 Hello, beautiful people. Thank you for coming out today. We are a group of prison abolitionists and concerned community members mobilizing in response to a proposal to construct a new prison. Boom. We're calling on the legislature today to prioritize building healthy communities over building cages and to pass a moratorium on prison construction and ensure that there's a working group that's actually looking at alternatives to incarceration. We believe that the 250 million would be better spent on housing, treatment, education, childcare, healthcare, and all the other supports that actually keep our communities safe. We're here to show the state that they do not have the backing of Vermonters to build these new prisons. And we're here to demand that they start creating the necessary conditions for prisons to become obsolete. And we know that we're only going to get what we're organized to take. So we have four demands today. The first one, pass a ban on all new prison construction and create a working group to look at alternatives to incarceration. Stop using our tax money to fund prisons. We're housing, starting in areas with a high percentage of black, brown, indigenous, queer, and working class communities. And end cash bail from our community. But before they come up, I just wanted to acknowledge all of the people that have come together today to support us. This isn't just a single issue. So many people in Vermont are impacted by incarceration and have come together today. So this movement is endorsed by Food Not Cops, Black Girls Matter Vermont, Brooklyn Strong, Vermonters for Justice in Palestine, Cooperation Vermont, Vermont Freedom Fund, Tempest Collective, Rights and Democracy, People for Police Accountability, Vermont Worker Center, Community Resilience Organization, The Poor People's Campaign, and Old North and Mutual Aid. The list keeps going y'all. Everyone is in this together. We have the IWW, the Tenants Union, Vermont Relief Collective, Education Justice Coalition, Middlebury Showing Up for Racial Justice, The Root Social Justice Center, Migrant Justice, Conservation Law Foundation, An Economy of Our Own, and the Howard Center Union, AFSCME Local 1674. And I know there's other folks who we didn't get to name today, and we're thankful for all of your support today. So first up, we're gonna hear from our very own campaign organizer, Jaina. Community, thank you so much for joining us here today in solidarity with our mission to build healthy communities, not prisons. My name is Jaina Ossoff, and I am the Vermont Free Her Campaign Organizer for the National Council for Incarcerated and Formally Incarcerated Women and Girls. It's an honor to be here with you all today, and I'm so thankful for all the people who worked to make this day possible. I wanna start with some backstory to how we got here today, and just share that community members have been working for years to shift priorities, push for change, and hold stakeholders accountable to how they are not putting communities first. Free Her as the new kid on the scene has been graciously accepted by numerous grassroots groups and organizations whose consistent hard work has made our fight possible here today. And I am so thankful for them all, and all they've contributed to the movement and for helping us build momentum around our mission to end incarceration. Free Her and coalition members have been fighting all legislative season session to be heard and dispel the narrative that Vermonters want new prison construction. As many of you here today know, we are in desperate need of housing, schools, childcare, transportation, union jobs, and other supports that allow our communities to thrive and flourish. One of our goals today is to highlight that abolition is the intersection of all movements. The end of incarceration encompasses climate justice, education justice, anti-racism work, and overall the collective liberation of all oppressed people. Vermont can be a leader in what it means to envision and build a new world, one in which we do not utilize punishment as our tool for accountability, where our biggest mistakes do not mean the deprivation of our humanity, and where our priorities are shifted to care from cages. Looking around at all the work being done in our state, you can see the potential of the beautiful communities we could start that center connection, care, and love. Quoting from one of the movement's treasured leaders, Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, abolition is about presence, not absence. It's about building life-affirming institutions. We have the tools here in Vermont to create the self-sustaining cooperative and loving communities that would make prisons obsolete. With the estimated cost of the new women's prison already set at 70 million, the total cost after everything is said and done will probably be significantly more, committing to expending that outrageous cost to preserving prisons in incarceration is incredibly backwards. We only have, we only have 49 sentenced people in CRCF. The rest are held on bail or some other detainer. If you look deeper, a majority of the remaining 49 folks most likely need mental healthcare or substance use treatment or some other support that is not a prison. So we're talking about incarcerating a small number of people for $70 million. Our state is struggling and has desperate needs that must be urgently addressed before money is even considered to be spent on prisons. We will shortly have 1,500 people, 500 of whom are children, unhoused with the termination of our emergency hotel program. We have the second highest rates of homelessness per capita. Our school's infrastructure is crumbling across the state and we will eminently be refuge to folks when the climate crisis makes large parts of the US inhabitable. As more and more people become displaced and have less access to social services, the more we see our community members ending up in prison. Our fears that the state has no public safety plans that involve nourishing communities by investing in them but only through control mechanisms like prison. So we need immediate diverse and holistic solutions to begin to be developed to address the assortment of impending disasters. Pausing prison construction is in everyone's best interest. Even this week the legislature received written testimony from those inside CRCF saying no to prison construction and yes, the community supports. The time has come for change and we are creating a steady roar that is only intensifying with time. We have to continue to rise up and push back against the construction of this new prison with everything we've got because a new prison will be detrimental for our communities and our progress towards an abolitionist future. We have tangible and real solutions for the state to follow. We hope to create a model for the rest of the nation to use in response to their own state's efforts to move towards abolition and we need the continued support of neighbors like you to get stakeholders to understand that the time for abolition is now. So I will end with saying that the vision for abolition is to once again build up vibrant whole and strong communities. We wanna see facilities in our neighborhoods with wraparound services so our people can heal with us and so the funding that is meant for harm reduction therapy, mental health and other supports are actually in the hands of the people and not in the hands of DOC. People are suffering and we need to start getting creative with our solution. Let's take a pause and look at the way we do things. More carceral infrastructure is a step backwards and we must demand better for our communities. Thank you. Thank you, Jaina. Next up we're gonna hear from Lydia Diamond, the matriarch of Brooklyn Strong. The sunshine fantastic. I'm glad to be here with y'all. Brooklyn's prison in Vermont, free her Vermont. Brooklyn Strong is against the new prison. More child care, mental health care. Oppression is a disease just like racism. It's systemic and we gotta fight it every day, everywhere you go. Now I went this year when I first came to Vermont. I was a hot mess. I did something wrong and I ended up going to, what is it, the jail in the South Georgia. That's it. And it was a raggedy whole then. I got out of jail January 10, 2007. And I haven't looked back since. To God be the glory. And I want you to know I did the crime and I feel like we don't need to go there. We don't wanna give Vermont no excuse to build a damn new prison. We need resources so that we can do better, so that we can work better, so that we can provide for our families better. A new prison don't help that. So my mom passed away 20 years ago, but I'm proud to say I got my life together or my shit together before she passed, you know? And so I'm proud of me and I made her proud and I'm always gonna be here to make my ancestors proud. Cause they gave their lives so that we could have better so that we could do better. And I heard a long list of people who are here to represent. I didn't hear the people's kitchen. Y'all hungry? I love the people's kitchen because as a child, as a kid I was a part of the Black Panther Party food program. You know, they fed us breakfast. They walked us to school, you know? And they were our parents and neighbors and friends. They wasn't nothing like what society made them out to be. So don't believe the hype. But that, I hold on to those good times. Those good times are family because they really do take a village. And I'm from a good village in Brooklyn, New York, and I hold on to those good memories. I'm glad that what happened, my experience got me straight. It set me straight. I got six grandbabies born here. I'm so proud and happy. And I wanna stay proud and happy. And I'm gonna always be here to stand up for those who don't have a voice and those who are not heard or not represented. Brooklyn Strong, I'm the matriarch. Thank you so much, Lydia. Next we're gonna hear from Tiffany Harrington, a local community organizer with Free Herber Month. Hi, Tiffany Harrington. I am here because I am a directly impacted, formerly incarcerated person of the Vermont Correction System. I did 15 years under supervision in Vermont. One mistake in my entire life was crushed to spiserines. And since then, I have done most of my time just due to technical infractions like lack of residence. The reason I'm here today is I just wanna encourage everybody to think about how correction doesn't correct anything. And the impact, the detrimental impact that it has upon not just the people that are involved in corrections, but their family and their friends. My children have serious issues like PTSD because of watching me go through what I've gone through. Watching me be put in jail for things that I should not have been put in jail for, being separated from me. The list kind of goes on and on. But basically, I could tell you guys so many stories. I could talk for hours about the negative impact that corrections has had on me and my family and friends. I could tell you about the discrimination and the mistreatment I've experienced. But basically, I just wanna point out today. Want to build a prison is literally going to do anything except for make a bunch of families' lives worse. And there's really no need for that when we have so many alternatives in our community. There are so many other things we could be doing with the money that they wanna spend for a prison. We could be doing in-community treatment. We could be doing like much less restrictive alternatives that would actually allow people to keep their homes and their jobs and their families intact. And these are really important things that we need to be thinking about because instead of continuing this cycle of violence and poverty, which is really what it is, we need to be thinking about ways to stop that cycle and stop the crime. And the reason that people are committing crimes a lot of times, it's not because they're bad people. It's because they don't see a way other than that to support their families or to support their communities. So instead of taking people out of their communities and taking people from their families, why don't we start thinking about ways to stop that and to end incarceration? $270 million to build a women's prison and to fill beds. You could literally give each of these women that are in corrections a new house, a new car, a job and still have money left over. And that would be like way better, so much better than putting them in a jail. So there's just a lot more than they're considering when they're thinking about these options. I know me personally. I've had two children while incarcerated. My three-year-old's actually playing over there. I had him incarcerated and I had a high-risk pregnancy and people like to say, oh, well, each of you had healthcare while you were incarcerated. No, I really didn't. When I had him, it was a high-risk pregnancy and when I got back to the jail, UVM Medical Center didn't want to send me home. They didn't want to send me to the jail to finish my sentence because they were scared for my safety. They were scared I was going to die. When I got back, they had been promised that I would get my medications and I would be checked. My blood pressure would be checked at least like every four hours. They did not check my blood pressure for two weeks. It took me putting in countless six slips every day, telling them at MedCart, which was three times a day and then finally, my friend on the unit where I was at were putting in six slips for me on my behalf and finally, and I kept getting ignored and brushed off. Finally, one of my friends had a friend on the outside that was involved with the ACLU and she actually got a hold of the medical staff at STRCS. Thank God she did. By the time they were forced to check my blood pressure, which was a 10-second non-invasive thing that should have been happening the whole time, I was so sick that they wouldn't let me walk back to my unit and by the time that happened, they literally had to call an ambulance. I got on the ambulance and I started having seizures and I was actually about to have a stroke when I got to the hospital. So then I was re-hospitalized for another two weeks because of neglect by the medical staff at STRCS. So if everyone can just consider for a fact, it's not like you can just say, hey, I need help when you're in jail. People don't listen, they don't care. If you're there, you don't exist. So I'm just here trying to stand up for my friends that are there and for the forgotten because we're forgotten and it's not fair. So that's really all I have to say. Thank you. Thank you, Tiffany. So we have a couple more speakers, but first, we have the honor of hearing some spoken word from someone who you know and love. He's a poet and an educator, the director of cultural empowerment for the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance. Let's give a warm welcome to Rajni Eddins. Peace y'all, how y'all feeling? All right, somebody say collective liberation. Say my liberation is tied with yours. That's right, that's right. I'm gonna share a couple pieces. I'm here to support and stand in solidarity because I know that it's important that we honor our humanity and respect and have reverence for our human dignity and for recognizing that every human being has worth and value and that we don't need to penalize each other. We need to create systems that offer us all collective resources so we can flourish and prosper together as a human family. Y'all believe that makes some noise. All right, the first piece I'm sharing with you is in honor of my mother. It's called, I'd like there to be a war where nobody came. It also speaks to the need to not compromise with warfare or with prisons or with systems that do not serve our best interests. I'd like there to be a war where nobody came. I'd like there to be a war where where the gunners didn't show and the flyers didn't flow like a river carrying death to those below where artillery moved too slow missed the boat and the whole dang show and we all refused to go. I said we all refused to go. I'd like there to be a war where I'd like there to be a war where where the infantry said no in crisp tones the taste of snow and the bombers stated clear they won't go in any year and sharp shooters closed their eyes much to the brass great surprise and there was peace with no reprise we chose the peace with no reprise I'd like there to be a war where I'd like there to be a war where where we first would check ourselves see what our causes do foretell tweak where tweaking would do well then maybe check ourselves again. Remembering some crazy macho in does not signify you in cannot signify you in so I'll say it once again I'd like there to be a war where I'd like there to be a war where I'd like there to be a war where wouldn't you give it up for yourselves. All right, all right. This next piece I want to share with you is in honor of all of the ancestors who have struggled for our freedom whose shoulders we stand upon and us today doing their name and their legacy justice by the works we do hand in hand to work towards a more just society and a world that embraces all of our freedom and our value as human beings. Somebody say, all right. Whereas love is not forgotten when a loved one is swallowed up by the system whereas public safety is an issue of human wellness and we are all deserving of love and compassion not further penalizing whereas people are not numbers and human beings are more than statistics. We declare in the name of Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer who said we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes and give light and people will find the way who said nobody's free until everybody's free. Say it, say it, say it, that nothing shall borrow us from our love for justice and our sister's freedom for ever proclaiming collective liberation. Say it, my liberation is tied with yours. Collective liberation, my liberation is tied with yours. There are more sound aims we can resource than bars and chains and prison doors. Let love be a liberating force. Let our joined hands embrace our voices raised, shake the industry of incarceration to the very moorings of its foundation. Cause brothers are missing, sisters end, daughters are missing, mothers end, mothers are missing, mothers are missed and, sons are missing, mothers end, mothers are missing, daughters end, fathers are missing, daughters end, daughters are missing, daughters are missed and families are being broken still and children are left with gaps to fill in the land of the free where 270 mil could be better sprint on ways to serve we cause nothing can stop the power of the people. Say it, say it, sisters we are coming, say it. Mental health and poverty don't make you evil. There was a spirit rising here, turning the ties on heartlessness, greed and fear. See we come armed with imagination, envisioning nations with no need for incarceration. Sisters we are coming, hear our voices singing rhythm, never to be once dissuaded till we create a humane system. One that doesn't blame the victim and keep blaming shame the syndrome, but it gives alms and extends bombs, show that healing is within palms. Sisters we are coming, we won't let you be forgotten. We will shine the light upon your plight to open doors or fashion so you may live your lives and reunite with all your loved ones and know more of these machines that eat up lives may be constructed. Sisters we are coming, sisters we are coming, and the wind picked it up through a worldwide refrain such that none could escape giving song to the aim. Sisters we are coming. Thank you so much for that Rajne. So before we go on to our next speakers we're gonna hear a little bit more poetry this time from some students at Burlington High School. So let's give it up for them. My name is Augustina, I'm a junior at BHS. This is my little cousin Lucy, she's a student at eighth grader, an eighth grader. I wrote this poem with another student called Sarah Ali. She is another student at BHS, another junior at BHS, and we wrote this in middle school and it was about black girl magic and I thought it would be nice to share with you guys today. So yeah, let's see some facts. We're girls, we have hair, we wear clothes, and basically any other trade anybody shows. But we're black, we've always been told pick up some slack. We're like infections crawling through America. You guys act like you get the memo but all we think is did ya? Bang, bang, that's the sound of a gun that you would think I shot. But really, that's the sound of a basketball on the spot. Yeah, she likes basketball and the only shot she'll ever make, the only shot she'll ever shoot is the one going through the hoop. Black girls dream of that Beyonce hair but we have struggled enough making our hair the way it is today. Hair picks grabbing our curls, finding the right oils and having people ask to touch our hair every time you get it professionally done. No, you don't get to touch my hair like that. You don't know what pain I go through every time I get my hair done for you to touch it out of nowhere. No, it's not a weave, it's not a wig, they're called extensions. They are connected to our heads. It hurts when you pull it. Are you trying to rip off my head? I would like to inform you that extensions are how I grow my hair. If I leave it out for too long, then it will get damaged. The question every single time you ask shouldn't be asking, does this hurt while touching my brand new hair? Not to mention my pain in my head or can I touch it? It should be how long did that take or what did you have to go through to actually know how rough it is, how rough this experience was? My process is way too much havoc. I have to deal with shrinkage, other people deal with hair getting in their way, but guess what? When you see my hair dancing on my head, hands off. You see when you're black and struggle with different traits in general, it's 10 times harder, but you learn so, but you learn. So remember what we said because it's all we got. We're black, we're black, beautiful and brilliant. And the best, white blank period. One more time for the Pollots from Burlington High School and High Middle School. So next up, we're gonna hear from the president of the Rightland Area NAACP, Mia Schultz. Let's give it up for her. Hey everybody, thank you. I stand before you today, a person who is tired. Tired of begging for our humanity. Tired of pleading for our basic rights. Tired of fighting for justice that should be inherent. As a black person in this country, I am tired of constantly having to prove my worth and the worth of people of color. My humanity and the humanity of people of color to those who refuse to see it. I am tired of the systemic racism that permeates every aspect of our society from housing to education to healthcare. And of course, this thing we call the criminal justice system. I'm tired as I watch black and brown people overrepresented in our prisons. And I'm tired of seeing that most of our incarcerated people are low income and lack economic opportunity. I'm tired of a narrative that proliferates an idea that prison walls symbolize justice and safety. But let me tell you, these walls, these bars, these chains, they only serve to exasperate the, exacerbate the inequities of our society. They do not serve to make our communities safer. They do not serve to rehabilitate those who are incarcerated. Instead, they serve as a grotesque manifestation of a society that is sick and broken. Our prison system is not an accident. It is a direct result of racist and classist society that values punishment over restoration of the human experience. It is a system that disproportionately targets black, brown, and indigenous people and further enforces a cycle of poverty and oppression. It is time for us to wake up and realize that this is not justice. It is not justice to lock up people who are struggling with poverty, mental health, challenges, and substance abuse disorder. Vermont spends over $174 million annually operating prisons and plans to spend more than 250 million more on this new prison project. This is a misuse of our resources. And we stand at a crossroads, a moment in history where we must decide what kind of society we wanna be in. We can continue down a path of mass incarceration, of locking up black and brown bodies and cages, or we can choose a different path. A path that leads to healthy communities, strong families, and a society that values the dignity and worth of every human being. It is not justice to spend more on punishment than on care and support. It is not justice to dehumanize people who are already struggling to survive. We must demand more from our society. We must demand that our government invests in healthy communities and not prisons. We must demand that our society values every human being regardless of their recent economic status. We must demand that our justice system is truly just and fair, and we need to recognize our collective responsibility to dismantle this system. That get worked up. And we have to redirect our resources towards education, healthcare, and community building instead of punishment and confinement. So I say to you today, let's rise up together and fight for a safe society based on love, compassion, and equality. Let us break down these walls, not create new ones, and instead create a world where all of our people, no matter their race or class, are free to live a life of dignity and respect. Next up, we are gonna hear from one of our representatives, Brian Chino, who's been sponsoring a bill to put a ban on the construction of new prisons. Let's give it up for Brian Chino. I was asked to speak here today, share my voice as a representative, but I think it's important for me to share something else with you that I feel like I unsafe sharing in that building, which is that this issue means a lot to me because I am a person with lived experience and who's been harmed by incarceration, that I come from a long line of what we now call justice-involved individuals, that's the language that is being used, and both grandparents and great-grandparents and I've seen the trauma it caused on my family, including my mom being adopted, and I'm a healthcare worker with AFSCME, with Howard Center, AFSCME Local, 67th birth, that's nice to see my union here, and I've been working for 24 years in healthcare in Vermont, and I've probably worked with over 1,000 families, and in the vast majority of those cases, I've seen children and their parents be united and people thrive, but I also carry a tremendous amount of pain, and there's currently people I love, trapped in prison, being abused by the carceral state and who've been driven there by the police, and by the way, they were treated since they were in school. I've seen these boys grow up from like nine to 21 and end up in prison regardless of what we did, and then they're taken away from us, they're taken away from family, from the support, I can't even talk to them, so it's a lot to carry, especially when you're advocating for things and being dismissed and silenced and erased, so I just feel like it's important, and I wanna say it because it's that pain that is driving me, because from the pain comes healing and our healing is bound together, and so I'm very grateful to be working with my sisters at the National Council. They approached me, I've been advocating for corrections reform for seven years and focused on the Norway model, and they approached me and said, we want you to introduce a moratorium, and I said, I'll do it, but we learned from defunding the police that you have to be very clear what the plan is instead because they will just turn on you and sabotage it. So they said, okay, but it can't be prisons, no Norway model, so I was like, all right, what do you need? What do you want? And they said, community care. So I did the research, we did the research, we gathered a tremendous amount of evidence that is on the record showing that incarceration is one of the most harmful things that the state can do. That the cost of incarceration is tremendous, and there's very little benefit. Yes! Woo! And depriving a person of their freedom itself is so harmful that we need to rethink that concept. And so we introduced these two bills that you're familiar with. We put a little spin on the moratorium because for years, myself and others have been trying to lift, there's a ban on school construction. So we've been trying to lift the ban on school construction. So what we did is, when I approached the council with the idea, they agreed. So we did a bill that lifts the ban on school construction and puts a ban on prisons for five years because we should be dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline and investing in alternatives to incarceration. So we came up with a great plan, it's actually a very viable plan, a working group that centers those who are impacted. People who've experienced incarceration, staff who've worked in the system and we want this working group to have a task to come forward with a plan to slowly and incrementally decarcerate the women's facility and reimagine, erase prisons and replace them with housing for justice-involved individuals. And if it needs to be secure, like we have certain mental health situations that it could be secure residential that's wrapped in treatment, but no one should be thrown in a cage separated from their family and their support for any amount of time. So we've had to play the game to be heard. I won't tell you that whole story because we don't want to give any energy to it. We're just moving in the face of their resistance, we have been persistent. And this week, we had two hours of testimony after me being told that I could bring in guests and then women not being allowed to speak and only me being allowed to speak. Yes, but this week, we were given the proper time. We were heard. And we have changed the course of the narrative already. In the current capital of both, there is language that is going to improve the conditions at existing facilities. And any improvement of corrections infrastructure has to be, this is so, such an oxymoron, trauma-informed wellness environments that are evidence-based and use restorative justice practices. I don't know how a prison's ever gonna do that, but from now on, when we approve our prisons, they have to do that. And we, us, pre-heard the National Council and other groups advocating made that happen. We haven't won a moratorium just yet. And then we found out that the Department of Corrections already has a working group that they handpicked to look at designing the new facility. And so this week, we gave our presentation and we brought an amendment. And I don't know if people are familiar with the Justice Reinvestment Initiative, but Vermont has committed to reinvesting money in the justice system towards, you know, away from the carceral state. This is already something we're supposed to be doing. And we're in what's called Justice Reinvestment 2. Well, we are coming forward with Justice Reinvestment 3. Okay? And so here's what we're proposing, that because our bills can't pass due to the rules at this point this year. So we are looking for what we can influence. So our current plan is to propose an amendment to the Justice Reinvestment Bill. And what the existing bill collects data, I'm not gonna get into that. People will fall asleep if I start reading. Well, that's in data and funding, but it's important because we're telling to the Department of Corrections that they have to be transparent about the data and the spending. But then what we are proposing is a working group that explores the alternatives. And then there's a fund that is in this bill that money is supposed to go into when we bring people home from out of state to be reinvested. Well, what we realized is one of the committee members pointed out to us that a bill has passed out of the Senate that would reduce imposition of cash bail. And this bill could potentially decarcerate half the women's facility if it passes. The data is unclear, but we know it's a massive amount of people and that's just the women. What about the men? For real. So it's highly likely that if we can advocate for that bill to pass, that we may be able to bring home most if not all of the people out of state and that's five million plus that would immediately go into that fund that we could try to reinvest over the next year. And what do we wanna invest it in? Housing, healthcare? Actually, I'll redo the list and then I'm gonna stop. But I think it's important to bring you up to speed because it's like a moving target for us, you know, like where we have to constantly shift our strategy, but we're not gonna stop. And we're gonna need you all to email and to keep advocating. So here's what we're proposing at this point. My phone with my glasses is like, I'm at that like middle-aged point. All right, so we would like any legislation related to the replacement of women's facility and to justice reinvestment to integrate these elements from our bills, okay? That social determinants of health need to be addressed such as housing, healthcare, nutrition and food security, education, economic opportunity, social opportunity, violence and structural conflict. That we wanna empower people with lived experience by including justice involved individuals, correctional staff and advocates in any working groups and in any venue where decisions are being made. That we wanna explore all alternatives rapidly to incarceration and reinvested community-based services and housing, that we wanna align the timeline for any construction of a new building with a moratorium. Securing time for an equitable process of deliberation that thoroughly explores the alternatives to incarceration before building new infrastructure. We wanna reduce the harm of incarceration by addressing violence, whether it's self-directed, interpersonal or perpetuated by agents of the state. And we wanna reduce the harm of structural conflict and promote equity by using a lens of transformative justice employing restorative justice principles and trauma-informed approaches in all group and organizational processes related to justice reinvestment in the women's facility. So we're gonna be asking for time to testify and bring an amendment to the Judiciary Committee now where that bill is. And we are also, we're gonna ask that they integrate these elements. We did the work, so we have language for them to look at and pass cash bail. If we can achieve those two things, even though our bills did have passed, we will have completely changed the trajectory. So that's where we're at. I hope that wasn't too much, but it's warm for people to know. Thank you so much, Brian. So as Jada was saying and we heard from Brian, this struggle is really intersectional. People all over the state in every walk of life are impacted by incarceration. And so we're gonna hear next from Andy actually from the union that Brian was talking about at the Howard Center. So let's give it up for Andy. All right, I wasn't planning to speak today, but what Brian was talking about, it felt really important for me to come up here. My name's Andy Blanchett. I'm the president of ASME Local 1674. We work for the Howard Center. I'm a social worker. I live in Wanooski. I support people with disabilities, with finding jobs and keeping jobs, adults in our community. And what I wanted to come up here and talk about is when Brian is talking about community-based services, it's really important to remember that the workers at agencies who provide those services can only be heard if you're in a union. Otherwise designated agencies can decide not to listen to the community members that are actually serving their neighbors. Howard Center has a union. This is huge. Every workplace should have that, especially if you're related to healthcare. This is really important, really, really important. And what I want to emphasize, as well as that designated agencies are people, are companies or nonprofits in Vermont, that must serve whoever qualifies for services. It doesn't matter, you cannot turn anyone away. And Howard Center has been underfunded for 40 plus years. This is something that when we are talking with the folks who make decisions that we negotiate on about our pay to allow us to stay and pay our rent to do these services, this is what we're told year after year. I'm being told that Howard Center management is advocating within the legislature. That is to be seen. I went to a panel that Brian hosted for healthcare workers that we basically got on our knees and begged for more money. So when I see that our community is deciding, the state house is deciding to ignore the community and build a new prison, that is a slap in the face to every healthcare worker in the state of Vermont. That is unacceptable. That is absolutely unacceptable. We are in a staffing crisis and we cannot provide the services that we want to all people who are supposed to have them. This is unacceptable. You do not solve a problem that has to do with people getting their needs met by building a building to put them in and not serve any of those needs to begin with, unacceptable. We want this money to go to education. We want this to go to housing. We want this to go to healthcare. And we want that money to go directly to tenants, ideally, who cannot afford to pay rent. And we would like this money to go to unionized designated agencies so workers can explain, here's what I need to stay to do this work. And I think that's about it. I just wanted to emphasize that. All right, thanks. Thank you so much, Andy. So Janna talked a little bit in the beginning about the fact that this is a fight that so many people are involved in and we want to make it really clear as free her that we're here to abolish all prisons and a policing and that includes ending the U.S. imperialism in Palestine. And so we stand in solidarity with Remoders for Justice in Palestine and we're gonna have our feet come up and talk about that now. Thank you. A Palestinian resident here in Richmond, Vermont, maybe you will ask why a Palestinian who lives in Richmond, Vermont will be interested in this issue. As you know, there is over 70 Palestinian women living in prison on an Israeli Zionist occupation and over 7,000 political prisoners. And because of that, even though they are political prisoners, I believe that poverty on this country is a political. Lack of education is political. Healthcare, the justice system that is a broken tower, different ethnic group, mainly black and brown people and indigenous people is major political. You have a country here, we are living in, they can find money to open a prison for women in Vermont, but when we discuss education, healthcare, they don't find the money. How is that? As a community member, I am very concerned about the construction of a woman prison in our state. We all know the judicial system intentionally punishes poor people and people of color. We must demand that the funds to support this project be diverted to housing, healthcare, mental healthcare, support food, education, childcare and job training. We must advocate for the funding of our police forces. And we started that in Richmond, Vermont. So please in every village and town, it's check the money of the police budget where it goes. We have no reason for the numbers of police always increase when they are defending the healthcare and the education and the food assistance. What we demand, the implementation of nonviolent community based interventions and restorative justice in the place of imprisonment. And thank you and free hair. So much. So what Fik was reminding me of the importance of remembering that today is tax day, the state is taking our money without our consent and putting it towards prison construction. And we're saying we are gonna do something else, we're not gonna do prisons anymore. We're not gonna let them take our money and we're gonna build alternatives. So the next couple of speakers are gonna talk about alternatives that they're already building in the state. So next up we're gonna have Michelle from Cooperation Vermont come up and talk about some of that work that's happening right here. Thank you so much for being here. And I just want to take an extra moment to thank Jaina in particular for free hair for all the tireless work getting on speaking. But as I was sitting between my sons there on the ground, I felt like I would be remiss if I didn't make a point of clarity that I understand so deeply in that this system is working exactly the way that it was designed to do. This is not a broken system that we can fix. There's no just like operational failure or if we infuse some different kinds of resources or services or money that are linked to those things, right? The system is working the way it was designed to do. And what was it designed to do, right? The prison industrial complex, I want to be very clear, the prison industrial complex was created as a byproduct and a tool of capitalism for controlling the workers. When they were in the process of the enclosure movement where they shut people out of the commons and they moved people off the land and congregated them into urban environments and folks were their ability to have subsistence living to live in villages, to support themselves, to support their families, to support each other on a communal level when that was removed and they pushed people into the cities and then along the way people have been dusting off that work as a way to tool exploiting our labor, right? And Tiffany, I will be forever grateful for you sharing during your testimony in front of the suits and ties which bless you for that because you're a better person than I am to have that much composure in that kind of a situation, right? Was talking about while she was pregnant working for $3 a day, point that when we're looking at these systems stop having conversations about how to fix them. Just stop, right? You cannot have a trauma-informed practice inside of an institution that was designed to induce trauma. Our communities need to, in our towns, in our regions, particular bio regions, and start reclaiming the commons, start working together to collectivize our labor and creating the institutions that we wanna see lose track of the link with capitalism in this conversation. Thank you. Thank you so much, Michelle. So our- Everybody needs food. I don't care who you are. Everybody needs food. Everybody needs housing. Everybody needs health care. I've been fasting for almost over two weeks now, and hunger is a very powerful, motivating force. When you're hungry, you're willing to do anything. And let's not judge individuals when they try to meet this need because from need comes right. So food is a human right. Housing is human right. Health care is a human right. And when the government failed to uphold these rights, and instead of meeting these needs for people, they deprived people of our even more basic right of freedom, then that's time to change the government. That's time to overthrow the system and replace it with something that is based on mutual aid. They are in Vermont every day. There are thousands of pounds of food. Perfectly edible food thrown away every day. Well, families go hungry. People have to choose between rent and food. That's not right. In this country, there's more empty homes than there are homeless people. That's not right. I came to this country. I'm an immigrant. When this starts being left of the free, I think we need to show them it's still home of the brave. So let's fight, thank you. Celebration of community joy. But before we do that, or to kind of usher that in, we have the honor and privilege of being able to see a dance performance by some of our dancers from the Burlington High School dance team. So let's get it on. My name's Lucy. Connected. Later, that goes to Hunt Middle School. And yeah, I kind of joined this. Augustina, this is Augustina. She's my older cousin. She's, okay, she a junior in Burlington High School. That's my cousin, this is my dad. It's amazing to just see the youth involved in these kind of processes and see how much power they have. So I'm really glad everyone gave it up for them because they deserve all their flowers. So thank you. That concludes the speech time of our rally. But now we're going to get into the community joy period. But before Jess talks about that, I just would like to do a bit of a call to action. From today, I hope you gathered that this is a very much of people-powered movement and we need to keep the pressure going to make sure we're heard. So if you leave here, please commit to doing at least one thing. Check in with the different tables. We have Vermont Racial Justice Alliance here, Vermont Freedom Fund, among other allies that have a lot of things going on. We also need folks to call their legislators about our demands. We have town halls going on. So please just find some way to get yourself plugged in to keep the movement going. Thank you. Community and practicing joy. Jana said, we also have a community art thing happening at our free herd table. We have some signs you can fill out what you want us to be investing in instead of prisons. Take a picture with your sign. We'll put it all over. And then I just wanted to shout out the Vermont Freedom Fund really quick. We've talked a lot about our demand of ending cash bail. We want cash bail to be eliminated completely. Right now it's not eliminated yet. Even a dollar less than a dollar, however much you can to the Vermont Freedom Fund. They're right up here. Help get some of our community members out of jail while we fight to end cash bail once and for all. Great to see all the support. This is only the beginning.