 Welcome. I'm James Mulan. This is an episode of Justice in the Balance, our series that looks at criminal justice from all different kinds of perspectives. A regular guest of ours on this series in over the years is Sheriff Peter Kutujan from Nittlesex County, of course. And we are very pleased to be able to welcome the sheriff virtually to join us today. Thank you so much for joining us, Sheriff. Always great to see you, James, and always great to join you as well. You are always, always a busy man, and so we never don't appreciate the time that you take with us, but I suspect that that's even more the case right now. We want to cover quite a bit of ground. There's lots to talk about today. But of course, because we're talking right at the beginning of June, it is impossible not to start off by asking you about the George Floyd situation. And by that, I mean, of course, as much the reaction and what seems to me and to many of us to be a kind of fury that is underlying a lot of the public reaction across the country and, in fact, globally at this point. So just to begin with, just what is your take on, again, the precipitating factor? We can talk about what some of what has transpired with the demonstrations turned other things. But just the underlying issue here. Sure. Well, I mean, the Floyd family may not be watching Arlington Cable, but I think it's important to express my condolences to the family. We get caught up in a political and social phenomenon, so to speak, a tragedy that we forget that they're really family members. And that couldn't have been more evident than Terrence Floyd visiting the site where his brother died and actually spoke with great passion and love and respect for the crowd and encouraged them to address the matter peacefully and to protest peacefully. My heart goes out to that family. I cannot imagine what it feels like to them. But I can tell you this, that when I saw that video the very first time and every time thereafter, it is a visceral, horrific reaction that I have. It flies. Firstly, it is inhumane, right? Let's just just set that aside from policing and everything else. It was inhumane and it was terrible to watch a man begging for his life under the knee of not just one, but really three officers just begging for his life and then passing right before your eyes. That's horrific. And yes, I feel outraged as well. My outrage might be a little bit different because I'm white, but the fact is I'm outraged by the way that law enforcement handled themselves on that day. There was no reason for that conduct. Crime itself was a fairly nonviolent crime. I didn't see much resistance and quite honestly, no matter what those cases were, what happened was inexcusable. Officers were not trained for that and what's even more concerning with that there are other officers around that were participating that really should have tapped that officer on the shoulder and said, step off, let's give him a breather. And so it failed in so many ways and I think quite honestly, and by the way, this isn't in isolation. You know, we're speaking about Christian Cooper in Central Park in the harassment he received. We're talking about Armand Arbery in Alabama being shot running in the neighborhood. We're talking about Eric Garner suffering the same things, the same words, I can't breathe, I can't breathe were said by Eric Garner as well as George Floyd, horrific, tragic and it's understandable that people would be outraged quite honestly right now because it's not like this is something new. It's happened over generations and decades and months and days now, right up to this point. Well, truer words, I appreciate the candor with which you have responded. Let me ask you, if you have any opinion, any ideas about why so I'm asking this in the context of the fact that here in Arlington, we will soon be going into our third or fourth consecutive evening of a lot of people coming out to protest that has been true across the country and cities and towns all over the country. What I'm wondering is because you have correctly identified this is not new. This is not new in the last three years. It's not new in the last decades, generations, centuries, et cetera. Yet it does feel different than what was the situation with Eric Garner, for instance. Just in terms of how widespread, how consistent the protest has been now. And of course, some of the uglier aspects of what has happened, yes. But I'm just wondering if you have any ideas about why it is that this moment is eliciting such a tremendously powerful reaction. Yeah. I mean, James, that's quite an interesting question because when Eric Garner passed, it was equally as horrifying. And yet society didn't rise up in the same way it is now. Maybe it's because it's the accumulation of events that have sort of breached this feeling of we'll get along. Perhaps it's the COVID crisis that has raised tensions. Perhaps it's the divide that's going on in this country. I think it's really all of those things. And I would not put it much past the idea that there is that divide in our country where we are seeing that separation of our society into two completely separate sides that seem not to be able to even speak to each other anymore. Never mind understanding each other, but can't even speak to each other. That's the horrifying part because I do know that I've got people that I know or people that I meet. I have to be cognizant of where they stand on issues so that I don't offend them initially. We always get to the point where we discuss these things. And I did that even just during this weekend where I had a strong discussion, if you will, about people that were dismissing and then speaking about the looting. I think it's important we speak about that. And yet you get to that point, but you have to know how to get to that point. And right now our society is very divided. And I think quite honestly, the president is not helping in any way. He continues to divide it in a way that suits him and does not suit this nation. Well we do want to move on to the other topics that we were going to talk about, but you said that just now that you didn't want to talk about the looting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So thank you. Listen, people should be peacefully protesting. It is important. I encourage it, right? Martin Luther King did this with civil disobedience. He did it peacefully. He did it thoughtfully. And there were changes. Not enough obviously, but there were that. The others that loot and pillage and burn and steal and destroy, not for the purposes of building anything up, but to tear something down, that does no good for anyone. And in fact, it does a complete disservice to the memory of George Floyd. As his brother said yesterday, please don't burn things down. Please don't destroy things. My brother would not have wanted that. You would want peaceful demonstrations. And then what I find is that that looting and pillaging and theft and all that's going on causes an excuse for many in society to say, well, you know, that's what's going on. This is who they are. And so it really does a complete disservice to the very issue we should all be discussing, which are like equity and justice issues. And instead we're talking about thieves and robbers and malicious individuals that sometimes are coming in from the outside to cause trouble specifically for that purpose. And we're not talking about the real issue, which is what we need to do, because these people are undercutting the legacy of George Floyd and Eric Garner and others. I just think it's such a tragic situation that we can't actually speak about it in a meaningful way. And again, as I said, others use that as an excuse to speak about that community. And it's very frustrating. That was the argument I had this weekend with people, as a matter of fact. Yeah. I mean, you echo frustration that it's hard not to imagine that so many people at the center of the legitimate movement here must feel about what's happening. It's heartbreaking. They go peacefully protest. They have hundreds of people. And then, you know, whether it's curfew starting or whatever it is, the sun sets and everything changes. And it's heartbreaking. I think all the good that they did for those number of hours during that day is completely undone and then some during those hours in the evenings. Heartbreaking. Yeah. Just as a last thing. And then we're going to move on. The footage from here in Boston the other night, when, just like you said, a peaceful demonstration as dark descended became something else. I just want to make note that I did see the police acting with restraint all the way through, at least in the images that I saw. And so fair, you know, fair, fair enough. We really do need to try and isolate these individuals who are doing harm and destruction, as you said, and separate that out from the from any, you know, the mass bodies involved in the really in the in the crux of the issue. So anyway, thank you for spending a little bit of time with that. So let's move on to, you know, of course, everybody's major concern for the day. And that is COVID-19 and its effect on so many different sectors of society. We have had a number of conversations in this series in recent weeks with folks who are looking at the situation in jails and prisons in our state and around the country. And everybody recognizes what makes such places, particular potential hotbeds and hot spots for the for the pandemic. I have to say, frankly, that middle sex has looked pretty good compared to other counties in in Massachusetts and other places in the country. But tell us, you know, give us a sense of going back to January, February, etc. But how what your guys experience has been and what steps you took from the beginning and through to deal with us. And I will say, I believe that middle sex has looked pretty good because we've done a really good job, I think, in our sheriff's office and in our facility. But our district attorney, Marion Ryan, we worked together. I don't know that you saw another sheriff and and district attorney working together on the decarceration efforts before the Supreme Judicial Court decision. We can speak about that in a moment. But let me just tell you, my journey on this began, you know, 15 years ago, really, in 2005, I was the chairman of the Committee on Healthcare. And at the time, we had just gone through Katrina and we now had the bird flu, which never really came to the continent, but it was a concern. And I drafted a pandemic preparation piece of legislation, which would set in place certain things that would trigger, you know, authorization for certain powers and then a regionalization of certain entities and powers and it would just make it a lot smoother transition. We didn't get much attention, right? You know, Katrina already passed, bird flu never came here. As is often the case with legislation, it really never got much attention until after I just left the health care committee and became financial services chairman. And let's just clarify for folks, just in case anybody doesn't know, you're talking about your time as a legislator. I'm sorry, yes, that's right. I was a state representative for 14 years. That's right. I was chairman of the Committee on Healthcare for a number of those years. And then in 2010, I became chairman of financial services. And that was right when the swine flu hit. The swine flu, I think we had 60,000 hospitalizations, a quarter of a million infections and 10,000 deaths that year, which was considered horrific. And so suddenly they became more attention. Sadly, when the House and the Senate passed individual versions, I wasn't involved in this because I moved on to my committee. They couldn't come to an agreement, didn't it fail? So I had been on this. So I saw this coming long before many of my colleagues did, quite honestly, because of my public health background. So actually in February, we began putting in place the medical questionnaire that you would see in medical facilities. You know, have you been around anyone sick? What are your symptoms? You know, back then, have you been in touch with anyone from Italy, right? Because that was where the breakout was. Those are the first questions. We don't ask that anymore. It's all around the world. So we started that in February. And indeed, we were the first facility to actually have positive cases, at least they admitted they had positive cases inside. But our commitment was to transparency. So we had our first case. He had a cellmate. We immediately put the individual that was symptomatic. We tested, put him into medical isolation immediately when he was symptomatic. His cellmate, we put him into medical quarantine, different status. And then he became symptomatic and tested positive. He was then into medical isolation in our health services unit. All the individuals that have been treated have been treated in our health services unit. But we started very quickly on a lot of cleaning. We brought an outside company that does cleaning that come in. I always say that almost like those busters, they've got a big suit on with the pack on the back. And they do a really good job. We started doing temperature checks for our staff. We started limiting movement in and out. And we stopped visitation, which is something, by the way, I want to be clear about this. That's not something you do lightly. I was probably one of the last two Sheriff's Office to say we should stop visitation. It was only a day or two by the time we realized we had to. Because the visitation is sometimes the only anchor for the individual inside to maintain normalcy and to prepare them for reentry and just to keep them healthy, mentally healthy, and strong and grounded, right? So you don't do that lightly. Right, and from what I understand, let me interject that after making that decision, you then made some gestures as you've said, and more than that, to the inmates to allow them for free phone calls, I think a certain number per week to try and make up for a little bit of that deficit. Well, we offered four free phone calls, 20 minute phone calls for each incarcerated individual. We've upped our video conferencing capacities. We've done a lot. And in fact, one of the other things we did is we stepped up our video conferencing, which we do with the courts, but now we're doing it a lot more. And I really stepped this up because our pretrial individuals that are incarcerated, they shouldn't have to just sit around while their case languishes, right? Just more months and weeks and months of dead time for them. We want to maintain the progress of their cases. So we've done well over a thousand video conferences and audio conferences with courts in order to keep those cases on track and to allow people to get out quite honestly. And this is again, all before the Supreme Judicial Court decision, our decarceration attempts have brought us incredible benefit, and I'll just tell you briefly about this, we can go through a little bit of the numbers if you wish, but we brought our numbers down significantly and I know we've got a graph that I'd offered that we can show, but what did that allow me to do? So for me, in a place of incarceration, this idea of decarceration is not just a social justice issue, although it is, it allowed me to do certain things in my facility. What did it allow me to do? In a facility it's hard to sometimes do social distancing. And we can do that in certain places with tears or pods where you have individual cells, but in the dorm units, you don't have the same ability, that you could sleep them separately far enough, you know, generally, but all day they're kind of mixing around one common area, can't limit their movement in that way. So we actually were able to enter out, we have five dormitory units, we emptied out four of them, and the only dormitory unit that we kept going was those with generally more mental health concerns, self-harm issues, suicide concerns, because in corrections, if you have people that are thinking about self-harm, you put them in dormitory style units so that the officers can see them more easily and they can watch out for each other as well. Now what we've done is those numbers started creeping up, and so we've actually taken some of the people out of the tears, and we've now opened two dormitory style units, but with half capacity so we can spread them out. And by the way, every decision we've made, James, this is, I should have said this right up, every single decision we've made is based upon the direction and recommendation of Dr. Elise Orsell who is our infectious disease specialist in Department of Public Health. Every single decision we've made, we run by her and then she will make a medical recommendation, infectious disease specialist recommendation, and then we will operationalize that. So many of the things that I wanted to do or I thought would make sense, she suggests that we're not the right things to do, and oftentimes things that we thought made sense that she didn't think make sense, she actually said, you know, that makes sense, we should do that. So it's been an incredible partnership. Again, it's all been medically driven and then operationalized, brought to us and then operationalized from that point. Right, so let me ask you about that because it does seem like that has been a crucial part of how effective your response has been. And I'm wondering, is that, is she or somebody like her available to all the other sheriffs as well in the various counties and are they making use of that partnership in the same way as you have them? Yeah, so what I did is she had worked with us on Hep C and HIV and AIDS, infectious disease issues before. We'd always thought very highly of her, but our use of her was not significant really, it was just for those issues and she'd come up, she'd actually come inside the facility as well. So she was familiar with the inside of the facility. We started using her more and more when Essex had an outbreak, she started, I think they might've been using her before but they started working with her more. In Cornell City, then I brought her to the Mass Sheriff's Association, so everyone had access, we brought her on retainer, so every sheriff would have access to her advice and they all do that now, they all have access to Dr. Worsell. Some don't have outbreaks, so they don't really utilize her as much and some have outbreaks and then they utilize her when that has happened, especially of course. So you have started to talk about this but I'd like to start to dig in a little bit more into the weeds of just exactly how you are doing the things that you're doing within the jail. My threshold question is there's gotta be a whole list of things that you, that are part of your operations on a daily or regular basis. Some of those things you could change, you've already mentioned some of the changes that you've made. What, so people have an idea of the real, of the whole context. What are some of the things that you just can't do anything about regardless of your desire to create a safe and environment as possible? So for one, it's not within our authority to just release mass swaths of people based upon age or chronic condition. So what we've had to do is to focus on those that are elderly or those that have chronic illness and try to see if we can identify them and get them out of our facility for their own protection, right? So that many people can become ill and recover. We've had, again, we've had I think 75 illnesses so far, everyone has recovered. Right now actually we stand at having two people that are still positive in our health services unit. There's been not a negative in about two weeks. And so I don't know if you can hear me knocking on you. Yeah, you did. Yeah, you know, hopefully I think as of tomorrow and Thursday, both of those should come off. If we don't have a number negative, it'll be the first time since early March that we've had no positives in our facility. Our greatest threat is those coming from outside. So some of my greatest frustrations, I've identified, I mean more, but two individuals that I could not get out of our facility, that perfectly fit chronically ill and elderly and should have been out, but I couldn't get them out. And I worked really hard. One was on a minimum mandatory multiple OUI offense, but it wasn't from Middlesex County. So it's hard to step that down anyway and be able to free them because it's a minimum mandatory statutory, but the other county from which this gentleman came for our veterans program, by the way, specialty program, they were not into it. They just weren't cooperating. Yeah, and you know, unfortunately it's like, so I am a chronically ill, elderly person that I have to worry about dying on my watch because you won't release him. And I don't want to send him back to you because I believe he's probably better off here too, right? Secondly, we had another gentleman, a pretty notorious case, chronically ill elderly and I worked with his family to try to find a placement for him for weeks, and you know, people think that, you know, I mean, even where someone has a family that is not impoverished, you know, and has some access, they just couldn't either see, either they couldn't put it together or they weren't really willing to put it together. Right. So these are just two cases that I could think of prominently, and actually the elderly individual, the first one that I mentioned on the OUI, he just got out. We would have been able to try to get these people out. Now, they have not gotten sick. They're still healthy because we've managed ourselves well, but that has been some of my greatest fears. Some of the rules on the outside just allow us for being able to take some of these individuals that we were willing to take a risk on and put them outside, even at the risk of upsetting victims of crime because it was important to keep them alive. Those are a couple of things that were greatly frustrating to me. And what about, I mean, you know, just things either the balance between security and safety, et cetera, and also just the fact that you've got people coming in, you know, it's a jail. Right. It's not like other incarceration situations. It's, you've got people coming and going. I guess you really can't do much about that. Right. Well, so you said one thing. As the disease would pop, you know, as we would have some people who were positive in certain units, we would have to begin to restrict movement in that unit. That's not a lockdown, right? We don't keep people in their cells for 24 hours a day or 23 or 22 hours a day. What it means is that they have access to phone calls and recreation, but we get them out in smaller groups. And so what we started, and again, this was working with Dr. Wursel. So our limited movement began with groups of five. And then when things got better, we moved it up to eight, then we moved it up to 12. Right now it's 20. And it actually is getting to the point where we might be able to open it up to just the regular work. So the idea of limited movement is important. It's never a lockdown. Access to programs, as much as we can provide access to mental health and medical health are really important because what people have to understand is, inside this public health issue on the outside becomes a public safety issue on the inside because these individuals are cooped up, they're incarcerated, they're frustrated, they're powerless really, right? And so as this crunches down on them, they become more agitated. And then that becomes a public safety issue. So I have to be mindful of managing the public health side, but maintaining a climate whereas individuals will not hurt each other and they won't hurt my officers. And that's really that balance that every day you find that balance between public safety and public health and allowing that growth and that hope. So if people see, you got limited movement and they're frustrated, then they can see it's at eight, the next, you know, about again a few days or a week. And then it's at 12, they can see that hope. And they say, and basically they're willing to say, I understand it's difficult for all of us. We understand you're trying to do what you can do. We believe it. And you're communicating with us a lot. We've been doing that. I can get by another week or two under these conditions and I can still see hope coming. I think that's really important of managing a facility like ours. Yeah. And I have to say that, you know, our experience, both, you know, people may be familiar with the fact that you guys granted us access to your facility a couple of years ago. We had an excellent visit in which we, you know, learned a lot. But a lot of that also establishes a sense that we all have that communication and a potential trust, trusting relationship as much as possible between you and the inmates, long precedes this whole episode. If you treat people like human beings, they'll respond like human beings. If you treat them with respect, they will respect you back. If you treat them and diminish them and treat them like animals, they will behave as such. And that's just not what we should be. I mean, again, it doesn't make sense on the correction side, but it doesn't make sense on the safety side inside. It doesn't make sense at all. So this is what we should be doing. And I believe we try as much as we can in middle sex to accomplish this every day. And by the way, it's great work of corrections officers. No one gives credit to the corrections officers and professionals that when COVID was breaking around the country, everyone was nervous and panicked. Officers kept coming into work because they knew that that was what their job was. And they had to worry about their own families as well. So kudos to corrections professionals and officers as well. Those of us out here are following certain rules and as to different levels of scrupulousness, of course, this is always gonna be the case. But here in Arlington, for instance, there's a really high level of compliance with this idea that you do your best to maintain social distance, but you also wear a mask at all times whenever that may not be possible. My sense is that for all of your efforts and you've described with the dormitories, et cetera, that there are just some things, meal times, bathing, things like that, where you're gonna have a hard time maintaining social distance within your facility. How widespread is, like, are you adopting the same alternative, which is wear masks because we can't guarantee social distance? Great question. So yeah, so I will say this, the limited movement allows us to spread people out so they can shower, they can call, they can recreate without getting too close. So we do that in order to create that distance. The difference between outside and inside is, you know, on the outside, they can make it a law, but you're reticent to enforce the law. Inside, you know, we have greater ability, greater capacity to enforce the rules. And so our rules are officers wear their masks inside the facility every moment that they're on the job, right? Inside the facility, they're always wearing their mask. Our other rule is, we started by when, just each remember that at the beginning of this, masks were hard to come by, right? Tests were hard to come by. So we've evolved through this whole thing and it's a different world now than it was just even a few weeks ago. So we had officers had to wear their masks because also part of our concern was, officers were coming going into the institution, right? So that was one of the primary weak points of our protection of the population inside, right? So by the way, we've put out probably two to 300 officers on precautionary quarantine over periods of time. Just if they came in contact and someone was positive, we put them out. We put them on paid leave, basically, but they had to stay outside in quarantine until they were at a test and they were positive when they finished their 14 days. Right now, I think we've got zero positives in our staff but it started, we were very high on our staff at one point. So that was one issue. And I think the other issue was, oh, the mask. So when we started, we didn't have many masks around. So we offered masks to all the, we actually had enough. We offered all masks to any incarcerated individual if they wanted to wear one. And then as the disease progressed or the concerns progressed and heightened, we actually then mandated that all incarcerated individuals wear their mask when they're outside of their cell area. So now you have the officers wearing their mask, you have the incarcerated individuals wearing their mask. It's the way that it should be on the outside, we can make it happen on the inside. Right, that's good to hear. I actually had no idea whether that was the case. Let's talk a little bit about testing. What are the criteria? I know that not everybody, not every inmate or even every staff member has been tested, I assume. What are the criteria that are being used in order to get that testing and is it the same for security personnel and for inmates? So with regard to testing, this is an interesting example of our Dr. Wursel in her medical and research mode and then working with us mode. At one point, some weeks ago, I actually went to her to say, hey, you know what? They're doing some universal testing. This is right after Pine Street and did theirs. I was a little worried about it because quite honestly, if you do that, you can heighten tensions inside and I was worried about that, right? So I thought it might be a good thing to do medically and it might be a good thing to do for the public to know, but I was concerned about the climate and the safety issues inside because if there were a number more cases than you think at the time, that can cause violence. A lot of people are asymptomatic. They never have it and they never know. So I went to her and asked her and she recommended do not universally test as well as Department of Public Health. And part of the reason by the way is because I know we've got a graph on this, the churning of the population. We are discharging people every day. But we can pull out that graph for a second so you can really show people what it is you're talking about. So if you guys can bring up any one of those graphs, I'll go through it, but so yes, so we have been testing aggressively in our place. If someone presents with symptoms, we immediately go to testing now that we have the testing and or if they said that they are positive. And again, as some people, as I've told you, we've had a number of cases come in from the street positive. Here you can see the number of tests that we've conducted. I think it's about 80 tests as I recall, but you can see at the very beginning of the pandemic, the blue line is the positive test, those that are COVID positive and the orange line is those that are COVID negative having tested. You can see actually in about, this is cumulative by week. So this is not daily, this is by week. So we ending April 20th, you can see we had 15 positives and two negatives. And then you can see because quite honestly, I think we did a good job in managing this in our limited movement and the way we addressed it. You can see that number coming down on the positives and those last few are really, I mean, we might have one or two that came from inside, but the others came from the outside. And you can see the inversion of the negative test going up and the positive test going down. And now I think we haven't had a positive test in about two weeks. So you can see this is kind of goes to show the peak of what we're doing. And I like this because to me it shows what we were doing was working and we were able to manage this pandemic. Yeah. It's a very dramatic upside down triangle there, going up, spiking up to the 15 and then really coming down immediately, it seems like, and then obviously on the continual downhill downward. Yeah, do you want to show any of the other graphs, James? Cause I can go through them quickly. Sure, we can pull the next one up, which is total number of releases. So this goes, actually, why don't we go up if we can to the first one showing that the clock. Yeah, that may be down on the way. Yeah, I think it's the other direction. There we go. That's it. So here you can see our population. Now, by the way, it should be noted that Mary and Ryan and I worked together to decarcerate initially. We picked, I helped identify individuals. She and the court would make a lot of the decisions on reduction of bail, so that was kind of it because they could only deal with bail issues. So we were able to identify for the DA's Office of the Mass Bail Fund to be able to release people. Now, by the way, this number, 788, historically low, James, people should understand that in Massachusetts we had the lowest decarceration rate in the entire country. When I first became sheriff, we had 13 to 1400 individuals. That was only 10 years ago. Then it was like, oh my God, we're going to break 1200. Oh my God, we're going to break 11. We're going to break 1000. We're going to break 900. We'll never break, you know, 900. We'll never break 800. And here we are below 800. So we started at a historically low level and you can see it's 788 beginning on March 7th. I think that might have been about our first case. You can see that number coming down to the number 567. That's a reduction of almost 30% of our population. And again, for many others, that's a social justice issue. For me, it allows me to practice better pandemic management and social distancing inside. And quite honestly, I think it'll be interesting to see what happens on the outside with the individuals we're putting out. I do have concerns, you know? When you're putting someone to the outside, first you have to be thinking about public safety. We have a lot of mental health and substance use folks up there, but we have a lot of dangerous people up there too. So public safety first. And then what I really worry about is when we put people outside, that we have to make sure that we have a plan for them. For many of the advocates, they just want to put people out in the street and that's sort of the victory for them, I guess, getting them out of jail. For me, that's not the victory. The victory is making sure they have a place to go. They have a program in place. They have medical health support. They have mental health support. And they have medication assisted treatment support. And a lot of times people are being just put out there suddenly by courts and there's none of these things in place and you're just really setting up individuals for absolute failure. And that's something that concerns me. Because that's a public safety issue. But really my concern is about those individuals and their families and the heartbreak that they will continue to have because they're not being set up properly. I have to say that is a theme that you have often hit on and you have innovated programs within the jail, et cetera. It's clearly something that you've been concerned about over your entire tenure. So therefore I am wondering how is it working? A certain tension I would imagine which is pressure towards decarceration but your concerns about how you're letting these individuals get back into the world. I would imagine with those numbers coming down as rapidly as they have been that you're just not able to monitor and provide the kinds of services and support you generally do with the folks who are coming out of your jail. Well, for those, a lot of the reason our numbers are coming down are just naturally. They're end of sentence. Sometimes they're provocal releases, right? And so with those we can plan because we know what day they're getting out. Our re-entry planning begins on day one of their incarceration. It doesn't begin 30 days or 60 days out. It begins on day one. We set up the programs around the criminogenic needs of that individual. Where are they lacking? How can we build support in there? And so for the time that they're with us we put out an individualized plan for them and then we have a plan for their release as well. Under this, you have courts that suddenly will be putting people out. We can also put people out. We've doubled up the number of individuals we put on our electronic monitoring program so that we can also have plans for them. But those are sentenced individuals. So that's something we can do on our own and we've doubled those numbers. Again, we can have a plan in place. Our challenges are when someone, a court case gets heard or the Supreme Judicial Court just oversees matters and starts releasing people. You know, and I don't mean that they're doing it wrong but it's just hard for us. Right, but you're not, right. You can't plan. You brought out guard and we don't have, it's really no one else except for us planning for their reentry. There's no one else out there doing this stuff. They don't have social service agencies that are working with the courts. It's just us and our office is doing a great job. And honestly, we've heard stories. I mean, I've not heard stories. They've been here sometimes on a Friday night till six, seven, eight o'clock at night trying to find a bed, trying to find a housing place, trying to do a housing check for someone. So this is something that is, something we're passionate about. And I think we'll see the success of this decarceration because there will be failures. There already are failures. The greatest failures are going to be those that victimize another individual and those that overdose and die. Right, that's my greatest concern about the failures. And so we've already had that happen to a degree but it's more qualitative information. It's not quantitative. And I think that anyone's trying to make certain predictions is a little ahead right now. I think that we need to monitor what's going on and then at some point in the future kind of go back and take a look at all the data and see how it's worked. And the pendulum might have swung, I don't know if I'm going left or right here or the end screen, everyone's left and my right. This way it might be that the pendulum comes back a little bit or maybe it comes back to where it was. I don't know where it's going to be but I think that's going to be an important thing for society in our communities to take a look at what's going on and say, okay, we're comfortable with it being here or we like where it is right here. So that's going to be the interesting part of it. You know, we've spent a good amount of time talking about the Middlesex House of Corrections which of course is your main facility but we've often asked you as well about the situation for women and other conversations that we've had with the women's facility in Framingham. What can you tell us about what's going on there you know, during this entire time? So Middlesex is, as far as I know, never housed women because we don't have the facilities for it. They have to be in a separate site and sound, you know, building so to speak. We haven't had that ability. So our women, along with many of the other sheriff's offices have all been going to the Framingham Department of Corrections. When I first became sheriff, I realized that some of our men were getting out on bracelets but our women were not because we were not involved in their lives down at Framingham. So I actually put out the first woman and you know, a number since then on bracelets to be able to be reunited with their family. People have to understand, by the way, women are very different from men. The drivers of their crime are different. Their experience in jail are different. Their mental health levels are very different. The needs of their families are, I mean, they're five times more likely to be primary caregivers of children than men. So the impact on their family is very different. And so we need to attend to that. They're also a smaller population. They don't take part in the more vicious and conspicuous and notable crime. So you don't think about them as much as we should, especially in the impact on the family. So we began to get involved in that. Right now, the numbers of women have diminished significantly but we have continued to address their needs up there. We're the only sheriff's office that was going up for a couple of years now, at least, visiting with our women to see how they were doing and prepare them for a re-entry. And in fact, we've doubled our numbers. Again, there's small numbers, but we've doubled our numbers for the women that we've placed on electronic monitoring programs as well. So we have been really stepping into that in trying to find, no, we are, there's a question about whether or not at some point we can take women back into our facility. And that is something that if we can't, the thing is this, if we can provide a better experience and a better preparation for them inside with us, I want to take them back. If they're doing, if it's going okay over there, I'm okay. So right now we're taking a look at whether we have space, whether we have the capacity and then what will that look like for us as well. Again, our numbers are small. So also creating an entire program around a very small number of women is also something that you have to be careful about. You've mentioned a couple of times now that the numbers are really small. What are we talking about really? So when I started, probably had about 100 women, slightly more, I think we've got probably 30 to 40 women up there now and there's a much smaller number of sentenced women. So the pretrial women that could have been released have been released. And so that number is kind of stabilized right now. And the sentenced women is a very small number right now. And if we're going to house them because of the, you know, where we can house them for pretrial, we have to put them in a certain level of security because they're pretrials, what's mandated on law. For sentence we can find based upon the crimes, we can find a lesser security setting. And that's going to be the issue is how many people can we have that we can put into a lesser security setting because we don't have the security setting for all the pretrials necessarily at this time and to be in compliance with law. You know, I'd like to keep going. We're going to have to close the conversation soon just to let you get back to your work. But before we do, I want to ask you just to give us a sense of what lessons you will be taking forward from this whole experience. So we're all love to imagine ourselves on the other side whatever that means of this, of the intense, the most intense part of the pandemic at least and whatever that new normal is in all our different ways. So what are either, you've mentioned technology probably that you're going to be using more video conferencing, et cetera as you can, but what are some of the other things that you're going to be bringing with you as practices or policies on the other side of this? So because we were one of the first and I think we've handled it as one of the best in the entire country, quite honestly. I mean, I don't say that lightly of the President of Major County Sheriff's of America. I have a national perspective. I don't see another shop handling it as well as us. And so what I want to do is take the lessons we've learned you know, in law enforcement use after action reports. Something terrible happens like George Floyd and you do an after action, you break it down. What was the training, how could it stop? Should someone have tapped? What was the point of this, right? And so you can do that. I want to create an after action report with regard to our COVID experience. And one of the things I've learned most was transparency and communication, James. When we were the first ones to acknowledge, let's just say, having positive cases it was a painful thing to admit and then we made the commitment, not just to acknowledge it and put it out there but we made the commitment to post it every day, every day publicly to the press and to our staff and on our website, every day what our numbers were so people could see what our numbers were. And that was actually really good because it was painful at first because when you had an uptick, you don't want to. Like everything inside just says, you don't have to do it. You got the devil on one side and the angel on the other side the devil say, you don't have to do this. You know, no one really cares. No one's paying attention. No one's gonna notice. You got the angel saying, you should do this is the right thing to do. And so we went on the side of the angels and quite honestly, I think it's worked out really well because it allowed a trust factor. We would every day, we would tell our staff exactly what the numbers were. We would then go right to the press immediately afterwards and then we would put it on our website so the families do too. And I think that really helped us in managing it and setting the expectations in a way that there was not constant pain, there was not doubting. So that was one thing that is difficult that's one thing that it was difficult that I'm going to be recommending to others communication and transparency, accountability issues. And any practices in your own department that you just know you're gonna keep going keep moving forward with that might have been born of these particular circumstances but you're seeing are gonna be, you know useful going forward. But Jim, you asked the most probing questions, James. So let me say that yeah, one of the things is our use of technology, video conferencing and other things. I mean, we're all using Zoom, we're all using, you know, Microsoft Teams but inside we've used it to communicate with our courts. We're looking to see if we can help out the police departments and the courts through their arraignment sessions. So I'm hoping that we can do more video conferencing of court matters in a way that will be beneficial to the individual and to the court into our shop. Because quite honestly, that's one of the the transportation of people around is bereft is just, is tremendous issues and concerns, expense, contraband, overdose issues, things like that when we're transporting people around and the individuals oftentimes don't really want to be in the back of a van all day in a court lockup. They'd rather have their rec, their phone calls and their programming as well. So we can find that balance. I think we can actually take that to a new level. And the most important thing, keep the cases moving. Move them, move them, move them. These pre-trial, we've got people in there for months and years sitting there on bail or no bail. We've got people on mental health issues that are only in there because they have mental health, only because they have mental health. They commit crimes when they are mentally ill. But the only reason they're committing crimes is because they're mentally ill. If we can speed these cases along and get resolution that's appropriate, then I think that will benefit everyone in the future too. All right, well, we're going to wrap up. I do want to finish by noting, you mentioned a few minutes ago that you are the president or the head of a national sheriff's organization so that you have a national perspective. And you said within that, you really feel like you're doing as good a job as anybody or, you know, that, I got to say, I love to hear that, not because I think you blow your horn a lot, but because that does accord with our general sense here in Middlesex County that we've got a pretty good. In this way, you know, folks that we can trust, folks who will be transparent at sheriff's office as well as the DA's office, that seems to be straight shooters. And so we do appreciate that. I'm the sheriff, but I've got an incredible team around me that drive this. So it's not me alone. I've got an incredible staff up here. And again, I will say this, I think we're one of the finest sheriff's offices, if not among the very top finest office in the entire country. And I say this every time I go out there and I see what other people are doing. And I find out what we're doing. And we're way ahead of the curve, which I think is one of the reasons I was chosen to be the president of major county sheriff's of America because that reputation that we had preceded that election, so to speak, to a point where my colleagues actually elected me to become the president. And by the way, this is among a profession where most of the rest of the country is predominantly patrol with some corrections on the side, right? And the corrections always that stepchild. They don't really want to address too much. As long as it's not a problem, they're worried about the patrol, which is understandable. I always say I have the freedom to focus on the correction side, which I just honestly, I just love that fact. You know, I love that fact. Well, and we love, again, being able to get access to you. You have just given us so much to chew on today. And we really appreciate it. We always do. We will look forward to talking to you again sometime soon. But for now, we will close it out. With our thanks to our Middlesex Sheriff, Peter Katujan. I'm James Milan. This is Justice in the Balance. Thanks for joining us.