 Okay. Can everyone hear me? Okay, everyone. Vermont Justice and our incarcerated folks and family, thank you for coming out to show support for an important right, timely and appropriate health care while serving time in the Vermont prison system. We are here because since the start of 2023, we have lost seven lives at Southern State Correctional Facility. Our last loss involved a man who reported that he could not breathe and is pleased for help were denied. This very same person, a detainee is or was considered in the eyes of the law innocent until proven guilty. Yet he received the death sentence, the death sentence. I would like to start with a story. When I was a young mom, I filled in as a registered nurse at the Windsor Work Farm to give the nurses who work their time off. The Windsor Work Farm was the Southeast Correctional Facility and was a very progressive form of incarceration. Our folks worked, they milked cows, grew vegetables to sell and they cooked. These daily jobs provided the incarcerated people of our state dignity while they did their time. I recall quite vividly or curmudgeonly over Monter who put his name on the list to be seen. Due to confidentiality, I shall refer to him as Samuel. His job was the floors. He would mop, wax, sweep, etc. He had two issues that needed addressing. His eyeglasses constantly fell down on his nose while he was doing his various floor duties. His second complaint was an inguinal hernia. So here was Sam mopping with his glasses hanging down, sweeping with his hernia popping out. I put him on the list to see the doctor who at the time came every Tuesday and Thursday to interview and examine our incarcerated folks at the work farm. Right away, Samuel got an appointment for an eye exam and new glasses and we referred him to a surgeon at Mount Asgardney Hospital to assess the inguinal hernia. Samuel got his new glasses and he had a simple hernia repair. A few months later when I arrived, Samuel was mopping the floor. He greeted me with a large smile and was proud to show me his new glasses. His care was prompt and appropriate. Samuel felt validated and was able to return to work as a contributing member to his incarcerated community. I had also heard through the prison grapevine that no one did the floors like Samuel. Let us compare and contrast this same story in the for-profit prison healthcare model we practiced today. Samuel would have had to put in a multitude of six slips about his eyes and bulging hernia. Eventually he'd get an eye exam and most likely he would have to put in six slips when the new glasses did not arrive in a timely manner. The hernia, however, would not be attended to. Samuel would have to put in six slip after six slip complaining of his hernia. He would not see a doctor. Eventually he may see a nurse practitioner or a physician's assistant and it may be telehealth. In the outside world a doctor listens to a patient's history of illness and then does a physical exam. This means a hands-on assessment. There is no substitute for a hands-on physical assessment for a diagnosis. That my friends is the art of medicine. In today's prison for profit healthcare system Samuel's new job would be putting in six slip after six slip daily. With enough six slips and I don't know the process for how many one needs to file grievance but it takes persistence and constant nagging similar to the squeaky wheel gets the grease. But eventually and not sure the process Samuel's inguinal hernia complain will get to the defender general's office. You may or may not be aware that the defender general's office is staffed with lawyers not doctors. The defender general's office has to then litigate Samuel's hernia with the for-profit healthcare company. For-profit prison healthcare companies have a lot of money to hire experts to say yep Samuel does not need to have his hernia repaired. This well-paid expert doctor who will not do a physical exam on Samuel instead he will use his fancy medical jargon to prove that Samuel does not in fact need a hernia repair. All the while Samuel is sitting in his cell hoping that at some point the for- profit medical care company will do what our state law says. This is 28 VSA 801 A the department shall not the department may the department shall provide healthcare for inmates in accordance with the prevailing medical standards. Since when does the prevailing medical standard include litigating for healthcare? Not only is this time consuming there are medical or surgical conditions that continue to deteriorate without timely care. In the case of Samuel being denied access to a specialist could result in a rupture of the bowel, peritonitis, a huge surgery, a colostomy and even loss of life. If this were to happen would the present for-profit healthcare staff recognize that Samuel's pink slip for abdominal pain was urgent and not his regular sick slip complaining of a hernia. Present for-profit healthcare has a skeletal crew of practitioners. I am not a practitioner I'm a registered nurse and LPN and an LNA are not practitioners. We do not do physical exams, write orders or prescribe meds. I would like to know how many practitioners are for-profit healthcare provider actually have. Are the current providers seeing and examining our incarcerated folks or are they getting a report over the phone and making medical decisions while skipping the very art of medicine a physical exam. Our incarcerated folks deserve boots on the ground in the case of Samuel our current system does not easily allow access to specialists. Money spent on a specialist would decrease corporate profit. Our incarcerated folks are easy targets. Their voices may be heard inside those walls but not validated through actions. Actions translate into decreased profit. Recently I saw the commissioner of the department corrections on the news stating how sick our inmate population is. Our demographics have changed. Allegedly 90% are taking five or more medications. To me that sounds exactly like victim blaming. Our incarcerated folks are dying because they are sick and because they are sick it is their fault. According to the source civic science 70% of Americans take at least one prescription medication a day. That is our nation's demographic and yes that demographic has changed as well. The amount of medications taken a day is not an excuse for poor medical care. Our incarcerated folks are receiving or not receiving. Rather I would ask the commissioner what can be done to oversee the new for-profit healthcare provider? Well path LLC. There should be weekly oversight. Is well path providing their own medical director and if so is that person drinking the Kool-Aid of their for-profit medical model? How many institutions is this medical director providing oversight for? Is this person located in Tennessee as well? These are important considerations if we want true healthcare for our incarcerated folks. I also read that we will be paying for this new for-profit provider $33 million and change a year. Will there be boots on the ground? Will we have MDs in house? Will we have any nurse practitioners or physicians assistants in house? Will our incarcerated folks still have to fill out multiple six steps until they get the prevailing medical standard of care as provided by Vermont law? I would urge the commissioner of the Department of Corrections to ask such questions. What will the staffing be? If our folks are as sick as he claims they are, there should be more practitioners than our current model. I didn't see any jobs posted by well path LLC for our state. Is this new provider using the same skeletal vital core stuff sort of like the phrase same blank different day? I also urge our lawmakers to bring back in-state care. I would have to think with a $33 million budget for about 13 incarcerated folks. We could build our own. We have medical students at UVM and Dartmouth-Hitchcock. We have nursing students at Colby Sawyer UVM Vermont Technical College. We could offer them internships. Maybe some would stay on for loan forgiveness. We have doctors graduating from both hospitals. Perhaps we could offer some student loan payments as a perk. What about retired medical people that may be willing to pitch in handing over a $33 million check to a for-profit Tennessee based health care company without any oversight in our state? Just seems like a recipe for the same same old. Minimal health care for maximum profit. Off the backs of people who sit and wait to be cared for. These same people who dream of the day. They don't need to fill out multiple six flips for simple things and not so simple things. Waiting for the dairy to feel validated. Finally, Mr. Commissioner, there is an old adage. A stitch in time saves nine. It is time to make sure with oversight that our new health care for profit provider uses that stitch and another family doesn't have to lose their loved one because they didn't get that care. They didn't get that stitch. And to our governor, the legislature, the Department of Corrections Commissioner, the people of our state, the people we hold inside a locked facility, our group Vermont Justice Justice has our collective hands on the pulse of criminal legal reform. Time to clean house. Time to step up. Time to answer that call. We are at a tipping point. Together we are Vermont strong. Take the profit out of prison health care and prevent another death sentence. Thank you all. Next up, we're going to hear from Janet who has a personal story to share about the actual care her loved one has received in the prison health care system. To Vermont Justice Justice for asking me to speak today. And I thank you all for being here today. I have two things I want to talk about. One is adequate health care. My spouse fought MRSA infections for two years before the DOC's health care got a handle on it. Two years of six slips, grievances, scars, pain and illness. My loved one had to endure. He would let nursing staff know at the beginning of an infection, using infection and highly contagious to others before they would address it. Is this adequate health care? It was only after a provider came in and cut him open in shackles and cuffs in the correctional facility's medical office as he repeatedly asked her to stop because he could feel every cut, every push, squeeze and medical device she was shoving into him, creating a bloody horror show that disturbed nurses and correction staff alike that he started getting better care. His grievance for that event was never answered, addressed or apologized for. Is this adequate health care? I have an audio recording of his accounts of the event if anyone is interested in hearing it as well. This brings me to my next issue with health care, mental health. When we get into an argument at home and someone gets upset and cusses, do we drag our spouse or teenager to a locked room, take away everything from them, strip them naked, strip them of their dignity? Do we as a civilized people do this? The DOC does this. Are these the deescalating tools that were discussed on the news last week? If our child or spouse was sick and begging to be taken to the hospital, that they knew something was seriously wrong, would we tell them shut up or I'm locking you in a closet? The DOC does this. I would think we would call 911 and take them to the hospital as a civilized society. I personally am not against correctional facilities. It was one of my most rewarding jobs I had in my life. There is a place for it. My problem is that there is no proper training in trauma-informed care or mental health for COs, which I know for an absolute fact and this supposed adequate health care is absolutely medieval. The medical staff is jaded and complacent. This is cause of deaths and long term trauma for our families. How will they come home to us? Dead or more mentally and emotionally traumatized than they were when they went to prison? What is the state of Vermont going to do about this? What is the nation going to do about this because it isn't just Vermont? It is happening all over the country. Demand prison reform. So prison death isn't the norm. Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Tim Burgess. I'm a former inmate, a justice impacted person and the leader, the current leader of the Citizens United for the Rehabilitation of Irons. In 1927, Governor Weeks famously said Vermont will take care of its own. While that's been a philosophy that sticks with Vermonters today, it's a failed notion for our justice impacted people. Those incarcerated, those who sent away to private prisons, their families and their loved ones suffer the consequences. Specifically, those in our prisons who are elderly and those with substance abuse suffer from poor health care in the state of Vermont. It's become common place to hear that someone in our correctional system is sick, dying or has died because of either negligence or indifference. In 2022, we had nine citizens of Vermont die in custody. Already in 2023, seven people, seven Vermonters have died by incarceration. To paraphrase a famous moving line, Vermont, we have a problem. As of today's headcount for the Vermont Department of Corrections, Vermont has 1329 people in its care and custody. In state, there are 110 females, 100, I'm sorry, 1094 males, 420 detainees, and 25, 125 are held in out of state for profit prisons. Over 1300 miles away from where we stand today. Our legislature is prepared to spend another $8 million on an unnecessary prison while the health care and our current institutions is abysmal. Our state continues to use for-profit prisons, for-profit health care providers, while Vermonters die in public facilities. Vermonters are being denied adequate health care, health services, and are being denied family contacts and being treated indecently and inhumane. If we as a state continually allow Vermonters who are ill to get sicker because of crimes they committed, many of their worst moments in time, some under the influence of substances and with cognitive issues, we must remember all incarcerated lives matter. Some here today may have heard the quote from Dostoevsky. You can judge a society by how well it treats its prisoners. How is Vermont treating its prisoners? That's apparent. By continuing to separate families by sending them more than a thousand miles from home, we must do better. We can do better. And we demand better from the state. When a person commits a crime in Vermont, they're held to account for their crimes. When the state puts them in prison, the state must too account for their actions or lack of action for keeping them healthy. That's their job. As Leslie pointed out earlier, that's statutory. That's the law. In my time in corrections, my serious health issues were belittled, when unattended and when unheard and were never properly addressed. After speaking with people running the Vermont Department of Corrections, I'm told that they're working to address these issues. I can say now that they're that these issues are being brought into the daylight and in the beginning stages of how to address the problems are being examined. The state of Vermont needs to be transparent. And what is being done and how? In conclusion, thank you for all of you who gathered here today came out to address this issue with us. The family and loved ones of David Mitchell, Vermont Just Justice is with you. To the families of loved ones who have passed while incarcerated, we're with you. I have been in your shoes if you're incarcerated. I know the pain you're dealing with every day. How you're berated, how you're put in segregation for complaining about problems. You're not alone anymore. Vermonters are here to support you. Thank you for coming out today. Dude, my name is Will Hunter and many years ago I sat up in that building. There's a lot of talk in Vermont about looking out for the most vulnerable. We hear all politicians say, we got to look out for the most vulnerable. They don't really define who that is, but I think that it's safe to say that somebody on an oxygen tank in a prison who's had his liberty taken away is pretty far up on the list of the most vulnerable. And we didn't do a very good job taking care of David Mitchell. We didn't do a very good job of taking care of a lot of other people and the stories that I hear over and over and over again from people who have loved ones who have medical conditions is that they have to try and try and try to be the squeaky wheel to get the grease that they ought to be getting by statute, by right. In a decent caring society in a decent caring facility, you shouldn't have to advocate for yourself when you're in the most vulnerable position imaginable. Now, I watched the commissioner to talk about how we've just got such a sick and feeble and diseased population that, you know, we can't really be expected to have better outcomes. I've got a question for the people up in this building. If our population that's incarcerated is so sick and feeble, why do we have them in facilities that are designed to make sure Clint Eastwood can't escape from Alcatraz? Why don't we use our head and design a system that puts people in appropriate places? Now, there's another building that's within sight of here that has something to do with David Mitchell's death. And that's right over there, the Supreme Court building, because David Mitchell was being held as a pretrial detainee. He had a whole bunch of cases pending, some of them almost three years old. The backlog, and I know that everybody will hide behind COVID, the backlog in our court system is atrocious. And there are people who have been accused of crimes that have to do with substance use, with mental illness, with other things. They're not getting better on their own. They're being locked up in a building that's run by a department that we used to call the Department of Corrections. I think they like to call themselves DOC and forget what the C stands for. One of the biggest things that DOC is concerned about right now is how to keep its employees happy. And that's a good thing for anybody to be concerned about. But it's become a central focus because their product is so bad, people don't want to work there. There are a lot of good people who work in the Department of Corrections. And if you talk to them over and over and over again, you hear how unhappy they are because their hands are tied. They can't function the way they think they ought to, to work on correcting the behavior of the people. This is often in the community when they're probation parole officers. We've gotten so fixated on charts and trends and talking about how we don't lock up as many people as somebody 10 years ago thought we might be locking up by now. But we're not focused on figuring out how to deal with the population we have locked up so that we can correct behavior and so that people can come out healthy productive members of society. We've only got 1300 inmates in Vermont. This is a small state with a small correction population and we can look at them as individuals. They don't have to be statistics. But while I'm mentioning statistics, think about 33 million dollars that we're going to be sending to private equity for 1300 people. $25,000 per inmate. The healthcare is costing and it's as atrocious as this. Something is really wrong here and it's that private equity firms got into this business because they knew there was going to be a guaranteed check coming from the government and the patients were going to be the most vulnerable who nobody pays attention to. That's why private equity wants to be in this business. But as Leslie said, we ought to be thinking about how we can recruit people in this state to be providing the healthcare. How we can make the product of our correctional system something that attracts people so people want to come be part of this thing that is transforming lives and improving things. The Department of Corrections needs to work on correction starting with itself. Thank you all for being here. Thank you for standing up for the most vulnerable and let's have our voices be heard. So I'm going to read the list of people who have died in the custody of the Department of Corrections since January 2022 and we will have a moment of silence and I have a sheet of paper that's wafting in the wind. David Mitchell, 46. Anthony Gallella, 85. Romeo Reum, the third, 53. Jeffrey Hall, 55. David Baglioli, 73. Kenneth Jackson, 60. Raymond Gadrow, 73. Matthew Castellini, 35. David Goldstein, 56. Ronald Roy, 71. Dan Griswold, 67. Charles Mold, 64. Thank you everybody for being here today. We have some information up here about remote justice. Also, we have some handouts from the Free Hair Organization who we have a representative of here today and please keep in touch with us, keep following us online on Facebook, looking at our blogs, sign up for our email blast and let's see if we can make some changes about this. Thank you.