups. And in this particular case was hosted by Washington College of Law with one of the prison-rate commission members, Brenda Smith, who was really just a pioneer in terms of safety and sexual safety for women offenders and expanded her work into staff sexual misconduct. And the concept that this is a security risk, so how that connects up to your question, which is how does it play out in terms of, you're talking about the everyday work life of a supervisor and a CO. So it begins really with making sure that we attach the training needs of our incoming employees, not just to the standards, but to the buy-in that everyone has the right to be safe, including our staff. And the skills required to lift up the mission of the pre-standards have to do with communication, escalation, observation skills. Not to mention, we really need to develop that muscle around personal and professional resiliency, as Commissioner Baker said earlier. This is not an easy job. And we have to pay attention to employee wellness and health and conditions in the workplace. All that said, we know culturally how it impacts staff. It can become a vicious cycle. For example, if you have a facility that isn't staffed properly, then you're going to have more people doing more over time. And if you have more over time, you're going to have more people getting sick, which means your sick days go up. And when your sick days go up, you're even shyer on staff. And so your burnout increases. And you're at risk of an uptick in things like incidents or mistakes or even being short tempered, right? So it changes really the environment of the whole facility. And so that plays into all of our efforts, whether it's recruitment and retention or support from leadership. There isn't an area that PREA doesn't touch. And if you go to any PREA training across the country for corrections, what you're going to hear, first of all, if you are in corrections and you haven't heard of PREA, there's a very big problem. The point about PREA and the standards and the cultural attachment is this. If you are committed to PREA, you are committed to corrections best practices. If you are making sure that your cameras are in place, your cameras are in place not just for sexual safety, but for the safety of staff and the safety of volunteers and contractors and inmates. Cameras work for every area. If we're training our staff how to look for evidence of some kind of abuse, then we're going to be able to have trained staff that can see symptoms of coercion and strong-arming. If we understand how pervasive the code of silence can be and how that can interrupt the outcomes of PREA, then that's going to address the code of silence in all areas so that we don't have a corrections culture that is based on secrecy. And if it's working in the PREA world, it should be working in the security world. It should be working for volunteers. It should be working for visitors. Should be working in health services and across the board. That's the idea. It's a heavy lift, and there's a lot of skills. One of the most important skills for our officers and supervisors has to do with our advanced communication techniques. And our department, it's 40 hours. And you cannot graduate the academy if you don't pass what we call ACT training, Advanced Communication Techniques. What we do with this training is that we train our officers to put language to every behavior, and it runs off a scale. The lowest behavior in our department is what we would call agitated. And the highest behavior in terms of security would be threat of lethal. And from agitated, it goes from agitated, disruptive, destructive, and dangerous. And we literally break down each behavior, so not so that we can speculate on what someone's feeling, so we don't speculate on what someone's feeling. So the behavior agitated, we might see that a funder who usually talks a lot is now not talking. And that's not. We're not going to put into a report. We're concerned. And this is dangerous. We're going to put into a report, inmate so-and-so, inmate Smith was agitated as evidenced by he's usually talking all the time, but he's been sitting in a cell for three hours not saying anything. Does this mean that he has been sexually abused? Not necessarily, but it means we need to ask a question. That's the premise of how we move this culture in terms of making sure that we're not being presumptuous and that we're not ignoring subtle signs and we're not putting our feeling language on a language that should be evidenced language. The next level of agitated is disruptive. And that's when you see somebody who's doing something they normally wouldn't do, but it's impacting others. So generally, Jen behaves herself in a unit, but that day she's being loud and interrupting people who are trying to watch the TV or standing in front of the TV in the day room. Once you are impacting other people, the word we use is disruptive. The reason this is important is because our staff are going to understand from there what their specific intervention is going to be because we train them that as well. And they will be able to explain it in a report. And so it doesn't matter whether you're a CO1 or a shift supervisor or a commissioner. If you see the word agitated in a report, you're going to know this is low level, not important, but lower level behavior, and then you'll have an understanding of what it was. The point from our perspective is that if we catch things early on, then we are addressing the preventive portion of the PREA standards. That's the first outcome of the standards and the audits and the mission is that we are as preventive as possible. And really the numbers don't matter. We want our, you know, it's prison rape elimination. We know that's the goal. We also understand that it's not going to completely go away. And we understand that the fear of is as impactful as nothing happened. So if you're serving your sentence and you're constantly terrified of this happening, that can be as damaging as anything. So we need to be looking for the signs. How it affects the culture in terms of supervision is that we've got to build more of a coaching environment. So if we're all training the same thing and the supervisor is just supervising to this, that's going to lend itself to a culture where we're saying the same thing and we can intervene in the same place. As you go up the scale, the stakes get higher and we know that once we get to destructive behavior, we're looking at things like gross motor activity and raising your voice. And we know that once somebody starts yelling or maybe moving their arms in a way that's wider and faster that the likelihood that something's going to happen that's physical is pretty imminent. Usually within, I think we say zero to 60 once you get to that point. So the idea is that we're constantly deescalating. And so we train specific modules. There's giving clear directions is one module. We train how to give a clear direction and to assess for cooperation right away. I really want to keep going, but I... It sounds like being a parent. Well, a good parent, right? That's what I was trying to do. I should do some of these things. Yeah. But the idea is that if someone has something to say that it is our responsibility to kind of listen it out before we jump to conclusions. And the modules are really, that we start at the lowest level to test for cooperation because if something's hard to say, we need to be listening more often. So we literally train listening as a skill. We train how to assess for cooperation and it's real low level stuff, but I think we've all had a boss where you go to the office and you want to ask for time off and here she doesn't even look up from the computer. I'm coming back later. We ask them to really look at things like body language and change in behavior. The idea there too is that we're trying to prevent other work and extra work. There's an officer at Chittenden, great deal of respect for him. He's been there for a while. His name's Godwin Yahu. He says, you're going to spend 20 minutes. Do you want to spend it talking and listening and find out what the issue is or do you want to spend the 20 minutes getting your uniform all wrinkled and getting sweaty? You're going to spend the 20 minutes. Spend it wisely is his point, which is that when we go to get cooperation, we need to do it from a place where the person who goes to do the thing we've asked them to do is because they believe that that's the right thing to do at that time. So if it's to lock in or to mop the floor or to go back to class, we want to come from a place where we're giving them choices. Is that always going to happen? Absolutely not. But the intention of the PREA work is that when we have, when we cultivate that kind of culture, then everybody is cooperating. And when we first started training this a long time, I'm going back almost 20 years when we first started to deliver this. Our staff said to us, if you give us all the same words to use and all the same verbal templates to use when we talk to the offenders, they're going to know what we're going to say. And we said, exactly. Exactly. So if they know, when you say, please lock in and they say, I don't want to when you say, please lock in, they know after the third, please lock in, we're going to say, listen, you got a choice. You can lock in, or you can have us walk you in. You choose. Knowing that that language is coming is supposed to be, you know, the idea is that we are empowering people to make the choice that they want to make. And it's not always the best one, but they have, we were a good eight years into this before we started to incorporate sexualized work environment behavior. And that's not easy. So when we add it to the continuum, what we know is that when it came to, and both genders are equally challenging, but the women were challenging. We had transitioned three facilities at this time. And we were getting very clear picture, mostly from male officers, but not all male officers, that it's very stressful. I heard many times during those years from in training environments that officers would prefer perhaps to be in a use of force than to work in a women's unit. Because we train for use of force. We train over and over and over again. And we train to work with the adrenaline and the immediate response. And anyone who's done use of force training understands that you have to practice and you practice over and over again because when the moment comes, you can't be worrying about where you're, you know, where does the wrist go and where are my handcuffs? We work off muscle memory. And what we discovered during this time is that we needed to operate off the same amygdala response and muscle memory when it came to speaking up and showing their most courageous leadership because some situations are extraordinarily awkward. And so we talk about things like cross-gender searches and we talk about, you know, if my day job is to literally figure out how much I'm supposed to look at someone bathrooming, that's a different kind of career. And not only do we have to do that, but we have to figure out how we're gonna discuss it and discuss the challenges. And the women were challenging and are challenging because we're different. And the feedback that we got was that the women just did not take no for an answer. So, and again, I'm generalizing and I'm sharing with you the conversation, not just in Vermont, but nationally, is that the word was manipulative, that we were manipulative and that we didn't take no for an answer. And the- Then who was manipulative? The officers or the women, the women's inmates? Well, I heard comments over my career that women in general were manipulative and in that particular discussion, it was about the MA population. And this had to do with skills again. It was about how we were listening and how we were training and it's a challenge to connect our expectations about keeping a facility safe, about addressing behavior, but also these are good people who came in with, you know, with upbringings where we were chivalrous and we were respectful. And so when a female walks into a day room and doesn't have a bra and we have to tell her, please go put a bra on. Well, if I'm raised to not look at your breasts and I understand that the rules are different in the workplace and I'm not really programmed that way, I might not look at you. So now I'm not making eye contact while I have to give you direction and this is a confusing message. And so it became, what is it exactly that we're gonna say? What exactly do we say? Go put a bra on, that's, we had a lot of that. And then there was argument. You didn't ask Jane to put one on yesterday and you didn't ask Kathy on Wednesday. And that's not fair. Again, generally speaking, the feedback we got when there was direction to a male in May, they were either gonna do it or they weren't, but there wasn't gonna be a long discussion about it. And there's a different dynamic for our department and this was a real challenge. It came down to basic things like using this behavior continuum. We literally trained officer so-and-so to say, Ms. Sprafki, you're not wearing a bra, go back to your cell and put a bra on and she's gonna argue with me and she's gonna say, you're looking at me, you shouldn't be looking at my breasts because that's where it usually ends up. You're looking at me. It's my job to watch you go put a bra on. It's as simple as that, but it wasn't that simple because we hadn't empowered our staff to say, it's my job to watch you and believe me, there is a difference between watching, looking, leering, staring, glaring, ogling and we have hashed it out and talked it out and when you put it on paper, it's very hard to prove. Officer so-and-so was leering at me. How do you write that? So it comes down to a feeling. Keep going. No. This is really good. It really is. It's understanding the culture. It's understanding the culture and I think that's what's really hard for folks to understand unless they live it and are in it like you folks are or it's a standing committee in the legislature that looks at a lot of corrections, policy and all the nuances, all the statuses of corrections and all the layers that happen within a facility and their directives and then your rules, administrative rules, all of that. Legislators that look at that on a daily basis have a concept of what it is and then outside of that, it's a foreign environment for folks and I think people come to the conclusion based in terms of what they know within their own family structure and their work structure, whatever that may be and it's not a correction structure. And so they bring that concept to the world of corrections and that's not apples to apples. It's an adjustment. It's an ugly adjustment at times too. And we need to support, it's an adjustment for everyone. It's an adjustment if you live there and it's an adjustment if you visit and an adjustment if you work there and it really does come, there's an enormous amount of content under this particular slide formally and formally default. The formal really is what is your rules? What's on paper? What are your policies? What's the statute? And in the corrections world, how we train this is we basically, we can take any area, what do we know is formal? What kind of ceremonies do we have? What do we wear? We wear uniforms. And if the uniforms are put together and they're pressed and everyone's looking like they're squared away, then we know that we are meeting the uniform standard. If you're looking at someone and it's your uniforms all wrinkled and maybe there's a little bedhead happening, we gotta ask the question, that's informal question. Like if people are coming in ready to work, what does that look like? If chain of command, the chain of command is in a formal section of corrections culture and we know who the boss is, but if you walk into a facility, you gotta ask the question, who's really running the show and if it's not the boss, we are now in the area of what we call informal culture. Informal is where the pre-work makes or breaks us. It is the informal culture where nothing is written down but it's the language that we speak and it's been the informal culture that has perpetuated the thinking that prison rape can and should be part of a sentence. That is not in writing, that is not the law and that is at the heart of what we're trying to tackle whether it's through recruitment and retention efforts or training efforts or the behavior scale that I described. If we don't stay on top of that component, we fall to the default culture and the default culture you can measure by looking at sick days, investigations, morale, attrition, retention rates, all kinds of things that can cycle out and make things even harder. For us, we're just very grateful that you're willing to hear what this looks like to listen to some of what the challenges have been and even consider discussions around keeping this work moving. I think we're all a little worn out. This has been very good testimony, very good discussion. We have a lot more work to do with you folks. And also as a committee, I don't have anything else to offer. I don't know if anyone else does. I don't want to do it. I really, corrections is a world, it's very similar in some ways to our education field where people say that, well, it's easy to be a teacher. It's terrific. It's easy to be. It's terrific meaningful work, corrections work. But the public thinks it's really easy being a teacher and they're making a lot of money. So if that's the case, then go in and do that job. Yeah. I think people are feeling the correctness is pretty simple. I mean, all you got is people there who are gonna be digging up a cell and that's all you've got to deal with. Yeah, not so. It's not so, it's a human condition. We are hiring. Yeah, we are hiring. We know. Anything else? Thank you. We're gonna have you folks back right around during the week and you said you would work with Phil. Thank God we got Phil. Was some different topics that you'd be working at within PREA? Have you? That was my question after this, enough with the culture. And here's the opportunity here because we don't know when you'll be sick of us. That the reporting and investigating is big. The hotline is big. LGBTQ care and custody is big. Training efforts around sexualized work environment, staff sexual misconduct. So I wanna be respectful of the fact that we can't be in here all the time. So why don't you write those down? And choose. And give that to Phil. And then when we do scheduling, Phil butch and I can sort of prioritize that. And see, you are scheduled, I believe you are scheduled back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. On Thursday, 10, 15. This is for training and professional development. In case. So that we can check off on your list. But if you wrote down all those items, those specific items, and gave them to Phil before tomorrow, before tomorrow at 12. Thursday, right? Or no. Well, we are scheduled Thursday at 10, 15 on reporting and investigating. And then after that, we don't have any other subject areas. Okay. So. Tomorrow. Not tomorrow. Okay. No. So on Thursday. But if you could write out all those items you just mentioned and have that done and to Phil by tomorrow at 12. No. Then we'll do scheduling after that for the next, for next week. Now, our time next week may be more limited in terms of what we spend with DOC because the governor will be giving his budget address on Tuesday. So once that occurs, we will be getting our budget adjustment for our capital bill. So we'll be doing our other work which deals with budgeting of state infrastructure needs along with corrections policy. So the day, our days will be split between those two items. And we will attempt to do DOC work in the afternoon. Doesn't mean it's gonna work out that way. But that will be our attempt. Sometimes if we're busy on the floor in the afternoon, we might have to juggle that. Okay. So we'll be flexible. And we'll have a list to you by tonight. I feel much more comfortable after giving that overview some suggestions if you're comfortable. Okay. I won't work with you. Don't work. Kurt, do you have something? Quick question that may have anything to do with any of this. But what is the epic train of ethics? Ethics? That's a risk assessment tool that we use. Oh, okay. And you do not want me to... It doesn't work. It doesn't work. All right. It does not. That's all I want. Anything else? Thank you. Thank you.