 I just want to thank the senator, the mayor, the representative, and Secretary Wetzel for actually being here and giving us an occasion, especially you, John, for giving us an occasion to get together. When I was inaugurated, when I was elected and then inaugurated, I set a goal which I thought was pretty ambitious of reducing the prison population by 250 in my first year. Naturally you tried to show me up. We've actually dropped the prison population by 850 in this first year. This is the first year, and John has been, how long have you been in your position? Five years now. So I'm continuing a set of programs and initiatives that were started before I became governor, but it was one of the things that really impressed me about John when I interviewed people for this position. He really has done a fine job, and I wanted to continue that, and I think the results of this first year show that that continuation, his good work, really has made a big difference. So, you know, this is important for Pennsylvania. I think there are three reasons why this is important. The first one is more of a moral issue. We're a free nation. We value liberty and justice, all the good things that we have enshrined in our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. We take these things seriously, and it is an acute embarrassment that this nation has, I think, the highest prison population in the world. Not just per capita, but in the world, and that's something that we need to work on, and so we are. So it's something that's important for that reason. Second thing is it's also expensive. It costs around $41,000 per inmate, per year in Pennsylvania, to house somebody, incarcerate somebody in the state correction system. So from a budget point of view, I don't know why I'm thinking about budgets at this point, but it's an expensive proposition. It's something that we shouldn't do unless we absolutely have to, and we ought to be looking for ways to reduce that expense. And the final thing is that there's a real opportunity cost to our society, our communities, our families, and our economy. When we incarcerate someone, we break up a family, in many cases. That's a problem. When we incarcerate somebody, we waste a life. Maybe it's the right thing to do in particular cases, but sometimes it's not, and whatever, we're taking that person out of a productive role in society. And with the way I know in my business we did background checks, extensive background checks on people who were looking for work, and incarceration was not something that made you look real good on an employment application. And when we do that, we hurt the economy, the third thing. We hurt the economy because we keep ourselves from people who might take those jobs and who might turn out to be a person who creates additional jobs, who actually becomes a consumer, who actually comes up with a process, a new idea, a new product. So there's so many reasons why this is a very constructive thing to do, to do what we can. And I'm going to ask Secretary Wetzel to talk about what we've done to make this happen. But I think we can continue to work on this. This is a program that isn't just for a year, it's not just for five years. I think we ought to continue doing this and continue to look for good ways to reduce the prison population. So we will continue to do this. I want to congratulate you, John, for making this happen, you and your staff, and maybe you can tell us a little more about what you've done to make this happen. All right, thank you. First of all, welcome to Harrisburg, CCC. Certainly not every day we see as many cameras for good news inside one of our facilities, so we appreciate that opportunity. I want to acknowledge our staff and the staff of the parole board who are here, who really are the folks who have put the hard work in that led to this great news today, this significant population reduction. And when you look at our history as a Commonwealth, we like the rest of the country have experienced just a boom in our population over, especially the 24 years before I got this job where we averaged an increase of 1,500 inmates a year. And then through a bunch of hard work, we started to see that growth flatten out. Past two years in particular, and this year in particular, we've seen four decade low population reduction that really we've been able to roll the clock back to we're at 2009 population levels. And you may remember in 2009, the parole moratorium that Governor Randell issued that really signaled a significant increase in the population. We've now rolled the clock back. And when you look at how we got here, there's a variety of reasons. But one of the things that I'm so excited about is the support of the governor. I mean, in his first year, he's been at both a state prison and a halfway house. And frankly, I believe he's probably the first governor to come to a halfway house that wasn't to cut the ribbon and open it up. And that really signals a level of support that our department and the parole board feel from Governor Wolf. I can tell you when we were interviewing kind of feeling each other out, this is not a shotgun marriage. This is two people who really believe the same thing. We believe that the citizens of Pennsylvania are invested in our ability to correct. One of the things I've been most appreciative over the past year and frankly, a big piece of our population reduction is the approach the administration takes where we identify a problem and work together as a team. And I'll give you a couple of specific illustrations that we've seen some fruition this year and we'll see more. Number one, you're all aware of the heroin epidemic. And across the commonwealth, the issues we're having with drugs. We are now pushing and expanding medication assisted treatment, specifically the use of Vivitrol for individuals coming out of state prisons. And it's not just this is not a DOC initiative, this is not a parole board initiative, this is a Wolf administration initiative. So we work alongside of the Department of Drug and Alcohol with Gary Tennis, Department of Health, Department of Human Services. That's all the agencies who are affected by this working together, specifically to focus on reducing barriers for individuals who are coming out of our prisons and make them more likely to be successful. One of the first things Governor Wolf did was expand the Medicaid expansion. You think what does that have to do with corrections or criminal justice or outcomes? It's a big deal. 70% of our population suffers from a substance use issue, 25% from a mental health issue. You can apply those numbers to the number of people we release, which is roughly 18,000 a year. And we have a lot of individuals getting out with behavioral health needs. Individuals getting out of prison with behavioral health needs who don't have services and don't be able to pay for services are going to commit more crimes. Period. So the fact that early on in the administration, we expanded and now those individuals are eligible is a big deal for public safety. It's a big deal for our world and it's a big deal for our outcomes. For reducing the future criminality of people coming out of our back doors. I think the third initiative point two is this WIOA. So the state is responsible to submit a plan for workforce development. And I can tell you how thrilled I was and I hate meetings. If anyone knows anything about me, I despise meetings. But how cool it was to be sitting around the table with my colleagues from around the cabinet focusing specifically on making sure that we have the ability to do workforce development for individuals getting out. Again, when you look at what our role is as corrections to create an environment where people can be corrected. And when you look at what our focus is and what our goals are, it's not just public safety making sure people don't escape. Which we better be doing well, folks. Because that's, that is part of it. But public safety in the larger sense, having people get our back door less likely to commit a crime than they come in our front door. These efforts by this administration really continued us on the path we're going and even more so. Last year we announced a four decade big population reduction. This year's even bigger and the future is bright. And this approach to problem solving by administration, where it's not what department or what castle, it's how do we get this done and who should be in the room has really put us on a good foot moving forward.