 Today is about our communities, our crime rates, our population, our families, everybody who's impacted by the system. We want to bring awareness and good discussions to the table to talk about issues to decrease our recidivism rates and decrease our crime rates within our society. Judy's message has been very impactful. She came into prison, I met her there, and she talked about her story and herself and how, because she's her story is from a different side, many of you might be able to relate with as well, and the unique thing is there's a common thread between the person who commits a crime and the person who is the victim of a crime, and through the emotion, through some of the thoughts and the fears, there's a unique experience, something that we can grow from, learn from, and hopefully move beyond. I would like to welcome Judy Dutcher, who is the facilitator of Bridges of Life in Washington State. So thank you all very much for the opportunity to come speak to you this morning. I am the Washington Regional Coordinator of the Bridges of Life Organization. Our organization is in its 21st year. It started down in Texas, and I was fortunate enough to get in on the pilot program, so I've been with the organization since 1998. In 2014, I approached Washington Department of Corrections and told them about my program and asked if I could bring it into some of the Washington prisons. So at the end of 2014, I started pilot programs in Purdy, which is Washington Corrections for Women, a Washington Corrections Center for Women, and also at Mission Creek Women's Prison in Belfair. I've continued on at Mission Creek in Belfair, and we just started our 13th, 14-week project there. Also, at the beginning of 2015, just after we graduated those first two pilot projects, I went over to Monroe and worked with the administration, and so now we just finished our ninth project on Tuesday at Washington State Reformatory. That evening we finished our ninth project at Twin Rivers, which is where I met Louie, and last Thursday we finished our, I think, sixth or seventh project at Minimum Security, and then I also am at Cedar Creek down in Little Rock and at Washington Corrections Center, the men's unit in Shelton. So a little bit about myself and why I got involved in this type of work. Back in 1989, I had three daughters, and my middle daughter was an exceptional young lady. She was academically gifted, she was athletically gifted. In seventh grade, she was second academically in her class of 297th graders. She was a competitive gymnast from the time she was seven years old, and they told us that they thought she had Olympic potential. She actually stopped doing gymnastics at the end of sixth grade because she wanted to be involved in sports at her school, so she was on the A-team volleyball team, the A-team basketball team. She was a cheerleader for her school. She was in karate. She took dance lessons. I mean, you name it, this kid was in everything. She wanted to learn to play the violin, but I was a single parent and I couldn't afford a violin and violin lessons, which still affects me to this day. But in the summer between Kelly's sixth and seventh grade, we had a family living next door to us that had moved in at the beginning of sixth grade. And I knew this young boy really well. He was one of Kelly's classmates. His name is Terence. And so one day in the summer, when Kelly was gone to an unscheduled cheerleading practice to prepare for camp, I didn't come straight home from work. I went car shopping instead. Kelly should have been home that day, but she wasn't. And she and I and the other cheerleaders were the only ones that knew she wasn't home. So when I got home at the end of the day and I pulled my car into the garage and walked into my house, someone started knocking on my door really loud. I went to the front door and it was Terence, the boy next door. And he asked me, did you know your house was broken into today? And it scared me half to death. So he proceeded to tell me that that morning he had been watching TV and he heard the dog of the neighbor on our other side just kept barking really loud and he thought something was wrong at my house. So he went over to check on Kelly and he scared the burglar away. So he showed me where Kelly's bedroom window had been broken out. And I asked him to stay where I phoned while I called the police. You know, they came out and checked and passed it off as, oh, it was probably kids looking for drugs or drug money. You know, it was just kind of like they thought it was no big deal. So I asked Terence to help me nail some plywood over Kelly's bedroom window because it was going to be the next day before I could get the glass company to come out and replace my window. So on Saturday of that same week, Kelly had one of her girlfriends over to spend the night and I had already gone to bed. And I think by this time the kids had too, but about 1.30 in the morning someone started knocking on my door again really loud and it scared us half to death. So Kelly and her friend met me in the hallway. We all went to the front door, flipped on the porch light. I looked through the peephole and Terence was standing on my front porch. And I opened the door and said, Terence, what in the world are you doing out here in the middle of the night? He told me that he had gone out to get some dishes out of his front yard and that they had left earlier in the evening and he heard my gate creaking in the wind and he thought the burglar was back. So again, it scared me half to death. I mean, I was a single mom with two, you know, young teen girls. And so I called the police again. They walked the perimeter of the house, didn't find anything, you know. So it took us quite a while to get beyond the being afraid in my own home. So now I'm going to fast forward to December of that same year. The kids were in seventh grade and on Saturday, December 2nd, I had to go in and work some overtime and we lived in Texas. I should have told you this right at the start, sorry. And so once again, Kelly had had a friend to spend the night the night before. And as I was leaving for work, I told the girls that they had a couple of chores to do before the friend's mom came to pick them up and I was going to pick Kelly up on my way home from work. So at the end of my work day, I stopped and got her and stopped through a fast food hamburger place and got her a hamburger and fries and a strawberry shake just like I had done a million times. And on the drive home, she told me that she had made out her Christmas list that morning but that I could already scratch off the basketball that was on the list. Before they went to the friend's house, they wanted to shoot some hoops in my driveway and we had a basketball goal but no basketball. Go figure, you know I can't figure that one out. But anyway, they had gone next door to borrow Terrence's basketball and he told Kelly that she could just keep that one because he had to. So I was thinking what a nice friend, you know, he was one of my carpool kids. Very polite, yes ma'am, no ma'am. So I sat at the table with Kelly while she ate her supper and then she said, I'm going to go out and shoot some hoops before it gets dark and I told her I had a dinner date that night and I was going to get in the shower. So she went out the front door and as I was headed to the bathroom, my phone rang. I answered the phone, it was her friend wanting to arrange another spending the night together so I went to the door and called Kelly in and she and Terrence were out on my driveway playing basketball and I thought how cute. They were both in their athletic sweats from school and I remember thinking to myself, it looked like a couple of twins out playing basketball on my driveway. So I called her in, I got in the shower, got out of the shower a little bit after that. You know, I was in my bathrobe, went into the kitchen, Kelly wasn't in the house, her purse was sitting on the table. So I went to the front door, called her name real loud, she didn't come in, stepped out on the porch, called her name a little bit louder, she still didn't answer. So first thing I did was go to the phone in the kitchen, the only phone we had, opened up the drawer, pulled out the student directory, you know, common thing for a mom to do. I looked up Terrence's phone number, called his house and I said, Terrence, this is Kelly's mom, is Kelly there? Which I didn't think she would be, you know, 30 years ago times were different. Girls weren't allowed to go into boys' houses and, you know, I mean, it was just very different than you young ladies know today, I'm sure. He said no, he thought she had gone over to and he told me this other boy's house and I thought, well, that was kind of odd, you know, because she wasn't allowed to go to boys' houses but I called that kid, his mom said he wasn't there so I called where he was. No, they hadn't seen Kelly since the day before. So I got in my car and I drove the neighborhood. You know, my date was going to show up in like 30 minutes. And so any kid that I saw out in the neighborhood, I'd ask, have you seen Kelly? No, sorry, we haven't seen her today. And so I went back home and got ready for my date and when my date showed up he was at the front door holding the basketball and I said come on in but we can't leave yet because Kelly's not here. And he and I had been dating for a couple of years and he knew Kelly really well and so he said no problem, I'll just flip on the TV and we'll just wait till she gets home. So I called Terrence's house a second time. At this point he said are you going to call the police? And I said well no, Terrence she probably called out and told me where she was but I was in the shower and didn't hear her but if you find, you know, if you talk to her, if you see her, you tell her come on home because I'm supposed to be leaving for my dinner date pretty soon. And so he sounded really excited at that point but I just, you know, told him that and hung up the phone, started calling other neighbors. Over the course of the evening, I mean I was getting really panic stricken because Kelly was a very dependable young lady. I always knew where she was. She would call me after school and say mom if you call and I don't answer, it's because I'm out, you know, practicing the balance beam or I'm going across the street to, you know, the neighbor girl's house or something, I always knew where she was. And so my date could tell that I was getting really nervous and he already felt like something's not right here. So he offered to go, you know, kind of look around the neighborhood. This was back in 1989 where the housing market had just collapsed and on our small cul-de-sac, about half of our neighbors had packed up in the middle of the night when their house was being foreclosed and we'd get up in the morning and here was another empty house, you know, neighbors were gone. And so he was going around with a flashlight looking in the empty houses thinking some vagrant had come through, saw this cute petite little girl out in the front yard, grabbed her up and had her, you know, doing horrible things in these empty houses but he didn't find her. And so about 9 o'clock, I kept telling him I've got to call the police and he said no, you're going to embarrass her to death, just give her some time. So about 9 o'clock he announced to me it's obvious we're not going to get to go out to dinner, let me go get some fast food and while I'm out, I'll drive the neighborhood. And so I always tell the guys in prison, well first I ask them, do you know what a cue beam is? And that's really popular down in Texas, all the guys have pickup trucks and had this big old spotlight that plugs into the cigarette lighter, you know, I don't know what they use them for but up here, I guess most guys don't know what those are. But my boyfriend had one of those in his truck. And so as he was driving through our neighborhood, he was shining this spotlight in the ditches because he really thought at this point that something bad had happened to Kelly. He went to the elementary school playground and the next day he told the police officer it was everything I could muster to get out of my truck because when he pulled in between his truck, as far as he could go, and the playground equipment where I told him some of the kids kind of go there on the weekends and hang out and talk, between his truck and the equipment were the great big garbage dumpsters with the flipped lids. And he told the officer, he said, I had my spotlight shining on those and I was scared to death to go flip the lids but I knew I had to do it because I was worried I was gonna find Kelly in one of them. Well, as soon as his truck got far enough out to where he couldn't see my house in his rear view mirror, somebody started knocking on my door again really loud. Guess who? It was Terrence again, standing on my front porch. This time he had on no shirt, no shoes, these wildly colored, what they called parachute pants, MC Hammer pants. He was standing out there, I know you guys are grinning because you know what I'm talking about. He was standing on my front porch and when I opened the door he said, have you found her yet? Have you found her yet? When you find Kelly, tell her that I'm really worried about her, tell her don't ever do anything like this again because I'm really worried about Kelly. And he also told me, oh, first he said, I'm fixing to go to bed and I came over to check on Kelly and I thought to myself, nine o'clock at night, a 12 year old boy is fixing to go to bed. I mean that just didn't quite add up but I was so concerned of getting back on the phone, calling people looking for Kelly that I just thanked him, closed the door, went back to the phone. So, all evening, all night until 11 o'clock I was calling neighbors, coaches, you name it, everybody I could think of. And finally at 11 o'clock I called the police and reported that my daughter was missing, that she had been missing since about 6.20 that evening. So they came out, took a missing person's report, I gave them a picture of Kelly and they left. So my date said I'm not leaving until you find Kelly so I paced the floor all night long. As soon as it started getting daylight the next morning I was on the phone calling neighbors, please tell people at church that Kelly's missing. My boyfriend started walking the neighborhood again. About 9.30 that morning I called a carpool kid, the little girl across the street and had her come over and I was standing in my front foyer, talking to her just saying I've gotta find Kelly, if you know anything, you're not gonna get in trouble, she's not gonna get in trouble but I gotta get Kelly home. About that time my phone rang and somebody started beating on my front door again and so I told her, grab the phone, this time it wasn't Terrence, this time it was Terrence's dad. He was standing on my front porch gripping his gut just stomping his feet and he kept saying Judy, Judy, I found her, I found her. Louder and louder and all I could think of was good, I get to bring Kelly home. So I started running out, following him and we ran across my front yard and when we got to his side yard where he didn't have a fence all around his yard like I did, I looked down at the corner and he was telling me I went out to get some firewood and I found Kelly. So when I looked down the corner into the corner of his backyard, I saw the stack of firewood, I saw one of those big old wooden spools like electrical wires on, they had an empty one that they were using as a picnic table. It was shoved up in the corner but I saw two bare feet sticking out of that firewood and I always tell the guys, cause the men in prison are all in gray sweatshirts and some of them are in khaki but a lot of them have gray sweatshirts and I said it wasn't my skin color, it was kind of the gray of your sweatshirt and I lost all logic. I was thinking to myself, what is a mannequin doing in Joe Samson's firewood as I was running out there? And so I get up close and I look down and I could tell it was Kelly and her sweat top was pulled up to where I could see that her bra was still fastened and that was huge to me because later as I was processing all this, this told me she probably wasn't molested and that was huge but I could see that her belly from as far, she was on her side but from as much as I could see all the way to her back was just badly scraped and bruised and bleeding but the thing that stands out in my mind even today, she was real particular about her hair. I have really goofy hair and I didn't have to work it being straight. If I just got out of the shower or was out in the rain, I would look like Bozo and she was kind of that way too so she would take her curling iron to school and between athletics and first period she was in doing the hair and stuff. So looking down at her, there was this big brown gooey mass in the top of her head that was just caked and dried leaves and grass and all I could do was just stand there and look at her and just scream at the top of my lungs. It was like my body was frozen. Well my boyfriend who was about two blocks away heard me and at this point he knew exactly what was going on. He comes running up and when I saw him I yelled, she's hurt, she's hurt really bad, we need an ambulance. So the defense mechanism in me was saying, she was probably walking across the top of the fence doing her balance beam, which I had seen her do many times and she slipped and busted her head open. I mean that's all I could fathom at this point. So the neighbor girl who was answering the phone from the principal calling to check on Kelly, I ran in and got a blanket and told her call the police. So one of them called the police. So I ran out to the street and flagged the police down and they told us to go in the house. It seemed like forever before they came in and the police officer told me my daughter was dead, my daughter had been murdered and they were pretty sure they knew who it was. It was the boy next door and I immediately said, no, no, no, you've made a horrible mistake. Terrence is a nice kid, Terrence is Kelly's friend. I mean I started doing all the same things that I would have about my own child. I knew this boy. But it turns out that yes, Terrence did murder Kelly. When I had called her in to answer the phone, he decided that she was probably like the other kids at school. She just didn't wanna mess with them anymore. So he was gonna go to his house, call my phone. If she answered, then yeah, he was right and he was gonna take care of it. If the phone was busy, everything was cool. He didn't take into account that we had a call waiting on my phone. So she heard the phone click, she told her girlfriend, hang on a minute, she clicked over, Terrence said, come over, I wanna show you a new video game I just got. She clicked back and told her friend, I'll call you back in five minutes. She went to the front door and he said, it's here on the table, step inside. He slammed the door shut and he told the intake officer he stabbed her six or seven times in the hallway and she started begging Terrence, please stop, please stop. If you stop, I won't tell anybody. And excuse me for what I'm about to say, but he said, that just pissed me off and I decided to finish her off. So with her lying down in the hallway, he straddled her and just butchered her face. I mean, she was a pretty little girl. She had the most beautiful sky blue eyes and I mean, it was really horrific what he did. He knew that his parents were coming home in a few hours so he drug her through the house across the backyard. He wanted to hoist her over into the empty yard behind him, one of the neighbors that had moved out, but he couldn't lift her dead weight so he drug her along the fence and covered her up with firewood. Before his parents got home from working at a concession stand that night, he did two loads of laundry, he washed walls, he attempted to clean carpets, he couldn't get all the blood up out of the carpet where she finished bleeding to death so he put a blanket and pillow over that. He came over to my house, well he talked to me on the phone two times, he came over to my house to ask me if I had found her yet to cover his tracks and he went to bed and went to sleep. So when his parents came home and saw there was blood on the carpet, his dad woke him up and said, what's been going on here tonight? And he told his dad, I was playing with my puppy and I busted my nose on the door facing and the dad said, well we'll deal with this in the morning. So the next morning when I'm talking to the mom asking did Terrence tell you Kelly was gone all night and she said no, she and Terrence got ready to go to church and left and, you know, that. So it's been almost 30 years and I still struggle with the fact that my daughter was murdered, that she was the one of my three girls that was the overachiever. She had been, I don't know what the proper term for it is but Duke University had selected her at the age of 13 and seventh grade for the pre-SAT. She was probably going to get an early scholarship from Duke. She just, she had the world in the palm of her hands and that was all taken away, you know. My family has been severely affected by this. My oldest daughter really struggled for a long time because she was very jealous of Kelly and was very mean to Kelly but she didn't get to make up to her as she was growing older and maturing. So she turned it internally and got into some really bad relationships and her life was not good for many years. My youngest daughter who had moved with her dad when we divorced, she was a daddy's girl and she had some learning disability, a lot of emotional problems and so she told her dad at the age of 11, daddy if I hadn't moved with you, if I had stayed with mom and Kelly because I'm bigger than Kelly, I could have beat Terrence up and I could have saved my sister's life or if he would have murdered me instead because I'm not smart and I'm not athletic and I'm not this and I'm not that, like Kelly, maybe he would have killed me instead and nobody would have heard as bad. So that daughter checked out mentally at the age of 11. Now, seven years ago, here's another tragedy in my family, that daughter had been in and out of really bad horrible relationships because she's not a mature adult. She doesn't know how to respond as adults do. She finally met a man that really cared about her, was a really good guy and really cared about my youngest granddaughter who is this daughter's only child and so this man worked as a full-time custodian in an elementary school and then he had two part-time jobs in the summer. So he was in between his two part-time jobs. He was at home for a few hours. They lived with my ex-husband, all three of them did, out in a very rural community in a small town in New Mexico. My ex-husband had gone into town to pick up a prescription for his 94-year-old mother. My granddaughter was out of town with her best friend coming home the next day. My daughter was sitting on the back porch texting with her phone and the boyfriend was in the bedroom with headphones on playing a video game. So a guy strung out on meth, came up onto the back porch with my daughter not realizing he was there until she felt something. He had a gun pointed to her temple, grabbed her phone, threw it out in the driveway, busted her phone, forced her to perform oral sex right there on her back porch, asked her who else is here and she said my daughter and my boyfriend. Saying her daughter was there was a lie but I think that's the smartest thing that's ever come out of her mouth because that turned out to be her escape route. He told her if you move I'll kill you. He went into the house, the boyfriend who had headphones on with this loud video game was totally oblivious to what had just gone on outside but he must have sensed someone was standing in the door. He turned around to look, the guy shot him point blank in the forehead, killed him right there on their bed, went back out and grabbed my daughter by the arm, brought her in there where her boyfriend was bleeding to death on the bed and said where's your daughter? Thinking he was gonna get a young one to do even worse than what he did to my daughter. She said she ran out that door so he went out looking for her, my daughter grabbed her keys and went out the back door, jumped in her van as she was driving down the long driveway, the guy comes out in front of the house, shoots the windows out of her van as she speeds away. You can't make this stuff up. One time, just another small story that I tell in the prisons, one time my purse was stolen and a lot of people in prison think what's the big deal, right? You got insurance, they're gonna take care of your credit cards, whatever it was that we took out of that purse. This was a couple of years after Kelly was murdered. I'm quite certain they did not realize how this impacted me. In my purse was my house keys, my driver's license that told where I lived, my car keys with the remote to my car, my insurance card which told the model down to the color of my car, my work badge which told where my car was parked every day when I was inside the building, right? My credit card that got run through $850 before two hours later when I realized my purse was stolen and how it was stolen, my boyfriend had a boat and we had gone out on the boat one afternoon after work just to chill out for a couple hours. Instead of locking his wallet and my purse in the boat shed, he had a brand new truck. I tucked my purse up under the driver's seat. He put his wallet in the console, locked the truck, we went out on the boat as we were walking back up to back the boat trailer down the launch. He can tell his passenger door of this brand new truck has been pried open so he told me, you wait here. By the time we got the boat back in the shed and got back to my house to call and report, yeah, somebody had racked up $850 on my credit card already. But that wasn't the big deal. It was knowing that night somebody had the keys to my house. Somebody could come in and rape me or rob me blind for everything I had worked all my life for or worse yet, kill me, you know? That night was almost as bad as the night we were looking for my daughter. So now I'm gonna switch gears. There have been some other crimes too that have happened, but they're much more minor than those. But let me tell you about the program that I do, Bridges to Life. It is a 14 week restorative justice program. We are a faith-based non-denominational program, but I tell the men and women on orientation day, we're not church, we're not Bible study. We do have Bible scriptures associated with our topics. And so, you know, we have a religious aspect to it, but we're not here to cram religion down your throat. We don't care if you have a religion. If you don't, we don't care what your religion is. I have had atheist agnostics, Wiccans, Pagans, Asatru, Muslims, Buddhist, Jewish, Jehovah's Witness, Mormons, Christians. I mean, you name it in my program and it works for everyone. So I'm gonna hold these up. We use the restoring piece using lessons from prison to men broken relationships as our curriculum. It has a corresponding study guide. So every man or woman who signs up for our 14 week long program gets a copy of this material it's theirs to keep. And so we're a nonprofit and we supply these through donations that we get. But let me tell you the topics that we cover. We go through week one in orientation and then week two is getting started. So orientation kind of tells them everything you ever wanted to know about our organization and about what they're about to get themselves into. They have graduation requirements. We're pretty strict with this program that they have to attend. We have two missed meeting maximum to still graduate at the end. They have to participate in discussions. They have homework every week that they have to read in the book, read a Bible scripture and answer questions. And I tell the ones that are not of Christian faith. I still expect you to read that Bible scripture but if you don't believe in God, if you're not a Christian faith, look at it as a moral story because we could all stand to improve our morals. And I'm right there along with you on that one. So week two, oh, additionally to graduate, they have to tell a version of their life story, including what they're incarcerated for and where they hope to go once they get out, where they wanna go from here so that we know how to help them move forward. They also have to write two letters that one of them is to one of their victims and we tell them you can't mail that letter but if you wanna submit a letter to the Victim Services Accountability Letter Bank, we bring in the forms and the instructions and tell them how they can do that and submit a letter. And then the other letter is to a family member to kinda make amends and sometimes restore those bridges that they've burned. So they write these two letters and toward the end of the program, they read their two letters in their small group and the last graduation requirement is confidentiality. And I always tell them, you've all heard the joke about Vegas. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Well, we divide our participants and our volunteers into what we call small groups. Usually 10 inmates, two volunteers and one return graduate that comes back and helps them kind of get into the program. And in that small group, whatever is said that's of a personal nature that stays within the small group. So far, I've only had one woman over in Belfair break confidentiality and get removed from the program. That's what makes our program work is they usually come in thinking, yeah, right, I'm in prison, nobody keeps confidentiality. But after they see what our program is all about, they do honor that. And so the men and women open up and get to know each other. And so I'll go ahead and tell you our topics and then I wanna tell you one really cool thing about a recent graduation that Chet kind of reminded me of when he spoke. So week two is getting started. That's usually when I share my victim's story. Week three is crime and conflict. Week four is faith, then stories, responsibility, accountability, confession, repentance, forgiveness, reconciliation, restitution, the journey. And then week 14 is a graduation program where the ones that have successfully completed get to walk across the stage, get a graduation certificate. We really honor their commitment and all of the hard work that they've put into it. So something that Chet reminded me of a couple of minutes ago when he was talking about himself on the yard with the Caucasian guy. So another thing that we do is we really break a lot of barriers by having these small groups that we make as diverse as possible both in age, race, offense. And we come in there with a compassionate, hey guys, we're here because we care about you. We want to help you succeed. So at the graduation, at the beginning of May over at Washington Corrections Center, there was one small group that because several guys got transferred out, a couple of guys got sent to the hole for various reasons. Their small group narrowed down to only three men toward the end of the program. One of those guys all tatted up from, I mean, every inch of his body that you could see that wasn't clothed, he had tattoos and a kind of a long, goatee beard. And he was very different than most of the other guys. He was very outspoken. He had no filter. And when he first came into that small group, the other guys were thinking that we're not gonna get along with you because he just said whatever was on his mind. It didn't matter. So he was also shy about coming up in graduation to speak because we have an open mic where we encourage them to come up and share with the entire group what you've gotten out of the program. So the three men that were in the small group all came up together so that he had support when he spoke. He is a satru. I don't know how many of you know anything about that. I had to learn about this through my prison work but they believe in the Nordic gods. So it's very different than my belief system but I went to an a satru event and I found it very interesting and I learned a lot. And so here he was standing there this white guy that's a satru. On his left was a black man that's Christian. On his right was a Hispanic man that had no religion, okay? So here we have this mix, black, white, Hispanic. They all came up together and when this man was finished speaking the other two guys also spoke and they said we came into this not thinking we were gonna get along even with each other, you know, the three of them because they came from very diverse backgrounds out on the yard, the Hispanic guys are over in this corner, the black guys are over in this corner, the white guys are over in this corner and they don't mingle. And they all told this entire room full of people that they were leaving our program as three friends. And I thought, wow, you know? Not only are we helping these guys get their lives on track and know how they can be successful when they get back into our community, but we're breaking these racial barriers that we have too that people don't even understand why those barriers are there. It's just because that's the way it's always been, right? You know? A lot of times just like Chet said, we just do what we were taught or what we've seen all our lives and we don't even think about, does this make sense? So we also, something else, and I wish that I had brought a copy, of course Chet's not here to see it now anyway. I'll have to get in touch with him later, but we have a family version of our book that we don't give out, but we tell the men and women when they first start the program, if you have a family member that wants to follow along with the program, if they're trying to help you succeed, they can order a copy of our nurturing piece that is written for the support person. And this book is really cool because a lot of times what we find is that family members or other loved ones or even friends, maybe they're an antagonizer or an instigator or maybe all this person's life, that other person has done nothing but put them down and tell them how sorry they are that they're never gonna make anything out of themselves. And they don't even realize that. So this book addresses from the other side some of the issues that maybe they have that where they've played a part in this man or woman's incarceration. So it's really cool. And the books that I didn't bring, we also have a juvenile version of our program that right now we don't have going up in Washington but several people have shown interest. And it's to get the young people before they make that final step of getting into prison. And so it's written like a black and white comic book. And the study guide has crossword puzzles, fill in the blank, matching instead of the structured where we do a ton of reading and then writing. This is geared more toward youth and some of them that don't have a high degree of education. So at this point, I would like to have my volunteer that's here with me, Gail. She's been with me since 2016. I think the beginning of 2016, she does two of our prisons over in Monroe. And I would like for her to come and just share a little bit of her perspective of being a volunteer in our program. Well, thank you. And as a disclaimer, I had no idea what's speaking today. I love working with Judy and I love working with Bridges to Life. One of my very earliest memories is walking across a sidewalk with my grandpa. And there was this really ugly mangy dog. Well, I didn't think it was a mangy dog, but I just had to go pet this dog. It wasn't my dog, but I just had to stop and go pet this dog. I was just enthralled with this dog. And my grandpa who loved and adored me let me pet this dog, but later he told my parents that that was the ugliest mangiest dog he had ever seen in his life. And I was shocked that he would call this precious little creature ugly and mangy. It was precious. And I don't say that because I compare people to dogs because I most certainly don't. But what it illustrates is that I don't believe in throwaway people. And I never have believed in throwaway people. I have always believed that there are good things. And one of the things that has just inspired me about Bridges to Life is when Judy tells for story in our group, when I hear the guys, some of these guys, they come in there. When they come inside, we try to create an atmosphere where this isn't prison, this is our room, this is our classroom, you're a person in here. And when they hear her story, they start to change. And sometimes they go out and they can't sleep that night. And the barriers actually start to break down. And they're able to start seeing the effects, maybe effects that they haven't been, maybe they are able to start feeling things that they haven't been able to feel before. We actually start seeing tears. We actually see people that are able to open up and share when they haven't been able to share before. And I think that's one of the things that has meant the most to me. And sometimes the people that are sitting there, the most cross armed and the most distant are the ones that end up growing the most. Sometimes the ones that give me the most fits at the beginning are the ones that end up contributing the most. I actually had a Satanist in my group. And I thought, I don't really know how I'm gonna deal with this. Because from my perspective, I didn't quite see how I would relate. But we actually found tremendous common ground and he was wonderful to work with. I don't know how, you know, he told me he loved the book of Ephesians and I didn't quite make that connection, but who's judging? And I think that having them be able to tell their stories and hear them say that telling them has dropped the weight from them, from their shoulders, and given them freedom and given them hope, it makes my Tuesdays my favorite day of the week. And I have some, like in my last group, that said, you know, I've never been honest about what I've done, I've always lied, I lied to my parents, I lied to my parents about what happened and this, you know, I'm gonna tell the truth. And they were scared to death, but telling the truth, it gave them a sense of freedom. And knowing that they could do that, knowing that they could tell the truth in a safe setting and not be judged and not have people hate them, it's just one step across that bridge and it's something special to be a part of. I think that if you have an opportunity to volunteer, if you know somebody, maybe that's even been a victim of a crime that might want to come in and talk to these guys, it makes a huge, huge impact in their lives. When they learn, when they learn how, one of the hardest things for them to learn is to learn how to feel. When they get in touch with their emotions, when they get in touch, when they get in touch with, I mean, they've forgotten how to feel. I remember asking in my group this one time, well, how did you get started in crime? And he just answered matter of factly, well, my parents were criminals. And it's really nice to be able to help them see that maybe there's a better way, a better path, a way that they can help their kids maybe choose something different, something that won't just keep that cycle going. And just, I had another one that had a severe mental illness and it was really nice to see the others in the group take protection of him. When I say take protection of him, I mean like if he's psychotic, schizophrenic, whatever it is that he was, they took his limitations or whatever and just helped him with his work, didn't make him feel awkward or weird. And then I had others that said, hey, you see me in the yard, I'm your friend, come talk to me. People that didn't know each other before, so you're creating this bond. So I guess that's what I would like to say is that it makes a difference for me because I know I'm making a difference in knowing that bridges to life cuts recidivism by 50%. I know it's something that's worthwhile. So thank you for your time. So how I got my foot in the door in Washington DOC, you know, when I first approached the administration I got the same old song and dance. We have too many programs, not enough space, too many volunteers already. And I did my little one minute commercial, but wait, let me tell you about my program. So our claim to fame so to speak is our recidivism reduction. The national average recidivism stayed at 38 to 40% from the early 90s until 2018 when they did a new study. Now it is dropped to where the national average is 37%. So one third of every, well slightly over a third of every man or woman that walks out the gates is gonna come back within three years. That's just a given that statistically. Our organization tracks recidivism, the three year cycle. And we have now, as of two weeks ago, we have graduated 47,000 men and women nationwide. Most of them are in Texas because that's where the organization was founded and it's in almost every prison in Texas. But we have groups in about seven other states right now and we have some other states that have done Bridgest Life periodically. So 47,000 men and women have graduated and our recidivism is 14.5%. So we have an 85% success rate with these men and women that complete our program of getting them on track so that they understand through gaining, learning victim empathy through the victim speakers that we have that work directly with them. They now get what crime does to people. It's one thing to go do something when you don't have any knowledge of the consequences and there's something else to do it when you know full well the other side of the story. And time and time again, they tell us, wow, now after hearing from the male volunteer that we have that calls himself the poster child for home break-ins and we talk about domestic violence. We have speakers on that. We have a lady that was hit. She was a cyclist. She was preparing for whatever the run is between Seattle and Tacoma, the bike today thing, Marathon. And she and one of her fellow cyclists were hit at 10 o'clock in the morning by a young woman who still had a blood alcohol level of 1.0 from the night before. Yeah, that was out and went out of the lane and hit them in the bike lane and she had a traumatic brain injury and is still recovering from that. I mean, we bring in people that talk to them not in a judgmental look what you did to me. No, no, no, that's not what our program is all about. This is, okay, here's how I've been affected and here's how you can keep from going back out there and doing things. Here's how you can keep your sons or your brothers or your nephews or whatever from making the same mistakes that you made because these are not, the vast majority of them are not bad people. They are people that made some pretty bad mistakes. They chose very incorrectly and a lot of them were raised in households that they weren't taught right from wrong and so that's no excuse but it helps us understand that they come from a totally different world and once they see people come in who are good, upstanding citizens that follow the law that raise their families that have still been married to the same person for 40 years that it changes their whole perspective of, wow, if I just do the right thing, I can be like you. And so as Gail said, we're always looking for community members to volunteer with our programs. We really do need, especially we need more young people involved. In a couple of the prisons that I go to, most of the volunteers are old white folks like me because we're the ones that are retired that have the time to go in and do stuff but we really need more involvement because everybody in prison doesn't look like me. And so they come in early on thinking, well, you can't relate to me because you come from a different world and so I really encourage more people to get involved. You don't have to be a crime victim. If you are, then we try to utilize that as a speaking opportunity but we have a lot of people that are just good citizens that want to make a difference. And so when we finish today, if you are interested in volunteering, I would love to get your name and information. So I'm gonna go ahead and start wrapping it up. I wanna open it up to questions. Yes, ma'am. Oh, one second, they asked me to give you the mic. What's your graduation rate? How many people that joined the program actually graduate? Do you know? That's a wonderful question. I need to go back and calculate that. Early on it was pretty low but now that we've been doing this for almost five years, I'll just give you a couple of examples. At Twin Rivers that we graduated on Tuesday night, we started with 71 men and we graduated 67 of them. And of those 67, 53% had perfect attendance every week for 14 weeks. And at WSR that we graduated on Tuesday afternoon, I think I recall that we lost seven men there. We graduated 34 and we had over two thirds of them with perfect attendance, which is almost unheard of. I mean, it just, you know, that's usually the person that we have the most dropout rate because a lot of them get transferred or it's sent to the whole or whatever. But yeah, I need to go back and calculate overall what it is. Thank you for, sorry, I don't have a direct answer for you. Yes. Get it up here. Your success rate is really high for your program. So I'm wondering, is there a criminal criteria for enrollment into your program? Okay, so no we don't. We take everyone, we do look for men and women that are gonna still be incarcerated for the entire duration of the program. And so we have murder, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, identity theft, rape, other sexual assault, carjacking, car theft, alluding police officers. I mean, we run the gamut. And so yes, absolutely, we want everyone that wants to. It is voluntary, I'm gonna get back down here so I'm not standing talking right in your face. It is voluntary, however, in 2017, the Indeterminate Sentencing Review Board, they're referred to as the ISRB, heard about our program. They had me come over and do a presentation directly to the board, and they were so impressed with what we do and with our success rate that now men that go back before the board, they're starting to write into their write-up that if they're not eligible to be released right then, if they have to come back before the board, they write in that they want them to take bridges to life before they come back. And some of the counselors are so impressed with what we do that now a lot of them really do promote our program. And so occasionally we have men and women that come in saying, my counselor, sign me up, I don't wanna be here. And I always ask them, well, give us three weeks. And if we can't convince you this program is gonna do something for you within three weeks, then so long. And the vast majority of them will stay, and then at the end they'll say, man, I'm glad I didn't drop out. I thought I didn't need this or I didn't want it, or it was gonna be too hard, and now I don't want it to end. So thank you for that question, yes. You kind of answered one of my questions, which was how do they initially find out about the program, but also if they do graduate from the program, is that able to take some time off their sentences? Okay, that's great. I meant to mention that one too, and then sometimes I'm getting old and I forget. Now we have significant word of mouth. So most of our recruiting is done through previous graduates. And a lot of the men, the reason why we have so much better attendance now, and they come in ready to start, is because a lot of them have heard from their cellmates, from their buddies, this is a program that you really need, and so we don't have as much attrition anymore as we did early on. But they do, some of them get good time restored also for completing our program, and some of them will come in initially and say, I'm only here for the certificate, and you can always tell who those are. And they're usually the ones that will decide, now I don't wanna do the work, it's just not worth it. And so we do have a few of those dropped out, but. It seems like such a brilliant program. I was just kinda curious, how did you come up with the curriculum and the whole program, did you look at, I know I've heard the IRA had this sort of restorative, there's all these people mean different things by restorative justice, so what did you look toward, or was it really just the experience of people involved? Wow, another great question, I should have done this in my very first introduction. In Houston, Texas, there is a man named John Sage, he's the founder of our organization. Back in 1990, let me think, 1992, something like that, John was a very successful businessman, he had built his business up to where he was a multimillionaire. He had actually been drafted into the NFL, he was like a linebacker at LSU I think, but he chose not to go into professional football because he was an entrepreneur. John was from a very large family of eight siblings, they were good devout Catholics, and the daughter, or the sister that was just younger than him that was like maybe 16 months younger than John, they grew up very, very close, went to the same college, John married his sister's best friend, so they always kept this very close relationship. One day, John was driving home from work, and I'd tell the young guys, they can't believe this, but back when cell phones looked like a big ol' brick and they had the curly cord that plugged into your cigarette lighter, okay that's when this happened, so John was driving home from work and he got a call when he was just a few blocks from his house, from his wife, and she said, Johnny, Marilyn has been murdered, so John's sister, this one I was telling you about, was living in an apartment, she had gone and done some laundry, she was carrying baskets of laundry from her trunk into her apartment and she left the apartment door open and the trunk lit up, and so one time when she came out and went back to get another load of laundry out of the trunk, two teenagers that had been watching her slipped into her apartment and when she came in, they bludgeoned her, wrapped an electrical cord of the lamp that they were bludgeoning her with around her neck and put a plastic cleaner bag over her head and suffocated her, all to steal her car. So John, I mean here he was, he's like six foot four, I mean this big ol' guy, he went on a downward spiral of very deep depression and just was trying everything on his own, going to psychiatrists, all this stuff, but his business was suffering, his family life was suffering, I mean he lost a bunch of weight, everything was going to hell in a handbasket, is how he describes it, and he said one night he got down on his knees about five years later, got down on his knees in his bathroom and he said, God, I just can't do this on my own anymore. And so out of his finally turning it over to God, he got the idea of if we could connect victims of crime with perpetrators of crime in prison and us come together in an understanding of why we're in this situation and figure out together how to fix this, so he started a pilot program in one of the Texas prisons and that's where I got to meet him and work in his pilot program. I had already been doing this type of work in the Texas juvenile system because Terrence was only 12 when he murdered my daughter and then when Terrence went into the adult prison I was working through victim services, so when John and I connected it was like a match made in heaven and so the book is the work of a psychologist named Kirk Blackard and John working very closely together and that's where the curriculum came from, so thank you very much, I apologize for not telling you guys this right up front. Yes. So I know your services are in a correctional facility, do you guys as well offer services in juvenile facilities or even outside for preventative to prevent crime? So down in Texas they do go into some juvenile facilities and they also have some programs in Salvation Army. They have partnered with them. I tried one Salvation Army project over in Bremerton and we just could not get the men and women to stay committed, they would come and get the materials and then split and we'd never see them again. We have a really awesome curriculum for a juvenile program but so far we haven't started it up here in Washington, I would love to see someone pick it up. I was told don't spread myself too thin to stay in the prison but the book is called Making It, A Story of Hope and maybe you weren't here when I mentioned this a little bit ago. It's written like a black and white comic book, it's really cool, I mean you flip through it and it looks like you're reading a comic book and it's about a boy, a true story about a boy named Tony who grew up in a slum area, his mom was a prostitute and drug addict so the grandmother was raising him and his siblings and when he was about 11 years old he started hanging out with the older guys in the hood and started getting in trouble, smoking marijuana, one thing after the other started joyriding in other people's cars and an older, I think it was a cousin or someone started kind of taking Tony under his wing trying to keep him out of trouble and so it's a story of his life and his struggles and the study guide that goes along with it is written much more geared to young people where it's crossword puzzles, fill in the blank, matching, so it's something that keeps kids interest. When you flip through it, it's really a very cool program and I think that it's intended to be done in 10 weeks, ours is the adult program is a 14 week long program and that one also is much smaller groups like maybe three to four young people with a volunteer so yeah, it's a really cool program. I'd love to give you my card and maybe we can connect later. Yeah, thank you. So I know we're about to run out of time. Any other questions? Oh, yes. You guys have been a great audience, thank you. You probably said before I got here how do you get funding for your program? So we are a non-profit and funding has been my biggest struggle. I could go into prisons seven days a week, 18 hours a day, that's what I love to do but I submit grants and a lot of our donations are just from people that will send us a check for $100 or we have done a couple of fundraisers inside the prison but those are pretty hard to get approved. The Native American tribes here in the state of Washington have been my biggest supporters. I get yearly grants from Puyallup to Laylup. Let's see, I've gotten grants from Suquamish, Nohomish. Oh, I should have all these memorized. There's Scalallum, yeah, there's a number of the tribes that have been good to support us and so we do use that funding to buy the materials and our graduations, we do this upright and when we can, when it's allowed in the prisons we have refreshments for graduation and stuff and so yeah, thank you for that question too. Okay, well I want to thank you all very much. Thanks for sticking with me for an hour and 15 minutes here. Thank you.