 Welcome everyone. This is our fourth lecture of the fall series. Can't believe it how time has passed. I did want to just remind you please to feel free to ask questions throughout the lecture. And even throughout the question and answer period which should start at about quarter of three we really do treasure your questions I think they're valuable. We want to thank CCTV again for their technical assistance this fall I don't know what we would do without them. Now I'd love to ask our program chair Beth would to please introduce today's speaker Beth. Thank you Carol. Hello everyone. And I just wanted to give you a heads up that very soon sometime this weekend you'll be receiving via email. A survey to obtain your feedback on the first four lectures of the semester, and both the Tripoli board and we have the program committee really really appreciate your feedback so we look forward to receiving your ratings and comments and, and those should appear in your email inbox sometime this weekend. It's my great pleasure today to welcome Jessica Brown. Jessica is a graduate of Carlton College and Georgetown University Law Center. She began her career in the New Hampshire public defender office, first serving as a staff attorney and then as managing attorney. Then she moved on to become the assistant federal public defender in Concord, New Hampshire. In 2011, she began a decade with the Vermont public defender office, ultimately joining the Chittenden County office here of the public defender as a staff attorney and then as supervising attorney. Jessica is an experienced litigator and trial attorney, having represented adult and juvenile clients. For 24 years as a public defender in July she moved to a new position as visiting professor of Vermont law school, where she teaches criminal law and constitutional criminal procedure. Jessica is actively involved in several initiatives to develop restorative justice programs and treatment models in Vermont, and to address racial disparities in the criminal and juvenile legal systems. It's my great pleasure to welcome Jessica Brown here today. Welcome Jessica. Thank you Beth thanks so much for inviting me to be here and for that nice introduction. All right, I, especially during the past year, I've become very reliant on PowerPoint so I'm going to share my screen. So, I did not come up with the title for this talk, I was previously asked to give a talk on a topic and I was given this title, why we need justice reform. And I said sure, not really knowing exactly what I would talk about but just figuring that the subject was broad enough that I would come up with something. And as it turns out, my process for developing a talk like this is involves emailing myself articles that I see in the news, texting myself, or taking screenshots of inspirational memes on Instagram and Twitter, and buying lots of books that I don't really have time to finish reading. You'll be hearing and seeing bits and pieces of from all of those sources. The last two slides of this PowerPoint, and I'm happy to share the PowerPoint with Beth. So she can provide it to anyone who might want to revisit any particular slides or look at the resources that are at the end. So a list of resources, some of which I will specifically refer to during my talk and others that I just think are helpful and important supplemental materials so there will be a couple of slides at the end that have resources on them. I've read enough articles and wasted enough time on Instagram and Twitter. I finally sat down to really start thinking about how I would answer the question, why do we need justice reform and I realized that the answer is pretty straightforward to me. And I think that some basic statistics about incarceration and policing in Vermont are illustrative of why I think the answer is pretty simple. In 2015, Vermont spent an average of close to $58,000 per inmate for a total of almost $117 million to incarcerate people in our state. There are 2,000 people by race so including men and women 225 of every 100,000 white people of 100,000 white people in Vermont are incarcerated and 2357 for every 100,000 black people in Vermont are incarcerated. One of every 14 black men in Vermont is incarcerated. As of 2019 we had between 623 and 624,000 people in our state, and 1.4% of that population is black people. I want to give a shout out to the Department of Corrections. This is probably the only shout out I'll give to the Department of Corrections this morning or this afternoon. But their website provides day by day breakdowns and monthly reports on the makeup of the Vermont prison population. Check the website this morning to update and get the most recent population data. It was from September 27. When there were let's see 101 women in jail in Vermont 100 excuse me 1089 men in our in state jail facilities and 145 men who you're paying to incarcerate in a prison facility in another state. As of July 31 2021. So the Department of Corrections website also provides population characteristics reports, and as of July 31 2021 8.9% of the Vermont jail population was black. So now I'm going to remind you that 1.4% of the population of Vermont is black. And routinely has one of the widest disparities in the US between the percent of our state population that is black and the percent of our jail population that is black. Some of you may recall a few years ago reading in the news about a report that was published in 2017 by a UVM professor named Stephanie so we know that showed that black drivers in Vermont are three to four times more likely to be searched after traffic stop than white drivers. However, white drivers are more likely to be caught with contraband. Whenever I read this particular combination of statistics I always feel compelled to expressly point out that what these statistics show to me is that when police conduct a search based on actual evidence of a crime. They're more likely to uncover criminal conduct, then they are when they conduct a search based on the race of the driver of a car. Professor Segrino's report also showed that black drivers are twice as likely to be arrested after traffic stop, then white drivers. Professor Segrino collected and analyzed data from 2014 through 2019 and eventually issued a follow up report that showed that these disparities have persisted in Vermont. So among the reasons, in my opinion, that we need justice reform is that our criminal legal system is racist, and not for nothing is also very expensive. I'm not even going to talk this morning about police really talk about the topic of police violence which also disproportionately affects black and brown people, and which costs taxpayers in this state and around the country. Hundreds of thousands of dollars and in some places in some cities in some states millions of dollars to settle lawsuits based on police brutality. But if you care about racial and economic justice and equity, you should care about overhauling our criminal legal system. Which brings me to the question I really want to spend the bulk of my time talking about today, which is how do we dismantle it how do we do it how do we dismantle and reform our criminal legal system. I think about the answer to this in from two perspectives. First, what can we do as individuals in our daily lives at a local community level to change how we respond to harm. And then second, what systemic changes need to be made, both within and from outside the system to overhaul our current criminal legal system. And I want to start by asking you all question actually, and I actually want to know your answers. And so I understand you have to put them in the q amp a. And I think that maybe will read them to me. So I'm going to give you about, I'm going to turn on my stopwatch and I'm going to give you about 15 seconds when I say go to please put your answers to the question in the q amp a. And the question is, what keeps you safe. So I'm starting my timer, maybe about 15 to 20 seconds. So please start writing some answers in the q amp a. What keeps you safe what do you think keeps you safe to short answers the first thing that pops to mind. All right so that was 20 seconds that can you share some of the answers with me. Yes. I feel safe at home. Knowing my environment. My judgment. My own awareness. Police. Laws seatbelts. I think we have another couple here let me just the community. My own behavior, respective behaviors of people. Good lighting at night. Others who care about keeping everyone safe masks. So we have a variety of thank you that thank you so much and thank you to everybody who put, who put an answer in there. So we have a variety of answers. You know, including a lot. I mean the police are certainly part of our community and part of obviously a significant part of how we respond. But, but I think some of those answers also illustrate that there are other things about our community that keep us safe, in addition to, and besides the police. This was a Twitter post after a mass shooting in, I believe it was Tennessee at the time, and this post spoke to me because it expresses one of the main points that I make to people when I talk about why we need to reform our criminal legal system and the way, and policing in our state and in this country. And that is that what we're currently doing isn't working. If giving more and more money to law enforcement agencies and militarizing our police offices are police forces and building more prisons and incarcerating more people was actually resulting in safer communities. So, you know, we're not the safest country in the world. You know, often my response when people say that the police keep them safe is that the police respond to harm. It's pretty rare that police prevent harm. You know, we're not the safest country in the world, but people continue to advocate for giving bigger budgets to law enforcement agencies and building more prisons. And I think that if the goal is truly safety, then continuing to do what's not working doesn't make a lot of sense. In fact, I posit that the safest communities don't have the most police officers, they have the most resources. And I think someone sort of spoke to that and one of the answers that I heard Beth read which was talked about the community and the you know their environment and sort of resources in the community. I live in a town that actually voted to eliminate our police department. Now that doesn't, you know, obviously we can still dial 911 and get a response. But a quote that I read from a police and prison abolitionist who my admire, whose name is Mariam Kaba, with which I agree, is that the only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police. And I would actually add to that point that the way we reduce recidivism, meaning people committing repeatedly committing crimes is also by keeping people out of the criminal legal system to begin with in the first place right. Vermont Public Radio did a great piece in 2018 as part of their brave little state project, in which they answered the question why are there so many black people incarcerated in Vermont. As part of the piece they interviewed a black man who had moved from Florida to St. Johnsbury. He lived near his sister I think, and he got arrested after getting into a fight at the first time someone called him a racial slur. And after that, he was, you know, he basically felt like he was on the radar of the St. police. And as he put it at the age of 43 years old, he racked up more arrests and charges in one year in Vermont than he had in his entire life in Florida before that. So once people enter the criminal legal system it is much more difficult for them to, or is much more likely that they will recidivate. So again the way to diminish people unnecessarily entering the criminal legal system is to reduce contact between the police and the public. I believe that this starts with us as individuals changing the way that we think about how we respond to harm specifically what can we do instead of calling the police. During the summer of 2020 I attended a virtual conference about police and prison abolition, and I learned about a concept called pod mapping. The idea is that your pod is made up of the people that you would call if violence or harm or abuse happened to you. Or someone close to you, or if you witnessed violence, or if you wanted support in yourself taking accountability or holding someone else accountable for violence or harm or abuse that they've caused that you've caused or that they've caused. This is an example of a pod map template that I found just by googling pod mapping. I found it on the website of the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective. You can see I put my initials in the center circle. The way I think about the rest of the map is that the people in the circles with the dark outlines are closest to the center circle are the people who are actually geographically closest to me to where I live and who I would feel comfortable going to for help. So on my real version of my map, there are specific names filled in phone numbers, but for purposes of this example you can see that I've written spouse, three nearby neighbors to coworkers who live near me. Moving to the circles with the dotted lines you can see that I've listed my parents and my sister. Now, I have closer personal relationships with my parents and my sister than I do with some neighbors, but my parents and my sister live in another city. So if I needed immediate help, they would not be the first people that I would call but I would certainly rely on them for support with any significant ongoing problem. The same is true with other family members in laws close friends who live in other states. So those are the people who fill up the dotted line circles on my map. Similarly, I use the outermost circles to identify services in my community, to which I could turn for help for myself or for someone else in the community. I live in Washington County so I have identified local services to address mental health emergencies substance use treatment needs, domestic violence interventions youth services. I've done a pod map for my home county or my home community as well as the community in which I work, since I work in a different county. I found a lot of community resources this is a terrible copy so I apologize. But I found a lot of community resources from this treatment directory, put together by the division of alcohol and drug abuse programs AD AP. Which provided on the health Vermont dot gov website. I also recently learned of a website called don't call the police calm which provides community based alternatives to the police in different cities, it appears to be a developing website, which for Vermont means that it currently only includes some resources in Burlington but I think most of you are from the Burlington community. I encourage you to check it out. Maybe you can help improve it. I also want to say here that thinking about ways. We can respond to situations for which we have been trained our whole lives to call the police is not only about thinking about how we respond as individuals but it's also about rethinking what we ask of the police. We ask the police to respond to situations for which they're not adequately trained adequately trained and don't have adequate support. And we really need to change that model. When I talk about ways we can start to think differently about how we respond to harm as individuals sometimes the next question is well how does this really change the system. So far today I have emphasized that I do think that we start to change the system by individually thinking about how to respond to harm differently, and by reducing contacts between the police and the public, but we absolutely also need to be challenging and changing the criminal legal system as a whole. And I want to highlight a couple of stages of the criminal legal system that are gaining a lot of nationwide attention as being ripe for reform. And in cash bail is considered a progressive policy that, like I said is getting nationwide attention and which has also gotten a lot of attention in Vermont, and is a way that some prosecutors try to affect change from within the system. I think that cash bail is only supposed to be imposed if a person is considered a risk of flight, and the judge finds that there are no conditions of release, in other words no rules that the judge can impose that will ensure that a person will return to court. I think when people hear a prosecutor say, my office will never ask for cash bail they interpret that as meaning that no one is ever going to be held in jail pending trial. The only thing that people should know is that ultimately judges make the bail decisions so even if a prosecutor is not requesting cash bail a judge might still impose it. Or if not cash bail, the prosecutor might request and the judge might impose a condition of release that effectively holds a person in jail because the person can't meet the conditions criteria right so for example. That commonly used condition of release or commonly imposed condition of release is what we call a responsible adult, meaning someone who will monitor this person if they are released. So if a judge orders that condition, and the person who's being held in jail can't find someone who will agree or who will qualify to be their responsible adult, then that person remains in jail. Furthermore, there are other sections of the bail statute in Vermont that allow people charged with crimes to be held without any bail, meaning there's no amount of money. The person can post to or pay to get released they are just held in held in jail. Basically, the statute reads that a person charged with an offense that is a felony, an element of which involves an act of violence against another person may be held without bail. When the evidence of guilt is great, and the court finds based upon clear and convincing evidence that the person's release poses a substantial threat of physical violence to any person. And that no condition or combination of conditions of release will reasonably prevent, excuse me, the physical violence. So this section of the bail statute is used all the time, including in the county in which I was a public defender the county where I think a lot of you are based to Chittenden County, where states attorney Sarah George does have a no cash bail policy. So the idea that a no cash bail policy means that violent people are being put back on the streets is simply false. We never hear prosecutor or a legislator suggesting that we should amend our bail statute from considering flight risk to considering risk of danger or violence. That person is leaving out the fact that our bail statute already considers risk of violence and allows for people to be held without bail if a judge determines that they pose a risk of violence. The criminal is what I would call a discretionary point in our criminal legal system. And if we want to change our criminal legal system, particularly if we want to diminish racial disparities in our criminal legal system, we should not be expanding or creating more discretionary points. Here are some other examples of what I mean by discretionary points. Judges decide whether or not to make an arrest that is with entirely within their discretion. Prosecutors decide whether or not to file charges that is entirely within prosecutors discretion. As I said judges decide whether or not to release someone pending trial and judges also impose sentences, those are parts of the process that are within the discretion of the judge. So discretionary points are where we tend to see the intrusion of implicit bias. And here's what I mean by, here's what I mean by implicit bias in the context of the criminal legal system. He literally appeared in front of a judge who would talk to white defendants about where in Vermont they were from, if he knew their neighborhood, or maybe even if he knew their family members, especially if they were, you know, young adults in their early 20s. He did not have those same conversations with non white defendants, no matter how young those defendants were. And he regularly held non white defendants in custody. And I'm sure that that judge does not consider himself to be racist, or to discriminate against any particular group of people. But to me what was clear was that he could literally see himself in the face of a young white defendant who appeared in front of him. And he could not relate at all to non white defendants. And that, in my opinion, caused him to make biased decisions when he was deciding things like bail that were within his discretion. So again, if part of the systemic overhauling of our criminal legal system needs to be focusing on reducing opportunities for implicit bias to intrude by reducing the number of discretionary points in the system. The second stage of the legal system that I want to highlight as being ripe for reform is community supervision and I'll start by briefly explaining Vermont system of community supervision which is unique, like many things about Vermont. No other state in the country has a system of community supervision, like we do in Vermont. The terms parole and probation might be familiar to you because most states have parole and probation supervision in Vermont, it is possible that someone might receive a jail sentence, followed by a term of probation meeting. They would be back out in the community, they would have a probation officer who they have to report to and they have to follow certain rules. It's more common with regard to probation it's more common that someone might receive a suspended jail sentence meaning that they don't have to serve any time in jail if they follow all the rules right. And a term of probation so a suspended jail sentence and a term of probation. If someone is sentenced to serve time in jail, not followed by a term of probation. Here's what happens. If you serve a jail sentence, for example, one to three years or receive a jail sentence of one to three years, you become eligible to be released on furlough after you've completed the minimum term of your sentence so in the example of one to three year sentence that would be one year eligible for furlough. You have to have completed any programs that you were required to do in jail. One of the biggest hurdles that people incarcerated people waiting to be released on furlough and Vermont face is that they will only be released on furlough to housing approved by the Department of Corrections. So, even if they've done everything they need to do while in jail, they can't, if they can't find housing that is approved by the Department of Corrections, they remain in jail, past their minimum sentence. If and when they do get released on furlough. After some period of time they might be phased down to parole, meaning that the rules might become a little bit less strict. But on either of those statuses either furlough or parole. If you are charged with a violation, meaning if you are accused of breaking one of the rules. Do not get to go in front of a judge for any kind of hearing you just go back to jail. And the Department of Corrections and or the parole board decides if and when you get released again. In contrast, if you are on probation and you are charged with a violation, you do get to be represented by a lawyer and have a hearing in front of a judge who makes a determination as to whether you have actually violated your probation or not. The information in this graph is from 2018 it was provided in a report published by the prison policy initiative. There is no reference to furlough status in this graph and I could not find any reference to furlough status in any of the information that about Vermont in this report. I suspect that they grouped people on furlough status and people on parole together, because as I said, every other state in the country only has parole and probation. So as you can see in 2018 almost 6000 people in Vermont were either on parole or probation. It makes sense that length of time spent under supervision is a key factor in the size of our furlough parole and probation population meaning if terms of supervision are long. You're going to continue to be adding people to the population at a higher rate than you are releasing people from the supervision population right. So following a list of studies is starting to show that long probation sentences are not actually associated with lower rates of recidivism recidivism or increased public safety. Most people who commit serious violations while they are on community supervision, like committing a new crime. Do so in the earliest months that they are on supervision. To make it through the early months without violating the rules, the longer the supervision term is, the longer the more likely excuse me, they are to end up committing what we call a technical violation. Paral violation is a violation of a rule that is only a rule because you are on supervision. So for example, if you're on parole, and you get accused of robbing a store, you are going to be charged with a new crime and you're also going to face a parole violation for committing a new crime. But if you're on parole, and you have a 9pm curfew, and the police find you out at 11pm, you're going to face a parole violation for violating your curfew requirement, which is a rule. You have to follow because you're on parole. So that would be considered a technical violation. When I was updating my Vermont jail population numbers this morning, I saw a statistic that as of August 31 2021 47% of the people who are in Vermont jails past their minimum sentences are in jail because of furlough violations. That percentage was not broken down to show whether those furlough violations were for technical violations or were for committing new crimes. But the data for every state including Vermont tends to show that a large percentage of our jail populations are people who are in jail for technical violations of the rules of their community supervision. So reforming how we approach community supervision is also about reducing our jail populations. So what would reforms to our community supervision approach look like. Well, first, they would include shortening supervision terms. If you're not keeping people on supervision for as long. You can focus more of your resources on providing more services and more support in the earliest months of supervision, when individuals individuals are at the highest risk of reoffending new approaches to community supervision could also include implementing goal based instead of time based supervision. So based terms of probation on the time necessary for a person to complete programming that's relevant to the crime they committed or relevant to, you know, the support that they need in the community or relevant to maybe the underlying issues, whether it be mental illness or substance use disorder that may be motivated their crime right but rather than sort of a cut and paste term of years, really individualize it to what programming this person needs to do and how long is, you know, it reasonable that it's going to take this person to complete that programming. And one other idea is the idea of instituting earned time credits. So in Vermont, if you are on furlough or parole, you are actually continuing to serve your jail sentence, you're just serving it in the community. But each day that passes counts towards reaching your maximum sentence. If you receive a three month suspended jail sentence and a two year term of probation in contrast. You can be on probation for one year and 11 months. And if you violate your probation, you could still be sent back to jail for three months. So in my earlier example about receiving a one to three year jail sentence and being released on furlough after one year. For every day of the remaining two years of that sentence that you successfully serve on furlough. That's one day off of your sentence right so if you successfully are on furlough for another year and 11 months and then you violate furlough, the most you could be sent back to jail for would be the last remaining month month of your three year maximum sentence. Whereas if you're on probation. And you don't initially have to serve any time of your three month sentence, but you, and you successfully make it through a year and 11 months of two year probation term if you violate probation after that one year and 11 months, you could be sent back to jail for that three month sentence. So the idea of earn time credits is to allow people who are on probation to reduce their supervision term through demonstrated compliance with rules and requirements so instead of making it almost to the end of a two year term and then being violated and sent back to jail. You know, that demonstrated compliance with the rules and requirements in the early months of the probation term would earn someone time off of that probation term. So bail and community supervision are two stages in the criminal legal system, where I think reform would reduce our jail populations would increase stability for people who are going through the criminal legal system, and would thereby reduce recidivism, and keep our community safer. And so I want to talk about one more way for you to start thinking about how to approach making reforms to the criminal legal system. And that is to get, get you thinking about who your county's states attorney is and if you're all from then maybe already know this but I want to briefly talk about Vermont state's attorneys because their role is one of the most powerful within the criminal legal system and it follows that prosecutors have a lot of power to keep doing things the way that they have always been done or to push the current system in new and different directions. If you want to reform from within the criminal legal system including prosecutors who declined to prosecute certain categories of crimes, or who offer alternatives to prosecution and incarceration, who propose policies that minimize court involvement, unnecessary incarceration and that reduce recidivism. So, need to pay attention to who your state's attorney is. They are elected. And they often run unopposed. And if you want to reform from within the criminal legal system. I encourage you to encourage reform minded attorneys to run for states attorneys positions attend events at which you can hear from your community and ask questions about the reforms that you want to see in your county. Engage with your state's attorney on social media. Again, if you're in Chittenden County your state's attorney is Sarah George. She has a Twitter account she has an Instagram account and she uses those to engage with the citizens of Chittenden County about what's going on in the courts. Let your state's attorney know when you support an office policy or decision that they made in a particularly newsworthy case. So, I'm sure that states attorney George, here's from her critics. So, if you support some of her policies, if you support the way she's handled certain high profile cases, you should, you know, I'm sure she'd appreciate knowing that, knowing about that support, because I'm sure it can be difficult and challenging if she's only hearing from her critics. So remember that your state's attorney has a lot of power in the criminal legal system in your county. They are elected in many counties they often run unopposed and someone will be the state's attorney for years. And so a really important way to pursue reform is to make sure that you know who your state's attorney is and engage with that person. I also quickly want to say that even though our judges are not elected. We can also hold them accountable for how we want our criminal legal system to work. One of the resources I've suggested at the end of this PowerPoint is ACLU Vermont, which is committed to developing criminal justice reform initiatives, including looking into developing bail funds and court watching programs, which I think are two ways to make sure that the public and our legislature are aware of the decisions that our judges are making. As I mentioned, I have listened to, I'm sorry, I think that something that I, you know, as someone who comes from the public defender world can agree on with people who are with prosecutors with people who are from more of the law enforcement side of the system is that our communities are stronger when we choose to think that we all have obligations to each other. Our communities are safer when we all take care of each other. So this is my vision for getting tough on crime and keeping our communities safe, build relationships with your neighbors. Make sure everyone is housed and fed. Invest in education. Provide job training, offer employment opportunities, pay living wages, ensure access to healthcare, including treatment for mental illness and substance use disorder. Hold ourselves accountable when the needs of all of our members of our communities are not being met and respond to harm with restorative and transformative justice. I thought about calling this talk imagine a world without police but I know that there are some people who think a world without police will be a world of even more chaos and violence than the one in which we already live. This poem really captures to me what I mean when I say imagine a world without police. Imagine a world where no life is lost to a bullet or a jail cell, the grave or the cage, a world where children feel free and safe when they walk to the store play at the park and go to school. A world where every family by blood or choice has food on their tables and full bellies, homes to sleep at night and good paying jobs. A world where an education or a medical emergency doesn't leave us in ruin, where people are able to heal and reach their full potential mind body and soul, where we have everything we need to fulfill our wildest dreams, where we know and care for our neighbors and no life is disposable. A world where our kids are raised and live without fear of abandonment or violence or each other, where all life on earth is valued over profit, and people are ruled by love over fear. Imagine a world where Trayvon Martin was offered a ride home instead. Before I actually I can't believe I'm actually ending right about on time. Before we get to your questions though and comments I just want to note that these last two slides are resources, some of which I've mentioned. Others I didn't reference during this talk but I think that they are great resources for learning about abolition, particularly the writings of Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Miriam. And also, whoops, sorry. I also want to encourage you to watch a documentary that aired on PBS in the spring, and I think it's still accessible through PBS, maybe if you have a PBS passport it's called Philly DA. I also want to highlight WJFI which is a Vermont organization that is doing great work to oppose a new women's jail and on abolition issues in general. That's the Women's Justice and Freedom Initiative. And so I hope that I know you have some more speakers already lined up and if you think about inviting speakers and the future on this topic, I hope that you will consider bringing in voices in the future. And voices of people with lived experience, like the women at WJFI, I think it's really helpful and important to hear from from those people as well, but I really appreciate you inviting me and allowing me to speak today and hearing my thoughts and what I have to share on this topic. So thank you so much. Thank you, Jessica. And I'm glad you mentioned Philly DA, because that was where I, it was related to that that I first encountered you when you were part of a panel on Vermont Public Radio that discussed or introduced that series that was coming so. Thank you for bringing that in and also Stephanie Segrino spoke to our group a few years ago, and so this is really helpful that you've expanded on on what she had for her research findings a few years ago. So let's get to some of the questions that we have. What are the biggest changes you've noticed during your years as a public defender. I would say one of the biggest, and I don't think this will probably surprise anyone. It is just the opiate crisis right and in retrospect, it makes me think that, you know, when I first started, which was in the late 90s, we, maybe it was just a lack of awareness on our part. But, you know, I don't know exactly what the percentage is. But an extremely high percentage of the cases that we saw that I saw as a public defender, you know, were motivated by someone struggling with substance use disorder and then obviously also another huge percentage of our client population that I represented as a public defender was, who also dealt with mental illness. So, to me those two things, and which is again not to say that they didn't exist when I first started. And maybe we just weren't, you know, talking about them as much or weren't as aware, but it also seems like there has been a significant increase over the past 25 years. Right and sadly both have increased considerably during the pandemic. So we've, we've yet to see the full impact of that. Okay, good. Another question. Our restorative justice programs demonstrably more effective than prison terms and reducing the probability of future offenses by those who have been convicted. So, since we've mentioned Stephanie so we know I'm going to bring her up again to say that I was on a panel with 70 with professors we know once, and I started respond I started speaking by saying that I didn't. I'm not a person who collects data or has a lot of statistics at the tip of my tongue, and that I tend to talk more anecdotally about just what my experience has been. And so that time and and she what I appreciated was that a professor so we know talked about how important anecdotal experience, you know, was so I'm going to speak anecdotally now to answer that question by saying that what I see as the benefits of the restorative justice processes are that they can as opposed to prison sentences prison destabilizes people's lives. And so the more we can keep people out of jails and prisons and help them stabilize their lives or you know keep the stability they have and you know maybe increase their stability by giving them the support and services that they need in the community, the better chance we have that that person is not going to keep committing crimes right. And what restorative justice can do is provide some of that right provide some of that support and stability, provide some of those services, but even more importantly, restorative justice is typically, you know, involves it is typically used in cases where there's an identifiable victim right, and a victim is never forced to participate in a restorative justice process but they are given the opportunity to do so. And if they want to what I have seen and what I think certainly Sarah George would say that she has seen in Chittenden County is that victims who go through the restorative justice process. are much more satisfied with the criminal legal process. In the end, then victims who do not go through the restorative justice process. You know, if a defendant doesn't want to ops not to participate in restorative justice process and decides for whatever reason to remain in the traditional criminal legal system process in court. What that means for a victim is that maybe he or she will get to make a statement at a sentencing hearing. You know, to tell the judge how they felt, but a restorative process goes a much longer way to having the person who caused the harm actually here directly from the person who was harmed about what that harm did to them, their life. Most victims feel much more, you know, toward whole I don't know if completely whole but toward whole going through restorative system process then a traditional criminal prosecution. So, and sometimes that offender and that victim that we're talking about the person who caused the harm and the person who was harmed, have a relationship that is going to be ongoing in the community. Right so going through that restorative process again provides a chance to maintain or or increase the stability of those people's lives, so that they are not in whatever position they were in where this harmful incident occurred. So, I forget the exact phrasing of the question but I hope I've sort of addressed it and answered it. Yes, and we have a related comment and question from another member. What a complex topic. I did watch Philly da. How can we get budget to be applied to mental health issues and community support rather than incarceration. I mean, talk to your representatives right like. I don't know the answer to that like that's I have the same question. I'm not, I'm not a like I don't handle money. So, like I never I've never been in a position at any of the public defender offices where I've worked where I was managing a budget or anything like that. I'm not the best person to speak to this topic, but I think of it just in the simplest ways right like if we're, for example, not asking police to respond to mental health crises, and instead, giving those that money to the Howard Center or mental health agencies to increase their staff and increase the, you know, training for staff to be able to safely respond to mental health crises, so that we're calling Howard Center when there's a mental health crisis instead of calling the police. That to me just seems like a shift in in budgets, but I'm, I know it's more complicated than that. But I definitely think it's, you know, these are issues to be brought to your, your representatives both at the local, you know, city of Burlington level as well as at the state level right. Okay. And two related questions. Could you describe the makeup of your law school students in terms of gender, race, age, are they from Vermont, other states, other countries, and what can be done to encourage outstanding young attorneys from diverse backgrounds to pursue public defender careers, even though they might earn higher salaries in the private sector. This is my first semester teaching at Vermont Law School, and I'm teaching one criminal law class, and I have only about 25 students. And I would say it's not an, there are more women than men in the class I'm not sure exactly what the breakdown is, but I do think that the student body population has a higher percentage of women than men. And I don't know exactly where all of them are from, but quite a few of them are from other states. And I may have one student who is an international student in my class. So I do, I mean so the good news is that Vermont Law School is attracting students from outside Vermont, you know, obviously I also think a lot of people who are already established in Vermont and decide they want to go to law school go to VLS. Particularly so it's not the criminal law curriculum that's drawing people to VLS it's, you know, they are obviously renowned for their environmental law programs. But with that said, Vermont Law School is the host now to both the Center for Justice Reform and the National Center on Restorative Justice. So it's, it is a burgeoning hotbed for restorative justice, which I'm very excited about. So I mean, part of the answer to that question is that because Vermont Law School is building its name as a Center for restorative justice and justice reform that maybe that will attract attorneys who, you know, want to go into the criminal legal system from a perspective of bringing reform and, you know, restorative justice practices into the system. So that's one way I think we can attract law students and make good lawyers to go into public defense. I don't know, oh gosh, I mean my story for how I ended up here as a public defender is long and too long for the time we have left and not that exciting. But, you know, I think it's, I mean, I think it's encouraging and giving opportunities to young attorneys and students who are in Vermont to, you know, intern and clerk in the public defender offices. And it's also doing outreach to students in other law schools in other states to who are interested in going into criminal justice and in becoming public defenders and selling them on why it's great to be a public defender in Vermont. And I think that, you know, our defender community here and, you know, the access we do have and the motivation we do have in the system who are interested in justice reform and interested in expanding use of restorative and transformative justice in our system are part of how we can attract people to Vermont to go into public defender work. Okay, and I think this might be our last question because we're coming up to three o'clock. Are there other states or countries whom we could look to as models or we beg for or steal ideas from because their countries are safer or their justice systems seem more effective. I wish I had Sarah George with me right now because she could tell you about I believe she's actually I don't know if she's actually traveled to other countries she or she may have gone to Canada. And she may have visited some other states but I do think that like a group of people from Vermont have traveled to some countries in Europe to kind of look at how they're look at their jails and prisons and how they even do that differently than we do. So I mean the short answer is yes that there are other countries and also just other states in the US but like you know I know that states Attorney George has traveled to Canada to view how they are handling safe injection sites. And like I said I believe a cohort of Vermonters have gone to it may have been Germany to observe how they, how their jail system works. So, I don't know a lot about how other countries legal systems work necessarily as compared to ours but I know that there are places that are doing things differently and more progressively than we are and we should absolutely look to them. Okay, well this has just been terrific Jessica you've given us a lot of food for thought and given us a lot of context to help us try to decipher what we hear in the news and, and hopefully some changes coming down the pipe. But thank you very much. Thank you so much again for inviting me I really appreciate the invitation. I think Carol is coming back in the moment. Okay, with some closing remarks. I think I'm here. Thank you so much Jessica that gave us so much to think about we really really appreciate all the information to chew on. So I don't think you can see me but I'm here. I want to wish everyone a great week do look please for the feedback emails that you should be receiving in the next few days, and we will see you next week. Thank you.