 Let me introduce myself. I'm Scott Newton. I'm the head of the School of Law, Gender and Media at SOAS, University of London. And we're hosting the conference on carceral policy policing and race, which has been proceeding yesterday and today, and has really been an extraordinary event. I'm sorry you haven't been able to participate directly. But we're glad to be able to offer you this opportunity to participate, at least in this fashion. Our plan is to record this session and then to make it available to conference participants following. So please understand, as I've said as we proceed, that most of the people who would be attending this panel are not because they're physically at the conference. And it's been, as I said, a really extraordinary and we hope transformative event. In my opening remarks yesterday, I said that this is really a watershed moment for issues of race in relation to carceral policy generally, carcerality, and policing practices around the world. And this is when we conceived this conference with David Lamme, really in a process beginning two years back, we knew already that there were many people who were working on these issues from different perspectives in different geographic context. But we really had no idea that we get the kind of robust turnout and response that we have done and a collection of really front-ranking scholars and activists, both who are doing critical cutting-edge work. And although, given our traditional geographic remit, we have been focusing on Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Caribbean and Latin America. And we have had contributions respecting North America, which are obviously critical for all sorts of reasons, particularly in respect of indigenous populations and indigenous issues. So we're especially pleased to be able to convene this panel. So let me, without further ado, introduce you bearing in mind that you are being introduced prospectively to the audience, which we are expecting will access the recording at some near point. So I'd like then to introduce Professor Bin, in the order in which I've received their information. And then that's the order in which we'll proceed. And Dr. Sameer Boulle is our missing participant. And we have set him per third in the sequence of presentations. So I'm hoping earnestly that he joins us by the time he's due to go on stage. Professor Patricia Bocascus is Meti from Alberta. Her research is focused on the intersection of justice and law, including access to justice, clinical legal education, and decolonizing and indigenizing law. She's particularly interested in examining the value of indigenous pedagogies and experiential learning in clinical legal education and in skills-based legal training and disrupting the normative violence of colonial legal education, which continues in multiple forms and places. And Dr. Bocascus will be addressing us on the theme of decolonizing and indigenizing law. So Dr. Bocascus, Patricia, if you would mind over to you. So you'll have 15 minutes, as will each of the succeeding participants, and then we'll reserve another 15, 20 minutes at the end for questions and conversation, really, since we're such an intimate gathering here. So I'd like to see this sort of at the end develop into a conversation. But to frame that conversation, Patricia, why don't you lead off? Thank you. Marcy, Tanshiki Oao, Patricia Bocascus, Tashini Kashan. It's a pleasure to be joining you today from the territories of the Lekwungen speaking people here in what is called Victoria, British Columbia. My work recently has taken me to the law school at the University of Victoria, where I'm on a one-year contract with the law school teaching in their first year program. And also, we'll be doing some work for them on the newly beginning National Center on Indigenous Laws. So I'm very pleased to be joining you today to talk a little bit about decolonizing and indigenizing law, specifically in the context of policing, carcerality, and what's happening here in BC, but in Canada, moreover, in terms of thinking through how the court systems are dealing with Indigenous people still, despite the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and despite the murdered and missing women and girls inquiry and the calls for justice coming out of that inquiry. So I do regret that once I, after I'm done speaking, I'm going to have to go because I have to teach this morning, unfortunately. So I'm sorry about that. But I'm very willing to take questions by email if people want to get in touch with me later. And they can reach me at pbarkascus at uvic.ca. So I can provide that information. And people are very welcome to get in touch with me. I'm sorry that I'll have to miss the conversation because I'm sure the discussion will be very rich. So I want to start with the I want to start kind of at the end of something, I think, is what I'll call it. Even though it's not really the end. I want to start with the report that was issued on the RCMP investigation into the death of Colton Boucher, which took place, which happened in August 9th of 2016. So for those of you who aren't familiar with the Barton case, sorry, not the Barton case, my apologies, that's a different case, which I'll talk about, the Stanley case. It was a case in which Gerald Stanley, a Saskatchewan farmer, was tried for the murder of Colton Boucher, a young red pheasant First Nation member who he shot and killed in a motor vehicle that was on his property. And the horror of that event in and of itself was exacerbated by the way that the RCMP dealt with that situation. So the investigation, though this is not what the report says, the investigation was horrific. And I'll give a trigger warning here. I'm going to talk about some pretty awful things in the sense that a number of events occurred that the RCMP did not take full responsibility for, in which the report found them to have conducted themselves reasonably in doing so. So one of the first things that happened was in reporting about the death of Mr. Boucher to his family, the RCMP showed up at his house and basically threatened his mother. They showed up and arrived on the reserve, arrived at the family's home, and treated the family members as though they were criminals themselves, which would probably not be surprising to any of you if you lived in Canada and had any idea what it's like in terms of the relationship between the RCMP and indigenous peoples. So that was one thing that happened. Another thing that happened, and this is all detailed in various accounts, but is that they left Mr. Boucher's body in the vehicle outside for a period of time. There was rain that washed away important blood evidence, blood spatter evidence. But in general, they disrespected his body and treated it as they would not, I think, have treated the body of a person who was not indigenous. That case and the resulting trial and the events that flow from it have led to the report. Like I said, the commission did make a number of recommendations despite finding that the RCMP conducted themselves reasonably. But at the end of the day, the reason that I bring this up is because it's a prime example of the ways in which policing in our country here in Canada has not taken up any of the myriad calls for change over many, many, many, many years. So starting with the Royal Commission, there were things before that, but the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, which happened in 1996, the Manitoba Justice Inquiry, the same things happen over and over and over again that really highlight the ways in which anti-indigenous racism, in particular in this case, although anti-black racism and certainly racism against other racialized folks and peoples of color, is certainly alive and well in this country too. I don't want to diminish that in any way, despite the fact that I'm focusing here on Indigenous peoples. And it intersects in all kinds of ways. So we have the Stanley case and what happened to Colton Boucher. We also have the Barton case, which I mentioned previously, which was the case in which Mr. Barton was having sexual relations with a woman whose name is Cindy Gladue and in the course of those relations, he inflicted a wound on her with a knife. That wound, and again, this will be explicit content, was in her vagina and she bled to death. He left her in a bathtub in a hotel room to die. And that is egregious and horrible, of course, and there's no way to talk about that without being completely stunned by the horror of it. But what the court system did in response is also horrible. So as a part of the trial of Mr. Barton, the Crown Prosecutor thought it appropriate to allow into evidence or bring into evidence Ms. Gladue's body in order to put that before the court, before the jury. And it was the kind of thing that can only be described as a shocking beyond belief that a Crown Prosecutor would think that it was appropriate to bring a person, a woman, a mother, a daughter, her body into court, her dismembered body, the part of her body where the wound was inflicted and display it and refer to it as Jean Taillay has so eloquently put to the Supreme Court of Canada and her submissions to the court on behalf of the women of the Métis nation. They made her into tissue. They reduced her to tissue, to a body part. They took away her humanity and all of her dignity in doing so and broke all kinds of laws and protocols of both her Métis and Cree indigenous cultures and legal orders. So when I think about the idea of the possibilities around change, which is what we're really talking about here in this particular panel, I have very little hope at this point that we are seeing real change in terms of what the police are doing and in terms of the treatment, especially in places like Alberta and Saskatchewan and Manitoba in particular, around the treatment and the issue of anti-indigenous racism in the police and the court systems, including when the Supreme Court of Canada can make decisions at the end of the day about some of these cases and the ways that they do. We've just had an indigenous woman elected to the Supreme Court of Canada, which is a huge change. It's the first time it's happened in all of Canada's history, so we'll see what happens with that. It's obviously a monumentous appointment. And I just want to turn in the few minutes I have left to some of the things that are happening that I do see in terms of possibility or hope in terms of change that's going on. So it's not really change. In 1999, the case of Gladue was at the Supreme Court of Canada, which was the first interpretation of our criminal justice section 718.2E, which is locally referred to as the Gladue provision based on that case. That section of the criminal code, 718.2E, came out of the act to amend the criminal code and other acts in 1995. And there were some responses to it immediately. As I mentioned, the Royal Commission and Aboriginal Peoples was taking place in 1996. So in bridging the cultural divide, that commission stated that the statement of purposes and principles of 718.2E certainly does not preclude imposing a sentence that emphasizes restorative and healing goals, that these are not given priority, nor are they seen as anchoring the sentencing process. And I would say that that's still the case. So although we have this provision, which allows for and has sort of created the need for specialized reports, which are referred to as Gladue reports when it comes to the sentencing of Indigenous peoples, and the provision which tells us that they must, that judges must, in all cases, consider all alternatives to incarceration, we've seen that over time, we've seen, I think, three things, importantly. One is that judges don't all accept that to be their duty. And we have the joint cases of Aipoli and Ladue, which followed in 2012. So quite a breadth of time in between those two things when the Supreme Court of Canada took the opportunity to remind judges across the country that they have a statutory duty to consider all alternatives to incarceration. But Gladue reports, which are produced for the sentencing of Indigenous peoples in this country, are not accessible to all people. We have seen, so too, when these Gladue reports are used, we've seen that they do work in cases where resources exist to provide the alternatives to incarceration. And of course, in many, many communities, especially those that are more remote, those resources don't exist. So this tension exists between the use, the idea of using Gladue reports, which is a great idea, the fact that they do work when they're used properly to provide the court with the context of colonialism and all of the ways in which an Indigenous person has been criminalized, marginalized, stigmatized and pathologized throughout not just their life, but the lives usually of their community and their family. So it addresses both intergenerational trauma and intergenerational injustice, which is a term that comes from Hadley Friedland's work, which I think is a more appropriate way to think about what happens for Indigenous people than just intergenerational trauma. So Gladue reports, which contextualize all of that for judges in a way that is meant to be neutral and unbiased from the writer and then puts forward a potential healing plan as an alternative to incarceration do work when the resources exist and when judges take account of them properly and also when defense counsel utilize them properly because to put a report like that in front of a judge and simply ask the judge to consider it without considering its contextual basis and without advocacy is sometimes, well, not sometimes, which is often what happens with those reports, unfortunately, despite the duty of defense counsel and actually of Crown based on the Supreme Court of Canada's decisions in Gladue and then Aipoli and Ladue where they tell us that if a judge doesn't take judicial notice of these things, it's counsel, both counsel's responsibility to make sure that that happens. So we do see that these are used well and very useful to judges when they are used well and that really has to do with when they're available and unfortunately they are not available in most places in Canada in most times when you have indigenous people before the courts. So as a part of a project with the International Center for Criminal Law Reform back in 2019, I was part of a team that produced a report called the Production Delivery of Gladue Presentance Reports, a review of selected Canadian programs. That report is available online and it really sets out the details of where and how reports are available and a number of recommendations about what needs to be done in order to service indigenous peoples appropriately according to Canadian law itself. And we've had more conversations since 2019 about the ways in which to incorporate indigenous law into sentencing of indigenous peoples. There are a number of courts across Canada, specifically in BC and then in Ontario with the Gladue Court. These are mentioned in the report of it too, but there's been more work since indigenous courts but they still fall under the provisions of the criminal code, right? They're still using Canadian common law. Although judges are becoming better accepting and thinking about the ways in which indigenous law shouldn't could be incorporated into what we call healing plans, which is the alternative to incarceration. So that's sort of a wide breadth of information and a hugely simplified overall summary of some stuff that's going on. And yeah, I'll leave you with that. But like I said, I'm very happy to take questions or comments or follow up in any way with folks because I can't stay for the discussion. Again, my email is pbarkaskis, it's spelled B-A-R-K-A-S-K-A-S at uvic.ca. And it's really a pleasure to have been here this morning to speak with folks and to let you know a little bit of what's going on over here in Canada. Thank you. As a fellow academic, I'm well aware of the pressures of the living classroom. Could I exercise chairs prerogative just to put a brief question to you in the way you're really compelling but just so that we have it on record. I mean, I just want the glad you report mechanism absolutely fascinating, compelling. And I realize that it has, it's of limited efficacy, it's case specific, and it's very targeted, but nonetheless as a measure of decolonizing, indigenizing the application of law, it seems to be a significant gain. And I'm just wondering, using the kind of, I'm glad to rationale or principle, particularly given its limitation to specific cases, whether one might not envisage to rolling it out and pioneering or trialing. So glad you're training for Crown Council, for RCMP, for judges for that matter, which as part of a basic formal legal education and professional education. So rather than having, I'm using the same idea and the same principles, but educating judges and prosecutors and police to the very particular circumstances of indigenous people that they are likely to come across in the execution of their duties as a part of their training on which for instance, they could be tested, et cetera. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it is fair to say that that recommendation has been made several times. So the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada made that recommendation. The calls for justice coming out of the murdered, missing women and girls in Korea made that recommendation. And certainly academic scholars and activists have been calling for that for a long time. And again, not just in terms of indigenous folks, but BIPOC folks overall, but specific to glad you and the ways in which the circumstances of colonialism have impacted indigenous peoples and why that means that they are more criminalized is something that's very important. And it is happening to some degree. So we see it, I certainly saw it a lot more post-TRC, so in the sort of early, or I guess in the second half of the, you know, 2000 teens, so, you know, 2016, 2017, 2018 and 19, I was doing a lot of educating of Crown Council and government lawyers that's still going on to some degree. But I think that there's a sense somehow for people that they've got it at this point, you know, they've been educated because they've had like one talk by one person one time. And I don't mean to be flippant about it, but that really is sort of the way that people end up taking them out of their homes. People end up taking that up, which is highly problematic. The one place that I'll say that that isn't happening in that same sort of one-off kind of way is with judges. So the National Judicial Institute is taking this very seriously and their work to educate judges about the circumstances of indigenous people, about their duty as judges when it comes to Gladiou and Gladiou reports is a real commitment that they've made. So I've participated in some of these discussions and I can tell you that the judges who do attend and of course judicial education isn't mandatory. So that's always an issue. But I do see a lot of judges taking this up in earnest and really wanting to understand. And certainly when we did the interviews with judges across the country for the report, and for iClear, they were very concerned about the lack of resources. They said that when they have Gladiou reports, they are incredibly useful to them. Even when the resources don't exist to create the exact healing plan, it helps them understand the real mitigating factors that colonialism has created that have to be considered. So I couldn't agree more that educating people properly is a huge part of this process. And then also in that educating them about the ways that indigenous communities themselves, if they're willing and if they're able can resource really innovative ways of engaging with healing plans for people and or where there and our as it were own laws come into play in terms of dealing with these situations in community. So I think that we're on a path that could lead us to a very good place if people are willing to really be courageous about taking that work up and really engaging. And you see it sometimes, it's of course magical when it does happen. Let me just, if you will, you've been very kind and indulgent, but let me just follow it up briefly and ask you, and did you just then connect the dots and understand that what they're being confronted with in the Gladiou report is obviously a contextualization, a decolonial contextualization of a particular case with a particular set of circumstances. But what that case and those circumstances reveal is the colonial nature of the justice system to core and to begin with. So each within, which would obviously have implications far beyond that case. Absolutely. And importantly, sometimes Gladiou reports are read into the record, but lots of times they aren't. And I mean, I understand the balance that we have to work with there too, because it's a re-traumatizing experience as the other side of Gladiou reports for a person to talk about and for their family members and their community members and their elders to be interviewed about all the ways in which colonialism have impacted their community and their families and their lives is a horribly re-traumatizing methodology. We can't deny that, but it does educate the court and it does educate the lawyers who are involved as well. So I think that when we see the ways in which judges publish decisions in which Gladiou factors have been considered and there's been a Gladiou report, they can very importantly put in the contextualizing factors that made them make the decision that they made. And that's also very important as you're saying in terms of obviously setting precedent in terms of case law, but also in terms of educating people about the ways in which the criminalization of indigenous peoples, communities and nations isn't a one-off. It isn't about that one individual in that one circumstance despite the fact that Canadian common law wants to carve that out and make that the case, that it's all about the individual. It really isn't and Gladiou reports make that very clear. I mean, it would be interesting to collect the Gladiou reports as they have been issued, right? I mean, I realize that they are court-specific and for court purposes. They don't get circulated or published, I assume. No. But it would be interesting to collect them and digest them and distill their findings for a broader audience. Yeah, we might, I mean, I don't know if it's possible. We might see something like that go on in the future as we move forward. So at least in BC, where Gladiou reports are more available to people at least at this point because we have the First Nations Justice Strategy and the First Nations Justice Council, which has now been funded by the provincial government to run a number of indigenous justice centers across the province. And they are the repository now for where Gladiou reports are available to people. So because they have a Gladiou team and because they have a infrastructure for that, we may indeed in the future see some sort of a report or a study that is able to take a look at that. This is provincial, I mean, and it's just the, with somebody else. Yeah, at this point anyway. All right, well, thank you again for the presentation and your willingness to entertain my question. Of course, no problem. All right, and please by all means, do make your details available and we'll ask people to send in questions as they have. Thank you. Perfect, okay, thank you very much. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye. Okay, Christina, it's now over to you. So let me introduce Christina Ducat who's a community psychology student at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in the US. She began her career in abolitionist scholarship at NYU in 2015, working directly with girls in the juvenile justice system at the ROSS Roses Advocacy Project. Her current research focuses on understanding the impacts of state violence in the juvenile justice system, particularly for girls and gender-expansive kids while exploring the unique ways these youth navigate the system and resist oppression by the state. And once again, this is a critical dimension in the overall analysis of race and carcerality, which has tended to be neglected, that's juvenile justice. And then as far as I'm aware, this is one of the very few presentations we've had directed toward juvenile justice. So Christina, we're really interested to hear you. This is, and you're going to be speaking on expanding the Corceral Net in the US juvenile justice system, expanding the Corceral Net in the US juvenile justice system, exploring success in quotes in community-based programming. So Christina, over to you. Thank you so much for that information. And also want to thank Dr. Barkaskis again for that wonderful presentation. I'm hoping that mine sort of facilitates the conversation a little further on some of that paradoxes and tensions that come with alternatives to incarceration in the juvenile context. I am gonna share my screen. I have a little slide deck prepared just to help keep it organized. And are you seeing my slides and not my notes? Perfect. Yes, yes. Perfect, all right. Thank you everyone for having me today. As you said, I'm gonna be talking about the expansion of the Corceral Net in the US juvenile justice system and specifically focusing on how we measure success in community-based programming or community supervision for youth. To begin, I wanted to give a brief overview of what I mean when I say net widening and the use of community-based programming or CBPs in the US juvenile system. So net widening in the juvenile system refers to the expansion of social control by the justice system where as part of reform efforts to avoid youth incarceration, we actually see more youth being brought into the juvenile justice system. And this happens because of the emphasis placed on preventing youth delinquency where basically we have all of these policies and interventions that are focused on identifying at-risk youth. But what those functionally do is they catch youth who might never have actually offended or very low-level minor offenses or just simply being at-risk and getting that label and they get caught up in that Corceral Net and pushed into the formal system to rehabilitate them. One of the primary ways the juvenile justice system accomplishes this is by outsourcing their supervision. So staying away from formal courts or incarceration and moving into community-based supervision. Obviously one of the more common examples that we might think of when we think of community supervision is probation where you keep kids at home but you still monitor their behavior to prevent further misbehavior. In the American juvenile system and also other systems as well, there's been specific caution around the use of this kind of supervision as it potentially expands the reach of the system into previously unmonitored venues. And we see this specifically with the recent emphasis on diversion programming for youth where we sort of route kids around the court system if they're identified as at-risk or doing low-level offenses and efforts to keep them out of the further system. But we know that that actually tends to push kids into the system because of high failure rates in those programs. And we also know that increased supervision can actually perpetuate system involvement in that way because as people are surveyed more they're more likely to get caught because you're watching them just by nature of that and that can push them deeper into the system either by sending them back to court or incarcerating them for low-level violations of those surveillance terms. The current study focuses on this type of community supervision and specifically what we're calling community-based programs or CBPs. CBPs are a hallmark of modern juvenile justice reform particularly in the US. They're a cheaper, more developmentally appropriate way of referring to youth to services and resources without relying on incarceration. And it's in efforts to again, promote youth rehabilitation and reintegration into their communities. And while this new reliance on CBPs by the formal system outsources the care of juveniles to community organizations it's important to note that they're still under the funding and overall supervision of the juvenile justice system. Now these programs can provide a wide range of services and resources to system-involved youth including therapy, vocational training, mentorship, drug and alcohol treatment. And youth are referred to these programs across formal system points. So from arrest all the way to post-release services after they've been released from incarceration. Because of CBPs emerging prevalence in the US context it becomes incredibly important for us to understand what the expectations youth are being held to within these programs so that we can also understand what it takes for youth to eventually leave the system as well as what the system might consider to be indicators that a youth has been actually rehabilitated in the long-term. There isn't a lot of literature or research into what the specific standards of success for youth are but we do know that failure in similar types of programming is very, very common. For example, the literature on probation compliance tells us in some cases more than half of youth on probation will violate the terms of their probation and a lot of times those violations are actually part of are because they fail to comply with the terms of the CBP that they have been mandated to. And as I said earlier that failure not only keeps kids in the system it can actually push them further in. They can get charged with something called the technical violation if they fail the terms of their probation and they can also be further incarcerated after the fact for that kind of failure. And because of again the novel proliferation of CBPs in the US system we wanted to look at how CBPs define youth success by taking a closer look at their measurement of youth outcomes to see how that might illustrate the expansion of the carceral net into youth's lives. In order to do this we conducted a systematic review of CBP evaluation literature and did a content analysis of their outcome metrics which is what I'll be presenting on today. I'm gonna start by describing the characteristics of CBPs or community-based programs so we can get a sense of what services exactly kids are getting referred to. And then we're gonna look specifically at what the outcome metrics being reported are and how those may systematically vary. To give you a quick overview of our sample this study reviewed the evaluation manuscripts of 68 CBPs being run in the United States between the years 2005 and 2021. These programs are operating in 130 different sites in 33 of the United States serving a total of nearly 30,000 youth and that's just in the evaluation literature so much more youth or many more youth are being exposed to these kind of services. The pie chart here breaks down what services specifically CBPs are providing to youth. Most commonly programs in the sample were providing youth with wraparound services or case management services which is where it's similar to a social services model while they'd be paired with a social worker or someone similar to that role to connect youth with resources to meet their unmet needs. Also really common were mental health programs like mandated therapy most of the time and restorative justice interventions like case conferencing or mediation where that is used in lieu of a traditional court process. Looking further at the characteristics of CBPs we can start to see some variation in when youth are being referred to CBPs after they become system involved. So you can see here that youth are primarily being referred to CBPs as a form of diversion which typically but not always means that they're mandated to the program after they're arrested but before they see a judge or a formally charged. Again, that's not always the case but that's generally what diversion looks like in the US. And then again following their release from a residential facility like a youth detention center in order to help facilitate their successful transition back into the community. And what we see here is that CBPs are primarily being used as tools to work with youth beyond the walls of the courtroom and beyond the walls of prisons and into youth homes and communities. Now this extension into their homes and communities by the formal justice system of course raises a lot of questions about what exactly are CBPs looking for from youth. If they're indeed interested in promoting youth rehabilitation and preventing delinquency we also wanna know how the system determines whether or not a youth has been successful enough in the program to be considered rehabilitated. And one way to assess this sometimes abstract and unreported question that we chose to do for this study is to look at what youth outcomes CBPs are focusing on. Again, going through the different outcome metrics that each CBP reported in their evaluations we found that on average programs report about four youth outcomes when they're talking about their program efficacy that ranges from one all the way to 57 discrete outcomes within each program. So massive range in what exactly programs are reporting about youth outcomes. We group these outcomes into eight categories. So outcomes measuring youth recidivism or reoffending after they complete the program, education, risky behaviors. So that's usually things like substances or risky sex behaviors, mental health, employment, interpersonal relationships and housing outcomes. We also have another category which encompassed administrative variables like how many program sessions youth attended. And you can see pretty clearly from this graph that recidivism is far and away the most commonly measured youth outcome across programs. This aligns with what we would expect not only from the literature on juvenile justice rehabilitation but also just general knowledge about how the system works. We're interested in getting people out of it and keeping them from coming back in. However, you also see that most programs measure youth outcomes in additional domains beyond just recidivism. And this tells us that CBPs are demonstrating some amount of understanding that youth success isn't just contingent on whether or not they recidivate. And I think this illustrates a lot of the reform trends that we've seen in the last 20 years with the increased federal funding for CBPs and community supervision and that emerging acknowledgement that jail isn't necessarily the best option for youth and we need to invest in other strategies. However, because these CBPs, again, they're tied to the formal justice system and often funded by the formal justice system, it also illustrates that most CBPs are to some extent monitoring youth or surveying youth in a wide range of domains that would not be monitored if they weren't under supervision. A good example of this is the relationships category. That's not something that you're going to be monitored on in your day-to-day life as a kid unless somebody is already keeping track of other outcomes that you're having in your day-to-day life. Now, of course, looking at reported outcome metrics isn't a perfect measure of what it takes for youth to succeed or not fail their programs, but this does give us some insight into what impact CBPs are expecting that they're going to have on youth and where the different places where the system might be monitoring youth in their homes and communities, which leads us to our next research question. How might this expansive monitoring perpetuate disparities we already know exist within the juvenile justice system? And I'm going to focus on racial disparities in this section. Even with the surface level analysis of outcome metrics that I just discussed, we're already starting to see a lot of variation in what outcomes are being measured and for which programs. This, of course, raises further questions about how deep that variation goes and if it's systematic, how might it align with the systematic marginalization of certain youth in the system? In order to answer those questions, we need to start by looking at which youth are being served by CBPs. And the main takeaway from this slide is overall, we're seeing the representation of different genders and different races on par with the rest of the system, but we know that those representations systematically disadvantage girls and youth of color. And again, I'm going to focus on race here for the purposes of time. The majority of programs really quickly on gender though served youth of mixed genders. A good amount of programs served only boys and two programs specifically served girls. That lack of programming for girls is notable because the US has had a really strong emphasis in the last 20 years on creating gender responsive programming and funding gender responsive programming. But the differences in that and the differences in outcome metrics could be an entire presentation on its own. Also happy to talk about it during the discussion. But within mixed gender programs, girls make up about 27% of girls in CBPs and that number is pretty comparable with what we see at other system points where girls make up about 30% depending on where you are looking in the system. Looking at race, unsurprisingly, the majority of youth served by CBPs are youth of color making up an average about 60% of youth in each program. Again, this is aligned with what we already know about the over representation of youth of color throughout the system. According to the last US census, I think youth of color made up a little less than half of youth, but they make up between 60 and 70% of youth throughout the system. Also, I wanted to note since this is a presentation about measurement, I wanted to talk about how we measured race here. We decided to collapse race into white versus non-white categories for this analysis because race is reported incredibly inconsistently across programs. So not every program reports all race categories, sometimes only the number of youth of color or the number of black youth is reported. Sometimes Hispanic youth are counted as white youth. All of that data was really inconsistent across. So we decided to collapse it this way to include as much data as we can when we're making some quantitative comparisons. And when we reviewed the outcome definitions of each outcome metric, we noticed a lot of variation in what specifically they were asking and also how they were asking it, even if ostensibly they were measuring the same things. For example, one program might measure educational success by asking whether youth are skipping school or if they had dropped out. And that's like a very deficit-based measurement of youth education. Whereas another program might ask about youth GPA or whether or not they're planning on going to college or how satisfied they are with their relationship with those teachers. You can see even though those differences are subtle and they're both asking about education, the ways in which they're doing it can give us some insight into the impact CVPs are expecting to have on their youth and what they sort of are imagining as futures for youth. We looked at this variation a lot of different ways for this review, but I wanted to focus for this presentation on the prevalence of compliance-based metrics. We found two distinct categories of compliance in our data and coded them based on whether each outcome metric measured either rule breaking or rule abiding. Rule breaking was measured in about 42% of outcome metrics and those outcomes asked whether or not youth are engaging in behaviors that they're supposed to avoid. For example, a lot of these outcomes are measures of recidivism, like self-reported offending, are you breaking the law? Rule abiding was measured in about 12% of outcome metrics which asked whether or not youth are engaging in certain behaviors that they're expected to as set by the program. So for example, questions about are you taking your mental health medication? Are you attending program sessions? Those are rule abiding aspects of compliance. And we use these frequencies of the compliance indicators to do a little bit of a qualitative exploration. I won't belabor the statistics here, but we wanted to see if the proportion of outcomes measuring compliance varies systematically and whether that aligns with what we already know about disparities in the system specifically by race. We found that rule breaking aspects are more commonly found in recidivism and risky behavior outcomes, whereas rule abiding outcomes come in educational outcomes. We also use the frequency of these compliance codes to explore the relationships between CBPs and expectations of compliance and racial disparities across the system. So we know that the proportion of compliance-based outcomes does vary significantly across system points. And we also know that the highest proportion of youth of color is in diversion programming. So mostly most youth of color are being referred to youth of color are overrepresented in diversion programming. And we also know that compliance is really high in diversion programming. And we wanted to see if they varied together. We ran a one-way ANOVA, which is what that graph is talking about. And you can see based on the shape of the lines and also the significance that the proportion of compliance-based outcomes and the proportion of youth of color vary together across system points. And what this suggests is that the way that we're measuring youth outcomes might particularly disadvantage youth of color because the programs that they are systematically referred to are also systematically focused on rule compliance, which is a more restrictive definition of youth success. Now, of course, the use of CBPs is not inherently a bad thing, particularly as the alternative for these is often incarceration. We know that the system involvement for youth is directly tied to their needs at home and in their communities. And so it makes sense to target these needs in order to prevent delinquency. We can even go so far as to say that there is value in measuring kids on outcomes beyond just whether they recidivate. There's value in providing youth with resources or caring for their mental health or avoiding formal court processes with restorative justice interventions. Our cause for concern, however, is the location of these programs. Because these programs are entrenched in the juvenile justice system, whatever resources they're providing or however holistic their measurement, they can't be disentangled from the carceral state and the implications of that for youth. Taken together, our findings are demonstrating a dense web of potential monitoring of youth by the state, and that's illustrated by the wide range of outcomes being used to measure youth success in CBPs. Much of this monitoring is in areas that we would expect like recidivism, but we're also seeing monitoring in areas that wouldn't be monitored unless we had identified kids as being at risk or delinquent. Things like their family, peer and romantic relationships, their employment status and educational goals, all of those being monitored by the state has implications for how the state is going to define their success and whether or not they end up leaving the system in the long term. We see that racial disparities that we know to be true are being replicated in CBPs. And overall, when we look at these outcomes, we're seeing they're focused on compliance, they're being more restrictive and that is disproportionately impacting youth of color. These trends are evidence of the carceral preep, which is a phenomenon in which the formal system will sort of outsource monitoring and resources to the nonprofit sector. That trend isn't new, advocates working in abolitionists, intimate partner violence, disability justice circles, they've all been aware of this and talking about this and researching this and these sort of harms for decades. And I think we can learn a lot from them on how to resist the expansion of the carceral net in the juvenile system. What we don't see in these outcomes is the prioritization of positive or pro-social youth outcomes like relationship quality or career aspirations. That's not very common in outcome metrics. An integration of more strengths-based measurement like this which assess youth outside of the constraints and the surveillance of the juvenile system can allow us to have a better understanding of how youth survive and thrive in systems which are designed to marginalize them. The lingering question of course is what exactly does that look like for us in our work? In recent years, there's been renewed discussion about what reform looks like in the juvenile justice system which is widely known to be broken. And these conversations have been echoed in the academy where we talk a lot about being inclusive and equitable and justice oriented or even go so far as to call ourselves decolonial. However, as we see in this study, there are inherent tensions between being strengths-based in your work and also the necessity of working with the justice system if you're doing justice system research. For example, if we're evaluating system programs in order for us to truly uplift the wellbeing and success of youth outside of and in opposition to the marginalizing force of the juvenile justice system, it's up to us to hold ourselves accountable to being and allying ourselves with youth success on their own terms. Christina, thank you for a really compelling presentation about which I have a number of questions, but I'll hold anything off because in the meanwhile, Brian has joined us, Brian, welcome. Let me introduce you and ask you to speak to us without further ado. I'm sorry, Samir. Samir, are you with us? Yes, yes, sorry. Dr. Samir Bulleh is a practicing physician in Toronto in the psychiatry department in Toronto Hospital and he's the past president of the Black Medical Students Association and co-founder of The Doctors for Defunding the Police. So, Samir, I'm glad that you finally made it. Sorry, apologies. You haven't been able to catch the first presentation, but at least you got most of the second. So, let me turn things over to you and then we'll save some time at the end for questions. We've got 15 minutes. Please start to get away. Perfect, perfect. Well, I wanna thank everyone for being here and I also wanna thank my co-speakers. It was wonderful listening to you and it is nice hearing about the American context as well as trying to understand what's happening there. So, just to give you guys an understanding why I'm here, so my name is Samir Bulleh and why I'm one of the co-founders of Doctors for Defunding the Police. So, I'm basically going to give a little brief talk about what Defunding the Police looks like in the Canadian context and talk a little bit about the struggles we're having supporting the communities and the people who really suffer from the brunt of police brutality and the sequelae of poverty. So, just to give an example, so I grew up in the community in the Northwest of Toronto that's mainly made up of immigrants and people with a low income background. So, I grew up in the community that was forced to interact with police a lot, to be honest. I noticed very early on how police would use violence in order to end the threat of it really to intimidate the kids in my community, my friends and my cousins and my brothers. I've all been directly abused by the police coming into our communities with more carte blanche to commit violence against us. The problem with a lot of our communities is the qualified immunity. The fact that the police officers do not come from the community and they do often carry themselves like a foreign occupying force with statistics like 75% of the police officers in Toronto don't even live in the city of Toronto. For example, when I was 16 and I began to drive, I would always get pulled over by the police and the officers would give me variations of the same excuse that they were just checking who I was or what I was doing because the community you lived in, once you would leave the barriers, there would always be some type of police presence. And at the end of my first year of driving, I was carted over a dozen times so when I never committed a single offense, even when I was driving one way down the street and the police officer would be driving the other, they would make eye contact, pull a U-turn and check you out. So, the problem here is unless you're from a low income racialized community, you're often left in the dark about what truly happens in Canada, in these neighborhoods and especially even in Canada, which a lot of people never even know about. So, police officers here are really taught the thin blue line between civil society and complete anarchy. But in the reality, they do look at a lot of us like criminals and thugs who are guilty until proven innocent. We've had cases like Deandre Campbell where he recently called 911 on himself during a mental health crisis and ended up being shot by the police. Where to this day, the offending officer who shot him does not have to give a statement or be investigated whatsoever due to the policies we have in Canada. This is the same story we hear about the SIU. So, their Special Investigation Unit over and over again, where we have an independent review board filled with former police officers. We have the same thing that happened with the patient of the people. Caleb Tobila Nijoko, a Samia team who was shot nine times due to transit fare issue. Ayesha Hudson, who was a 16-year-old indigenous girl who was killed when stealing alcohol and a jazz chaudry on a family-asked and elderly man who was in a mental health crisis. They asked the police to de-escalate. Within three seconds, they already shot him. So, and so many more. We have countless cases and they always keep happening in our country. So, even in the prison system with correctional officers, we recently had the results from the Soleimani-Fakiri case where a young schizophrenic man was tortured and beaten to death with a bag over his head. And even though the chief forensic pathologist in Ontario, so one of the doctors did a review and found that the prison's guards' actions directly led to the death of the patient. No one will be charged. So, the family fought for years in order for this to be reopened. The chief pathologist said, yes, the issues of what the guards did led to his prison, his death. But because we don't know who dealt the final blow, we can't charge anybody. So, when people ask for police reform and should say and say constantly that we should be waiting for the full report from the SIU before we jump to conclusions and things like that, we want people to understand that in Ontario where we're from in Toronto, the SIU was created over 30 years ago in 1990. These problems have been going on in our communities for decades and we've been screaming about it and still avoid it for a very long time. So, it's very obvious at this point but we cannot police ourselves out of systemic poverty and systemic racism as was clear from the second presentation as well. Policing is a public health crisis. By now, we're aware of the origins of policing. A lot it was to protect private property. There used to be slave controls here in Canada specifically with the RCMP. They were very much known to push Indigenous people off their land and take that land. So, and to even give more context, the fact that every school I went up to growing up in the Toronto District School Board, so the most focused district for Toronto, always had a police officer but never a psychologist, nurse, or anyone to help the students there. In fact, Toronto, York region, and most recently Pildress 6, it was at three areas around Toronto, have all been under review for human rights abuses as a result of anti-black systemic racism and the Pildress District School Board so much the provincial government had to step in and remove the board leader themselves. So, if any other system worked like this and as efficiently and recklessly as the police, they would be completely dismantled and reset. What if there was a few bad Apple pilots or a few bad Apple surgeons or doctors? Would we be all right with them in our society? Obviously not. So, the question is, why are police allowed to function with such immunity? As doctors, all of our actions are under the scrutiny of a cost-benefit analysis down to which tests to order and when to do them. We need to rationalize every action we do because of the healthcare budget. Yet, where's the transparency in our police budgets? Defunding the police to me is a truly an abolitionist project and abolishing the police to me doesn't mean there are no officers on the street immediately, but imagining a world where there are no need for police officers, where people have the needs and the things that they need that would probably divert them from doing the crimes that we constantly see happening in society. To me, there are clear intersections with the feminist movement. Violence against women cannot be solved by the carceral state. And the police are, in fact, some of the biggest perpetrators and conductors of sexual violence against women and minors. There's literally a sex ring that was busted up recently in Toronto where a high-ranking cop was one of the top people hiding some of the things happening. And we have multiple studies showing that up to 40% of police officers have been involved in some form of domestic abuse within their own families. How many stories have we heard of women trying to get the police to protect them from a man or somebody? Just for the police to say the threat isn't serious enough for them to do something at this time. And before you know it, the woman is abused to the point of no return or even killed. Are the police really the best way to deal with this type of violence? And what about that violence against women? Does jailing a man or woman who completes this two-committes act reduce the likelihood of it happening again or to another woman? No, because sexual violence and violence against women cannot be solved by the car so safe. It just creates more people's behind bars and never addresses the root causes of these said issues. Decriminalization is a law we're asking for in some issues. What we define as crime. Threats to our safety or security don't come from what is currently defined as crime, but threats come from the failures of institutions in our country to deal with issues of health, education, justice, opportunity, and so much more. The police in their past and current forms have never been about protecting the peace, safety, or security for all the masses, but for the subjugation of certain undesired populations and the accumulation of capital. Why do police help process evictions, suppress protests and strikes and are disproportionately in the poorer, more colored schools? Because in our estimate, it seems to be that as their purpose, control and corrality undesirables, the more vulnerable the people's whose labor really fuels our economies as the essential workers, risking their health and the health of their families because they have no option. The police were created to really push a lot of these communities and they are well-funded to do it. So we spend $41 million a day on policing in Canada. 10% of the Toronto's city budget, so over $1.2 billion is what we spend on the police and it never seems to stop growing. The police state, the prison system, the justice system are all somewhat extensions of the prison and military industrial complex and the state's monopoly on violence. And the fact that the state is only serving the oligarch to the capital holders in our society, where we have crazy facts, like two Canadians had more wealth than 11 million Canadians in the before the pandemic started or during the pandemic where we have stats like the top 20 Canadians made $40 billion during just seven months of the pandemic while the lowest proportion of Canadians lost a similar amount of money. So the people with all the wealth and capital seem to be using a police more as an extension of their power. But what if we imagine a world where they do not have that unilateral hold on that power and instead of a shared democratic with the communities having access to resources to take care of themselves? What if we could shift capital away from the policing and raise the divert taxes from the extremely wealthy who've sometimes not paid their fair share of decades and invested that in education, healthcare, community investment, reintegration, rehabilitation of the criminal and true empowerment of marginalized communities, investment in jobs, et cetera. So imagine, so just to conclude, to imagine the intellectual world where we can have people to be free as they possibly could be. We create and utilize a bigger tax base to invest in the true future of the country by investing in people because the human capital right now, we're wasting so much potential by creating systems that exclude and destroy so many people. So I believe as doctors for defying the police really have three main takeaways from the work that we do and the ideas that we've been trying to put forth in the community. So the first takeaway and the first ask that we've been really pushing is full transparency of all police and RCMP budgets with full disclosure on how and more particularly why the police budget allocations have been prioritized over things like mental health, social education, social funding, housing, recreation and other healthcare resources and allocation. Number two would be an immediate change to the use of force laws because we do have, we need to forbid the lethal force that we constantly see in bodily harm with disarming police officers who work with certain civilians, especially with the homeless population, people in mental health crises or people in petty theft because we have a lot of stories in Canada where people, if these situations where the police did not show up, these people would not be dead. If we're not asking if the mental health crisis should have been averted in a different way, but all we're saying is we need to give people opportunities to heal and get better and sometimes the police are not the best option. And finally, defunding the police budget with reallocation towards first, the creation of new community emergency services to support the mental health of black, indigenous, racialized, disabled, poor and other community members made vulnerable a lot by the structural violence that we see in our institutions. And really the creation of non-police response teams trained in de-escalation and crisis support who root their work in transformative trauma and community informed practices. So in Toronto, we actually do have so just to give some credit, we actually during COVID have started some pilots in these communities. So we have four major pilots happening in Toronto where major community groups that have already been doing work on the ground in crisis care have been given more of a budget and a phone number to now get some of the diversion from 911 calls. And it does seem to be something that is working and hopefully we'll get more data on that as folks. And finally, to me, it is clear that police despite increasing yearly budgets not made significant impacts in the reduction of crime. After multiple decades of failed attempts at a police reform, tangible solutions need to censure the voices of the people in the communities because the safest communities are the ones with the most resources. Thank you. Thank you. Since we are a very modest gathering now and as I explained to the outset, you wouldn't have heard this because the carceral policy policing and race conferences is taking place live in the background. Most of the people who would have attended this session which is a special online session will be attending the live sessions at the conference. So they will be viewing this later, we're recording it and I should have warned you that we are recording it. So please let me know if you have any, if you have a problem with that. No worries at all, no worries. Okay, great. I mean, frankly, if I were you and I'd be pleased and proud to have myself recorded for a very good answer. We've got a really splendid assemblage of scholars and activists for this conference. And I'm sorry they're not here to put questions to you directly. So let me, both of you will indulge me because Christina, I'm also gonna sort of ask questions as a proxy for the audience of you. So if we can engage briefly in a conversation, let's do that. And I guess, let me start with you, Christina because the whole idea of outsourcing juvenile justice using community-based programs is obviously sounds enlightened and progressive but turns out not to be the case at all, right? You characterize it, I think, quite eloquently and persuasively as outsourcing. So that instead of being an alternative form of justice, it really just becomes an adjunct form of justice which expands and enhances the defects of the existing justice system, right? So it enables ineffectively amounts to outsourcing monitoring and surveillance and control as the primary functions which these programs, well, it's not the primary functions that these programs seem to be discharging, at least a very significant priority set of functions. So I guess part of the difficulty is getting people to think that community-based, although, again, it has the attractiveness and the ring and the resonance of an alternative form of justice and a kindler, gentler, milder form of justice is actually serving very dubious and pernicious ends. So my question to you is, how do you get people to, is this just, is this misbranding, is this mislabeling, is this abusing the term community really to disguise this insidious form of outsourcing that you described and is it a matter of relabeling? So how do you imagine reinventing these kinds of community-based programs but ensuring them against their weaponization, their instrumentalization for these kinds of monitoring control and surveillance purposes? Sorry, that's a broad question but you can take it in any direction you like. No, that's a really good question and something I ask a lot. I think you're right. I think a lot of it is relabeling. A lot of the, I like the dubious, that was the word I was looking for in my presentation that I couldn't remember. The sort of more, is this actually doing what we're saying we're doing, are we doing something sort of behind the scenes is a characteristic of not only the juvenile justice system, not only the American context. If you look at the history of any sort of carceral system, which we can learn a lot from abolitionist scholars who have been analyzing the system in this way, this is not a new trend. This is just sort of a latest version of the carceral state replicating and expanding itself. So we see that in trends with how prisons and mass incarceration has sort of expanded in the last 50 years. We see this in policing. We see this recent example that's been getting a lot of attention in the adult system is electronic monitoring. So having ankle monitors and being at home but your home, it's not your jail. That is, it's not a new trend. And I think it illustrates a lot of the goals of the carceral state, which is to protect and expand itself. And it can do that by doing that sort of subversion. And a lot of that is based in capitalism and the economic value of like hoarding resources and keeping the resources within the carceral state to preserve itself. I think that's sort of what we're seeing in this case in the juvenile system and also elsewhere. When it comes to resisting it, I think that is a question for ever. I think one of the things that I really value, especially working with kids and like advocating for kids when kids aren't around like in spaces like this is emphasizing the fact that we do need to trust kids and kids know what they're doing. They have very sophisticated nuanced like analyses of the system and how it's working and where it's monitoring them and how to navigate that system, how to resist it, how to subvert surveillance in different ways. They're very smart about that if you talk to them about like what they're doing in terms of like how they're becoming system-involved. And I think channeling that into if we're doing, if we're developing programs, if we're evaluating programs, channeling that into what we're doing is the best way to resist it because the kids know best. They know, they live it, they breathe it. It's like functionally all impacting them. So it makes a lot of sense to integrate them in that. Methodologically, obviously youth participatory action research is like a good way to do that. A lot of like highlighting the voices of youth organizers and making sure that whenever we're talking about policy or we're talking about programs, so their voices need to be at the table because otherwise our adult perspectives are going to be what comes out and we tend to have a sort of ageist perspective on well, I know what these kids need. I remember being a teenager once and I think that there's a radical mindset that can happen if you're thinking, if you're thinking about including youth that can be more expansive and in the long term, more protective to you. How do you control then for sort of counter subversive responses to revelations of subversive tools and techniques? Right, so once, and this is in some sense a question of academic and activist ethics because once you identify and analyze and publicize all the really clever and cool things that kids have devised to dodge and get around and defeat the multitude of new mechanisms that have been developed, right? Then people think, okay, so now we're gonna have to go back and build a better mousetrap because they're escaping from these mousetraps. I had an answer to that, I wouldn't have a job. Yeah, no, I think about that a lot whenever I'm working, whenever I'm talking to or on behalf of youth. And I think a lot of that again, comes to having really honest conversations with youth and being like, okay, this is what we're seeing. This is like, how do you want to present it? And giving them that autonomy over it is one way to protect it and making sure they have control over their own narratives. And I think collaborative like academic methodologies sort of, they build that in, right? They have that sort of that assumption that the researcher isn't the person who knows what's best. They aren't the person who knows what to report and what not to report. I think it becomes the burden of the researcher to identify those ethical tensions. Like if like you find something that like you have to report your findings, but like this could like harm youth that like whatever, how do you do that? And I think that's a really case by case basis, but I think again, turning back to the youth always gives an answer on how to approach it because it's their lives at stake, not yours. Thanks, Christina. So let me turn things over to you now. I mean, that was an amazingly eloquent and really lapidary, you know, some 15 minute encapsulation of the abolitionist case. I mean, it's so well done you. That was like a superb articulation of the principle arguments for abolition. And I just say, I told Christina and Patricia initially that when I introduced the conference yesterday, I said that this was really a watershed moment when race and carcerality and policing were finally being appreciated and understood at the proper scale. And it wasn't accidental that we, you know, discovered there were a multitude of researchers and activists and analysts and scholars who were busy exploring these issues and the relationships among race, carcerality and policing in multiple diverse geographic contexts. And part of this watershed, one of this historical conjuncture, you know, is the advent of abolitionism and the sort of the elaboration and the maturation of the abolitionist arguments is they're game-changing, right? So now we're dealing in a totally different discursive terrain now that we have the abolitionist case out there, right? So, and I wanted to ask you as a doctor specifically because I'm fascinated by the idea of a group of physicians coming together and agitating for abolitionism, effectively making the medical case, the public health case for abolition is just amazing. Let me articulate it a little bit because it's very interesting that we even got to this point because if I can tell you how we got to becoming doctors for defunding the police, were we able to make it? Let me just, it put me in mind, you know, physicians for human rights, right? And obviously there are a lot of analogies because essentially, you know, treating the police as an occupying army or a militia, paramilitaries, I mean, you know, what the Janjaweed are to the Sudan, right? The Toronto cops are in Toronto, right? So understanding the police as essentially enforcers of a racial order and dispensers of state violence, right? They're not here to serve you is like our main argument that we tried to put out here. Well, in just to like back up. So a lot of the times when we're doing so, if you see what's happening in our psychiatric ward that's in Canada right now, specifically in Toronto, it's ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous, the amount of carceral violence, the amount of poverty you really see, the amount of like the sequelae of longstanding trauma that is just brought out in just so much acuteness. There's acute suicidality, psychosis, whatever is going on. And what we're trying to say is my responsibility as a doctor doesn't end the second you get out of my emergency room or my clinic or my office or whatever I decide to work in. If I've taken on the mantle of a doctor and I care about your health, if when you leave my office, the things that are impacting you being your education, your workforce, the people in your community, the jobs available to you, if we're not working on those to kind of complete the person, I think we have a huge disservice in. A lot of the doctors, so we actually were able to get over 600 doctors to sign on to this group, but the main core of the group of doctors, really funny, please, is about 50 doctors. Even smaller is like the organizing group of about 10 doctors and those are like very abolitionists, very focused doctors. And if you can see all of these doctors, we don't work in the same fields like at all. Like I'm one of the only psychiatrists there and I work mainly like forensics and like the prison where it aligns. Other doctors we have are like palliative care addictions doctors. We have family, a lot of family medicine doctors. We have emergency doctors. We have people in different aspects of the system who see people in different places and then they've also gotten to the conclusion over years of this, right? I know I'm young in the game, but I'm the youngest doctor amongst the other doctors and they've gone to the same similar conclusions where we're putting our resources in the wrong place and expecting different results because we have gun violence issues in Toronto and certain communities where if you go into those communities and you spoke to the people who are most affected and the families that are most impacted, there's a pattern. There's a clear pattern of poverty, not trusting the system, not having any access to resources, not feeling like they are a marginalized, dejected part of society. So nowadays, we're really trying to say that as doctors who really believe in the health of our communities being the first and foremost thing that we care about, we have to have every aspect of a person's life, at least in our focus. And right now what we're saying is, policing in and of itself is a huge detriment to our imagination as a society because every time there's a shooting or there's a crime that happens in certain communities or there's something bad that happens, the direct response is more police funding. It's constantly more police funding and it's never an intellectual agreement or argument about like, okay, this happened because of these reasons, what can we do to reduce some? Yes, will there be, need to be some violence protection absolutely in some areas, but how do we get to root a lot of these issues? Many of the times we don't think like that. In medicine, when I was taught through medical school, we weren't taught to think like that, but when you get onto the field and you see, I was talking to other retiring doctors now and they're talking about how the field has changed completely and they can't even imagine practicing now because the scope of the patients that we're seeing, it's so much more acute. There's so many new things coming up where the mental health aspects are bleaching into other things or going into other things and we have to be much more honest. Are these other psychiatrists or? Yeah, yeah, we have a lot of psychiatrists working with us. You are aware, of course, that you have an illustrious predecessor as a decolonial psychiatrist. Yes, yes. So, I mean, it's no accident that, you know, Fennel wrote as he did and analyzed as he did on the basis of his clinical practice. So, his clinical practice, you know, informed in a fundamental way his entire approach to decolonization and his understanding of colonialism as a generator of multiple pathologies, right? So, yeah, the evidence of those pathologies in his patients. So, the connection between psychiatry and anti-colonial struggle is a venerable one. I'm sure you're aware of that. Yeah, we are the cops. We joke, we are the cops. We've been the cops of, like, the medicine for the longest time taking away people's rights without any, like, due process, but yeah. Yeah, so this, right, so psychiatrists have this dual veil and so, I mean, on the one hand, you know, effectively adjunct security officers. But it's also a privileged place, you know, as Thannon certainly demonstrated, from which to develop a critique of the system. Absolutely, and that's, it's the kind of absurdity, right? Because the daily things that you see working in psychiatry, you will see every day, I don't want to call it a crime, but a tragedy, like a tragedy of the system and a person that could have easily been diverted at an earlier stage or even at this stage, but we don't have the resources or the energy or the wherewithal to really push. So nowadays, there is like a old school and useful psychiatry, I guess, we're kind of in the final category. We kind of think that we have to take care of the whole patient and if the systems and the institutions are the ones causing the damage, then I think we have to attack those. Well, listen, Bosem, I would really love to keep this conversation going and it's thrilling to meet you both. I'm only sorry that Patricia couldn't stay for the end of the discussion was, it's just, you know, when we put these panels together, we were mixing chemicals and we had no idea what kind of reaction we'd get. I have to say, this is, for every one of these panels and I've been present at a number of them and chaired now too, with a lot of people and chaired now too, there's the same amazing productive chemistry and the interventions that people have prepared not being aware of one another necessarily, nonetheless, speak to one another in all sorts of ways. And I certainly have that feeling today and I hope the both of you do. So thank you for making yourselves available and we will post this in due course on the website and do keep in touch, because we'd like to involve you in the ongoing development of this project. So if you're willing to sign on and continue to be informed of and involved with events in our eventual research protocol as we develop it. Absolutely, please. Thank you. I want to thank Oliver, even if he's here, if he's not here, but it's always great working with people internationally that have similar ideas that we have to hope to try to make a better world, right? That's our job. Right, so that's a great note on which to end. Christina, thank you again, both be in touch. Absolutely, take care.