 of Chittenden noticed a lot of interest in hearing about that. And I did meet with Mike Smith who's scheduled at 11. And he's willing to talk with us a little bit about the decisions and where they're at. But the agenda was put together before the Chittenden news broke about the Chittenden. So I remind us all that on the 17th we'll get an update from the Justice Center and one of the things that they're obviously looking at, not with the women but the men and the different problems that we have in terms of facilities and so forth. So I would expect there'll be more conversation about the women's facility and suggestions from the Justice Center on the 17th than today. There's still in the Justice Reinvestment 2 is still in the working phases. But I would expect to have more ideas like that. I don't know. There's been statements put out by the governor, statements from Secretary Smith, statements from Senator Ash and the House leadership, and just yesterday a statement from the women's caucus about it. I think they're all consistent. And I think from my point of view, the day with that consistency is we look forward to hearing the results of the investigation by the state by the Attorney General and by the administration and to what happened there and what we can do to prevent it in the future. Anyway, if people have comments or questions about it, Mr. Smith can bring that up. Secretary Smith, excuse me, no longer Mr. Smith, just Secretary Smith. Once again, he's more than happy to talk to us about that while he talks about the issue of where we place youth on the state, which has to do with Woodside, of course, and other things. But this is a little confusing, this particular piece of the agenda. There is a report that's due, I think, Michelle sent everybody copies of the language from last year. You also have it. We do. OK, thank you, baby. And it's workforce development, but it's really disentitled, I think, in more of workforce policy, which is something of great concern. And it's also the issue of regarding parole creation and parole officers' information about how we can change. And I can tell you, preliminarily, looking at it, I don't know if you saw the latest draft from the Justice Center. I haven't had a chance to say that. But one of the things that there, I mean, I don't have the details in front of me. One of the things we know already is that our current parole system is resulting in a huge number of revocations and that much of the increase in prison population is due to revocations of the furlough. And that system is something we've all been talking about. But I think that's going to be one of their recommendations. And by the way, any recommendations that they make, and if we put them into legislation, you are then eligible for two years of Bureau of Justice assistance with implementing those proposals. That's one of the advantages of Justice Reinvestment, by the way. And that's why we pursued that in mind. If we were to, as part of a Justice Reinvestment bill, are to change the furlough system. So this is very timely. And when we were in St. Albans, one of the young men that we talked with was met for those of you who miss St. Albans. He was maxing out because he's been on furlough so many times and got tired of being put back in. And I don't know all the details, and one could argue that he was just a bad actor or whatever. But he was so tired of being violated on furlough or put back in from furlough that he just gave up and decided to max out. So with that. So just for clarification, when you talk about furlough, there's always conditions of release that are put on by the Department of Corrections. And it's those violations of those conditions of release. It could be you're not supposed to be in a certain able voting, you're not supposed to contact somebody. It's those type of things that deal into the revocation of that. And that's what triggers us to put that in perspective for folks who are not used to dealing in that world. So we're going to start with Ken Bushid, the program services director, talked about the workforce development report that was part of Act 80, which you have Section 11 Corrections workforce training that was part of that deal. And if Cheryl wants to join at the same time, it's fine, whatever you want to do. Please. Do you want Sarah to come? If you want to, yeah, it's up to you. For the first part of it. Sarah, I meant Cheryl. Yeah, yeah. You have both you and Cheryl, all of that. Yes. What I was suggesting is, since this first part is around our coordination and collaboration with DOL, that Sarah and I could talk about that together. We got a lot of Sarah's here by the way. Is that true, Sarah? OK. Go ahead. OK. So if you all remember, part of what the section of this piece of legislation was really looking at was how we can begin to identify and minimize barriers and obstacles for offenders obtaining and maintaining employment and to take a look at the impact of requirements on offenders in terms of their monitoring and compliance. And so some of what we've been doing is we've been collaborating with the Department of Labor and also through the Adult Reentry and Employment Planning Grant to really begin to identify what are some of the barriers and obstacles and hearing from people more at a local level. So the Department of Labor convened and contracted for 12 Regional Development Workforce Development summits across the state. And the Department of Corrections was one of the core partners and participated in those summits. And Sarah, if you want to describe those a little bit more. Sure. For the record, Sarah Buxton is the Director of Workforce Development. So as Kim mentioned, the Department of Labor, as part of a regional effort to coordinate and align services, sponsored along with the State Workforce Development Board, 12 regional summits. And we did include the Department of Corrections, both in the planning and then also in the operation of those summits on the ground. I'll note sort of anecdotally, when I first brought Kim to one of the planning meetings with the RDCs, the Regional Development Corporations, we spent about the first 20 minutes trying to explain why probation and parole and why the Department of Corrections would be participating regionally. And so that's exactly right. That's right. And so I think just from the start, we had some breakthroughs both in communication and in viewing what our roles are. Because I don't think probation and parole were generally seen as part of the team at the local level. And as the Department of Labor is making an intentional effort to try to support individuals who are re-entering after being incarcerated, those partnerships are more important than ever. And it's really important for us to bring in our local leaders who are working with businesses so that we can identify where these challenges in gaining and retaining employees exist. So we had a lot of interesting feedback. We're still gathering that, and we'll have an official report on the summits overall. But one of the notable findings was the variety of perspectives and the rich conversations that came out at the local level when probation and parole officers were part of some of the systematic planning at the regional level. So I would just add to that that part of the structure in the afternoon was presentation where you had work groups working on scenarios. And we had a re-entry scenario consistently as part of that work group. So as those findings get collated and written up, we'll have some learning specifically around re-entry and what did some of the work groups, both regionally and themes across the state, identify as both opportunities and challenges in working with an underpopulation. We also, as part of the AIRS grant, we have a self-assessment tool that we are using that employs best practice and evidence-based strategies in terms of working with moderate high risk offenders on re-entry. And we have a cross-disciplinary team who took responsibility for taking that survey and moving it out to their managers and to the local levels. So we're also gathering data throughout the state around our partners in terms of their both awareness and their employment of some of the best practices in working with offenders and employment. So it covers a wide range of things. So it takes a look at what kinds of educational services or supported employment activities or what kinds of cognitive behavioral interventions do you employ for certain groups, et cetera. So we'll be able to gather all of that. Actually, we should have that data by the end of the month. So that will be additional information around both opportunities and gaps and barriers that we can strategically work together to address. And then also, Sarah's team and my team have been sharing information that we currently have about our respective services. And so we're starting to put some of that information together as well. Recently, we received a flowchart of services that are available through the Department of Labor. And we're going to be putting together, incorporating that material into our learning management system for probation and parole officers. I'll just add on to that. The Department of Labor have learned is that things go a lot more smoothly in the community when you're working with individuals in co-case management when not only do probation and parole officers understand the services that might be available to a person who's re-entering, but also when our case managers understand better and have a deeper understanding of the conditions of release and the correction system overall. And so as part of the information sharing, it's both making sure that in your manuals and your trainings for your probation and parole officers, there are guides and resources for them to draw on. But we also recognize that in our planning, actually one of our initial meetings will be tomorrow, what we're planning to do some cross-training with our regional managers and our case managers around the state, especially around the distinction between being on furlough, not the different statuses that an individual could have when they're in the custody of the Department of Corrections. I think as you alluded to earlier, Senator Sears, the supervision structure has a number of statuses that can be very complicated and very confusing. And generally, our experience is that a number of people, a number of our partners find that system very confusing in terms of knowing what do we actually have latitude around and what don't we have latitude around. I'm not sure every other representative or senator hears the same thing from their business community is that they're more than willing to hire people, but sometimes they're impediments to hiring people who are on supervision of Department of Corrections, make it difficult to hire them, make it difficult to train them and put the investments in that are necessary for the training. But in this environment where we have so low unemployment, there is more and more companies are more than willing to take a risk with offenders. But we put things in front of them that make it difficult for them to get hired. Maybe an example of where a collaboration went well. I just met with some construction employers last week. And one woman who represented a fairly large company that does a lot of the roadside flagging noted that they had, regionally they'd worked out, I think it was in Chittenden County, a fairly good arrangement with probation and parole where some of the visits, they had, they coordinated their employees' schedules so that some of the visits and the meetings with probation and parole and any other folks they had to check in with occurred in the morning on a specific day each week. And that allowed the company a lot more opportunity to be flexible and where they placed their employees throughout the week. And it also made it so that an individual wouldn't have to miss an entire day of work because of a midday meeting. So those are findings that we're collecting and sharing back with the Department of Corrections for them to be able to share best practices out with other arms. But also counseling and other things that are required if they're scheduled at appropriate times. Long been the enemy of probation and parole officers and Steve Howard don't throw daggers at them. It's troubled me that many times probation officers are closed at four o'clock and nobody's available at five or six when people get off the job and could then be meeting and having supervision. But also the groups that, people who are receiving substance abuse treatment or medically assisted treatment or office times in the morning need to go to these centers to receive their treatment. All needs to be able to work with the employer. Thank you. I appreciate that the legislation asks you to engage in a planning and oversight process. I am curious when, if I am an offender when my experience of the system will change. Has it changed? Am I getting those services that I need to be able to be productive or when will it change? I think some pieces of it have changed already. I mean, I think if you remember at the end of the legislative session last year the field executive sent out a memo to the entire field probation and parole offices and directed them not to be going into businesses for supervision unless there was a specific identified need or risk, so not just to do checks out there. There were a number of other activities. I think also taking a look at scheduling where there was some ability to flex some scheduling like in terms of their weekly or monthly checks with probation and parole. I think there are a number of other things that we're examining at this point. So I think to some degree part of, I will share some of my own learnings at attending some of the regional development workforce meetings is that the coordination of services is really challenging. So as Senator Sears alluded to earlier, a number of our, the offenders that we are actually under risk management are also receiving medication assisted treatment and we don't have a whole lot of ability to influence when those, when those interviews are when, how often they need to meet with a therapist, et cetera. We can try to coordinate with those services but I think it's really trying to sort out what are the priorities in terms of this person being stable at this point. And so one of the things that I think we came away with is realizing that depending on the offenders sometimes met health is a higher priority initially than employment is. Sometimes housing is a higher priority initially than employment or health is. So I think it's, what we're realizing is that there's some distinctions on, it's really gonna be more individualized I think based on who is coming out or who's in the community and trying to help officers have a way of understanding how do you prioritize what is most likely to jeopardize this person's successful transition or ability to be supervised in the community. There's one place where it has changed and that's in St. Albans. We've been, the Department of Labor provided a $75,000 grant to the Community Justice Center. There to do a one-stop service delivery for high risk offenders who are re-entering and this provides one-on-one case management and employment support services along with training. This was an opportunity for us to use a community partner who could be on call at 4.30 or 5.30 or 6.30 or 7.30 or 6.00 a.m. when the car doesn't start and help individuals who are navigating not only their basic needs but also getting themselves through a training program and into employment. We will be able to present some success from that and intend to fund it another year and hope to use this as something that we might replicate in other parts of the state, maybe in coordination with some legislative approval. One finding, however, is that no matter how many services or how much case management we put into a particular individual, it only takes a little bit for someone under so much stress as some of these individuals are to quote-unquote fall off a wagon so it can be a breakup with a girlfriend and all of a sudden you're not at work and then it spirals. So we're trying to figure out how we can work outside of our scope and provide funding to those local community partners who are better able to support those individuals in their re-entry. We've got quite a few witnesses here about a half an hour to go so I want to make sure we hear from everybody that there are other things that we should know about right now would be the review that. The only thing I would echo is what Sarah just said in terms of we're also interested in that site, the St. Albans CJC site in one cell in terms of an implementation grant for the adult re-entry and employment so we would look to collaborate with that same site to see if we can strengthen it and perhaps duplicate it if additional funds become available. I was curious about what we're doing inside and outside, what you just described. I mean that goes on with everybody, that goes on with even legislators who have problems. Do you have problems? Yeah, some of you. The house member. Yeah, the house member. But in all seriousness, everybody in daily life goes through crises and I thought that one of the things we do in training people to re-entry is, I used to call it red flags and what are some of the red flags? So if you are going through a breakup or you have a bad day or whatever, who do you call? And I still have kids that I had 20 years ago who called me to vent about stuff and that's fine with me, I know what they're doing. But it's the idea of developing relations. I thought we were doing that. I mean that's just kind of common sense that if we're not doing that within our systems then there's something wrong with our systems, frankly. So I appreciate what you're saying but throughout life there are gonna be ups and downs and we all need people to help us through those. So, and I realize you wanna talk about driving and difficult but go ahead. But I just wanna caution us that we should be training people in how to deal with these life ups and downs as part of the incarceration process and the re-entry process. So the bill when we were crafting the bill we were very conscious that this training is for our state employees and not training for our incarcerated individuals. And I think that gets lost and I think maybe when Steve comes up I'll ask him a question about how these people feel about this and how it's going for them because that was a, if we don't get buy-in from the P&P employees then this will not work. The legislation's about training P&P employees. You guys are all right? Yes. We worked with, no, we worked with Congress Committee on this. I don't understand what's going on. The last observation that we made. They do everything in the house. We don't do anything in the house. We just rubber stamp everything in the house. We even have a section there that deals to trying to have inmates get a ID, which is a luggage. I will say we did that in the Senate before you did it. The barrier that we rubber stamped. Yeah, we rubber stamped. The barrier that came up in this pilot up in North East, I'm sorry, in St. Albans, which was part of it is training the inmates, but that I was only referencing the complete program. We are partnering on the training of P&P. But we discovered that for individuals who hadn't registered for selective service, that is a requirement for you to receive federal aid through our WIOA programs. And what we found and a barrier that we are working through is a quicker process for getting approval. We can waive that if the Department of Labor can, if we have a process in place, waive an individual's eligibility, ineligibility to receive federal funds because they failed to register with a selective service. And so what we discovered is this is about a three week process. And if we're coordinating better with the Department of Corrections as they identify individuals ready to exit who would be ready to start working in a training program and could use our federal dollars, that is now on our checklist to make sure that we've got verification that they either did register with selective service or we've started the process of working back and forth with Washington and going through the waiver process so that they're ready to go with eligibility when they come out. I think this might be a good time to hear from Sarah Holpen, who's the Director of Identification Coordination, given what you just said about ideas. The House was smart enough to write in the ID stuff that we asked them to do after you did all the work. We did all the work on that. No, but in all seriousness, ideas are, I mean, you get out of jail and you don't have any ideas of real impediments to try to do anything. Go ahead. So Cheryl Eleanor-Rodofus, the Information Manager for the Department of Corrections, and Sarah Copan, his Identification Documenting Coordinator. We didn't, I don't think many of us knew we had an identification coordinator. We do now. And that's good to know. We did not before. So when did that all start? Actually, after the legislation came in, we were able to create a position for it. So we used the legislation as a way to create a position. You increased the existence. No, we used existing position. We didn't get a new one. They took an existing position. They did not increase the number. We did not get a new position. Yes. Make it clear, somebody got promoted to the position. Correct. Yes. And it must be Sarah. It's Sarah. Well, welcome to the Dr. Soversight Committee, Sarah. Thank you. And welcome to your new position. So maybe either one of you can describe what you do. So we are working with the Department of Health for vital records for birth certificates. We're going to be working with the Department of Motor Vehicles for whether they are eligible for a driver's license or non-driver ID. So they have some form of picture ID. And we are also going to be working with the Social Security Administration so that they will have a Social Security card as well. Because I'm sure any of you have gone to any one of those offices, you need the other documents to get the missing piece. So the plan and hope, and when everything works according to plan, is that upon release, those who are eligible will leave with those documents to ease their re-entry back into the workforce. We already have the signed agreement with the Department of Health. The Department of Motor Vehicles is at the commissioner's office waiting for some signatures. And I just met with the Social Security Administration last Thursday, and they have approved the security levels that we have in place to allow us to request the Social Security cards and maintain those. So that's kind of one more step closer to being able to start submitting the applications for them. That's tremendous, because I know I used to take kids from 204 Depot into Canada before 9 to 11 and couldn't do it now, but we had to have some form of identification. It wasn't easy to find birth certificates and all that stuff for troubled youth back then. That's really terrific. I'm glad you're doing that, because it's so important to getting out to having that picture ID and some form of government identification. We were here with Elkar a few months ago, because we had to change some of the rules around the health department, because we weren't included in that. So we've had some logistical piece. We've had to take care of up front to start the process, but I feel like we're really on a good path to get this started and going beyond just the picture ID as well, too, with getting, because if someone's not from Vermont, we can't get them a Vermont ID. But we can certainly then get them a Social Security card. And then, if we can't get them a birth certificate from Vermont, but we're hoping to work out the kinks in this and then maybe expand towards other states to get birth certificates. I did. I've heard from people who are already in the communities who have lost their IDs, who don't have their IDs. Are you quick to help them as well? Right now, the legislation is for those who have six months or more to serve. And we, so that's our focus right now to work on people that have six months or more to serve in the community. There are other agencies like the CJCs that will help people get those identification documents once they're in the community. So we won't be looking at them in the first reg go around. We also, there's a cost, obviously, to get birth certificate and there's a cost to get a DMV ID, which are set in statute, those costs. So it's an expense we now have as well. So we need to look at what that looks like for us as well, too. But we've expanded as much as we can beyond just the picture ID to the other two forms of ID as well, too. And working with the Veterans Administration to see who may have a veterans ID as well, too, that we could get a copy of. So one of the good pieces of news that we heard recently is we thought that it was years into the future that we would be looking at getting a DMV ID for somebody who hasn't been there because your photo is good for eight years. So if we've had somebody for 20 years, their photo is no longer good at DMV. We could not get them an ID. So we will be looking much sooner than we thought of being able to us take a photo with an iPhone and send it to DMV and then still be able to get an ID for that person. So that's really good news. We thought that was years out in the future. And Sarah went sort of beyond that as well, too. DMVs agreed if someone suspended to give us a reinstatement letter for the person. So we will get that reinstatement letter. Sarah reached out to the Judicial Bureau and they're willing to give us the tickets, the numbers, and the costs to those things. So we can let the inmate know this is what you need to do to get your license reinstated. And as long as they enter into an agreement with the Judicial Bureau and pay their reinstatement fee, they could actually leave with a driver's license if they came in suspended. Because once they have a payment plan and they're on their payment planner, even if it's $10 a month, they pay monthly while they're in the facility. Once they leave, they can have an, as long as they pay their reinstatement fee, and that's something you could forget, there's that piece to it, too. But they can leave with a driver's license at that point and as long as they keep making their monthly payments, they'll keep their driver's license. So they may come in suspended, but our case workers can then talk to them about what the plan could be to get them actually reinstated before they leave. And that includes the surcharges, correct? That includes, yeah. Sarah, we'll get on that for the floor. We had a huge debate last month about the surcharges. Yeah, the initial list from DMT was gonna be the list of the ticket numbers. And I kind of looked at that and I thought, well, nobody's gonna know what to do with that, depending on how long you've been in for. So as Cheryl said, I reached out to her contact at the Judicial Bureau, and she was like, I'm on board. I think we also do a better job of educating people about the surcharges and the ability to get your license back and to suspend whether you're in corrections or just got your license suspended for failure to pay a fine. It seems to me that the Office of State's attorneys would do a great service to the public to publicize how they can, how people can work with the agents, the Department of Motor Vehicles and others to get their licenses back and to set up a payment plan. I saw Mr. Pepper from the Department of State's attorneys come in and I, but I think, well, we had several State's attorneys a few years back had days where they amnesty days. And that's kind of fallen off, but that is still one of the major problems in Vermont is the number of people with licenses suspended. Were they being in the correction system or just citizens who are not risen to the level of a criminal civil suspension, not criminal license suspension, but are still on the civil side? But how they get them back, I think a lot of people don't even know whatever we can do to publicize that, maybe. Yes. So, good work. I think we forget how hard it is to organize the sort of work. When will the First Defender leave a facility with these documents? And have you thought about health insurance, at least getting them back on Medicaid if they're eligible for it? That's a separate process that we already do as far as insurance and doctor's appointments. And it's happening? Okay, thank you. I didn't realize that. Because even Alabama does that. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. I'm like, we must do it. I don't know, are you? No, we didn't. In the past, we had to have to do it in a while. No, actually, I was talking to somebody from Alabama about that a couple of years ago when they were doing it in Alabama, making sure people were on Medicaid before they left. And I think we did that several years ago. Yeah, and I was actually glad to see the legislation because it's something that I was passionate about before that. I know Sarah, which I'm so glad she's on board because she is too. We researched what other states are doing so we don't have to reinvent the wheel in some of these cases. And just getting social security on board was a huge task to do that. I mean, they wanted to tour facilities, meet with staff. They wanted to look at our central office. So it was a process. It's not just as easy just to work on signing something with them. But it also requires enhancements to our OMS system because, I mean, I could tell you the entire process but you don't need to know that. But we do have to have enhancements to our OMS system so Sarah can upload the documents so the case workers can review them with the inmate before they're released and say, yep, that's correct. And then Sarah can file them. On the other piece that's a little important too is Sarah will track inmate's releases. And inmates who are being maxed out of a facility as if they've been returned to or if they want to go back on furlough, Sarah will know which facility they're getting released from. And those documents will be ready for them at their release. So they'll get them from the step facility that they're at. If they're going to a P&P office, she'll send them to the P&P office so they're there for their intake. So that way they don't have to worry about getting them from the facility that they're going to a P&P office. So we've settled on that piece as well too. So when will that start happening? That's really, I don't know that I can give you that answer because we don't have the OMS system functioning yet. But we are working on a procedure which is pretty close to being signed off on. And once the procedure's done, then the OMS components will be implemented to match the procedure. So when I see you in January for an appropriation steps to money, y'all can tell us about where we are. I hope so. Or what money you need to. I know that DMV has some legislation they'll get looking at reducing the cost for us because in legislation right now, if you're on disability, it's a $10 fee to get your non-driver's ID or driver's ID. Most of our people are. But when they're in the facility, they're turned off for them. So DMV was looking at submitting some legislation to reduce the cost for DOC to only pay that same $10. So that would be significantly helped. Let me think at four for the price of one ID. So hopefully that comes forward and you'll see that. I appreciate all this is really good discussion and it reminds me of something. I am really concerned about the money that we save through Justice Reinvestment 1 not being reinvested. And these are investments and should be counted when we ask you the question, what are you doing with the money that was saved through not sending 750 people out of state anymore down to 250 or whatever the number is today. One of the responses, obviously, as we can see what community programs are, diversion, et cetera, and transitional housing. But also, these types of efforts that should be counted towards that effort towards, I think there was language in last year's budget bill to have us identify places where we're spending money that's been saved into investments into lowering recidivism, et cetera. Sarah, the way we're setting up our database for that, Sarah will be able to actually tell you how many of what she gave out, who didn't want it, who said no, I don't want it, who said I already have it, I don't need it, because those are questions that we'd want to know too. You're not that we just didn't give it, they didn't want it. And then, who did want it and what we're able to get for them. So Sarah will be able to give you those statistics from now. Are there other things that I want to give time for the state employees to comment on this effort? There is another issue that I don't want to lose sight of, and that's the issue of. And I think I got confused with this in setting the agenda with Representative Edmunds and Peggy and Michelle. There's another issue, and that is the language in one of the bills that dealt with probation and parole officers and whether or not the department was supposed to recommend by December 15th, whether or not they should be able to solve the fence, et cetera, and many of those issues. But that was a separate issue that involved, and I think there was some confusion about which issue was coming up today. And I hope I've cleared that up, or maybe I muddled it more. Have I muddled it more? What's that looking at me? What's that looking at me? Those language in a bill, Michelle gave me the language the other day. The language that talks about the self-defense for probation and parole officers would taking that up on the 17th. Yes, we are. So I don't want to confuse these two issues. That's part of that probation and parole officers report. That's on the agenda for the 17th. This was due on the 1st, but we're getting it early. No, this is after the 20th. We are in the 7th. You were asked to see. I was asked to see on the 1st. I was asked to see, and I'm still out to see. You probably wish you still were. You know, I've got to tell you, the last week at this time, it was 74 degrees in Chile in the Bahamas. It was a chilly wind. I decided not to go in the pool. And I came home to this, and I'm definitely not in the pool. Thank you both very much. As you can see, I was suffering the last week. Yeah, you were really suffering. The chilly wind in the Bahamas. Kind of raw. It was. Just gone from 85 to 73. Steve, did you want to? Sure. Now that we know which one we're talking about. I also want to mention for you and other members of the corrections unit of the One State Employees Association, we recognize during this what came up with the JITNIP facility that there are thousands of good employees who work for the Department of Corrections who are not involved in that behavior and that work every day in very difficult circumstances. So I just want to make sure that we don't lose sight. Because frequently, one politician goes bad and all of us are bad. And we need to realize that the very serious nature of what happened at Chinman shouldn't reflect on every corrections officer and every probation officer in the state. Well, we appreciate you saying that, Senator. I think our members definitely feel like things are painted with the broad strokes with us like these are very serious allegations. They are allegations for a small number of COs. But we feel very proud that a BSEA trained steward who had this information brought this to management just as he was trained to do. So we're very proud of that. We'll see how these play out. But we appreciate you saying that. Now, here we go. Here we go. No, I think we all recognize the importance and the long-term probation officer with you. They want to do some of the talking, but your reactions and how it is in the field of dealing with this. So if I could just one second, I'll just introduce him. So for the record, Steve Howard and the executive director of the BSEA. This is Dave Martenson. Dave has a 35-year career with the Department of Corrections in both management and as a frontline worker, including in the field. Most recently, I think the last 10 years in the field, Dave. Dave is now one of the newest union representatives at the BSEA, so he's working for you. I thought I would bring Dave because he's the person who knows the most about how this really happens on the ground and what folks feel about it and just allow him to say how he feels and you can ask him any questions. I maxed out October 20. My reaction, it was a pretty broad stroke that I just listened to. I was a probation officer, intensive probation officer in Newport, Vermont, for the past 10 years. So what I can tell you is I can't talk about policies. I can, but I won't. But what I can tell you is what it means to be blind level in dealing with offenders coming out of jail. I know the process well. I know the status as well. I've been doing that for a very long period of time. I can tell you that a lot of the things that folks talked about had an impact on me directly is, first of all, it's a complicated business and it's a complicated expectation for a parole officer as it is today to do. We can't do the things that are expected, just so you know. And then when you add different layers, that complicates it a little bit more on trainings and things like that. But what I can tell you from experiences when folks come out of jail, I know where to get IDs because of the fact that I have a relationship and always did with Northeast Kingdom Community Action, the Community Justice Center. They have a staff member that will drive an offender across a state line to get an ID if in fact they're not on furlough. So they can leave the state. Other folks, they're able to take those folks and get them done, reversed on it, they're trained on it, they understand that. I don't have to do that personally. I just need to make the phone call and get the offender to go there. I've also worked nights and weekends to meet with offenders because of your initial comment about working in the hours. I can tell you personally as a probation officer, when I was available till eight o'clock at night, all those folks that couldn't make it at four o'clock were able to make it at four o'clock. His last thing they wanted was a probation officer in their world at six, seven, and eight o'clock when they were doing what they do. That's just an observation of testimony I heard. I can tell you that I always worked, the last case load I had, I intensively worked with sex offenders to make sure that their appointment with me, their appointment with everything they had, we combined that to happen one day during the week where it was either morning or afternoon. The guy showed up at three o'clock because his group was at five o'clock. So I would sit where he could come in and see me, he could go directly from there to his counseling appointment, then after that go to sex offender treatment. So for those ADA flaggers, the guy could flag four and a half days a week. I know how to make that work, I did make that work. I can tell you that the folks that know their population, know their case loads, and know what their offenders need are able to maneuver that and navigate that system fairly effectively. And well, I can't say that for everyone I've worked with or observed. There's a lot of folks that maybe didn't make the best career choice. I have some obstacles there. Those are the cases that you may hear about, but as a person that was able to have that realistic talk with offenders about what it is that you need. When a guy's coming out of jail, that's the most critical time for things to go wrong, as we all know. The job is a piece of it by getting them into treatment, getting them into counseling, getting them into the referral process is more important than because it's critical for them not to re-engage with the same neighbors in the same neighborhoods, because realistically that's where they're probably gonna go. We have limited housing. When we have the right guy who we think is not done well in that, we can look at those transitional housing places, just as an alternative to what hasn't worked in the past for those guys that are furloughies that have tried and tried and tried and didn't do well. I've worked with all those kind of folks, so I just wanted to give you my initial thoughts and then I would be more than happy to try to answer any questions. Well, particularly with sex offenders when they're coming out, do you have a sense of what some of the problems are for you as a probation officer and dealing with them? Some of it is. I mean, are there some of those that are, obviously they're individuals and so problems are different, but housing a major problem, jobs a major problem? Everybody's unique and indifferent in that aspect. Some people have family connections, some people don't. Housing has always been an issue. I think we do a much better job than we ever have in the past of not saying, you just can't live there. I can remember years ago, people that were savvy would go out and say, oh, by the way, you don't want a sex offender living in your neighborhood, do you? That was the end of the housing transition process. That doesn't occur, that I'm aware of it today. I think that everybody's unique and brings a whole set of problems and you just have to break it down and look at what is it that this guy has and most of that's done before they're released. We look at those issues, six months, three months, two months before. A guy that's got a work history, the work isn't gonna be the problem. It's the guy that doesn't want to work, never has. Unemployment rate in Newport is relatively high. So having the ability to find jobs isn't hard. We take a guy on work crew, he's been designated to do work crew because he doesn't have that driver's license. So he's got 30 days of community service to do. Every day, one day a week, he comes into the office and updates the job opportunity board in the lobby that talks about who's hiring and that's updated weekly because we have a connection with the department of labor. And the guys can come in there, there's paper, there's pencils and they can write down jobs. It's also listed what the hourly pay is. So what happens is quite often, you ask people to look at the board, they have it. They realize that those jobs are out for $14 an hour, sometimes $18 an hour, where they were thinking that the only jobs available were $8 an hour. They exist, you've just gotta kind of guide folks to do that. So I can tell you that I've watched that and that's been, that wasn't always there but in the last couple of years that's been a much larger priority. So I just want to tell you that those are the things that I've seen. What are some of the things that cause you to recommend that somebody be put back in jail? Really related to their offense, dynamics and the risk of harm to someone. So a guy having a drink is probably not going to a jail. A guy who has a history of domestic violence when he drinks in that household with a significant partner. That would be a situation that would rise to the top of the level immediately. Guys that are on, you know, we mitigate that with electronics, GPS and alpha sensors, we do a lot of that stuff. So by the time somebody's returned to jail, there's been a whole lot of steps that have already occurred. If you went back and looked and wrote down what happened, they had a whole lot of opportunities to correct that. So just missing your curfew doesn't send a guy to jail. Smoking a marijuana doesn't send a guy to jail. You know, those things, I did your analysis for a very long time. I used to get pretty honest answers when I said, you're probably not going to jail. Most guys will say, well, this is what I'm using. A, B, C, and D, and then you find out N, E, and F, two. But, and then what you do is you look at the referral and how, most of the last time you were in council, you follow up with it and make sure that there's a referral in place. Is there tension between the central office, the institutions and the probation and parole or who should go back? All the time. I was a senior FO, so I, when the management was out of the office, I quite often covered the daily operations and those were the things that I would, didn't have the authority to make decisions on. I couldn't tell an officer that Johnny Joe should go to jail or should be incarcerated based on that behavior. They would take somebody else at a different level. So it's not anything that anybody can decide at a local level. The worst case scenario is that I make a decision at night that somebody needs to be incarcerated. I get in the office in the morning and the guy comes right back out. The behavior was egregious at the time but it doesn't look like the guy needs to spend the time there. Turned into a sanction of one day and put the guy back on the track. Kind of got his attention. He's, we've had a long in-depth discussion about the behavior and then what's next. Sometimes it's a short hit, sometimes it's a long hit. Guys that stay in jails, there's more than just a bad day. So just that's my thoughts on that. Because in my experience, personal experience, I've been more with the juvenile system and I used to say it was tougher to get a kid into Woodside than the Harvard. I see the commissioner of DCF this year. Because everything went through the central office and there was one person who kind of made the decision about placement but that's not the case with correction. I've talked to managers, I've talked to superintendents, I've talked to district managers in the community and there's some latitude there. I've luckily heard folks from even central office say I have good staff that make good decisions and I allow them to make those decisions and then we follow up and do an analysis and drill down the next day. So a lot of times those get sorted out fairly quickly. I don't know as a probation officer that I was always happy with the outcome but I was able to not personalize that. Same with sentences and courts. I write a probation, present some investigation and what happens happens. I don't have the latitude or the authority, I'll supervise whatever I'm designated to do. So to me it's not a personal thing. I identify risk, I identify what might get somebody hurt and then I make recommendations based on that assessment. Question? What's the question? I've trained them well. Yeah. I knew there would be a question from either Mary of course. Yeah. I was interested when you said, in two things, number one, you said you took your folks across state lines to get an ID. Yeah, for thrill. That's correct. They weren't on thrill. They weren't on thrill. Yeah, it could legally take them across. Yeah. Yeah. That's the first question and I guess I'll let you hack that one out a little bit. I'm confused why we can't get an ID in Vermont for the person but we can go out and see. Sometimes it's related to social security cards because the person was born in New Hampshire for whatever reason they take them to New Hampshire because the social security office is there. They were born in that state so therefore they can make the connection they can get the social security paperwork that day. So they make a call. They take the ID with some type of identification. Sometimes we take the guy to jail, get him an ID with the pictures on it with their background, it's a non-official ID and sometimes that's acceptable. So we look at what we can do with who we can do it with and some people just need an ID in order to get a check cash to get them on. So that would be, in your experience, that would be just limited to people from New Hampshire? Yeah, that would be, I don't know that I've had history where we transported somebody to Massachusetts but we've certainly given them a travel permit to go to Massachusetts in order to go down there, get their ID and come back that same day. Can you do the same thing for Vermont folks? Yes. Can you take them down to the local social security office to help them? Yes, there's plenty of folks that would be willing to do that. Communities, family members, we look at what that person's individual needs are. Second piece is in regards to what you heard with Act 80 in the training of P&P officers. What was the reaction from the folks on the ground when they heard about this? I think it's more of, I can't do what I'm supposed to do today and I have to sometimes sit down with my supervisor and say, here's the 13 things I'm managing. Help me prioritize what I'm gonna do so that I'm not in trouble for what I'm not gonna do. And I'm always happy when we both come to the same with five things at the end of the day and we have to prioritize what we can do. I don't think that's, I've been at labor management with the DOC, I've been at a bunch of different union functions and I think everyone says there's a lot of expectations and pulled in a lot of ways, sometimes because of legislation and it makes it very difficult to figure out what you're gonna do because there's something that you can't do. And what I've always said as a line staff, which is, one, do we deep work with the offenders if we're doing all this other stuff? We're locked into computers, we're locked into assessments, we're locked into paper, but what we're missing is that human connection. I think it's about relationships. Personally, when I have good relationships with people, I have good outcomes. So that's... So the legislation says we should train your officers. And so I'm assuming that once this training protocol has been established and your officers are trained, the two pieces of the legislation should be fairly smooth in your process. And hopefully not create a huge barrier to... I'm not real clear on the need for that, to be quite honest with you. I assume that it's related to some funds that you can attach because you're right. The need is because we hear that all, we hear it all from the constituents or from other folks. I was, I'll say it in my other life, I'm sorry, was an employer that employed people on parole and probation and parole and being on probation and parole created an impediment to their employment when I was employing these people. And actually it became so unwieldy that I didn't hire those folks. I think if you were in that same role today, I think that might be a different experience for you. That's my personal opinion. But is that different from region to region? The experience and longevity of some of the officers. And also I'm wondering about the churn that happens within DOC. There's a lot more now than what happened 25 years ago. And maybe the dynamics that are in their lives now are very different than 25 years ago or 30 years ago. So I'm just wondering how much of that has contributed to some of the issues that we've been hearing about. I think that, yeah, I'm just gonna tell you that quite often families enable and they think that things are because is why my son can't. On the, I've had many discussions of partnering up with family members to educate them on their son, try to get the son to sign a release so I can have an open discussion with mom, just to be quite honest with you. And when I've done that, I've found that the fog lifted and quite often that families become help in making those things work differently. I can get him there. So they don't always understand it. So I think it's bigger than just, it's too easy to say there's obstacles created by being on statuses. That's not necessarily true. There's some obstacles because some statuses are different but usually it's because somebody's failed at those other options. They failed at probation. They failed at other types of supervision. So they end up at the high level because they're more likely the violent offenders, more likely the guys that hurt somebody or they're more likely the sex offenders that kind of fall on those guys. Or they're just an antisocial personality and they're more criminal. And those are the tougher cases just because that's a lifestyle and that's a choice to live a lifestyle. I don't know if I've answered your question. No, thank you. Great, thank you all very much. What do we do with kids with the Woodside situation? But you may also are welcome to speak to the recent allegations regarding correctional officers and what's going on there. I know there's a lot of interest from members of this committee also obviously with trust. Sure, Mr. Chair, what I'd like to do is probably start out with you know, it's what everybody is talking about. So let's start with that. And then we've been to Woodside at an appropriate time here, primarily because Woodside was my decision and I wanna make sure that you understand all the parameters and what we're looking at as we move forward. As I said publicly six days ago when the story about the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility was published in seven days, we have a problem and it's our responsibility, my responsibility to fix this problem. This means that if systems need to change, then we've gotta change those systems. If individuals need to be held accountable then they should be held accountable. So in the six days since the story broke, what has been done? Just to give you some recap of some of the things that have been done, I've met with the Attorney General and his team along with the Vermont State Police to ensure that I do not do anything that would interfere or hinder the ongoing criminal investigation at Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility. I want to express, publicly express my appreciation to the Attorney General for helping me in any efforts that I may pursue. He has been very gracious and generous with his time and his people and I appreciate that. I have also met with the U.S. Attorney's Office to explore their involvement and insistence in this investigation. I think it's important and I'll talk about this in a little bit more. I think it's important that we have an independent entity outside of state government to conduct an investigation of the Chittenden Facility or perhaps the entire correction system to make sure the rights of employees and inmates are not being violated. I am setting up a new reporting mechanism outside of the Department of Corrections and the Agency of Human Services for employees and inmates to report misconduct, retaliation, retribution or coercion and anything else that they would classify under misconduct. In the next 24 hours, I will temporarily move the Deputy Commissioner of Corrections, Judy Hentkin, to the Secretary's Office. Physically move it to the Secretary's Office right outside my office. I will temporarily move the Deputy Commissioner and her responsibilities will oversee the operations of Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility and the superintendent of the facility will report directly to Judy. Any incident that she will report, the Tresa Stone will report directly to Judy Hentkin, any issues or concerns related to medical casework, security or operational needs, any incident that may attract immediate attention and an incident that may have an impact on operations safety and security at the multiple facilities and incident where a person's life may be in jeopardy and the list goes on, will report directly to Deputy Commissioner Hentkin. Judy was selected for this assignment because she's relatively new to the position. She started in February and she has served mostly outside of corrections during her career in state government. She has had a lengthy career in state government and she is an attorney. Besides the organization, besides the sort of the organizational assignment of the Chittenden Facility, Judy will also be responsible for coordinating and implementing a new reporting system that we're standing up right now. In fact, by the end of the today, we'll have the employee reporting system in place that will be outside the agency. It will go to the Department of Human Resources. It will be a hotline number where we're still working to get the inmate hotline number up and running as well. There is one that is running, but it's inside the Department of Corrections. The 5-5 system is inside. We want to pull it out and take it outside the agency and we're looking at a viable place for that. Because the Chittenden Facility is part of an overall correction system, there are aspects of the operations that can't be separated. Examples that would include on-hour reporting timeframe outlined in the directive for any sort of incidents that fall within that directive. Those incidents include inmate assaults, involving a weapon, escape, attempted escape, evacuations, or facility lockdown, inmate death, or illness that's considered light-threatening, activation of special teams, and or use of restraint share for more than two hours. In the last few days, we've been talking about how do you move something out of an integrated system and yet keep it integrated at the same time, and that's what we're doing. But for the short-term and temporary basis, the facility, I just want everyone to know, the facility will report to the Secretary's Office. Mandatory sexual harassment training will be reintroduced system-wide. They do go through sexual harassment training. I've asked that it be reintroduced system-wide. I have conducted the first round of interviews with the Commissioner and the Superintendent of that facility. I've concentrated because what I have done is concentrate on what the article showed is a systemic sort of overtime issue that we have in corrections. What I want to know is what did the current Commissioner and when he was Deputy Commissioner and the Superintendent, what issues happened on their watch and what did they do about it? I've conducted the first round. I anticipate there'll be another round of interviews as we move forward. So what are the next steps? We will continue to interview correction officials and individuals that provide information that could benefit what I'm looking into. We will look across the country to make sure we find the appropriate third-party entity to complete an external independent review. I'd like to get that started as quick as possible. I want an external independent outside the agency, outside of state government to look at this organization to make sure that people's rights aren't being violated within the organization, both employee and inmate. We will also, there are organizations that specialize in this work and we'll coordinate to make sure we have the most qualified individuals to conduct a full review. That hasn't been determined who that is yet. We will continue to coordinate with our partners such as the Attorney General and the U.S. Attorney's Office to see what their role and they could have an independent role in this regard as well. And as I said last week, we will continue to work expeditiously to provide the governor with a full review with recommendations. Probably by the end of next week is what I'm shooting for to have the recommendations and doing. I just want, we're pursuing full steam ahead. I just don't want to surprise anybody. We're pursuing full steam ahead to have a outside independent review of our Department of Corrections and what that looks like and who is involved are still items to be worked out. So I wanted to just give the committee an update of what's going on. I appreciate that, and I don't want to, we could go on for hours about the situation here. I think that my biggest concern is to make sure that we take every step we can to prevent the behavior in the future and to hold whoever should be held accountable for the behavior that was outlined in the article. In some ways, it's a good thing that you just came back. And by that I mean that you took the job, all of a sudden you're handed this, but you don't have any track records beside years ago, although the fact that it came through the press is one of the more, it's good that we have a free press, it's good that we have a press in Vermont that's willing to dig down and dig deep into some of the subjects. But it's also unfortunate that this didn't come to either the attention of the commissioner or the legislature or whatever. I mean there had been, it's no secret that many groups have been meeting at the Jitman facility. Your own committee visited the Jitman facility, the women's caucus, and for whatever reason, this came out through the digging of the press and not through those meetings. So there's something for us, us as legislators to look at as well. We yearly visit prisons and my committee visits prisons, we present at Woodside. And evidently, people didn't feel comfortable talking with our committees. I think that's something that we, as legislators, need to look at too. We didn't get this, so go ahead, Bill. I was interested to hear you talk about the external independent review. I think that's a very good step. But to go back to the hotline, where would the hotline, does that still go into the administration, just another agency? Well, where the, the employee hotline would go to the Department of Human Resources, that's the inmate hotline, I want outside of government. And I don't know what that means yet in terms, but whether it's legal aid or the defendant, the defendant's not outside, but is somebody independent outside of the state government as well. And I wanna qualify that. I mean, you could argue legal aid is part of state government, you could argue the defendant general, something outside the agency. All right, good to hear. Okay. Do a few minutes of motion, go ahead. I wanna thank you. I wanna also thank you to be very clear that these, what was reported, was over a period of time, about 10 years. Not all at once. And to really look at the current folks who are employed in DOC, the commissioner and the superintendent, what happened under their watch and what did not happen. I think that's very important for that, for everyone involved. One thing I would like to note just for clarification purposes, when you said you're reaching out to the attorney general and Vermont State Police so that any investigation that is occurring is not interfering with the ongoing criminal investigation. Can you clarify what we're talking about for an ongoing criminal investigation a little bit? Because I don't want confusion. If there was already something happening in a criminal investigation prior to the seven days article, I think that's important for folks to know, because it can be interpreted quite easily, that because of the article, there's no criminal investigation. So I want that clarification. There was a criminal investigation to open up in October of this year. Prior to the article. Prior to the article. That investigation is ongoing. I'm aware of that investigation right now. It is, I'm trying to remember Paul's article whether it was, it said where it was targeted, but nonetheless, that is ongoing right at the moment. That was referred by the Department of Corrections to the State Police at the time they became aware of it. I think that's important to be out there so that folks just don't have the feeling that if this hadn't come to fruition, there would not be a criminal investigation going on at this point. The one thing I do want to respond is, as much as I'm focusing on the people that are there now and what they did when some of these incidents happened when they were there, I don't want to discount the fact that this seems to be a systemic issue that's been over time that we really got to pay attention to. And maybe it's a culture change that we have to look at. And that's where the independent outside review was very helpful. Thank you. I want to make sure that we don't do the side of the fact that it's not just chitin' Right, right. Necessarily behaviors on part of a very small minority of the thousands of people who work for the Department of Corrections where there are 12, 14 hundred people. So it is a small minority, but it's not just a chitin' and more problems that have risen. And we may focus on chitin' and the population there, but it's not just there. I think you're right. I hope that there's an overall review of the state. Yeah, I think where I want to start, just to be honest, is chitin' and then we'll expand it from there. I've heard we all hear allegations regarding drugs, particularly being brought in. And there will be some controversial recommendations that I will make sure. And one of them may or may not be, and I'm gonna see if Steve's standing right over me, but it would be drug testing at some point. I will, you've never been shy about controversial proposals. I know, I got one coming up. Oh yeah? So, is it okay if we transition to, yeah. You had said that you were gonna be reintroducing mandatory sexual assault prevention training system-wide. Is that to mean that that wasn't mandatory before? It was mandatory before. I'm gonna reintroduce it. Was there, do you know the reason why that was stopped? I think it's ongoing. Oh, it's ongoing? Yeah, but I want to make sure, I want to look at the program. I want to restructure the program and move forward on what we're doing. So, before this all broke, we had set up another controversial subject, which was Woodside. And the legislature last year was busy trying to figure out whether to build a new Woodside, what to do with Woodside. And at the time, I kept getting daily reports from the particular state's attorney in the Northeast Kingdom, who will be named, the joint nameless of the number of people who were in Woodside. And then post that, I continued to get daily reports, but the numbers were dropping dramatically. So, I think you've reached a conclusion, and I don't know whether it's part of budget adjustment or where it is, but might as well jump right into this one too. Can I interrupt for one second? Did anyone lose a key? You found another floor. What kind of car? Looks like a Lexus, I think. Oh, that's mine. No. Yeah. Anyone? It's not mine. That's for sure I'm a developer. All right. Well, I'll have it in the middle of the night. All right. Well, I'll have it in the middle of the night. So, anyway, so if we can transition to Woodside. Right. And the subject of what do we do with youth? Right. And in the near future, youth will include 18 and 19 year olds. So, Mr. Chairman, Madam Vice Chair, and members of the committee, I wanted to be here today because, you know, not only did I want to discuss what I just discussed, but I wanted to make sure that the committee understood that this was my decision and in closing Woodside and the thought process that went into it as I moved forward. It's been an eventful month as you have concluded. One of the things, let's look at it from two parts, and then I'm going to ask him to sort of go into the specifics of it, but just generally what I was looking at when I made the decision. First of all, Woodside costs approximately $6 million, $5.8, depending on what you're doing, it costs approximately $6 million a year. That's all general fund money because the federal government will not match that money at all. So that's $6 million of general fund money. When I first came here, the population was hovering, and I think it's still hovering fairly small, but was hovering between two and zero. So we were paying $6 million for a population that was two and zero, even if the population increased substantially, $6 million for that facility from a financial point of view made no sense to me, at least. Secondly, since I've been gone from state government, Ken and his colleagues at AHS have done a very good job at building a robust community-based treatment system out there where a lot of diversion happens before youth goes to Woodside, but also has the capability of handling people that we would normally have sent to Woodside in the past. That, my anticipation, and Ken will talk about that, is that we continue to build out that robust system in order to meet the future needs of youth that were once all going to Woodside. It's a success story if you look at it in terms of what we have done in terms of community, least restrictive environments for our youth in this state. It is truly a success story as we move forward. It isn't difficult to make these decisions. It is very difficult. We're gonna work with the VSEA and our contract obligations to place people and help people that have been there for a long time that have worked at Woodside in this discussion. Obviously, we're not gonna close down Woodside until we have the alternatives in place, and Ken will talk about what we're doing in that regard in a moment. It is in the FY21 budget, is where it is. It is not in budget adjustment at this moment, so it is in the 21 budget. So the target date would be July of 2020 for a close down of Woodside. If it can be done earlier, I would welcome it. You got 2020 next July. Next July. We're 2019 now. We're going into July 20, and it's not gonna be in budget adjustment. It'll be in the 21 budget, which starts July of 20. Right, okay. I was interpreting that you were trying to close it down and have it done by July 2020. That's how I was interpreting what you just said. That's exactly what I, July one, the new fiscal year starts at 21, and I'd like it closed before the new fiscal year starts. Not closing it tomorrow. Right. Between now and July first. And now and July first. From there, I'm sorry if I'm confusing now. No, no. So with that said, I just wanted to make sure you understood the background on this and understood sort of my decision making as I was looking at this, and now give Ken the hard task of making it happen. So Ken, if you can go from there. Sure. So I'm Ken Schatz, commissioner of the Department of Children and Families. I do appreciate having this time to talk. I just want to make sure that it's clear because there's a lot of people here that may not know me. And I've looked at the back of your thing here, that your presentation. I want to make clear that I have a bias. The bias is the C.L. Link, S.E.A.L.L., Depot Gap, Depot Street, Bennington, Vermont. Those are all programs. The S.E.A. is Sears. I operated those programs for three, five years. They have changed dramatically since I retired in 2006. But just so that people, I don't want somebody coming back and saying, well, you had a bias here and you're gaining from it. I don't gain a dime out of this, but I do have friends and relatives who work there. And so I have a bias and I'll try to be careful but I just want to be transparent about that since some people may not be aware of my relationship with that program. I appreciate that, Senator. I'm Ken Schatz, Commissioner of the Department for Children and Families. And go ahead, I just wanted to make sure. Sure, no, I appreciate that. And honestly, we're a small state. So we do work carefully to maintain the appropriateness of our contracting procedures to make sure they're fair and unbiased. And I appreciate your commentary and disclosure. So as Mike described, this was a thoughtful process to make this recommendation to close Woodside. I want to start by saying that it is done with significant admiration and respect for all of our staff. This is, they have held a challenging role for decades. They, up until today, we continue to be proud of the work that they've done with respect to the youth that they serve candidly. It is a group of youth with some challenging behaviors. And so it is not easy work. I also respect the process. So I appreciate the fact that they have disagreed with this decision and they will come forward and present that information to you. And just please know that I'm appreciative of their commitment. And because I think that's where it comes from. Their commitment to the youth. So even though we're making this recommendation as an agency and they're disagreeing, I really respect that process and the thoughtful consideration of the issues. But as Mike described, we're coming from a place where the numbers of youth with delinquent behavior is going down rapidly. And so we provided some of that data in the past. So three years ago, we had 129 youth in DCF custody as delinquents. As we sit here today, that number is approximately 60. So that number as a whole has dropped in half. And I think that's a compliment to many of the programs that you and the agency has supported in communities to reduce inappropriate behavior by youth. It's a compliment to the programs, the service providers at multiple levels who work with our youth on a day-to-day basis. And so they are not continuing to commit more delinquent behavior as you probably are aware and we've talked about it before. Recidivism rate in the juvenile justice system is significantly less than in the adult justice system. So again, that's a positive sign. So we entered into this with the expectation that we can manage the population of youth who come into DCF custody without the locked secure facility at Woodside. We do have a robust system of residential placements and honestly, Woodside has been part of that. I did provide you with that information in terms of simply a list. Glad, I know you have a lot of things on your agenda. Glad to talk about this more in depth. If you're interested, we actually have produced some reports over the last couple of years that you might want to look at. In 2017, the agency unit services produced a report on all of these residential placements, including both placements of youth in DCF custody and also youth involved with the Department of Mental Health. And last year when we did consider the future of Woodside, we also updated a lot of that information so it's a lot of the in-depth information about these residential placements are in that report. We're glad to update that for you as needed. And so as we look at this proposal, we recognize the research. We recognize there's an important place for significant levels of security for a very small number of youth. There's a place for residential programs, for a group of youth who need that level of supervision and care, but primarily we have been successful in addressing the needs of youth in family-like environments. That's consistent with the national research and that's the approach we have been taking and we will continue to take because that's really in the interest of youth. And so we do have a fairly rigorous process just to give you that base of knowledge that is we don't make decisions to place youth in residential programs lightly because it is taking them out of their communities. It's taking them out of home-like environments. So we have a case review committee that consists of, excuse me, representatives from DCF, the Department of Mental Health, Dale, Department of Aging and Independent Living, and also the Agency of Education. So we have a process that looks at whether or not a residential program and which residential program would be appropriate for a youth. And that has been very helpful. And again, we are mindful of the conversation about out-of-state residential programs and so again, I sort of want to be straightforward about it, and we provided you some information here in this material. So we have approximately 146 youth in residential now, 80 are placed out in state, 66 are placed out-of-state, but it's worth noting that many of the out-of-state programs that we utilize are in Massachusetts, New York, and New Hampshire, and in fact, sometimes closer to the home of a youth than some of our in-state residential programs. Tennessee. Do you have the breakdown of the number of youth who are placed out-of-state who are delinquents? I don't have that. That would be important. I appreciate that. To have, because you've combined kids who aren't eligible inside in this list of their kids. So that would be helpful to know the number of delinquents who are in-state, out-of-state. I appreciate the question. I'll be candid. I had asked the same question myself. Unfortunately, our IT systems are not easily manageable, so we will have to do some of that by hand. We can credit that by next, but we will definitely get to it. We have to be helpful on the 17th, because I think that I want to provide an opportunity to hear from state employees at the meeting on the 17th, perhaps putting that into the agenda as well on the potential closure. And I think we need, because obviously kids who are not delinquent are not eligible for this. Correct. As my understanding, that's still true, right? That is correct. So I will be glad to provide you by next week a breakdown of the youth in custody's delinquents who are placed in residential programs and clarify where they are. Yeah. And again, and so, but it is an important, it is an important piece to recognize. And I think that it's also worth noting that really over the last year, as Secretary Smith indicated, we have made some extensive efforts to expand the variety and types of programs available for youth. And particularly for youth in custody's delinquents. And specifically, we created a new assessment center in New Fane recognizing that sometimes it's actually important to have a time out, so to speak, for an opportunity to really look at a youth rather than having just multiple placements that are sometimes unsuccessful. We wanted to create an assessment center. That's been very helpful. We've also expanded our beds at the Vermont School for Girls to enable them to take youth with more high acuity needs. Similarly, with respect to 204 Depot Street CL, we also expanded the number of beds over the last year and also asked them and they agreed to take on youth with more challenging behaviors requiring more supervision and care. And so, those efforts have been successful in part leading to the reduction on the numbers of youth who needed to be in the Woodside facility. So going forward, as you recall, we've talked about, you asked us to look at expanding our residential programs in the communities. We are working on a request for proposals that will go out to expand our capacity to make sure we can meet the variety of needs. I don't want to, I want to be clear with you that we understand that for a very small number of youth, there is the potential need going forward to have a substantial level of supervision. We are mindful of that and recognize that we need to meet that need. I think I'm going to ask a question and Mary may want to chime in, but from an appropriation standpoint, you and your 21 budget recommendations will reduce by $6 million roughly, general fund, and that would be easy because there's a lot of needs out there, but I'm hoping that some of that $6 million will still be part of the system to help with kids. I mean, we have a habit around here of taking that $6 million and spending it on bridges. So I just want to start by appreciating Secretary Smith because we had that same conversation. Okay. And Secretary Smith was very responsive and helpful and so the short answer is yes, we will reinvest some of that in community-based programs. Senator Sears, it made no sense to me that we were taking all general fund money and not utilizing it to its maximum. And what we did is we reinvested some of that money but matched it with Medicaid money as we were using it as well. So it's a two-fer from my standpoint. Not only do we reduce that amount, we're able to reinvest in some of these, what I call a robust, making the robust system more robust, but also it allows us to match the Medicaid money. If I could just ask for a little more specificity, you've talked about alternatives in the 2021 budget and an RFP but and now you whittled it down a little more to something that will provide for the, call it somewhere between zero and maybe five or six people with the need for a locked secure facility, what RFP would you be putting forward? I don't want to jump to conclusions about what type of facility it will be and partly that's because as we continue to look at the population that needs supervision, one of the things that we've recognized, it's oftentimes youth with serious mental health issues. And so we wanna make sure that we have the right type of facility to meet those needs. So that's part of what we're looking for from the request for proposals. We've also seen looking nationwide that there's a variety of types of programs that have been quite successful in supervising youth without necessarily having to be a facility that's locked all the time. Okay, and I will personally just look for more specificity as we go along. Last question I'll ask is, so I tend to sit in education a good part of my day. We've had a very similar decline in numbers from 127,000 to now more like 75,000 students. To what extent is the drop in delinquent numbers from 130 to 60, just a demographic? You know, I wish I had more expertise to be totally confident in answering. I think that's way more than the reduction in O-population so I can say it that way. Clearly, I don't wanna deny that it's a factor that there are perhaps less youth in our community but a 50% drop is obviously much higher than it is. And not to denigrate the efforts of, you know, House and Senate committees, agencies that have made those numbers go down, but it does seem that the quick tendency would be to think this is a confirmation of everything we've been doing, whereas in education the drop in the numbers is a confirmation that we're screwing up at a massive structural level. So just I don't think that's the case here, but again, we're trying to be thoughtful about it. And again, it is a national trend also to be clear that the reduction in youth crime is, it's now limited to our efforts. But again, I think we can be pretty proud of the significant drop. So the other point I just wanna make, so I'm glad to answer any questions, but I thought originally, and maybe I'm wrong, that the reason you asked us to return in part to talk about residential placements was a follow-up to the presentation of Raising the Age. But the whole thing started to try to get a sense of what we were doing to prepare for 18 and 19 year olds, and you have a facility that we were wondering what the plan was if an 18 or 19 year old needs a walked facility who should not be dealt with in the adult. We also have problems that there will be a bill on and that's how you separate out the 18 and 19 year olds as they become juvenile court people in the, so I mean, I'm happy to try to fit time in next week to talk about that. We didn't expect the discussion of the chicken facility nor did we expect the discussion of Woodside Potentially Closing, but Representative Shaw has a question as well as Representative Hooper. So a bit of follow-up to Senator Verrull's conversation. I read in the newspapers that one day you had zero and then Woodside, a few days later, you suddenly had two residents coming in from the courts. Will your RFP address the placement of folks, youth coming in, especially the youth of this age coming in from the courts? Or do you have a plan for that or will you have a recommendation to us of how do you handle that going forward when you get somebody from DLC? So I think that, yeah, I appreciate it. I think I understand the question. And I think the answer is we are hopeful that the responses that we get from the RFP will enable us to address the arrangement we currently have with the Department of Corrections. I can't guarantee that at this point. We're certainly in discussion with the Department of Corrections. We do sometimes house youth who are charged as adults with sight and sound separation, and that certainly may continue to some extent, but we are so mindful that there are advantages to having a placement of a youth, even if charged as an adult with other youth in a different type of setting than an adult correction facility. So we have that in mind. We'll see and we'll report to you more specifically as we go forward. So Representative Shaw got at the core of my concern. So let me just go a little bit larger, which is in the past with the adult mental health system, we said, hey, we're gonna create a robust community system. We don't need these institutions and we ended up with a system that is not as robust as we need. And this is as much, I guess, an observation for ourselves that we need to fully fund a robust system. And I'm concerned that we're going to say, yes, we're creating this juvenile system that is going to rely on these placements, but we don't make that year over year commitment to making sure that's in place. And the fact, I mean, any night somebody could be brought to DCF, who needs a placement and they're gonna end up sitting in an inappropriate place that DC really concerns me. So I'm looking forward to hearing from you all how you're going to make sure that does not happen. So I do appreciate that and that is certainly our intent on this again, as Secretary Smith pointed out, that's one of the reasons why we're not rushing to do this tomorrow, even though the population did go down to zero. And honestly, it's gonna go up and down. It's been below five and that's the number for months and that's what we expect. But we will thoughtfully consider the need for that type of placement going forward and that's why we are doing the RFP process. That's why we're also giving ourselves time both to thoughtfully address it, but also present it to you so that we can address that concern. I guess we share it. I mean, we wanna have a robust system that is able to meet the needs on any given day or night. It was always my belief that there would be very difficult place to link with kids who would not be appropriate in the community setting and that he would need a one-side type facility. But if I look back at the history, back in the late 70s, there was a program at the state hospital that was operated by Washington County mental health that held those kids. And then the pre-woodside was taken over by the state, that facility at the state hospital. It was a pretty dank place to walk into, I must tell you. Talk about the old days. If anybody saw that today, they would be horrified that we actually put kids in that facility, but we did. Then the crisis hit the horrible murder of Essex Junction. And the legislature at the time was considering a hundred-bed facility, by the way. There were many proposals for a hundred-bed facility, which thank God they didn't build. But we did build a 30-bed facility and it's continually been down from that 30 beds down to the 15 and now down to five or whatever the number is. But it is a 30-bed facility and I'm hoping that the institutions committees will still, I'm assuming no private corporations coming in to buy that facility and tear it down for senior housing or something. That you have that 30-bed facility there that maybe if the legislature agrees with your proposal that it might be repurposed for some other use. And Senator Sears, I think. So I'm just, that's the institution's committee. Senator Sears, I think we'll have some ideas and be speaking with the institution's committees on that. We'll just institute whatever it is. Senator Hook is on the Senate institution. Oh, okay. I think that, but that little history of the facility and you think about the 30-bed that we did have and it was pretty robust. It was generally 15 beds for treatment, 15 beds for detention. And it's that detention group that I think we will still have headaches with going forward. And I remember the floor fight on the floor to put the money for building Woodside. Back in the early 80s. I remember that fight. That was before my time. That was before your time. And I remember it was very clear that the debate was that Woodside would not be a juvie jail. It was very clear. What's interesting is when you say, you've been around a long time, I was in the legislature when those tragic murders happened. You came in right now? Yeah. Gretchen Morse. Yeah. Bought the fight on the floor of the house. Anyhow, I don't know if there are any other questions but we have two other witnesses scheduled and I just don't know if Pepper's still in the room. Can't see him. Can't see him. Can't see him. If you can make your way up and if Mark is here, maybe the two of them can't get curious. Oh, there you are. You want to touch the back of my hand? I walked you in the, we will take this up again on the 17th, what the original proposal was, which was to look at what we're doing with youths but you may have comments about this proposal from the administration regarding good side matter not the state's attorneys and the dependent general want to comment to you. Absolutely. Well, you can get up off the floor whenever it's convenient. Any night of the day? You can tell me to just, I'll wait for him and then I'll go out. I'll be briefed. I mean, James Pepper, Department of State's attorneys and sheriffs, the state's attorneys were not consulted prior to this recommendation coming public. However, since it has become public, a number of our state's attorneys have weighed in with me personally in the executive director's office. And the consensus view is that the state, there is a need for a no reject, no eject secure beds. It doesn't have to be a facility. It doesn't have to be a wood side, but there are a need for those types of beds. And in fact, the lack in the state of kind of these more local secured beds can actually be a detriment to the state, to the offender. It removes them from their family. You know, if there's kind of an after hour detention, transportation issues come into play. I wanted to talk a little bit about the need for the beds. The types of cases that we think are appropriate that demonstrate the need. There's the short-term detentions following the commission of a violent crime. I think that this is relevant even more so if they've raised the age to 18 and 19. There's the youth that are already in DCF custody, whether they're in foster care, residential care, you know, bout-of-girl retreat, that go into crisis and need kind of a crisis stabilization. I think in 2018 there were 12 cases like that in a DCF report. And then there's also kind of a longer-term need for when you're trying to work out a less secure plan for an individual. This is particularly true for older teens that are gonna lose jurisdiction when they turn 18 or 19. And, or kids with mental health issues. And the delay, I mean, the delay can be for any number of reasons. You know, very often in social work we'll need to find an appropriate placement out of state. They'll need to go visit it. They'll need to fill out applications. They need to get that approved both by the court and the review committee. And there's compliance with the interstate compacts that needs to be worked out. I mean, all of those things just take time, cause delays, and where is the individual during those times. And then of course there's just the interstate compact youth that get picked up here and need a place to be placed. So the administration, DCF, AHS has made themselves very available to the Department of State's attorneys to work through some of these issues. We haven't fully made it for me to talk about what these alternatives are gonna look like. I think that we're open to those conversations and we'll be happy to testify. I know that the people that I talked to and the private nonprofit sector who operate programs would point out that in many cases there are no reject to them. Particularly with kids who are in beyond the control of the parents. One side's not available and there are other choices. So they feel like that this whole idea of no reject, no reject is questionable to some of them. That's just a discussion with them. I just point that out. There's a difference of opinion there. But there's no question that a 17 and a half year old who's serious delinquent problem and who's gonna under current law be out in six months where you're placing that child. Martian. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm just feeling a little bit about what Mary Cooper was saying about a mental health situation. How we were really looking at the community system to how part of that mental health system is people know that there's always a backup that there's state beds somewhere with the hardest cases. And I can't help but think that that will play out as well in this situation with you. That some of these residential placements, how many of them would be able to handle a situation that really escalates and there's no backup? Or, I mean, is that a non-issue? I would say that is our primary concern. You put your finger exactly on the kind of last resort, institution of last resort. But that's what we're gonna be working through. I mean, I think that there is, having local secure beds is a benefit in many cases. But is that the state operates those and the state builds them or are we still gonna be dependent on the community services to provide that? Because we get pushed back on the mental health. We don't have enough, we don't have enough secure beds within our mental health system. And then you get the backup. And I'm just wondering if that will happen within our youth or not. I don't know. I wanna hear from Marshall if you would like to. Those are good questions I think will need to be answered in the committee of the jurisdiction in the next session when the decision is made to either go along with the administration's proposal or not go along with it. What do you do? I think those are on it beyond this committee. But I'm glad that they're not doing it in budget adjustment and closing it tomorrow. Because it does give you some time to look at it. But I'm putting again our appropriations hat on. It does create a minimum of a $3 million problem. If you spend it somewhere else, it does give you a problem for these guys in the house. Thank you. Thank you. Marshall. I think you agree. Yes, yeah. Thank you. Marshall Paul, Chief Juvenile Defender and Deputy Defender General. I'm gonna jump right into it because mindful of the time. And I wanna just sort of start by picking up where James Pepper left off addressing that question about the sort of comparison between this transition and the transition that happened in the mental health world. And I think the short answer to the question in terms of how are we going to, like we're in the mental health world, there was a lot of problems that happened when the shift was made from institutionalized, centralized, secure care to community care. How are we gonna ensure that those same problems don't come up? The answer is we already did it. And that's mental. When we did it in the mental health world, we took a very full state hospital and tried to find placements all over for everyone at once as the hospital was shut down. Two in, you know, there was not, there was a lot of factors beyond people's control at that time. But that's how that transition happened. Here, the community system has already stepped in, has already picked up those, picked up those very difficult to place, very challenged, very high needs children and brought them into the community system already. It's not the same thing to take a centralized institution like Woodside that's down to, you know, sometimes zeros, sometimes up to five, a very marginal number of high needs placements and find placements for those as it is to take a large population like was at the state hospital and in an emergency situation, find community placements for those. So I think we're looking at a very, I don't think they're actually that comparable. I think they're very different. And I think that this is really looking at the problem, the way it's supposed to go. You start by building up the resources and then you make the structural change not the other way around. This is exactly, and I wanna start, you know, my comments by saying we're really supportive of the plan that the administration has sort of outlined in broad strokes, whether we'll have differences of opinion going forward as things get more detailed is, I'm sure we will, it's in our nature. But I do think that in broad strokes, we're really supportive of what they have planned and they've really done the legwork ahead of time for years and years. There has been this increase in the community programs that are available and the severity of needs that those community programs are able to address. And I think just sort of the one other point that I wanna make to the committee is that we're not an outlier here. This is very much a national trend and a regional trend. We're looking at closing our facility and we've got our number of kids in that facility down to what I would call a really marginal number. You look next door at New Hampshire, they really accomplish the same thing. The Sununu Youth Development Center is New Hampshire's version of Woodside. It's their only secure, no eject, no reject facility in the state in the 16th Gen facility. Last time I talked to a New Hampshire public defender, they were down to 11 kids in that facility. And New Hampshire, even though they have a population that's about double Rs, they have an under 18 population that's closer to triple Rs. So you're talking about essentially the same level of de-incarceration happened in New Hampshire. When you take 11 and divide it by three, you get a number that's within a margin of error of zero, just like we are at. Similarly, we take a look at Connecticut. They're still using juvenile detention facilities, but they've done away with secure commitment facilities in Connecticut. They closed the Connecticut Training School, which was their last secure commitment facility. They operate on a model where detention all happens in local facilities and they used to have one centralized facility for commitment. They've closed that centralized facility and done it successfully and have moved the kids from that program into community-based programs and oftentimes not even into community-based programs into their home and provide wrap services in the home much more effectively and at much lower cost than they were doing in the centralized facility. Similarly, you look at New York State. They were actually the leaders in this. They started in the sort of early 2000s. They used to send all, New York City, I'm talking about New York, not New York State. They used to send all of their juvenile detainees to upstate facilities and they had something like 3,000 kids at one point at their peak in their facilities upstate. They started a program that wasn't actually designed to reduce numbers. It was just designed to bring that population back into the city. It was called the Close to Home Program so they set up security facilities scattered all over the boroughs and they set up group homes and staff secure facilities all over the boroughs. And the idea wasn't necessarily to reduce numbers. It was just to get kids back into their communities to get them receiving services in their communities to get it so that they could still have the connections to their communities. They could go to kids who were able to could go to school for the day but return to a facility at night, that sort of thing. What they found is it reduced numbers dramatically. As of last month which was the last time I talked to somebody from New York they had 12 kids in secured detention and 12 kids in secure commitment in the entire city, 8.9 million population and they were down to 24 kids behind locked doors in the whole city. And that really speaks to the efficacy of this model of de-institutionalizing and decentralizing those services. It doesn't just result in a better outcome. It results in lower numbers. And Commissioner Schatz spoke about the juvenile crime rate dropping. That's also, I just keep, he said it but I wanna reinforce it. That's a national trend and not just a national trend. All over the country they've seen the same kind of drop-offs in juvenile crime that we've seen and in fact a lot of places have seen much greater drop-offs in juvenile crime than we've seen. So I don't want people to think that we're some sort of an outlier on this issue. We're not at all. We are very much in line with national trends. And I'm not even touching on when you just start, just if you just do a Google search for states closing juvenile facilities it is all over the country. States are closing juvenile facilities. Wisconsin's closed most of theirs. Maine has closed one of their two and they are looking at plans to close the second one. New Jersey's closed a bunch. Pennsylvania's closed a bunch. California's closed a bunch. In fact, we got sort of a nice shout out from California. They're now the fourth state to have a proposal on the table to raise the age of juvenile jurisdiction. And their proposal for raising the age of juvenile jurisdiction interestingly isn't coming from the defense bar or the sort of children's welfare bar. Advocacy organizations. It's coming from the Juvenile Corrections Officers Union because the rate of juvenile crime has dropped off so much that they are closing facilities and they're proposing raising the age to 20 and they're pointing to Vermont as an example of a state that's already doing that just so that they can keep the infrastructure alive. So I think that this is very much a national trend. We're not any kind of an outlier on it. And the states that have led us on this trend the states who are ahead of the curve ahead of Vermont on the curve on this have seen really great results. They are not seeing the problems that we saw when we transitioned people out of the mental health system. They are seeing really drop offs in juvenile crime and a lot better results for the kids that they're dealing with. Last point I wanna make is, we're very supportive of the plan as has been outlined in broad strokes but we don't see this plan as eliminating either the need or the existence for or of secure beds for juveniles. What those look like? I think I'm really interested to see I wanna see what other states are doing and what the proposals that come in are. But I don't think we're talking about a situation where when a cop calls a judge in the middle of the night to say I have a kid who's just committed a violent act and I need some place to put them. I don't think it's not our understanding that anybody is talking about a system where we say, oh, we don't have a place for that. I think more of the question is, what should those spaces look like? What should their use be? What should the scope of them be? And we'll be very interested to see where that conversation goes. And I'm happy to answer any questions but I do know it's not. I'm gonna break the lunch and come back to this message of media questions that come to people's minds. Thank you very much. Nathan is here, along with David Scher, who I see right behind you. I don't know if you wanna come up together or separately. We'd love to have you kick it off and then a little later on, Skyler has been good enough to put together a conversation about systematic racism. And I'm gonna let him kind of take that over but I appreciate his putting that on the agenda and trying to educate us. We all need education. Please join us. This is a report that we require. Do you have it on your plate? We have it on our plate. It's for you. For the way this is used. Whoever wants to start. Well, I would love to, although I'm having a moment where I seem to have, no, no, hold on. I'm getting to that point in life where these are critical. Yeah. Yeah. Weird. I've watched what I can't find them. I actually have them set in every room that's in the house. Yes, it's critical because otherwise nothing happens. You can't even open a band-aid. No, no, no. I can't grocery shop, it's humiliating. All right. Well, I thought I would give you some sense of the process and then it has occurred to me when I looked over this that both Karen Vastin and Monica Weber who were really critical in this process asked for an executive summary. We forgot. So I'm gonna do that verbally for you. But the process, which I'd like to start with, we really worked with the idea of building consensus from the beginning. That was important to me as chair. It was important to all the panelists. And we did so even through the end of the report which was unanimously accepted. Everyone on the panel voted in favor of this. It meant that the process was relatively slow and considered. Everybody weighed in. Everybody was encouraging everybody to weigh in so that their reflection and their expertise could inform our collective discussions. It led to very wide-ranging conversations that covered most of the mandate of the panel as Act 54 laid out. And it went beyond as that entire section that's entitled Further Discussion and Recommendations, a test that I believe that begins on page seven. We wrote sections as appropriate and edited them and then edited them again. This was certainly the case when our first bit which was section 6A of Act 54. That's the first bit of writing that we produced, having to do with creating a robust complaint process. And it was certainly the case with the rest of the report. This process of course takes time. It's not quick. And when one understands that everybody has jobs and that the panel meets for near two hours every month, this really went, I thought, quite well. It may not have been as fast as some people would like, but I actually did feel that it was expeditious given the lives of the panelists. Moreover, it was very productive. I'm a college professor by training and thus given to excessive repetition. I said often that the process for the panel would be one in which we would work to mutual disapproval so that we would all get to a moment where we could live with our labor and go, it's done. And not be completely happy with it, but actually feeling like we've gotten something here that's important that works towards the amelioration of racial disparity in the criminal and juvenile justice systems. I felt we did that. I really do think that that's what happened. I'm not sure that anyone walked away feeling triumphant. We could all live with it. We gave it our best effort. And in my opinion, that's the art of collaboration and diplomacy. And that's what the panel achieved. And this is what I believe you have in front of you. Now the executive summary. We followed the act relatively closely, as you'll see. We answered and put at the beginning of the report recommendations that focused upon section 6A, B, and C. If you have the act in front of you, I believe those are on page 4. It disturbs me that I know this well enough, that I know that. But it is indeed. Section 6A, having to do with how to institute a public complaint process to address perceived implicit bias across all systems of state government. We spoke with many people, including the ex-director of the Human Rights Commission, Karen Richards. The panel broadly felt that there was no need to reinvent the wheel, but rather make a more robust version of agencies and organizations that already exist. And so for us, the Human Rights Commission was an obvious choice. We initially came up with very precise ideas of how to beef up the Human Rights Commission, but decided in the end that our job was to make recommendations as the act states and not come up with concrete solutions. That certainly is the job of elected officials. So we came up with recommendations that look broadly at the issue of creating a more robust Human Rights Commission that could clearly feel complaints relating to perceived implicit bias across all systems of state government. We wanted to leave it open also so that the concerns of the various organizations could be addressed in a way that didn't bear the burden of dealing with our specificities. We're not on the Human Rights Commission. You already know Boye. You could talk to her. She could give you very, very concrete ideas about what's needed. What we're doing is supporting that. In 6B, and that whether and how to prohibit racial profiling, including implementing any associated penalties, the panel submitted recommendations that it believes will mitigate racial bias in the criminal and juvenile justice systems, which will then, we hope, reduce the racial profiling to which Act 54 refers. There's much here in this section, including the expansion and support of the use of community policing approaches to law enforcement, and making certain that Vermont statutes track with existing federal requirements with respect to due process for those with limited English proficiency. There's also a great dealing here, and it was felt very strongly by many members of the panel that we needed to talk about training for all law enforcement officers, but not just training, also enforcement systems of accountability around issues of race, racial disparities, cultural competency, race relations, and data collection, and I'll say more about data collection in a bit. This notion of enforcement also relates, as I say, to the idea of accountability, and I cannot overstate how important that was to many members of the panel. Again, the recommendations abroad. To paraphrase David's share, I rather liked it when you said that these are recommendations from 30,000 feet. Looking broadly, looking down and making broad recommendations and not getting mired in the specificities. You'd be, maybe you wouldn't be surprised. The conversation got very slow when we started getting to the specifics, really slow to the point that we were all glazing over. So we backed off on that. Our intent was to stay, as I say, really, really broad and allow the elected officials, which is to say you, to refine the recommendations into specific policy proposals. They're meant to focus attention and that is largely what we did and confined ourselves to doing. There was no moment where we just said this is exactly what's going on. You know how conversation goes. Every one sort of at a moment gets to those unspoken moments of agreement. And I think that's particularly what happened here. We did not adequately address associated penalties with respect to racial profiling. Our intent is to do so and to present proposals on this matter in the future. At several of our meetings and at our last one on three December, one member expressed concern with creating new penalties of any sort. And so there is much for us to discuss both on the macro and micro levels on this particular issue. I'm glad we didn't rush it. Just so I'm just a clarifying question on my penalties. How do you have accountability if you don't have some? For example, if a police officer is engaged in behavior that is certainly biased and that police officer is not held accountable with some penalty. I'm not suggesting you go to jail but at least some kind of either fired or some kind of. I think Senator, that's the point is the spectrum is huge and it requires a certain judiciousness and approaching it. That we really, because of its size, we have to really spend some time looking at it very carefully because it could be what, a letter of reprimand or it could be jail time. That's a big, big spectrum. We did not have adequate time to refine that. Well, I think of a case in Bennington where a person of color was arrested because he was in a cab and that case was thrown out by the Mont Spring Court. And I don't have any idea what accountability was to the officers who made that or the department itself. That would be an example of not suggesting we put the officers in jail but I'm suggesting there should be some accountability other than having the person having the case thrown out by the Mont Spring Court. Correct, and I would agree and I would imagine that most of the panel would agree but what that penalty should be and it's specific, we did not adequately discuss. But you plan to come back in the future. Correct. Thank you. You're welcome. 6C, referring again to page four of Act 54, whether to expand law enforcement, race data collection practices to include data on non-traffic stops by law enforcement. This was huge for most of the panel. The entire notion of data collection loomed very large for us. There was broad feeling that one cannot measure racial disparities without adequate data. Now I'm not, I know there's a lot of feeling about this. There's a lot of people who go, we have a lot of data. That's why I say adequate data. You can have a bunch of data and not crunch it very well. We were mindful of that. Not only does this data need to be collected, it needs to be consistently collected. It needs to be clear. It needs to be accessible in ways that are not currently represented across state government. That was a very strong feeling of the group. A critical moment came when the panel recognized that data regarding race exists at the beginning of an interaction with both the criminal and juvenile justice systems and also towards the end of that interaction. In other words, with the Department of Corrections. But that between these points in time, data's hard to come by. At one point we tried to address this and suggested that we should break our report down and just talking about the beginning of the interaction, the middle and the end. We didn't in the end go with that for a variety of reasons I mean for you with. But we certainly were aware of it. We tried to address this lack of data in the center and suggested that data correlated to race be collected at, and this is a quote from the report, high impact, high discretion, decision points, charging, bail, plea bargaining, moments like that. We also urged a commitment to creating a centralized staff, statewide staff that is charged with assisting with data collections. We also felt broadly that, and this is a quote, mechanisms that insured both accountability and compliance, unquote, would be in place at the same time as data are collected in a more consistent and transparent fashion. Again, with the accountability. I don't know that there would be penalties at that point other than to say please get the data right. But that certainly needs to be there. After this, after we discussed data collection, and I didn't spend a whole lot of time bringing that to you, you will see it in your report that it's big. We came to the section that I referred to just a bit ago, and that was not specifically required by the act, but which the act allows. And that would be the section that begins on page seven of the report, further discussion and recommendations. There are many, many matters here, and I will not go through all of them in terms of giving you a discussion, training and outreach, legislative inclusion of members of communities of color. In other words, as we like to say, not about us without us. Pre-trial monitoring and risk assessment, home detention, mental health and substance use disorders, and others. We were concerned with noting whether legislation under consideration has a disproportionate impact upon people of color, and we recommended that the legislature get input from these various communities as part of the legislative process. Again, not about us without us. There were also concerns about discretion. Certainly, as we note, it is a cornerstone of the criminal and juvenile justice systems, but this is also a notion that allows for bias to make its way into decision-making. Several members of the panel felt that a system of oversight was needed for prosecutors, excuse me, non-forcement officers and judges. This was a huge topic that we could not adequately discuss, but this is an area that requires much more focus and attention. We went a bit further. You will see there's a section called non-consensus reports. This was great. We had moments. We really wanted to give you everywhere we went as much of a sense of our thinking as possible. That particular section, I won't say it was contentious. It was, well, yeah, it was contentious in the best sense of the word. Not that people were throwing things at one another, but it certainly, it brought up a lot of passion. It brought up a lot of argumentation that was really good. It pushed the boundaries of what the act requires. I think it pushed the boundaries legally as well. You would agree, yes. And I'm glad about that. I think that that's many times the case with issues that concern people of color. Well, that's legal, and we all have to sit back and be happy about that, that it's legal and somehow people of color are still feeling like they're being put upon and they are. So to have a section of this report that actually goes a little into that seems to me important and necessary. I will read just the introduction to that. Certain ideas were discussed by the panel and supported by some members, but not all panel members could support them due to legal and practical concerns. Nevertheless, in the interest of a full airing of our discussions, the panel felt that it was fair to include some of these areas with the acknowledgement that they do not have the support of the panel as a whole. You're getting everything, folks. I mean, aside from water breaks. What I'd like to say finally, and then I have a stop blathering, which is always fun for a professor, is a bit about the conclusion and the preamble, not necessarily in that order. I get very nonlinear at the moment. This is the part of the report that got kind of hard for people because there are phrases in here that people see some people as inflammatory. There was a feeling among many of us that in order to dismantle a problem, one must be willing to name it, despite the discomfort that it may provoke. And the problem is white supremacy and the problem is white privilege. Now, we had a lot of trouble with this because there were people on the panel who were afraid that legislators would just look at that and go, oh, God, we're not reading this. As you will know, I'm sure, we're not talking about the burning of crosses and about wearing pointy white hats and lynching people. This is a far more sophisticated concept than that. It's in this preamble. I suggest, I urge, I beg that you read it. I think it's very well worded. I think it's really, really well worded in the conclusion which comes with a link. I love things with a link. It means I can read even more. And the conclusion has a link, for God's sake. You want education, you got it. The interesting thing about this is I don't have a commissioner, right? I am a member of the community. Everybody else was taking the report to their commissioner or the commissioner was on the panel at the moment. I took this to people I know who I think are really bright. A guidance counselor, a college professor, a janitor. I could go on and I showed them the report. I told them we were having trouble with white supremacy, with white privilege and they looked at me because I was ready to go, let's just leave it out. You know, we don't need to. I won't fight for this. They were quite clear I needed to. They said, this is the part of the report that's about us. All that legalese, I don't know what's going on. That's not us. This is what we hear, this is what we feel, this is our stake in this. And it's here, and it's here for you because those people felt that way and because the panel felt that you should know that. All I have to say, David's here to answer the technical questions because I'm not a lawyer and don't know anything about it. So, what about anything? Yeah. Obviously, this is a really trying situation to prove. Trying? Yeah. You must have had hours upon hours of debate about this. Oh, God, yes. Yes. Trying may be the wrong word. No, no, well. They cried at it though. I would say intense. Intense, yeah. I didn't feel that any of these people were trying, they're remarkable. The fact, and I'm using statistics from the draft of reports that most people don't have access to right now, but I'll give it to you. In Vermont right now, 9% of the sentence population are people of color. Roughly 144 people. 113 according to my figures. Okay. Of the, you're correct. I've got two different numbers. That's alarming, but even more alarming is 14% of the people that are detained today in Vermont prisons are persons of color, which is the 65, which adds to your number. I guess you had, well, those figures may be old to you, these are, but I've set the system. If I'm talking specifically about the justice system, why would 14% of the population is detained be persons of color? That's the question I think that we have to ask ourselves and ask our system. How does this report help us to get to that? It gives you recommendations for making sure that that situation does not continue to obtain. So is it looking at the front end of the system because this is what the senator just gave is the back end of the system, it's DOC. DOC doesn't go out there and recruit folks coming in to a certain extent. Except those that are violated. Right, violated, but in terms of new folks coming in, that's way downstream in the judicial system. And this would be what I was talking about when I read you the quote from the report about, and I'm not gonna get it right, but I'll find it again, high impact, high discretion decision-making points. About looking at those, setting up systems of oversight and accountability around those moments. Collecting data around those moments so we know exactly who's being incarcerated because that's not entirely clear in some ways at the moment. It's kind of muddy. It needs the data, and I pot shade the people who feel like we spend way too much time on it. I'm sorry, I'm looking at what we've got and going, oh wow, this is a mess. It needs to be cleaned up. It needs to be cleaned up, and you cannot make those interventions without knowing those things. I don't believe, I don't think the panel votes. Right, so that's the front end that this is. Correct. That's what's really important. The high impact, high discretion impact point, yes. Yeah, so I know that in the original act that there was an ask, or it was part of your mandate that you could be providing recommendations to the Criminal Justice Training Council on data collection, which we've talked about, but I didn't see anything on use of force. Was that something that the panel discussed but just couldn't reach a consensus on? It didn't come up as much as we should have, would have wanted to. I would have moments of feeling guilt about that except my God. It's common. It's common. I will tell you that a panel member came to me with something on that very issue that will be discussed at our next meeting. Sorry to add. Just to add, there was a recommendation buried in the data section. Oh, that's right, there is. That's been expanded to include information about use of force incidents, which a couple, I believe a couple of departments are doing now, but it's not widely collected. Not necessarily on the tracking of use of force, but on a model. I think that was, yeah, so that would be nice to see. Did you find a difference with a juvenile system from the adult system? Yeah. We're not, we're working on that still. It's not, we didn't do as good a job with that. I kept looking at commissioner Schatz and having bad moments where we would have a draft and I'd go, oh, this is great. And then read it over and go, wow, we're really missing half of us here. The juvenile justice system did not get as much weight as we wanted. Now, at our last meeting, we did also, I mean, we were talking with Karen and she actually said at one point that there's a lot of overlap here and so she feels good about that. There's still more work to be done. I mean, I never, somebody asked me and I've always responded. I could never understand why at some times when I ran the program at 204 Depot, I didn't, I had, I'm gonna say 10 kids because it's simpler saying 12 or eight. We generally had 10 to 12 kids. And many times there'd be three or four kids in color. Other times there'd be none. I can't explain why that was or what happened. And I went to Woodside. I think there were 10 kids there and two, three were actually, three were kids of color. And I don't, I mean, that just doesn't make sense that 30% of your Woodside population would be black. And there's, you wonder what's going on but I'm sure if I went there another time, there'd be no one. Like now. Like, well, I guess that was if you caught me. But, and I was on the David Graham show and somebody asked, texted David a question. I tried to answer as well as I could. Well, isn't the number of persons of color in our correctional systems a reflection of the drug problem and that they're coming from other places? Brooklyn, New York or Troy, New York or Holyoke and I said, it doesn't explain the problem. It doesn't, that may be some of it but it doesn't explain why there's that wide variation in those numbers. And I think that's those of us who have been either working in the field or who are legislators it's sometimes hard for us to explain those and based on my own upbringing and my own understanding of these problems. But other than that we have a society that is biased in the criminal and juvenile justice system there's no other way to explain it. Would you agree? I would agree. And that it's certainly, this is a place where as representative said, the one department would agree that DCF is not in that position even though some would argue. They don't hold up a welcome sign. They're not like Motel Six. They're open all the time but they're not trying to get people in there. So they're a reflection of what society is doing. There's a lot of argument about this. I mean, I was reading a report. Oh, I don't remember from where it's, I've been reading so much I'm not even keeping track anymore. Somebody was arguing that in a good Marxist sense that the drug trade represents a market to which is indeed open to people who are not allowed entry into the so-called open markets of the society. It allows them an in, it allows them to make money. I have trouble with some of the argument but I'm just putting this forth is that that's one discussion that people are having. I think it's something that is problematic but it certainly bears looking at, if only to discredit it. David, would you like this? One data point I'd like to note on that specific topic. If you look back at the Department of Corrections Report from the fall of 2018, which had the racial disparities in the correctional system numbers, they did a nice job of disaggregating that data so you can look at each county and look at out of state which allows any reader of the report to simply pull out, remove from the report everybody who's out of state. And when you do that the numbers are virtually the same. The disparities are virtually the same. So that pretty definitively disproves the idea that this is not Vermont's problem. And just want to say that plainly and know that that data's out there for anybody to look at. I wish I remembered that when I was on the show. You always, yeah, my best features are made on my way home. Wow. In the heart. You have a hard drive, so you don't have to think. Yeah. Unlike representatives. I have a long walk. Yeah, you don't have to drive very far home, so you don't get to make this. I don't get to think. Go ahead, Gary, would you? Well, to this discussion, it is the issue of bias. And I just wanted to say thank you for insisting on including in the report that this is about white privilege and supremacy. Because unless we keep saying that to ourselves, we ignore what the base problem is. And it's an uncomfortable conversation for most of us to have. And it needs to be had because we're not going to solve the problem until we start talking about it. So thank you for insisting on that. More than welcome. Thank you for saying thank you. But this is the issue that we have to get at and what we need to be insisting upon with all of our partners. And it's important, I would say, just as a close to that, not to spectacularize white supremacy. That's what, I think that's what happens and that's why there's a knee-jerk reaction. That everybody goes, wait a minute, I'm not wearing a white hood and a pistachios of it. And I think once people get used to that, they won't have this kind of knee-jerk reaction. I find it interesting, personally, people don't tend to freak out when you say male supremacy. I don't know a lot of men who then go, wait a minute, I'm not a rapist. But I know so many Caucasians who stop and go, but wait a minute, I don't have a pointy white hat. And I'm not making fun of that. It's just there is a way of portraying this that is very deeply problematic. And we've got to get beyond that. With that, it doesn't help when the Democratic candidates through the United States president start arguing amongst themselves about who's more, who's been more discriminated against. Yeah, the oppression Olympics is kind of boring, you know? It doesn't help the discussion. No, it really doesn't. It really doesn't. I wish they'd stopped arguing. Yeah, I agree. Focusing on the problem here with all due respect to my good friend, Bush Shaw. That's fine. I don't think he agrees. I think he agrees. He totally disagrees. He disagrees. But I merely point that out, because that's how we get into these. That's one of those little, just one more on the data. I agree that the data is our data process right now. It's just not, saying it's not sufficient would be putting it very diplomatically. Especially when we're attacking this problem, but knowing how important the data is, isn't it important that we also attach some accountability or take a really hard look at accountability for fulfilling those data requirements that we've put on people? Say more to me. Just that, wouldn't we be doing ourselves a favor by potentially looking at attaching, whether it would be through funding or a different vehicle, some levers of accountability for different agencies to collect data so that we have that, and we're not just, if we're saying how important the data is that it isn't good enough to just say, well, please report this data, and we're gonna trust that you're going to collect it in a sufficient manner and give it to us so we have it. I'm not sure that's entirely what the reports, I mean- Not characterizing the report is saying that, but just that I know that you guys hadn't really, it seems like you hadn't taken a deep dive into establishing like a hard line accountability measures for reporting that data, and just wondering that if it was worth taking a look at- It's certainly taking, worth taking a look at. Again, we were doing this for this initial run through, the 30,000 foot metaphor that I was using at the bottom of page five, thank you. We do have in there, with that last bullet point, the panel strongly urges a commitment to staffing and other resources to collect and compile data properly. This could include, and the last one there, mechanisms to ensure accountability and compliance. Again, we didn't want to define what exactly that would look like. I'm not sure that's entirely our purview. We can do it. We can go sit down and spend some time. I'm not sure. Okay, but that's, but a recommendation is, you know, it's a bit broader than that. Just to add in there, I was at a meeting of Mark Hughes's group in Burlington, and we got talking about that very thing. And so I've had a bill drafted to tie agencies' grant funding from the state to timely reporting of traffic stop data. And that sounds on the face of it really lovely, but that's exactly what we wanted the elected officials to actually participate. And come up with it. Rather than the panel, the panel, again, we wanted to focus attention. We wanted to draw attention. We wanted to suggest. We don't want to do your job. Yeah, that's why you were elected. David, is there anything you'd like to add to? No, I appreciate Dr. Nussred in the longest presentation here. It's been very helpful. Yeah, and I'm really here as his assistant today. So I don't have too much to add if you have specific questions, I'm happy to answer them, but. I can shut up. I mean, I, you know, microphone, I can't help it. We really appreciate it. I can tell you how much it's worth. How helpful this is to, you know, some of our questions may sound. I'm not gonna say I'm important, but. No, I think there's. A question is a question. I think a number of us are concerned about where the state is heading and where our society's heading. As is the panel. So I do have a question or comment for the doctor. Yeah. How do we, how do we, this report's very inclusive and looked at it, but it's been spent a lot of time on it. How do we take this message to the public in general statewide? Because the attitude statewide is may not be the same attitude that we see here in Montpelier or other counties that are. Sure, it's not. How does that message get, get out? It's a good one. I like, I always want to go back to transparency. I always, there's a part of me that says, you're, this is being filmed. That should be disseminated. So people know that these discussions are taking place. That people know that there's a conversation being going on about white supremacy itself, but that term has come up. I think that there's a lot that needs to be broadcast. It needs to be online. It needs to be in all sorts of media because there is a sense. And I certainly got it when I was showing people the work we were doing. They were completely surprised that this was taking place at all in the state. To me, I don't know, I'm a simple person. Okay, we have media. Let's engage it somehow. Let's talk about how to engage it. Let's make sure that the discussion that's going on here and that you're going to have in a few minutes is in fact out there for people to see. I mean, it's great to have open meetings, but if people don't know how to access them, that's not really very helpful. Does that help at all? I haven't like come up with a... Yeah, it's just, it's not a real relation. No, but I'm sure it's not to start. It's a place to begin. I think that's a great question. I mean, my concern is that as a nation, and then to some extent as a state, we are okay that the white supremacy that you described, certainly not the Klan or the lynching, but that certainly that we are... And it hits loud and clear when we had meetings in the Senate Judiciary Committee that we heard about the Northeast Kingdom. I thought it was only in Burlington and Bennington, but it wasn't, it's state-wide. And I think there's that, the media focused on Bennington, the Kayamorta situation, focused on Burlington with several situations that you're more familiar with than I am. But there wasn't a focus when the gentleman from the Northeast Kingdom came down and talked to us about what they have been seeing up there, that it is state-wide. It's not just, and it's easy to say, well, people of Bennington and the people of Burlington are just not. And I think it is recognizing that it's not just isolated situations that it's... If the whole notion of microaggression, which you've heard this, is based on this, is that in the normal course of events, every day, social intercourse, there are racially disturbing, indeed racist moments enacted. Once you understand that, you take the spectacular out of it and it becomes very quotidian. We have to understand that. We have to start understanding that. And we have to also get comfortable. And this is gonna be very controversial. We have to get comfortable being called racist. We have to go, okay, that was really insane. I do it. I do it all the time. We have to be comfortable being wrong. We have to be comfortable not getting it. But we also have to be willing to be open to changing that. I learned that from my mother and I teach it in my classrooms. It's nothing that is impossible. Thank you very much. I just wonder if some of the... Based on what you just said about acknowledging it within yourself and being clear about it, I wonder if some of the reaction that happens is, oh, no, I'm not a racist. Because it's an uncomfortable feeling. Oh, yeah. When it comes up and folks don't wanna acknowledge that. So they just say, I'm not a racist. I'm just wondering how that plays into it. And it's difficult because we anathematize it. But at the same time, everybody does it. There's a mixed message that as a society we put out there. We certainly don't want it going on. It's not a good. We don't wanna do that. But to completely anathematize people who may in fact unknowingly, unthinkingly put something forth that is racist is a very problematic gesture. Because it does not allow for a teachable moment. You simply say you're wrong. And I know from 30 some odd years of being in a classroom there is no more dangerous thing and no thing that will get in the way of teaching any more than telling someone that they are simply wrong. You have to invite them in in order to change them. I wish I could just make them wrong. But it doesn't work. That's good for everybody too. Approach it back. Remind me of my mother who used to tell me I was overweight. She was wrong. There. What? Are there other questions? Thank you so much. You're very helpful. I've been trying to make some of your classrooms. Yeah, that'd be great. Thank you. Thank you all. Skyler, if you wanna introduce the next. I think it's a pretty natural segue. I know when we were initially talking about the raising of the age with the juveniles back November 13th, I think it was. And we were getting kinda, I think a lot of times we get frustrated with these outcomes that we're seeing and these disparate outcomes. And the one thing I said then and which kind of led into this is that, we're getting frustrated trying to find solutions to these problems working within a system that was produced and designed to produce these outcomes. And that is the problem of systemic racism. And so I think, I hope that today we can begin to expand this conversation from just looking at policing and law enforcement to the entirety of our systems that racism is rampant and has been since their inception. And so I think it's important that, we're gonna hear testimony, but that this also is an opportunity to ask questions and learn. And hopefully give you all going into the legislative session, some of the language, the ideas, the knowledge base to engage in meaningful conversations with the constituents and with legislation to really go forward and as a state kind of achieve what I think some of us are trying to skip steps and say that we are right now or we're not. I'm accepting that we're not there yet, but that we can be. But this, all of this, the panel and then addressing this problem and naming it systemic racism is an important first step to getting to where I think we all want to be eventually. So I thank you guys for allowing me to put this together and listening. And I hope that everybody finds some value and engages with this. Thank you. We'll try to do this in 45 minutes. We've got four witnesses, so I look forward to it. Mark. And we're going back for a moment first. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and committee. For a record, I'm Mark Hughes. I'm the coordinator, the interim coordinator of the racial justice, the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance. Appreciate the shout out earlier to Senator Beirut for getting me to feel special. I said you were in one of our events. We do these types of events, mostly in Chittenden County on a regular basis. We've literally over the last five years and hundreds of community outreach events, largely in Washington County, because I'm a big Washington County guy. I've been here most of my life, most of my time in Vermont, nine years, but I've been in Chittenden for about the last year. We make a lot of noise. I want to just acknowledge Human Rights Day as well. I just also encourage those of you who have the opportunity when you're in the Burlington area to stop in at the 1619 exhibit, which we have on display in Fletcher Free Library until 15th. So I want to highlight that and flag that. Also, a shout out to the event that we'll be having this evening, which is a reparations event for those of you who haven't realized the United Nations has been calling on the United States to move forward with reparations for quite some time now. And so we have an event scheduled tonight at 38 South of Newsy in Burlington at the First Congressional Church. We will be talking, we have a couple of speakers and also community involvement there. And I would also bring your attention to H-478, which is in House Government Operations and Reparations Task Force Bill. I have on the line with us James McKim, who is a, who is a, in addition to a leader in the Episcopal Church at the national level, he's also an avid social justice worker, racial justice worker across the state of Vermont. And he's engaged quite intensely in a number of their initiatives. And I was hoping at the end of this we would give James an opportunity to at least give the committee an opportunity, give the committee some outside perspectives. Because we're not dealing with a unique issue. I thought it would be enlightening to hear maybe what another state was doing. New Hampshire, right? This is New Hampshire. So my original plan was to offer you a video, maybe like a five minute video. That doesn't look like that's gonna work very well given the constraints of where we are right now. So what I will do and move that is, is maybe speak to it. What the original intent was, was is that we would have a conversation about systemic racism, and about some of those, some of those building blocks around systemic racism. I think the last time we were together, is there a nilifolder back there somewhere? I don't know if that's bad. Maybe not bad right there. If you see it. The last time we were together, what I was able to do was to tell you a little bit about a guy named Joe Fagan. Joe Fagan, a pre-eminent researcher on systemic racism. So I wanted to just share with you again, part of his definition of systemic racism. On the front end of this very brief, believe it or not, Mr. Chairman, very brief testimony that I have for you today. Systemic racism includes the complex array of anti-black practices. The unjustly gained political economic power of whites, the continuing economic and other resource inequalities along racial lines, and white racist ideologies and attitudes created to maintain and rationalize white privilege and power. Systemic here means that the core racist realities are manifested in each of our society's major parts, each major part of U.S. society. The economy, politics, education, religion, family reflects the fundamental reality of systemic racism. As I told you in my last time, I was here and testifying the systemic, rather the existing government structure. It was not designed to disentangle itself from its own DNA. It was designed to protect itself and to self-heal as well as to adjust. And that's exactly what we've been seeing for the last 400 years. To change this requires new thinking and a willingness to transform the fail safes that enable the existing system to protect itself to one that auto-corrects to justice for everyone, no matter what you look like. Justice in housing, in education, employment, health services access, in economic development, and in the justice system. You recall in Act 54, there was another component of Act 54. We've just spent 45 minutes, 50 minutes talking about the racial disparities in the criminal and juvenile justice system advisory panel. However, it was a task force that was created. The Attorney General's and the Human Rights Commission's task force, and they produced a report on 15 December, 2017. And he articulated this in probably the best way this has ever been articulated in this state's history, this quagmire, this conundrum that we're talking about here, these challenges where we have racial disparities across all systems. When we sit back and we look at the criminal justice system, and we ask ourselves repeatedly over and over, how can this be? What is causing this? What is causing this? Without taking a couple of steps back and acknowledging the fact that we are experiencing the exact same challenges in all systems. If we don't do that, then we fail to acknowledge what systemic racism is. Because if systemic racism exists anywhere, then it must exist everywhere. Now Joe Fagan, he left us a few pointers. And I think I just wanted to share those with you before I moved on. And that was, these are some of the, some of the, I guess, aspects of systemic racism. He explains it in his book called Racist America. I recommend that as I did last time. The impoverishment of people of color and the enrichment of white people is the top point. The impoverishment of people of color and the enrichment of white people is the top point, as well as in terms of characteristics of systemic racism. Vested group interests among whites is number two, alienating racist relationships between white people and people of color is number three. The cost and burdens of racism are borne by people of color is number four. The racial power of white elites is number five. And number six is the power, racist ideas, assumptions, the power of racist ideas, assumptions, and worldviews is six. And the last one is resistance to racism. And that is, it's exactly as it sounds. There's a dimension of racism to where throughout all history we have and we will continue to resist. Again, I encourage you to read the book. I ask the committee members to consider your perspective on your legislative priorities. I mean, ask yourself how and why do your interests intersect systemic racism? Again, reflect upon your legislative priorities and ask yourself how and where and why do they intersect systemic racism? How do your priorities enable or how do dismantling systemic racism decriminalize and eradicating poverty and ensuring equity and enable your legislative agenda? How would you use the population level outcomes to be helpful in achieving desired systemic racism, statewide outcomes? How would you use those? Is the impact of a flat budget for the executive director of racial equity into 2022? Is that a, does that factor, how does that factor into addressing systemic racism statewide? The impact of a flat budget for the executive director into the executive director of racial equity into 2022, understanding her charge, how does that interact or interplay with addressing systemic racism? And finally, as I close, how do we close a one in 13 black, white, medium wealth gap in this state? How do we do that? I'm giving you some things to wrestle with. I've provided you a report of my written testimony, rather each of you, I also provided my previous testimony. I'm open to your questions. I wanted to also just encourage you to go out and take a look at our race data traffic stop dashboard which was released November 12th. It is the only statewide race traffic stop data dashboard that exists. We're all 79 agencies, data are correlated where there is comparative as well as trend analysis capabilities. We'll continue working on that. I'm moving to your questions. The dashboard, where do you find it? It's on a link in the email that I sent you two hours ago. Oh, look at our email, look at our email. I realized that, but I figured you'd get back to that. Thanks for asking. Thank you. Also, thank you for inviting me, Mr. Chairman. The person that we're gonna have on at the end of this, I guess you guys are gonna call James in. Is that correct? That's the number, yeah. I wanna first thank Cameron Sears and the committee members and our guests for allowing me to speak with you today. I bring you greetings from your sister state of New Hampshire. I'm honored to speak to you about this challenge we all face of addressing systemic racism at the statewide level as Mr. Hughes has so eloquently pointed out. And I understand you've been helping you all understand this issue. And you've all been doing some really good work from what I've seen in trying to address this issue. Thank you. As a bit of background since you cannot see me, I am an African-American and I've led a complex life. I was raised in Charleston, South Carolina to parents who were educators and civil rights activists. Over my lifetime, I've been discriminated against yet I've also had privileges that few people have had. I've had the privilege of studying at, in my humble opinion, the best academic institution on the planet, Dartmouth College. I work in management as one of the most successful technology companies on the planet, Hillwood Packard. And for those of you who own HP computers or printers, I thank you very much. Thank you. Besides my day job with Hillwood Packard doing consulting and management, I played and play many roles in public and nonprofit organizations, which are very relevant to this topic. At the state level for the official Church of New Hampshire, I serve on the reconciliation commission, which focuses on reconciliation, racial and otherwise, around the state. I help facilitate the state's economic vitality New Hampshire initiative, which is out of the state's Department of Business and Economic Affairs, led by Taylor Caswell and Willar Velo. I co-facilitate the economic development work stream of the race and equity series that is sponsored by the non-profit New Hampshire Health Equity Partnership at the national level as a pleasure of the presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. I serve as the chair of the executive council committee on anti-racism. So I see this issue and this challenge from many different perspectives and at many different levels. My sense is that those perspectives and levels, with those perspectives and levels, comes complexity and frustration. I understand that you and Vermont have been grappling with this complexity and maybe thrusting with your ability to affect substantive change and fast enough change. To this I try to keep the perspective of taking heart. As Theodore Parker, a university, a unitary minister and prominent American transit devilist who called for the abolition of slavery, back in 1853, said in a sermon, which you may have heard paraphrased by Dr. Martin Luther King. He said, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. And we have successes and we have setbacks and I think, keep that in mind as we go through this challenging issue. So Mark has laid out a little bit of the facets of this work. We wanted to share with you a video and the video talks about a couple of those facets that I'd like to touch on here. One facet is the work of individual personal learning and that work needs to be done at, first of all, an awareness level. Just understanding the concepts of unconscious, implicit bias, white supremacy of the real cause of racism, the economic foundation for the reason for racism, understanding that just being aware of all those concepts, that's one level. And then there's the understanding are acquiring a competency level, individual attainment, which is having the skills to engage in the changing of hearts and minds of our fellow citizens and the people in power. This individual personal work must be done and may not well be done by the state as an entity, but by better done by individuals and communities and a stage role can be to support that work being done by individuals in those communities. So this is one facet we deal with and we talk about that this facet alone is not sufficient to get us where we want to and need to be. Another facet of this work is the altering of interlocking systems in areas that make up our lives. The areas that Professor Patricia Rose from Brown University has identified so well and speaks to in the video we wanted to show you, the areas of wealth, housing, education, media and criminal justice. I'll say those again because I think they're so important to keep in mind as we look to affect change. Wealth, housing, education, media and criminal justice. Those are all systems. There are systems of wealth creation, wealth disillusionment, wealth dispersion. There are systems of housing, development of housing, purchasing of housing, maintenance of housing. There are systems of education, there are systems of how the media operates to shape our lives and what we believe as well as to educate and inform us. There's the systems of criminal justice. Racism has an impact on each of those systems and our challenge is to address that impact in each of those systems. And as you're probably all aware, impacting any one of those systems by itself is a huge and daunting task, challenge. And since those systems are made of people, this authoring has to be done by individuals. That's the importance of the first batch that we talked about, the individual personal work that has to be done. You all are individuals. You all need to do your individual learning and awareness and competency level training in order to understand how to truly impact the systems that you interact with and have influence over. But I wanna talk about another facet, another dynamic as well. To truly address systemic racism, which involves all of those areas about the change that we really want, racial reconciliation. We need to address the fact that the facets in the areas are interrelated. That's what makes this even more complex. Housing impacts wealth and in some cases helps define wealth. The stock in your house, how much you paid for it with the Buddhist value, impacts your wealth, your education impacts how much money you have to buy a house. The media on all the images that we see through the media shape how we perceive the world, how we perceive individuals and how individuals are educated, what monies are shifted toward education for various communities and various people that lead to affordable ability to afford housing and to generate wealth. So these areas, these facets are all interrelated. To address that interrelated nature of the challenge, we need to address what? And the cultural norms that have been established that keep the status quo behaviors in place. That's the question, what is culture? Think about that. What is culture? What is this culture that keeps us behaving the way we behave? And for Paul, it's Christina DiRossi from Bartlett and Southgate College in London defines culture as encompassing religion, food, what we wear, how we wear it, our language, our marriage cultures, our music, what we believe is right or wrong, how we sit at a table, how we greet visitors, how we behave with loved ones, and a million other things. So culture is what's keeping our status quo as it is. How do we go about changing culture? What part of culture do we want to change? I wanna stop here because I've just thrown a lot at you and I wanna ask if there are questions so far about what I've said and I'm making this cause because this is the next part of my testimony and I'm gonna share with you a bit about what we're doing in New Hampshire, how we're trying to do this in New Hampshire. But I wanna make sure I stop and ask if there are any questions about what I've said so far. Well, this is Dick Sears. You did a good job of trying to combine wealth, housing, education, media, and criminal justice, but here in Vermont seems to me that we focus a lot on the criminal justice portion of this because it's quite frankly easier because you can, education is throughout the state. It's got 251 different school districts, correct me if I'm wrong. Fewer than that now. Fewer than that now. But just like New Hampshire, we have this local control of schools. So it's harder with education. Housing is a problem for everybody and it's huge. So I think we tended to focus on the criminal justice portion of it rather than bringing it all together. So I'm quite frankly looking forward to hear how you're gonna bring it together in New Hampshire and maybe we can talk to you. But I think you've identified what for me is a huge problem. Being chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee in the state Senate here, our focus is naturally on the judicial process, why we got such racial disparities within our incarcerated populations and other questions like that. And so we spend a lot of time on traffic stops and all of that. I don't think we spend a lot of time on housing education. But I would add one, and I haven't heard is obviously, and I suspect it'll be similar in New Hampshire, the issue of climate change is gonna be a huge issue that legislature is gonna be dealing with. And I haven't heard much discussion of how that impacts the issues of systematic racism or so I would love to hear that included. I was thinking on the way up, I have to drive 240 miles round trip to get here. That's an expense to me, but it's also involves emissions and so forth. Those of us that live in a rural state, most of my constituents need to drive a car. They're not able to use public transportation. It's not really available yet. And many of them are persons of color as well. How is the climate change efforts gonna affect those? Are we gonna take that into consideration? So those are my comments or questions. Great, thank you, thank you for that. And I will touch on climate change a little bit as I go forward. Love to hear other questions, thoughts, reactions. I wanna mention that I was in Savannah, Georgia and that's part of where the climate change came up because many of the persons of color, of course, in that area in South Carolina and Georgia live in the so-called lowland areas of the state. Yeah, in a low country, which is where I came from in Charleston, so I'm quite familiar with that. Yeah, you would be, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Questions, thoughts? Any others? Do back. No, we'll go ahead with the solutions. Yeah. No. Sure, solutions. Here we go. Here we go. So in New Hampshire, we're taking an approach that is both in the private sector and the public sector. And also trying to marry them as best we can. From a public sector perspective, I think I mentioned the economic vitality of Hampshire initiative being driven by the State Department of Business and Economic Affairs. And I'm gonna hold that until kind of toward the end of my remarks. Governor Sununu, in an executive order on December 14th of 2017, brought into the life and advisory council on diversity and inclusion. And the charter for that was led by Rogers Johnson, who was actually president of, well, he's the state head of the NAACP in New Hampshire. And he's also president of the Seacoast chapter and also a former state representative. So he has a big experience in government, from the government perspective, which is why our governor chose him as the chair. But the charter for that group was to review, analyze the Hampshire laws, regulations, and agency policies of the teachers to make some recommendations around amendments, around diversity and inclusion, to look at ways in which the state could support local and community efforts through educational programs or otherwise, to identify and recommend ways that the state could partner with non-governmental organizations and to identify recommendations and revisions to a specific RSA for New Hampshire, which brought forth and defined the duties of the Commission for Human Rights. So that was the charter that was created and the council consists of representatives from state government, from various commissions of state government, from the UNH, the University System in New Hampshire, from representatives of the Police Chiefs Association to handle criminal justice from the Municipal Association, which is an association of municipalities in the state, to public members and leadership experience with cultural competency, and a couple of other folks who are appointed in serving at the pleasure of the governor. So from a state government perspective, the governor wanted to do an investigation to really understand the state of our state with respect to diversity and inclusion that brought our topic and diversity and inclusion here. I guess I wanna step back and say the term diversity tends to be used and defined differently by different people. In some cases, when people use the term diversity, they mean black and white, my sense is our advisory council used that definition. When I use the term diversity, however, I use a broader definition. I use the definition put forth by Marilyn Larber from Johns Hopkins Institute, which is described as the diversity wheel, which includes race, age, ability, a much broader definition of diversity and inclusion. I think Vermont is going to benefit by doing is defining your terms, language matters, and recognize that not everyone has the same understanding of certain words that everyone else has. And I think that was one of the things that actually came out of the advisory council has put forth a preliminary report, which we can certainly point you all to. It's actually on the diversity and inclusion council's webpage that made recommendations mostly around state government. They've not really made recommendations on how to help communities yet. We're waiting for that final report which respect in any day now, actually. But it was the state's attempt to, through listening sessions, there were seven listening sessions held around the state to hear what people said about diversity and inclusion, what they felt their needs were, and to take that information and generate some recommendations as to how the state could improve from the state government's perspective, and really focusing on the state government. James, I just want to, we're running down on time and I want to give you five, 10 minutes to kind of wrap up if you can. Great, sure. Thank you. So that has been good because that was what I wanted to say about the governor's advisory council and the public sector work. Let me just say a few words about the private sector work that's going on through the RACE and Equity series that was initiated by the New Hampshire Health Partnership. The partnership recognized that there are many organizations across the state working in this space. Yet they're working in silos. So in October of 2017, they convened a symposium inviting anyone in the state who is interested in this topic to come and be part of a larger effort to create a set of action plans in five key areas. Civic engagement, economic development, education, government, and healthcare. So you'll hear that some of those mapped to the five areas we talked about being the areas of concern from Dr. Trisha Rose and some of them are a little bit different. There are work groups working on those various areas even today and I could facilitate the economic development work group. They're trying to look at and map who in the state is working on these issues, where are the gaps? And then putting plans into place to address those gaps where they are needed. And after that, I think is a role of not necessarily government, but government can help to launch that kind of an effort in conjunction with the NGOs that are involved in the state. And certainly the NAACP chapters can play a role in that but there's so many more organizations involved. We in the civic engagement group found at least 50 organizations across the state that the eight members of the work group knew themselves were doing this work. So we know there are a lot more because eight people don't know everything that's going on in the state but it was a start. So that's the kind of set of initiatives that we're launching into New Hampshire to try to get our arms around this huge issue and make some sense of it and build some action plans to address it. And I'm going to stop there. And he's just tied. If there are any last questions I can answer before I turn the mic over to whoever's next. I don't know if it's 60 years from ever. Pretty much finishes it, but thank you very much. Thank you so much, James. Thank you, James. Is there a way of sending us a link to the video? Yes, it's also on our own. You haven't had a chance to check your email. It's in there as well. Oh, it's in there. If it's not, I will make sure that it's in there. See, we're being polite. We're not checking our email. I will look into that. That's great. You guys are amazing. I really appreciate it. Mr. Chairman, I wanted to thank you. Thank you, James, by the way. Have a good one. I am. Thank you for the opportunity. Thank you. James, I'll call you from the road. Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you for your time. Committee, I want to thank you for your time. You've gone again above and beyond by affording us so much latitude so thank you all so much, Peggy, everybody. Thank you so much for being accommodating and listening to what it is that we had to offer what we had to provide. I would most definitely love the opportunity to interact with you regarding the latest report. It's only been out for six days. The racial disparities in criminal justice has begun to work. Back in January, we should be hearing from you. Absolutely. So I'd be glad to come back and give you some on that. There was just one thing that I did notice about the report. Just one observation is that I do think that that term bias has really gotten a little loosey-goosey on us. And it's going in a lot of different directions. It's creating a lot of unclarity and potentially even some, it could even be weaponized in some way. So I just want to be very careful about language. I'm looking at that report. I've only had the opportunity to see it just before I came down. But I did want to just caution that that report, I haven't had a chance to look at it, but I'd love a chance to respond to it. Thank you again for your time, Drew. Have a great afternoon. You too. I'm concerned about our behavioral health contracts. You help us understand where we're at. I certainly can, if that's the question being directed to me on the phone. Yeah. Okay. Can I ask my colleagues, Matt and Judy, have you provided any information about the contract? They just sat down. Okay. They just sat down. Just walk in the room, Annie. Sorry. We can do this all together, if you'd like. We start with you two and then go in with Annie or do you have to go down? She dialed Annie, I thought. But we can have all three of you at the same time. It's fine. Sure. I begin by introducing myself. I'm Judy Hentken. I'm the deputy commissioner. Matt Dugasino is our financial director over at DOC. And our request was for the contracts for this. There is a very large centurion contract, over 200 pages. There's, the Phoenix House contract is another one. We did not bring copies of those just to the bulk and the relevant sections, but we were also, we wanted to narrow down. I understand that you're concerned about the behavioral health services that are provided under the contract. And I think the specific questions about those. Well, the specific questions are the quality of the services that are provided by centurion. And secondly, the availability. Now, again, I'll start. You didn't hear me, my opening statement was maybe I'm being conned by a con in St. Albans. But basically I was told that they are part of the, he's part of the MAT program there. And there is no counseling available. And so you were on the right track with speaking to Annie. We did have a discussion earlier and she visits the facilities is the most aware of all the programs and the availability. There is what I understand, there is availability to those who want to get counseling. But I think Annie can tell you about at each facility what is available to her knowledge and how we are getting information from people. It's not a subject of grievances for us that there's unavailable counseling. We don't see that as something that we're seeing a demand that we're not meeting. But Annie could at least explain what services are available and if there is a person out there who has made a request, I'm not aware of that through any type of grievance or any type of weight or denial. So, and we can look into that. But Annie will at least inform you as to what's available. Sure. So piggybacking on Judy's statements, I can only echo much of the same. I review all the grievances that come into the department that are primarily penned by the person I supervise, Colleen Nielsen, the mental health chief. But I review and weigh in on all of them. All the responses, generally the language comes directly from the providers themselves but we also provide oversight pouring through the electronic health record and reading what we can see there as well. If there are any discrepancies we ask them to correct that. But there really are no grievances about this particular matter. What there has been some concern about is the timing of dose adjustments, people wanting to be on more medication or different medication and meeting with providers, medical providers on a more frequent basis. I'm specifically talking about counseling. Yeah. NA or availability of NA, availability of individual counseling, substance abuse counseling. Yeah. So it's also part of the oversight. I get a schedule and check in with the providers on a weekly basis and have a monthly oversight meeting as well. And so I know on a daily basis how all these behavioral health services are staffed and that information is also communicated to all of the superintendents and their chain of command. Specifically at Northwest, there are AA meetings, there is individual counseling, there is MAT counseling, there are recovery coaches. And I'm actually at Northern doing the third annual recovery coach training. So they're increasing the amount of recovery coaches at the facility. We were told there was no NA. There, I'm not sure about that. I know that there's definitely AA and MAT. But I'm talking about the counseling that goes along with MAT, not the MAT. No, I understand. No, there's that. But I'm wondering if there's actual counseling. Yes, there is. And I can also report that Centurion just completed the second annual training and evidence-based practice that was developed by researchers here in Vermont. That was an offshoot of the SBIRT program, the Screening Brief Intervention Referral to Treatment. And we're looking to increase the capacity and cross-train the mental health providers as well in substance use. So the mental health providers and the substance use MAT teams can be working in a more integrated fashion and provide more consistent group services. But all of these are happening right now. So I know you began to comment, Senator Sears, by saying maybe you were conned by a con who's receiving MAT. I don't know his particular situation, but I can tell you that services are available if he wanted them. Hi, Annie, this is Mary Hooper. Can you say what percentage of folks who are receiving MAT are also participating in a weekly counseling session? So I remember you asked me that question several months ago when I appeared in front of the committee and I did my best to mine the data. I do not have that data in front of me and quite honestly it was quite difficult to glean. The electronic health record is not set up to create a report like that at this time. So I had to do a basic count of how many sessions were being conducted, but I was not able to cross-reference that part of the record with whether or not they were receiving MAT. And I couldn't tell you how many unique sessions they had or whether it was the same group of people coming for that volume of sessions. Does the contract call for the provision of a certain number of sessions? I mean, there must be some way of managing that through the contract or knowing that. Well, we amended Act 176 last year in regard to the counseling behavioral section to make sure that it was an alignment with the Department of Health rule on opioid, office-based opioid treatment programs, OBOTS, which we are considered to be. We are a spoke. And counseling certainly is a component of recovery, but it is on a voluntary basis, as you know, and only becomes a mandatory component of their treatment when the medical provider determines that it's medically necessary. We certainly do have those instances where that decision is made and those people are then referred to a group or to individual counseling. So that is absolutely happening right now in the system. So, Annie, what you just described, does that also happen out in the real world? Yes, the model that we are replicating. Oh, our world. The model that we're replicating, I mean, I can't see your face, but the model that we're replicating is the Health Department rule for this level of opioid use disorder treatment. So someone who's out in the community, this non-offender, could be one of us, that's participating in an MAT program at their local spoke, they would enter into some form of counseling if their provider determined it was medically necessary. Correct. And not all folks who are under MAT in the community are required to be in counseling if they're on MAT, is that correct? That is correct. It's a medical determination and so people who are receiving buprenorphine obviously do not need necessarily to be treated in a hub, which is for more complex patients, they can be treated in a spoke, like the Department of Corrections and counseling is only part of their treatment plan if the provider determines that it's necessary. So I guess the question, the next question to this, within an incarcerated setting, the provider, the medical provider is Centurion. Correct. And there is a contract there that we have entered into and the leap could be that some of the counseling is not being provided because the contract and the costs of the contract would be too much. So it's economically driven and therefore the medical provider, the Centurion might not provide it. Can that leap be made? Because when we put in MAT, it was a real cost increase to that contract that we had not anticipated. I think that's about 50% so. Wait, can I just jump in, Judy? So as part of our whole behavioral health conversation with this committee and then also with the House and Senate, and part of our compliance with the health department's rule, we also adopted their metrics of staffing, which they recommend. So currently part of that renegotiated contract amendments support the MAT program through its implementation. We adopted the same metric of providers that exists in the community, which has been found to provide the capacity for the medical necessity that comes with this treatment protocol. So that's a bunch of fancy language to say that we have already absorbed that cost in the existing contract amendment and have been operating at that level of service for quite a while now. We have dedicated sections or subsets of FTEs in nursing that are dedicated to the MAT program to dose people at the MAT med lines and to provide the oversight necessary at that nursing level. We also have clinical case managers that are MAT specific only. Again, a certain number of FTEs per ratio of number of inmates in each facility. We have a MAT care coordinator who's entirely dedicated to oversight of the care coordination at release. And then we also have a MAT program director and a MAT LADC specialist who also aids and supports and supervises the MAT clinical case managers. They are interviewing patients whenever they put in a six lip meeting with them face to face, triaging dose requests, offering behavioral counseling on a daily basis as these six lips come up. I think it's a testament to their ability to meet that demand that we are not getting grievances about this because they are meeting with the patient's face to face. Hi, Andy. What's, so backing up a little bit. If I'm in the community and I'm receiving treatment, I spoke and I say to my physician or provider, I'd really like some counseling. Would I be able to get that counseling even though it may not be medically necessary or whatever the current rule is? Absolutely. Okay. Would the same thing happen within the facility? Yeah. So if I'm in the facility, which I think I should be sometime, will I get, and then I ask for counseling, I will receive counseling. Yeah. Even though it's not medically necessary or part of the treatment measurement as prescribed by the department. Correct. Okay, that's not what we heard. Right, that's not what we heard. So the question then is, are people requesting this and it's not being provided or are they not requesting it and not knowing that they could request it? We, I heard that they were requesting it and it was not available. Or perhaps also they were told it was not available don't the last step request. Yeah. Welcome to the world of corrections. Yeah, I just, you know, I'm at a loss because as I said, honestly, we could give you all the grievance data. There are no grievances on this. And I mean, I'm here with the open years coaches right now. This has been part of the discussion. There hasn't been any report to me about this from them. I would hope that they would trust me to tell me. And then I meet every two weeks, we have a very extensive Matt work group meeting where we meet with all of the players and no one is talking about being overwhelmed or not being able to provide a level of service. So where are you now, Annie? I'm at Northern Newport. Newport. You're not at St. Albans. No, I'm not at St. Albans. One of those, one of the people we met with was an open years coach. Really? Yes. But wasn't the coach that mentioned it? I don't remember. I think it was the other person. But he was in the same discussion. Yeah. He seemed to agree. Uh-huh. He said, as a matter of fact, he said, yeah, there's AA but no NA. Right. No NA, but NA may be different than counseling when you're in an MA teacher. Is that correct or not? So what I can tell you because I, so all the other recovery centers like almost every month as well is that the NA meetings for whatever reason and Northwest is not alone in this are somewhat more difficult. Newport has suffered from the same thing. I've been trying to get an NA meeting going at the facility here for, you know, two years. There isn't anybody who's willing to step forward in the community to come to the facility to do it. And there's not one in the community either. Well, if we can shift gears for a moment to sex offender treatment. We can. What do we have with that? That is not my area. Oh, that's right. Well, what's the contract for sex offender treatment? I would defer to Matt. Yeah, Max Titus is our kind of person on the contract. I wasn't aware that was a subject of discussion today. What behavioral health? Yeah. And I know I remember when you're talking about the old I don't want to be, I don't want to be difficult here, but I just have had too many concerns expressed by various people regarding the behavioral health contracts that the department has. And it just, so, except we don't have answers to the sex offender treatment, I would like them at some point because I, you know, you can send them to me personally, but concerns me that we, at one time, Vermont had one of the most renowned sex offender treatment programs in the country and now we're having a hard time getting sex vendors out of our programs, out of our institutions. And I suspect that part of that is the housing situation. I can hear the complaints there. I know there's a battle going on with St. Johnsbury about transition residences there and whether or not, you know, the problem that the department has is getting sex vendors out into the community who are past their minimum and have been treated. The communities don't want them. There needs to be a conversation about that contract and what we're doing. Whether or not that's part of the problem or whether the problem is the communities or what's going on. I didn't know that you weren't prepared to talk about that. Well, the transitional housing piece is a whole separate piece. I understand that, but I'm saying that the sex offender treatment, let me back up, maybe I wasn't very diplomatic. I'd be more diplomatic. What has happened, if what has happened with sex offender treatment appears that there are a number of sex offenders who are past their minimum that do not have an appropriate place to live. And part of the reason they don't have an appropriate place to live is because they can't find a community placement that will accept them. And is that reflective of the treatment program? Is that reflective of the community's adverse? Or is it reflective of the departments trying to find placements for them? And it's not easy. I don't know what's going on, but we've been asked to look at various groups of individuals for release into the community and how do we ensure that these folks get out and we've been having discussions about perhaps presumptive parole or something of that nature. And if we go in that direction, that means that we would presume that if you're past your minimum, you're gonna be released unless the department has a reason not to. Yet, we seem to have great difficulty getting sex offenders back into the community. And I think there's a real reluctance of landlords to take, if there's a housing requirement, it's a very difficult thing to get landlords that are willing to take people that have sex offenses. I don't think it's necessarily the lack of, or inevitability of treatment. I do think that there's difficulty getting people into the community in a community that doesn't want them. And if there's restrictions of where they could live, whether it's near children or some other type of imposed restriction, those also limit the options for people. And I would just chime in that the sex offender treatment center here is bundled under program services, and it's not part of the Centurion Behavioral Health Contract. Okay, whose contract is that? So that is managed under Kim Bushey. She would be the person to come in. Yeah, and she would be the person to speak to that. I think we got too much bureaucracy. That's in her charge in regard to, you know, the TIPSA and the VAZOR, the sex offender treatment assessments, et cetera, it's handled under a criminogenic risk in need. So Annie, the folks doing that work, are they state employees or is that contracted out? Matt? Thank you. So the TIPSA folks are part of our department, but the services are through contracted vendors. There's a number of contracts, and I apologize, Senator Sears and all that. We don't have the list of those. Not including a program service component of. Judiciary Committee meeting January 8th, I would like a complete list of all contracts, with all providers and all, whatever you call, whatever you want to call, like a complete inventory of all the contracts, how much they're providing, what they're not providing. And I'd like to also have a complete inventory of the number of offenders who are incarcerated on January 1, 2020, who are past their minimum, and the reason they're not being released past their minimum. So that'd be January, I think January 7th. It's the first day, yeah. So January 8th, please. And Peggy, if you would set that agenda for contracts, so you don't have to worry about what to do the first day. She was worried. She was worried. So I would really like to get a full understanding, and if you could share that information to Stephanie Barrett from Joint Piscal. I just don't have, if you want to join us in that meeting, you're welcome to, Stephanie. I brought this. I brought this. Depends what we're doing on the four, maybe paid family leave or minimum wage. On the eighth? On the calendar for the seven. It's on the calendar for the seven. Oh, good. I still have to. Glad I'm not at the house. At least for the big contracts, also when they expire, kind of those are my things. Also. Was that Centurion? Yeah, in particular. Well, I will say, at the St. Albans meeting, I was impressed with the doctor who we met with informally. I believe works for Centurion. He's their map person. Yeah, I was impressed with him. He was very helpful to us. And so it's not all bad, but I'm just concerned about behavioral health and what we're getting for the money with pet spending. I'm also concerned about the so-called anger management and other programs that are being offered. And can I just say that it isn't just like the map program and stuff, I had a constituent who called and was concerned because of an inmate who was suicidal and hadn't had, didn't feel that they were getting enough help there. So I'm hoping that that's taken into consideration. Yeah, the behavioral health. Absolutely. When is the Centurion contract out? It runs to June 30th, 2020. So you're in the process of selecting a vendor? Or another vendor or that vendor or whatever you want. New contract. We will have a new contract. With somebody. With someone. So are you already into the year extension of the existing contract? I'm kind of remembering that you had it for maybe a couple of years and the opportunity to extend. Yes, so we're in the final amendment and that's, yes, I think it's June 30th, 2020. If you remember, we had our joint fiscal office do a study about our medical and mental health and we wanted that information to come back to us to help us discuss how we move forward with the new contract to providing health and mental health services. Which we got last year. Right, because we knew this contract was expiring and coming up for, it was gonna expire. And the main thing it said was centralize your services. Yeah. Any while we got you on the phone, could you explain a little bit about, is the recovery coaching and the, what's it called, open ears or program? Those are inmate, inmate to inmate, correct? Correct. And the recovery coaching is done by inmates to other inmates? Correct. And you're kind of, how do, how do, is that a DOC program or is that? It's a DOC program. I developed it and overseen it. Okay. So you're using us a fairly unique system that sounds like it's really, I'm familiar with recovery coaching in our local turning point center, but I wasn't familiar with the open ears. I don't know if that's in any other correctional facilities or not, but sounds like a really good program and what the inmates were relating to us was fairly positive about it. Thank you. Yes, it is, it is unique. And then we are in the process of expanding it. Probably to date, there's been over 16,000 individual coaching sessions and that does not include the extensive tours and segregation and other restrictive housing that they do, the infirmary and all the informal meetings that they have with people, those are only scheduled. But in addition, after this training is complete, we'll have enough coaches to expand. We've been piloting a reentry recovery coaching group here at Northern that's been very successful. It's facilitated through a coordination with the recovery center here in Newport and a recovery coach who works there, who has been a formerly incarcerated person and he along with an internal inmate recovery coach facilitate this reentry group to help address the emotional behavioral aspects of impending relief and to also help support people obtaining resources and talking through what resources might be helpful to them upon release. So it's really meant to also augment and relieve some of the intense demands that are on our case workers inside of the department, inside of the facilities. But the next thing that I'm working on with the health department is to expand it further and we're trying to set up a protocol whereby every inmate at release through a conversation with their case worker can voluntarily elect to have a recovery coach on the outside prior to release so that there's a much stronger handoff and connections when they reenter. And I'm waiting for the protocol to draft to come to me hopefully in the next week or two. But the health department is involved in that as is all the recovery centers. We hope to streamline a universal system and train case workers on how to make this offer to releasing inmates and then put it into motion. How is that different Annie than the pilot project or is it just the extension of the pilot project? The reentry group will just be expanded as Northern had more coaches and had more workforce capacity simply to do it without straining the coaches since they deliver so many individual sessions. So we needed to go through the training that I'm doing right now so that we increase the number of coaches in all the other facilities. And then once that's there, the more mature coaches who have been doing this for a while will be the ones to do the group facilitation and the younger coaches that are just being trained will kind of be brought up and through the ranks. We have like a multi-generational system now of three generations of coaches. But I'm thinking of the piece of reentry and then connecting with the outside recovery coaches. Yeah. Yeah, so that will happen at the reentry group and then the separate individual connection will also be made through the development of this protocol that I just talked about from the health department meeting I had. We're working with Fawn Montague who is the recovery network director. She's in turn coordinating with all the recovery centers. Representative Emmons, you know that I go to all those centers and see me in action at the centers. They know me very well. They're all primed and know about this effort and want to participate. But we're just looking to try to work with our sister agency ADAPS to make sure that this is centralized and that everybody has awareness of all the levels of service that are being provided. Are the recovery coaches all volunteers? Yes. Well, they're volunteers, but there's money that comes from the current recovery, from the turning points. It's part of their budgets. Oh, so are you asking about the... They don't get, they're not compensated. They're not paid by DOC. Are you talking about the inmate coaches? Particularly, I know that the recovery center coaches are volunteers, at least in Ruffin. And I'm just wondering about the inmate coaches. I think they get paid. They get paid, they get a little from the turning point. It's not great. It's not great, but that's part of the turning point. Do the inmates get paid? The inmates get paid. I think you'll find it in Ruffin. They get some compensation. I don't think it's getting rid of it. No, I'm not sure it is, but... And it may be one particular coach. Either of you have information on any of the contracts you'd like to share with us as you came here to talk about? The recovery coaches. I think we'd probably give a more complete picture. If you gave us the opportunity to go back and go through and make that listing for you. We had focused on the centering contract, which as I said, we didn't think we wanted to sit through today. There's a lot interwoven. There's not a specific behavioral health alone section. So, we did not bring that. It's really hard to figure out what we contracted out, what we do in-house. Are there any other questions or anything? Sorry to bring you all over here for very few questions, and I know that we just heard about your new assignment, so good luck. That was earlier at 11 this morning, so I was surprised to see it here, actually. My closing up of business on a lot of things today. No, I'm going to retain a few things that I'm working on there. Okay, good. It's a temporary assignment, so go right to Secretary's office. Let me know if you want to join us on the 8th. We'll do it in the morning. Okay. At 8.30. You may not be on the floor until 10.30 or something. All right, good week. All right, okay. Welcome to join us. Sir, can I just ask maybe that before the 8th, if you can maybe on just on maybe the week before, get that information to Peggy so that we can make sure that we're staffing them properly with whoever covers that particular, because I'm guessing this is probably a pretty wide swath of different contracts, and I want to make sure that this... Yeah, we'll get all that together, and also anyone who would provide the... The next meeting, do we concentrate on transitional housing instead of the other contracts that we talked about? Do you want me to... I'd like to focus, if you're all prepared on the transitional housing to talk about that next week, that seems to be, there's also, and part of that reason for bringing that up here is because it really is a justice oversight issue is just what do you do with the St. Albans work camp? And I don't... It's on Johnsburg. It's on Johnsburg, right? Excuse me. Thank you. The issue, I think we all received emails from Senator Benning and somebody else who were... Can... You. No. Well, anyway, there was a meeting that took place in St. Johnsbury with the St. Johnsbury Select Board and Commissioner Tushett, I believe, about the work camp and what to do with the 50 odd beds that aren't being used, and it was tremendous pushback from St. Johnsbury, but they like to use it for people that we don't have incarcerated. I'm just paraphrasing, okay? So, you know, we've got a problem. We've got a facility with 50 beds and the town is saying, you can't use it for what you really need to use it for. I don't want to use it for a group that's no longer incarcerated. So, I don't know how we're going to deal with this, but it would be helpful for us next week to hear a little bit about transitional housing and what the plans are, whether they're expanded or... I know in Bennington, they're willing to look at women as the depot program. They've already got 14 beds for that. I don't know how many are being used, but a better discussion of transitional housing would be helpful for all of us. When those beds up at the work camp, what was the work camp? That is to house folks who are transitioning to the community. The contract right now with St. Johnsbury is there are no sex offenders there to be housed there unless they come from the area, right? So that's tying, what we're hearing, that's tying DOC's hands in terms of putting folks, part of those B1s, that might be able to stay at the St. Johnsbury facility, but there are sex offender from another part of the state. And St. Johnsbury is saying no to that. The St. Johnsbury is also getting money from the state for what is called a readiness to serve. And that was negotiated when those B1s went in there. Based on 100 beds. Based on 100 beds? Was it 100 or the other 50? I don't know. Anyway, we increased their make-to-be-ready money from that population in there. And I was part of the discussion in St. Jay. Matt was at Fyre, Juncture, part of the discussion with St. Jay officials, and there is not any welcome Matt out for anyone who did not qualify when they negotiated that contract. And so they are people we don't have. So I wasn't being facetious when I said that. They want people we don't have. So hopefully we are not paying them. We are. We serve based on the 100 beds. So even though those beds aren't using them, I would hope we're not paying for them. We are, especially if we can't use them. So I look forward to the budget that does not have a payment for that. I don't want to have that. That's an appropriation issue, but I would like to focus on what we're going to do with the people that are incarcerated who are past their minimum who don't have appropriate housing and it appears that St. John's Bird is not the answer. Tell me what's the answer. What's the answer? What is alternative B? You know, there will be a push, I suspect, from the representatives and senators from that area. And I might mention that two chairs of the Appropriations Committees are from that area. So there will be a push to try to use it, but if they don't... And the chair of the Institutions Committee in the Senate is from that area too. Yeah, so I would prefer to have this committee have a grounding in it so that we can respond to that when the time comes. So that's for next week, if you want. Next week to talk about transitional housing, clearly... It's always good to let noon right now. Yeah, I just want to make clear what we're talking about, that there have been some lack of clarity from me because I was out at sea on these issues. But I want to make sure that we're talking about what are we going to do in the light of the fact that the 50 beds that would be appropriate, perhaps, are not going to be available at St. Jay. Rather than trying to fit what we don't need. You could ask the question, why are we buying what we don't need? We're going to do that all the time. You buy what you don't need, or you ask the question? I ask the question, happy to have my committee. And they get kicked. You sit anywhere near kicked? Yes, I do. I'm just close. We all are closer. And butch kicks me. All right, thank you both very much. I appreciate it. Hopefully we're clear on next week on the idea of transitional housing. Thank you, Whitney. You're welcome. So besides that, and what else you want to talk about next week? We have actually we have time scheduled about an hour and a half for the justice. Here's the agenda that we have. Justice, yeah, because we're meeting on. We're meeting on what we talk about, what we did, we did at least 10 meetings. You know, if there's any legislation needed in the various communities of jurisdiction, without letting them refer. We're not coming in at 1030. Coming at 1030. You are? Yeah. Oh, you and I meet. We're meeting at 9 to 1030. 9 to 1030. We're not coming in at 1030. We're not coming in at 1030. Next week. If we don't have a snowstorm that day, which I hope we don't. We don't. And did you check it? I think we're going to have to delete the presumptive parole court. I think we're going to have to put in the have to have time for the woodside, the closing of woodside and hearing from state employees. You want to hear what that's? I also want to add a judge to that group that we hear from on closing the woodside. Can I judge Gerson? Yeah, and I'd like to hear more from the state's attorneys as well. I think that was rather brief today, and I think they had some significant concerns. Judge Gerson, can you pepper to anybody else? So this one, getting rid of that. Yeah, getting rid of that and just put Steve Howard. Steve Howard, and then continue with that at 1130, and then this new rule. So I'm not dead. I guess you know what I mean. I'm going to tell me who else to add. Yeah. Do you want more time on this now that we? No, I think that half an hour should be enough. Don't you think? I guess we may have a snowstorm next week. No, we're not. It says one to three inches during the day, one to three inches. And we have this right now. We do have half an hour stay. Conters, you want to take that off, right? Yeah. And then where do you want to add time? All right, well, let's do lunch at noon. We'll put them at 12.45. Or two. Well, you can get here at 1030 and have lunch at early. No, I guess you're right. I'm going to try and you don't want the lunch there. Have lunch at 1.30. Well, appropriations. When does it approach me? 1 o'clock. OK, so that gives you. We could do a canyon. 1 o'clock, 1.30, 1.30, then. Talk about 3, 2, 15. I could come down for that. OK. All right, so that sounds good. I don't know what we're doing here. What are we doing at noon? We're doing here? Yeah, for. So I don't know lunch at 12. Mike, can be traditional. Oh, transitional. I know. OK. It's one. I was hoping to sneak out for part seven. Yeah. I may not. Well, sneak out as much as you can. Get a note. Just tell her. Get a note. Get a note. Just tell her. No, it's more fear of what will happen. OK, no. I'm leaving. I'll be fine. Just the administration president buzzer, right? So that will be your last meeting. Our last meeting. And there won't be any of the meeting prior to the session about anything that should be done. Unless you desire an emergency meeting, something serious comes up. Which is a suggestion that we just kind of review what needs to be done. Did that make it on you? No, it didn't. Yeah. That's a good. Yeah. Michelle, would you be able to review whatever needs to be done that we didn't do? Whether we did do. Right now? No. Next meeting. So I was just reminding Peggy, so I'm only here to move on the 17th. Right. Good morning. So, you mean go over. Is there anything we've missed? That's the question. I mean, just remember when we were meeting over the tax department, I kind of went through your charges. There were some things that you didn't really get. Yeah. And, but it kind of seemed like, you know, you decided what your priorities were. Yeah. And I raised those. I can go over those again for you, but I. So my question was not what we're really supposed to be doing, but what have we done that needs more action in the legislature during the session? During the session. This is a good idea. Maybe we should talk about it in the community's interest and the whole justice reinvestment needs to be legislated. Right. Should we just do that all at the same time or like kind of your representatives? Yeah. Because that all needs to be in legislation in order to get federal funds to help us. But that, right? Yeah. The recommendation that they made is to be in the legislation. So whatever they come up with on the 22nd is their final meeting. But unfortunately, we have to have our bills. And so that's why I'm hoping that one day we can invest right there. It's going on there. Now on Tuesday they're going to present this committee. I'm sorry. I just get frustrated with the department sometimes. It's the department. Oh, wait a minute. Yeah. Too right. Yeah. You can see all of that. You know, I probably would like to say. There are problems with the behavior of the public. There are really problems. Yes, ma'am. They have, they are no longer forward-thinking, solved, but they have so much to turn in the system. As far as they've lost that, they've lost that view. We should have been more of a caretaker. And I'm hoping that, like to show that you're taking a seat in the board at any time. Yeah. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. St. John'sbury is the only case where there's people who operate programs that are operating programs for people that we no longer need the program. I think there's some I know in the juvenile side there's some federal law coming that's going to require medical personnel on board and these programs like you just said that are you know a block up the hill is the hospital but they're going to have to have medical personnel on board because of the federal the first families first I don't know they're it's very so I don't have federal requirements there but it would be helpful to have an inventory of all the transitional residences and what the rules are for admission to those programs and maybe there are more programs that you know they're trying at more than just St. Jay I mean St. Jay is such an obvious example of trying to get people that don't we no longer have we were thinking of the Windsor for the re-entry program and the Windsor down at Windsor do what they do with it. There are a lot of factors involved in the discussion of what site being used as part of the re-entry. Which site could be could be a lot of things we're still being filmed yeah we're more informal discussion right?