 Good evening, and welcome to Moments with Melinda. My name is Melinda Moulton, and my guest today is Robert Sand. How are you, Bobby? I am doing very well. Thanks so much for having me, Melinda. I can't tell you how excited I am for this interview. You and I had the opportunity to meet each other at the spot a few months ago, and I think it was the first time that we ever got together and talked, and it was just so exciting that I asked you in that moment to please be on my show. I thank you for being here this morning on this beautiful day with me and my viewers. So for my folks who are listening in, I want to let you know that Robert Sand, Bobby, is the founding director of the Center for Justice Reform at the Vermont Law and Graduate School. Is that correct? That is correct. Did you do? I'm just turning something off so it doesn't make noise. Go ahead, sorry. So can you just share with my viewers a little bit about your early childhood and your early years growing up? Sure. I was born in Washington, D.C., but grew up in New York City. Very happy to have grown up there and very happy that I don't live there now. Was incredibly fortunate to spend lots of time up in the Adirondacks, and that's really where my heart is, is up in the mountains and the waterways in the Adirondacks, went to, I don't know, how far am I supposed to go? Early childhood? Just your childhood growing up, where you come from, and then I have a few questions about that, but give our viewers a little context on who you are. So my mom was a social worker in New York City, worked very hard on literacy and helping unhoused people. And my dad was a lawyer and then became a federal judge. So I was absolutely convinced I would never go into the law so much for that. And honestly, what got me through school was largely sports, football as a kid and then soccer as captain of the wrestling team and love baseball. So that's mostly how I made it through because academics were not necessarily my strongest suit. So older brother lives in the Boston area. My sister lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, and everyone seems to get along pretty darn well. Well, that's great. So what brought you to Vermont, Bobby? So as I said, a lot of time up in the North country in New York, I knew when I decided to go to law school that I wanted to be someplace more rural, where I wouldn't feel like I was competing with the environment. And in a small world, my roommate in New York City's girlfriend had been a student of the Dean of Vermont Law School. And she said, oh, you ought to go up to South Royalton, Vermont. And I said, huh, and came up, fell in love, got in and had three great years at what was then known as VLS and stayed ever since. So you your early years working in Vermont, you know, you came up and did you did you attend Vermont Law School? Or did you? I did, I did. You did graduated. OK, and then you got and you. So so that's what brought you here and you've stayed here ever since. So I want to talk to you a little bit about about your years, because I know that you worked with one of my favorite and most exciting litigators in the state, which is who is Richie Berger. And you worked with Richie for, I believe, quite a quite many years. And talk to us a little bit about your time in private practice. She worked for the Dinssey team. Yeah, so if I might back up a tiny bit. As I said, I was not an academic superstar, high school or college, but things really started to click in law school and that went fine. I had the great good fortune of clerking for federal judge in Rutland, Franklin S. Billings, Jr., after graduation. And from there, I went to the Dinssey firm and was incredibly fortunate to have Richie as my supervisor and mentor. And for folks who don't know Richie Berger, he is really the preeminent litigator in this state and just learned an incredible amount from him, learned an incredible amount about things I was doing improperly. And so I spent just shy of two years at the Dinssey firm. I knew early on that my heart was more in the public sector, but I really wanted to have that private practice experience. So you had a few years with with Richie at Dinssey. And then did you go? Then you went back to do your professorship at Vermont? No, no. Then for 22 years, I was a prosecutor. Right in Windsor, right? So I was in Windsor for Windsor County, yeah, four years. And then it was really, honestly, I wanted to run for state's attorney, but I didn't want to run against a person who had hired me. So I took a job in Montpelier for the Department of State's attorneys, and that was a fabulous job because I became the legislative liaison for all the prosecutors statewide. So I basically lived under the gold dome. During the legislative session for three years and learned so much and met so many people. And then go ahead. Well, then and then Governor Dean appointed me as state's attorney, and I ran four times after that. Wow. So in 2016, that was when you took the job as a full-time professor at Vermont Law School. Yeah, that sounds about right. I had started, I taught once while I was a new state's attorney and realized that wasn't fair to the voters because I couldn't do both, took a hiatus, then started teaching more regularly and then eventually transitioned to the law school full-time. So talk to us a little bit about the history of the school because I'm sure there are people in Vermont who don't know much about the Vermont Law School. Just a little overview. Yeah, we don't often talk about our actual origin story because the man whose idea the school had some questionable ethics and who the heck would have thought of the idea of starting a law school in tiny South Royalton, the only law school in the country in a town without a stoplight. But so it started very small, but there were some big players from private practice in New York and elsewhere who helped launch it and very early on the school developed an expertise in environmental law and it is one of the preeminent environmental law schools now in the country. It is, it is, and you, my friend, you are the founding director of the Center for Justice Reform at Vermont Law School and you spearheaded the creation of a Master of Arts in Restorative Justice Degree and Professional Certificate in Restorative Justice, right? That is true. Talk to me about that program a little bit. Okay, so you cannot work in the criminal legal system and not recognize that it is deeply flawed. The flip side of that, Melinda, is that it's actually doing what it was designed to do, which was stigmatize and marginalize and separate, but anyone who believes that the system should hold people accountable, but not crush them recognizes that it needs major, major changes. And so I was really fortunate to get the blessing of the school to try to develop a program at the school that would focus specifically on criminal justice system reform, a component of which an important component of which is restorative justice, philosophically different way to respond to harm. And so we launched, I don't know, 2017, maybe, the Center for Justice Reform and then had to get a permission of the American Bar Association to offer a new master's degree and the professional certificate. And it's been, the school has been great in giving us the latitude to develop our courses. I think we have maybe 30 to 35 justice reform RJ courses and very robust online offerings. So we have students all over the country and actually international students as well. So it's been pretty exciting. I have to say, I'd like to say it was prescient on my part and it may have been just a little bit of dumb luck, the timing has been really good. RJ was not that much a part of the national dialogue. And I think RJ being restorative justice, I think it's becoming much more part of the dialogue now. So let's share with our viewers. What is restorative justice? So I like to explain it in contrast to what conventional criminal justice is. And that is a rule based adversarial response where the net outcome is typically punishment. And RJ is really philosophically different. It is a relational based response, centering the needs and wants of the harmed party and acknowledging that responsible parties have obligations to make amends. With the hope that the net outcome, some people say healing, I find that that is a little too strong. The net outcome is a desired positive result rather than adverse results, which is what so often happens in the conventional system. So it is personal and relational, as opposed to rule based. It is emotionally taxing. It actually asks a lot of people who cause harm and somewhat, unfortunately, we don't ask a lot of people who have caused harm in our conventional responses to make amends in any way. We extract things from them. We inflict pain and punishment and incarceration, but we don't ask a lot of them. RJ puts expectations on people who have caused harm to make amends. So why do so many people in this country support the crushing of those who cause harm? Why is our mentality that mentality of let's crush these people and not offer them an opportunity to, even to the point of that you can't vote and once you're incarcerated, your life pretty much ends. Why is that then that we're so cruel? There's a light question. Part of it, Melinda, I think is language based. We know the language of punishment and honestly, the media uses a language of punishment and I think language informs thought. So one of my quests is to get people, including the media, to start using more humanizing language. Crushing inmates or convicts is one thing. Crushing human beings is another. The other aspect of it, and this is not surprising in our society, we outsource everything, right? We outsource food production. We also outsource accountability. And so in the olden days, communities used to figure out how to address their own conflicts, but now we ship it off and decision makers are removed from the factors that influenced the harm. And it just becomes, people resort to what they know. And if they know punishment, that's what they resort to. If you spend time with harm parties and carefully talk to them about what they want, it's often very different from the outcomes that we see in court. But we have this conveyor belt and we don't ask those questions. So I have so many questions for you and I'm going to skip over a couple of these because it's all about moving the needle toward a more compassionate. I think you're going to get into this with some of my other questions. Where in the world is restorative justice being practiced that is a model that we could follow? Well, so Vermont is ahead of the curve in many respects. Every county has access to a community justice center that uses an RJ model. I would like the legislature to loosen some of the restrictions that have been put on what kinds of cases can go to RJ. And actually, I think a bill may have just been signed that in part does that. New Zealand has gaffolded their entire juvenile justice system on restorative justice principles. There are a couple of cities in England that have declared themselves restorative cities. We have this misconception in this country that RJ is simply a programmatic response to particular low so-called low level crimes. It really is a way of being in a way of interacting. And I'm excited we will be offering a course in the spring at Vermont Law and Graduate School that I've called Designing Restoria. And the idea is if you were to create a place from the ground up built on and predicated upon restorative values and principles, what would that look like? All right systems, transportation, health care, education, law enforcement. You're taking me right into my next question. Vermont is considering building a major jail facility that will cost millions and millions of dollars. And, you know, I believe I serve on the Williston Restorative Justice Center as a volunteer, and I'm also on the Executive Council. Newly, I've been there for like two years. So I'm still learning. But the financial realities of these restorative justice centers, it's tough. And every year they get reviewed and every year there's this fear that the money is going to be cut. And so that's one issue. I'm going to put that over here. I would like to see the money used instead of a new prison go more towards restorative justice. But an idea that I had, Bobby, was and I visited the women's prison quite often. Is that we close the women's prison and we put all the nonviolent offenders on a campus, one of the empty college campuses or a piece of property or whatever with housing where they could be educated, where they could create their own businesses, create a venture that would create some income for the facility. They could have their children live with them and manage a daycare. They could grow their own food and they would be free to grow and prosper, to re-enter society with skills because many of these women in the prison system are there because of the men that they were with or people that they were with that pulled them into what ended up putting them in jail. So that's a thought that I had, have that I'm really trying to fight and move forward. But what are your thoughts about the new prison and the possibility of keeping, putting women in a campus to create a whole different way from the ground up that you're talking about? If anyone can make it happen Melinda, it is you. So Howard Zaire, the EHR is some people say the grandparent of the modern RJ movement. And he did a presentation for the Lawn Graduate School a couple of weeks ago. And one of the things that he said and it really resonated with me was the punishment is supposed to be the separation. The punishment is not supposed to be the cruelty of the place that someone is sent when they are separated. So we have so much to learn from some other countries and Norway in particular comes to mind. Yes, people are separated when they've caused significant harm, but they're not treated like animals and they're given skills and they can have visitors and they can work on becoming better human beings. It is absolutely impossible to visit a correctional facility in Vermont and possibly think that someone's going to get better by virtue of that. And so unless we are deliberately trying to further marginalize people, we need to do something fundamentally different from what we're doing right now. So I love that campus idea. Frankly, I don't think anyone should be sent to prison unless they pose a present and ongoing risk of harm to other people. In my view, that is the only reason to incarcerate someone, but even as such, it doesn't have to be this. I mean, they're horrible, horrible places. I agree with you and I'm just thinking about the amount of money that's going to be spent on this new jail and I think now would be the time for us to rethink the way and be leaders. And I know we're leaders with our restorative justice centers, but again, the money is, you know, it's not there and there's very small staffs working 60, 70, 80, 100 hours a week trying to do the work to move these panels through. So I mean, that's just something I really think is important because there's also an economic piece to this, Bobby. I believe that the amount it costs the state to incarcerate a responsible party is 65, 70,000 hours a year. And imagine if we could take that money and put it into a campus situation where where people like me and so many people in the state would say, hey, I'll volunteer my time and I'll go down to this campus and I will teach accounting and I'll teach marketing and and bring my skills and my leadership to these women and help them to find a path for a future. There would be a lot of money saved, wouldn't there be? There is no question that there's a there's a way to save money and get better outcomes. You know, so you think about publicly traded companies, they're accountable to their bottom line. You know, that's financial and result based accountability. We don't do a great job of that in government. What what is the return that we're getting for incarcerating so many people? And one of the things we know is that incarceration is what's called a criminogenic risk factor. It increases the likelihood that someone's going to end up back in jail. So that just makes no sense at all. So could we save money by not incarcerating people and by working with them to give them the skills to become better human beings, the people who probably they were meant to be all along? Absolutely. And honestly, that takes courage and I'm increasing of the view the courage has to come from legislators. Absolutely. And a lot of that a lot of that that harm is caused by their own internal trauma that they're living. And then you put them in an incarcerated situation. I mean, I've been in the women's prison. I mean, I was frisked. And I mean, the whole thing with when the door shut and even everything about it was is horrific. But I mean, at the end of the day, you end up with a human being who actually grows and prospers and then becomes a someone who contributes to society as opposed to continuing to pound the trauma of being incarcerated in these really horrible places. OK, so I want you to explain to my viewers who are like, oh yeah, well, that's all about the response. What about the harmed party? What are the benefits to the to the to the harmed party? Like I we had a panel where this young man stole sneakers from from from dicks. And and you know, it was so interesting. Well, it's a whole different story. I'll talk to you offline about it when this is over. But the harmed party is part of this process. Talk about that a little bit about how this benefits them as well. One of the things that researchers have discovered is pretty significant lack of satisfaction for victims. A term I don't tend to use, but I think that'll just help for clarity, clarity purposes because they either don't have any voice within the response to the harm they suffered or it's very constrained. So as a prosecutor, I used to have my advocates give a so called victim impact statement. So very much within the confines of that piece of paper and the confines of the criminal legal system, what response do you want? And I'd meet with victims. And my first thing I'd say is what punishment do you want to see? It already started putting blinders on. And so the R.J. starts really with the first question to the person harm, what do you want and what do you need? And that is just a fundamentally different approach than what rule was broken and what punishment is available. And so the satisfaction from harmed parties is much greater in the restorative response. And I should say this. Is it a magic panacea for all our ills? Absolutely not. You know, we're talking about human beings and human beings cause harm, but it is vastly more satisfying and I believe effective than than our conventional responses. You're here. So though, so I want to know, I want I want you to talk to my viewers about those folks who are concerned about what is being perceived as rising crime in Vermont and particular cities like Burlington, the cuts to funding for the police force and the reduction in uniforms on the streets. A lot of people are torn between more police officers or less and it's a conundrum happening in the largest city in Vermont. Talk to us about that. I spend a fair amount of time in Burlington and it has some real challenges. One of the things that we know is that a credible risk of being caught actually is an effective deterrent. Whereas punishment and the prospect of punishment is not a particularly effective deterrent because people aren't looking that far down the road. So I and this may not my colleagues in the R.J. movement may not necessarily support this. You might not, which is fine. I think police presence that creates a credible risk of being caught actually serves some value. Now, I also think that how law enforcement officers conduct themselves and engage with community needs to change. But I do I continue to see an important role for police. I don't have a great solution to unhoused population, though I'm actually convinced we need to create incentives, including financial incentives for people to move to the pod housing, you know, whether that's a guaranteed minimum income or some other way to incentivize people to engage in the behavior that we want instead of always thinking that punishment is going to dissuade people. And it just it doesn't. And we need to learn that lesson. Well, Burlington is a very humanitarian city, as is as is most of Vermont. And and I and I do feel that that there needs to be. I remember the days when I was on the Burlington Business Association Board and I was chairing it where we had community policing. And there was more of a presence of of officers who knew all the store owners. And it's and it and when they have that cruiser sitting on Church Street, there's, you know, so I'm I'm with you on that. And so I'm also on the board of the ACLU. So there's things about policing that are disturbing and concerning. And but in Vermont, I think we were pretty reasonable human beings here. So I want to talk to you as we're coming to the end of this show, give you an opportunity for someone who is interested in getting involved in restorative justice as a career. Could you talk to them about the program that you have the Vermont Law School's Master of Arts and Restorative Justice Program and how they can get involved? Sure. And thanks for that opportunity. So the two specific restorative justice programs that we have at what is now Vermont Long Graduate School is a master's degree in restorative justice and a professional certificate. What's unique about the master's degree is that it was offered at a law school. And so just fundamentally, that's a very different way of thinking about law school and many students earn both degrees, dual degrees, a JD law degree and the master's degree. The certificate is has primarily been taken by folks who are already out in the workforce and realize they need that they want to make an adjustment, including some folks who are doing RJ work already. So how can people get involved? They can reach out to me and come join our program. But that for your listeners, every community justice center, every court diversion program relies on volunteers. And I have to say, I feel like there are a lot of people who have very strong feelings about the criminal justice system and punishment. But they're based on emotion and not necessarily hands on information. And I promise you, you sit in and watch a responsible party and a harm party find harmony, reconciliation and honest amends and apology. And your perspective on what's the right way to respond to harm and crime will be fundamentally different. I've been doing some training with law enforcement officers. And when they see that distinction, it's just so heartening to see even police recognize that a different approach is important and appropriate. Indeed, indeed. I have I have seen that because I am a volunteer with Willis and I've seen that. And it's extraordinary. This and oftentimes they become they actually become friends. There's a there's a coming together where the harmed party and the responsible party grow to have a respect and a love for one another. It's extraordinary. It's extraordinary how the human heart and the human soul can heal and grow. And what we're doing right now in our country with the with our justice system needs to be overhauled. And you are a leader in that Bobby sand. And I want to thank you so much for being on my show. And I look forward to working with you in this movement. So anything that I can do reach out to me and to my viewers. Thank you for being with us today. I really appreciate it. And I will see you very shortly for my next show. Bye bye.