 Good morning and welcome to a hearing between the Vermont House and Senate Judiciary Committees and very much appreciate the Senate Judiciary Committee and Senator Sears for joining us this morning and we're going to be hearing the report of the racial disparities in the criminal and juvenile justice systems advisory panel report and here to share the report with us is the chair of the panel A-10, Ms. Redden-Longo, Dr. A-10, Ms. Redden-Longo, excuse me. Great. So welcome and thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you for the welcome and good morning. Thank you for letting us join. Well, I don't know if we're joining you or but it's a joint hearing so folks should feel free to ask questions as we go along but it might be easiest if you raise your hand under the system and hopefully we'll see you so that we can shout. We don't need to shout. You might. Thank you Senator Sears. Okay. Well, thank you for having us. Absolutely. Thank you. Okay. I should go then. Okay. Good morning again and I some of you I know have already heard me present this but other issues have come up as I've done so so it sort of has germinated in the way that any kind of class presentation has. Again, please feel free to ask questions as it go on. I may or may not have answers. We did not have a particularly broad timeframe in which to put this report together to consider and put this report together. So there are some places where there are likely holes that will need to be plugged in and I will answer to the best of my ability as the chair and certainly not as a ton. Originally when this bill was what S-338 we had been told that it was a shoe-in that there was just no question this was long like back before we all were talking about viruses and face masks. This was a shoe-in and we would have some responsibilities under it in the R-DAP. By the way, R-DAP is what we familiarly call ourselves racial disparities advisory panel because otherwise there's no acronym that can take that thing into account. I had no way of knowing that this had in fact gone through. I actually indebted to Representative Lalonde who I accidentally met in a Zoom meeting to which I was serendipitously invited and he asked in fact what was the R-DAP doing in regard to Act 148 and I looked like an idiot because I just looked at him and said honestly not a thing because I had, I depend on my informants as it were who have ties in Montpelier since I'm not a lawmaker and I live in Putney. I don't really know what goes on unless the informants are telling me and of course with the pandemic that's not happened. So suddenly and this was I don't know Representative you might be able to help me that was either late June or early July that meeting. I was suddenly informed that the bill had indeed gone through was signed and was now Act 148 and that of course the R-DAP had responsibilities specifically under Section 19 of the Act which directed the panel among other things to consider data that could be used for the amelioration of racial disparities in the criminal and juvenile justice systems. Before we got to this moment as a panel we were looking to amplify many of the points that we had made in our report of December 2019. There was a feeling on both I believe the part of the Judiciary, Senate Judiciary Committee and then on the panel itself that there should be a deeper dive given the recommendations we had made and we were going to turn our attention there. This Act 148 asked us to reconsider data and it was a reconsideration for us given that we had very much spoken about data in the 2019 document and so this wasn't really a stretch for us. The timeframe as I say was a bit daunting a bit aggressive. It was a bit of a reach and we weren't sure that it would be possible to get it done and we spend a bit of time discussing what could and could not realistically be done. That gets back to how I began by saying there are likely some holes here that you'll want to have filled in and you know it's a collaborative project right? I mean it's not something that necessarily we ourselves are going to figure out we may have recommendations in fact some things have come up in the last 24 hours that we'll be talking about at our meeting at the beginning of February. It was kind of an awkward moment. There was some feeling that we were repeating ourselves. There was some irritation about this. Endless reports are something that tend to annoy people of color who'd like to see more action and perhaps a bit less verbiage. Nevertheless we turned our attentions to producing whatever it was that we could produce in roughly 10 hours of meeting time with the full panel and for those of you who don't know we have two hours a month that we meet. We meet on the second Tuesday of every month between 6 and 8 p.m. Used to be somewhere up and down the 89 corridor and now it's in wherever you happen to find yourself. The lack of time meant that we needed to convene a subcommittee which we did and that the list of those members is on the front page of the report as you have it and we asked them to do a great deal of the heavy lifting. We did that with the support and assistance of the council of state governments and also quite notably with the tremendous assistance of the prime research group itself which was as you likely know statutorily required to help with the data collection that this report would necessitate. This subcommittee generally met weekly sometimes though it was twice a week certainly as we got closer to pulling the final draft of this document together. Initially an even smaller group than the subcommittee met with Kristen McClure of the agency of digital services without whose help I must say this document would not exist and that smaller group in fact met with a collection of IT officials from various state agencies to get a sense of three things. First what data do exist as we're directed under act 148 section 19 in what form they exist and lastly the possibilities of communication between the various data systems that exist within the criminal and juvenile justice systems. The result of those meetings and there were two of them are contained within the fourth appendix of the report it's on page 24 and it's entitled the current state of data and data flows regarding racially relevant data among various state agencies in Vermont. At the very bottom of page 24 you will see a flow chart this was created by Kristen McClure. The kind way of speaking about this is to say that it's rather suitable for framing. Many of us felt that this was occasion for migraines possibly seizures and what it does is it shows the tangled web that are the data flows regarding racially relevant data among various agencies. You have to understand when the meetings began this was a very neat picture that Kristen had put out for us and then as the meetings went on and various people spoke lines were connected between various spots to show connections where people were talking where they weren't so on and then we have this which is what you have now. As the report notes this is a snapshot so it represents the past. This is the state of affairs in September of last year and it really cannot be said to depict matters as they presently stand. Things are getting better internally in each of the agencies. They're changing not necessarily because of the need for cross agency communication but rather because of their own internal needs. If you look way off onto the right I believe you will see the department of corrections is kind of in its own little self-contained unit and that was because they were at that moment bringing a new data system online which wasn't going to initially have any connections to anything. It might but we didn't know at that moment back in September so it was quite a mess. Anyway it won't help to assume for the purposes of the act of act 148 that the data flows are now more comprehensible or indeed usable. We got lost in the weeds by the way at this point because the panel is filled with a lot of brilliant people. So you get brilliant people and you give them a problem and they want to solve it so everybody was digging in how are we going to make these data flows clearer and I was part of this. I was digging in as well and at a certain point several of us kind of went this is crazy we're not experts at this. There are people who actually do this and who know what they're doing. We don't even know what they're talking about. We need to stop and the subcommittee at that moment sort of switched over and started thinking more broadly looking down on it from a higher level perhaps 30,000 feet as opposed to 10 and it seemed to the subcommittee and then to the full panel to whom we addressed ourselves regularly that without some sort of standardization and the RDAP addressed this notably in its report from 2019 this effort under act 148 would be yet another failed effort concerning the effacement of racial disparity. That without that standardization there just is no point in continuing and if that seems odd again look back at that at that picture look back at that data flow. You ought to know that there are I think two data systems in use in the criminal and juvenile justice system that in 2021 continued to conflate race and ethnicity. That's just not acceptable. That's just not acceptable. People have not thought like that since perhaps the late 1960s that we still have data systems that do that is to say the very least somewhat concerning. Again I can't remember where those systems were at this point but I do remember their existence. The whole issue around standardization had been and continues to be a dominant theme for the panel and the current report that you have makes this quite clear. Without some serious and focused standardization regarding data the aims of act 148 with reference to data and the use of that data around racial disparities cannot be achieved and that was a guiding notion that really underlay the panel's efforts throughout the summer and fall as it prepared the present document. Another important moment that concerned the panel had to do with identifying the high impact, high discretion moments in the criminal and juvenile justice systems at which either conscious or unconscious bias can make an entry. This was a task that had occupied our collective imagination in last year's report but we certainly did not take it then as far as we did here. All of the jurists on the panel put their heads together to make an extremely comprehensive list of these moments and that took no small amount of time as you likely can imagine. The community members on the panel were able to add other moments that might seem initially to be outside of the legal framework. I do recall Sheila Linton of the Root Social Justice Center here down here in Brattleboro in Wyndham County asked us to consider moments such as interactions between students and guidance counselors in the school and as many of you likely know that is very, very much a commonplace. It's a commonplace to say that that is a beginning of the school to prison pipeline as we presently understand it. What happened at the same time was a compilation of the data that do presently exist as section 19 of Act 148 asks and with the help of the crime research group we got a sense of where those data might reside. They also work to give us a sense of what data just don't exist again as the act asks. Once the panel determined that those moments might yet be of great importance it was important to know as the act asks that there's just no data about those moments whatsoever. We came up in the end with a compilation not merely of those data but their locations as a result of working on the creation of the report. We were very proud of this and very happy. Several of us were joking about printing the documents out and putting them in a time capsule because we weren't sure this had ever been done before that someone had actually compiled all of this and gotten it in one space. It's all on my hard drive at the moment so I've kind of enshrined my computers. What subsequently became clear were the relatively high number of high impact, high discretion moments in the criminal and juvenile justice systems. We were also mindful of what may be perceived as the relative impossibility of getting to all of these moments at one fell swoop. We then set our minds to prioritizing these moments to the best of our abilities and what you also have now in front of you are both a prioritized list of high impact, high discretion moments and the racially relevant data that concern them and then also a broader list of these moments. We deeply believe that all of them, all moments, all of these high impact, high discretion moments are of great concern and need attention and focus but we show the moments that we believe to have the greatest priority and what data do and do not exist concerning these moments. Now those prioritized moments are not in any particular order. It's not one is most important, six is less. It's those moments. Just as a whole, those moments. At this point we had a spread of high impact, high discretion moments and racially relevant data or lack thereof and the question became what to do with what felt a bit messy. It seemed clear to many of us that there was no one presently in state government who could on their own, not saying that collaboration can exist, but who on their own could do the huge lift that would be required here, not only to create the needed data but even more radically and I use that word in the sense of fundamentally to define it then gather it and certainly then of course to analyze it. From the early meetings with Kristen McClure and the various IT officials, it became clear that no one actually has the time to do all of this. Again, refer to that data flow chart on page 24 and think about untangling that. I'm sorry, the Council of State Governments at this moment came to our rescue. This work it turns out is already underway in Connecticut and also in Colorado and it was easy for the Council of State Government people to facilitate a meeting between the subcommittee of the panel and three officials from, hold on, this is a long one, the state of Connecticut's criminal justice policy and planning division in the office of policy and management and when you think of the acronyms that one makes you dizzy. These people are involved in the implementation of that state's own efforts regarding the collection and analysis of data concerning the amelioration of racial disparities in both the juvenile and adult criminal justice systems. They also do other things as well more broadly within those systems but they also focus on these matters. The panel had a very productive meeting with these three people. It was made easier by the fact that we're all online these days. They offered very useful insight and the panel came away from that meeting feeling that their input gathered from actual experience would be invaluable and one of the officials was the undersecretary of the state of Connecticut's criminal justice policy and planning division in the office of policy and management, a man by the name of Mark Pelka and two of his associates came as well. That meeting led to several additional recommendations from the RDAB for the legislature. We felt that building on their experience would be useful and that there really was no need to completely reinvent the wheel especially since the need for movement on the matter of racial disparity is suppressing. And then we made as a result of that meeting the following recommendations which are contained in the third section of the report beginning on page nine and that was based again on that meeting that we had on the third of November and some of these recommendations overlap and reinforce recommendations that the panel has already made again back in 2019. I'll just look over those briefly with you that a body charged with the definition collection and analysis of data pertaining to racial disparities across the rejuvenal and adult criminal justice systems both be created and staff. Experience has shown that Connecticut has needed three staff members charged with collection and analysis. We also asked that it be housed in an entity that is not subject to the vagaries of the political process because there is we felt the matter of reducing racial disparities it should not ever be seen as a partisan issue. We do say that funding for these positions within state government so that in Vermont state agencies that presently exist needs to happen so that this data can in fact be extracted and then provided to this body that we propose. That extraction is both time consuming and in some cases possibly a quite lengthy process. We asked that that body produces monthly reports and that really gets at the transparency that's required. We also suggest that this body's work be guided by an advisory organ consisting of stakeholders from historically impacted communities certainly communities of color possibly also in their divergent communities communities of gender and sexual minorities that concerns itself with the definition certainly and the collection and analysis of data that are needed in this task. We felt that stakeholder input on these matters is crucial frequently as I was explaining when we went through the creation of the prioritized list of the high impact high discretion moments community members were adding things that the jurists within state government didn't immediately cotton on to. So we feel that the stakeholder input here is really quite crucial. Finally we recommend that the legislature both expect to create this body and further be prepared to consider legislation that supports the work of this body as its needs change over time. I wanted to close this off if there are no questions at this moment. Yeah I'm not seeing any hands. Okay. Senator Sears did you? Yeah the Connecticut model obviously Connecticut's much larger than Vermont population was. Are you recommending the same number of staff or money? We are we are because the data systems have to be made unlike what goes on in Connecticut. The data systems have to be made in Vermont to speak with one another. It's very helpful that Mark I knew Mark from the Justice Center. He's tremendous so I'm glad you found him a good resource. Oh he was great and very gracious and very very giving of his time in this. Okay I just wondered why you know that would be the first question in my appropriations committee role would be sure why the same size. Right. Senator White did I see your hand up? Okay. I want to close off with people call this a history lesson and I it may be but I'm trying I really think of it other in another way I'd like to address sort of the politics behind the funding because I do realize we realize that this is big and what I want to do is go back in a and for a moment to to the middle of the 19th century and address costs at that point in time. A very common job description in the middle of the 19th century certainly in the southern United States was laborer and laborers made six dollars a week in today's money or three hundred and twelve dollars a year again in in 1850 and this is in today's money. A slave itself depending on the the source that you look at costs somewhere between 23,000 or $40,000. Okay. Many plantations had 50 or fewer slaves but even at 10 the low figure means that someone has spent $230,000 or the annual income of just under 767 free laborers. 50 slaves I'm far more common number meant $1,150,000. Slave ships were another expense here that are important to keep in mind and they were frequently made in Bristol in the UK. They cost 62,000 pounds in today's money, roughly what 83,000. Again that would be the annual salary of 277 free laborers in the United States. None of this none of this none of these figures addresses the cost of feeding the slaves who of course were only nominally people they weren't being given rich meals. It doesn't talk about feeding the slavers. It doesn't talk about maintaining the ships which of course had to be cleaned and refitted after the slaves were transported to the new world so that the goods could be transported back from the new world to Europe such as cotton or sugar as you all know that would be what we now know as the triangle trade. The point that I want to make here is the outlay of capital and the dedication of capital to an economic system of which white supremacy played an integral role and the resonances of that system are sadly not anachronistic today though we wish that they were. These are huge sums of money that have gone into the perpetuation of racial discrimination and one can profitably ask what it cost to support the repressive efforts that went into reconstruction and into Jim Crow and I would remind us that books are written at the present moment about the new Jim Crow. None of this is free. None of this is free. To undo this is also not free. It's not simply a matter of not buying slaves and not buying slave ships. If it were there would be no need for this report or for this hearing. What there does need to be as this body you all recognize when you authored Act 148 is a move towards understanding through data the personal impacts of white supremacy and racial disparity upon people in our own systems of justice but this is also going to involve an outlay of capital just as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did. There are legal articles concerning and many of them many articles concerning the extent to which employers can legally justify discriminatory practices on the basis of cost containment and profit maximization put another way. The question is what financial costs can courts properly impose upon business in the effort to enforce the equal opportunity principle. This is as I say and lawyers know this better than I do. This is not a new concern around the Civil Rights Act. I don't even know how you would actually come up with a number for how much capital is involved in these efforts. It's grand. What I am trying to say here fundamentally is that to say that there's no money may at once be true and also be a statement that supports the very system that this body seeks both to interrogate and to dismantle and let me say that again because it's two things that are operative here. It may at once be true and it may also support the very system that this body seeks both to interrogate and to dismantle. Actualizing the recommendations in the R DAPS report becomes a question at that moment of making extremely hard and I can say those two words in split second and it belies the amount of effort that this is going to take. Actualizing those recommendations becomes a question of making extremely hard, likely intensely creative and possibly unprecedented decisions. But I do want to make it very clear that there's no money is in fact an ideological statement when we are discussing the dismantling of systems of oppression. There's no money means that the money is being used elsewhere and that choices are being made about the dispersal of capital just as they always have been. If saying that there's no money seems reasonable, I'm asking all of us to consider why that is so. The reasonableness of saying there's no money is exactly the thinking that exemplifies systemic disparities. That is the location of systemic racism. That is precisely the location of systemic racism. It's very reasonable. It always has been. That's the problem. I'm asserting then finally that none of this is going to come for free. Justice slave ships and the slaves themselves cost the ruling establishment a great deal of money in the first place. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Thank you very much. Appreciate your work and your presentation. I'd like to open up for questions, comments. Senator Sears also glad to share the chair. I appreciate that, Madam Chair. But I want to appreciate very much the work that's gone into this work. I was tumbling around trying to find files that I have here at home and I have actually found the 1919, the 1918 and the 19, excuse me, 2018, 2019, 2017 reports. I was going to say I'm not that old. No, you're not. I am. But I think that we're, if by progress, we've had these reports before, but this is the first time I remember an actual proposal to start to move towards actually doing something about what we all know is a problem. I don't think it's very hard to sit here and say, well, we don't have a problem. But data informs us of what the problem is. And when we don't have data, we're not even sure where to go. I'll go back to your statement if we set up, is this, did the governor in his effort put in any money to provide for this in his money? No. I do not know. I have not had a chance this week to go and look at that. I asked Mike Bailey to check, Eric Fitzpatrick to check with, I think Eric's here at the meeting today, to check with Joint Fiscal to find out if there is money in the governor's budget. I can follow up JFO in that center, Sears. Yeah, if you would, please. That would be helpful because I like the way you said saying there's no money. You're just saying that it's being spent elsewhere. There's a number of the Senate appropriations committee. I have on occasion said there is no money. And it's a reasonable thing to say. And that's why it's so difficult in some ways when we do this work to make these kinds of statements and not immediately get into a sense of accusation and blame. And I hate that. I hate that. I find that counterproductive because I think most often efforts are coming from a lot of people who have good conscience and good heart, who are working within a system that encourages all of us not to think beyond the reasonable. We like being reasonable. We're all taught we're supposed to be reasonable. When someone raises their voice and starts screaming, there's just, you know, we don't listen to them because they're not being reasonable. So when something is phrased and couched in the sense of something in the reasonable, it's hard to ignore it. It's hard to deny it. It's hard to fight with it. And that I just wanted to put out there that that's something to just be in mind here that we're fighting against in some ways what we've all been taught to do. Appreciate that. Thank you very much. I'll be admitting this is my second time hearing your report and each time it becomes clearer. Hopefully on the third time, I'll more fully understand. Thank you very much. May I ask a question? Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Aetan. So actually, this is the second time I've heard this also, and it does become clearer. So regardless of the amount of money that we're talking about and what might be needed, is there, I know you've talked about creating a new entity. Is there any thought that it might be giving additional resources and data collection resources to the racial equity directors position or perhaps contracting with somebody like UVM who have statistics person and data collection analysts? And so have you thought about that as opposed to creating a whole new entity? We thought about that along with the possibility. And in the report, I'm getting there. Give me a second. The fifth appendix on page 25, information regarding the National Center on Restorative Justice gives you a sense of another organization within the state that is doing work that is like this. And we did believe that there may be a moment of collaboration that would be useful here. Certainly the crime research group who we all know and love now could play a role in this. We are simply asserting, however, that there needs the focus that the report proposes in this new body is really kind of not negotiable because none of these people are untangling data systems. If you were to put in and I'm not remembering the numbers because this conversation came up, if you were to get data systems that all could speak with one another, the cost is it was beyond what I spend in jelly beads a month. I mean, it was pretty terrifying. Multi-millions. And I'm trying to remember how many millions. But multi-millions, that tells you something about how the resources that are required here and the difficulties that are involved in making sense of the communication between the systems. So you may get some collaboration. I would also, when you had mentioned the Executive Director of Racial Equity, I would say that she already doesn't have enough staff to do what she's doing. Yeah, you're right. I didn't mean to imply that we should just give it to her, but maybe that's the place to put the ending. That may well be. That may well be. Thanks. Anybody? Barbara. Thank you. So I look forward to reading the report and probably watching this so I can take advantage of what Senator Sear's advice was about watching them more than once. But I'm wondering about like Code for America has done some amazing work in states in making things that seem like they're going to be millions of dollars or impossible. And I'm just wondering about us exploring, bringing in a resource like them to help weave something together. Yeah. What else did I say? Yeah, great. I was thinking how would I start that? That I was going five steps ahead. Sorry. Yes, ma'am. Again, because it's like we're never, we're always going to say, does it make sense to have, I mean, unfortunately, we should be thinking these things out before we buy new software systems for government. But there are ways that the smart techie people have figured out how to do things without millions of dollars. And that would be great. We certainly, I mean, and you already know this, why am I saying this? We're not into make them spend money. I mean, we're just sort of to impress that this is really, this is hard work. It's involved work. There are experts who do this work. Right. Right. So I'm happy to poke around and see if I can find ways to reach out to people and pass that on. I'm in the more is more mode right now. Okay, great. You know, the better, right? Right. Yeah. Right. Same thing with complex system problems at UVM. You know, I don't know, like, let's tap whoever we can. Right. So thank you. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Thanks. Yeah, first, before I ask my question, I just really want to thank you for the work, the work that you have all done and your conversation with us today, particularly your words contextualizing the appropriation ask, I thought that was really powerful and really important for us to hear both as it relates to, you know, this report and the recommendations here and, and for our broader thinking about, about state budgeting. And also really just want to thank you for the report. I haven't seen like all of these, all of this information brought together and it's already become a really invaluable resource for me that I find myself going back to again and again, like, oh, what do we know about what data is collected in this moment? Well, you know, so I've been really looking at it over the last month and I have one, just one question that might be really too in the weeds, but I'm going to just throw it out there. I was just curious why, so it was great to see the whole array of data and then the slightly, like the subset that you all prioritized. And I had continued just have a question about why sentencing didn't make it into that priority list. And if you have anything you can recollect about that conversation, I'd be curious to hear it. And if not, no worries, I can kind of dig in it, you know, in another way, but I'm just curious about it. Yeah, I'm going to give you a very simple answer. I don't know. I don't know. I can simply tell you that this was a really difficult part. That it was as any process, I guess, a prioritization requires, it's making some very hard choices that are not savory. And that was not in it. There was a lot of discussion between people like Rebecca Turner, Jessica Brown, Judge Greerson, James Pepper, David Cher, I mean, there was a lot, I mean, I was there just because I wanted to feel like I wasn't the kid at the adult table at Thanksgiving. But there was a lot of really intense discussion about how to put those priorities together. I just know that I would want to consult with them before answering that for you. Because I certainly can't on my own. I appreciate that. And I can do some follow up. And like I said, it's been this report has already been a really, really invaluable resource for me. So thank you for your effort. And I know, I know the timetable was an ideal. So extra appreciation for your work. Thank you. Thank you. Anybody else? I don't see any hands, but I give folks a minute to either unmute themselves or jump in. Okay. I think so. Well, thank you so much. I so much appreciate you being with us and for Senate Judiciary joining us in and both Senator Sears and I, based on when we heard your report in Justice Oversight, did put in drafting requests for the Connecticut model. I know others are also interested in this work and have put in requests. So certainly this is a conversation that we will be having. And really look forward to having it with certainly Senate Judiciary Committee. This does really go across probably every committee in the legislature, certainly in the house. It's a very important conversation. And so I thank you. And Senator Sears. Yeah, no, I thank you too. And you know, this is the second time, but I keep learning more each time I hear the report. Yeah, but I do want to emphasize that this focus on the juvenile and adult systems needs to continue. Justice systems will be clear because that's really our purview. That's really where we need to make significant change. And I look forward to working with your group, with the House Judiciary Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, and then ultimately the appropriations. I hope it doesn't get into too many committees. I hope that it becomes something that we have to do and we make choices and you're absolutely right. When we fund things, we make choices. I'm not convinced that, you know, it needs to be five people versus four people or whatever the numbers are. But I think we do have to do a better job of understanding the data because I also put in a bill. I hope you'll take a look at along with Senator Rahm, to look at the disparities you spoke with the school, the prison pipeline. This bill would provide for data collection in schools on expulsion and suspension. I think it's an important step that should be part of this because clearly those studies in Texas particularly have shown that there's this regulation in school discipline and prison. Yeah, thank you. Actually, that's something that House Judiciary has looked at in the past before. Well, in our body, the Education Committee got the bill. Yeah, yeah. Okay, great. Anybody else? Okay, great. Well, thank you again. Thank you so much. And we're ready. Oh, I'm sorry. Senator White, you were waving. You don't have a question. Oh no, I was just waving bye to Eitan. We live in the same town. Yeah, I know, but she's not there today. She skipped out of town on you. Look, I'm in my committee room. Oh, nice. I can't go anywhere else in the building. That's nice. Great. Okay, so then, so we will adjourn this joint here.