 Oh God, good evening, everyone. Welcome to the, I guess it's November, no, it's October. Good God. Meeting of the Racial Disparities Advisory Panel. I will start with introductions. I will do as we normally do and go through my screen and say your name and please introduce yourself when I do. Erin. Good evening, everybody. Erin Jacobson, I use she, her pronouns and I work at the Community Justice Unit of the Attorney General's Office, author. Great. I'm Atan Nassred Longo. I use masculine pronouns. Derek. Hi, good evening, everyone. Derek Mio-Devnek, he, him. I am the representative from the Department of Corrections to the RDAB. Nice to see you folks. Thank you. Hello, Tyler. Good evening, everybody. My name is Tyler Allen. I use he, him pronouns. For the sake of the quorum and other things, I am still DCF's representative on this group. And I think DCF's sole representative tonight, usually Elizabeth is here with me, but she could not be here tonight. She has some other pressing matters. Yeah. Susanna. Hi, everybody. Susanna Davis, racial equity director for the state. She's serious pronouns and a member of the working group. Great. It's good. Oh, no. Judge Morrissey. Hi, thank you. My screen looks so fuzzy. I apologize for that. My name is Mary Morrissey. I'm the judiciary's representative on this panel. I use she, her pronouns. Thank you. Tiffany. Hi there, Tiffany North Reid. Oh, stop. I work with ORE and I support the division of racial justice statistics. Great. She, her. Yes. Laura. Hi, my name is Laura Carter. I use she, her pronouns and I am a data analyst in the division of racial justice statistics within the Office of Racial Equity. Thank you. Sheila. Sheila Linton. She, her, her, hers panel member and community, the Root Social Justice Center. Thank you. Tim. Well, in the Department of State's attorneys and sheriffs, he, he, him pronouns and good to see everybody. Great. Jen Furpo. Hi, Jen Furpo from the Vermont Police Academy. I use she, her pronouns. Lovely to be here. Great. Witchy. Hi, good morning, everyone. My name is Witchy. I do pronounce he, him, is and I am a health equity and data systems consultant and expert appointed to this committee by Susana Davis and Office of Racial Equity. Morning, Witchy. Where are you? I'm just, I'm just trying to see if people are paying attention, you know? Oh, okay. But I thought they were paying attention. That was a really good save, actually. Judge Davenport. Hi, I'm Amy Davenport. I'm a retired Superior Court judge and I sit on the Council for Equitable Youth Justice. Great. Thank you. Representative Arsono. My name is Angela Arsono, representative from Williston and I am on the House Judiciary Committee. So here really to listen in. Thank you. Jennifer Pullman. Hi, I'm Jennifer Pullman. I'm the Executive Director of the Vermont Center for Crime Victim Services. I'm just here to listen and I'm gonna stay off camera because I have been sick all day. So I'll spare you the way that I look. I'm sorry. Pepper, long time. I'm the one who runs the Vermont Crime Victim Service, Center for the Vermont Crime Victim Service. Hello. Hey, James Pepper, I'm the chair of the Canvas Control Board, former member of this committee and just listening in today but I just heard my four-year-old twins come home. So I'm gonna also turn myself on mute and stop my video in case things get all crazy at the Pepper House. And last but not least, Reverend Mark Hughes. Hey, good afternoon or good evening, everyone. And A-Time, welcome back. It is really good to see you. Thank you, Mark. Thank you. I'm the Executive Director of the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance and I'm also the Co-Chair Health Equity Advisory Commission, former member of this panel as well. Glad to be with you all tonight. Great. Welcome, everyone. Announcements are short. It's basically regrets. Don Stevens will not be with us tonight, Chief Don. And neither will, as Tyler said, Elizabeth Morris. She had some family obligations to which she had to attend. So, but she expresses complete confidence in Tyler. To, yeah. Tyler's like, yeah, maybe. But at any event, so that will be great. We'll get there in a moment. Let us begin with the minutes that were sent out from the last meeting, September 2023. Any discussion, addenda, errata, anything that needs to be discussed? No? Okay. Seeing none, then shall we move on to a vote? Somebody wanna move? I move to approve. Last meeting's agenda. Minutes. Great, thank you. I can't understand. Wonderful, seconded. Therefore, all in favor, please signify by some interesting way. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Got it. All opposed? All abstaining. Aye. Okay, got it. Thank you, but the minutes have passed as submitted. Thank you. Moving right along, we're gonna get onto the presentations and the discussions, which is really the body of the meeting. Tyler, we start with you, I guess, with the Juvenile Justice Subcommittee. You'll all recall from the note that I sent out with the agenda and the whatever they're called, minutes. We need to start pivoting to writing. So I really want everyone to start going, you know, like, here's a bullet point we're gonna bring up. Here's a bullet, I mean, even if there's like not a paragraph attached to it, I just wanna start, this has got to, we've gotta start sketching it out. This is where, for those of you who are around in 2019, I turn into the professor that I really am and it gets scary. So Tyler, the stage is yours. Well, thank you, Aton. I will do my level best as Elizabeth has expressed her confidence. But you know, that we've been working actually pretty closely together on this conversations. We've had several of the Juvenile Justice Subcommittee has met several times in different variations. That subcommittee being myself, Elizabeth Morris and Rebecca Turner, who I'm kind of sad to see is not here right now. She might be joining at some point. Aton, we did have the fortune of meeting with you. I think Rachel Edens was in that conversation too, once where we went through a lot of the substance of this. So, and that was helpful for us in terms of organizing this. I'll start off with an apology. I did not put this into paragraph written form or even bullet points that we can start with writing, but we did put it into a PowerPoint. I think the idea was to be kind of digestible so that we could show the data, we could walk through it. I'll be jotting down notes as I kind of run through this and we have conversation and then I can easily turn that into kind of either narrative or prose form, however you all prefer it, they can go into a report. So I think getting the substance of it in a visual format was what we thought would be most helpful. So if it's okay, I'm not actually super familiar, oh, there's share screen. I'm not as Zoom comfortable, but I'm gonna give a shot. Ooh, all right. Can you all see that? Can you see? Excellent, I will put it in the, all right. Wow. Look at this, give subtitles a try, is that something you all are seeing? I don't want, all right, there we go. It says RJAP JJ subcommittee. There we go, so that's us. We'll start it out with the kind of one of the primary things, I don't know if it's not framed in this presentation as recommendations, it's more the conversation we've been having. And it is for you all to think about, I think depending on how this group hears this information and where the interest is, we can make decisions on whether or not we wanna write this out as recommendations. But the starting point is the discussion of what the minimum age of juvenile court jurisdiction is. We're talking about juvenile court, of course we're talking about family court, but juvenile court is more understandable. This is referring to delinquencies. So Vermont has a minimum age of juvenile court jurisdiction of 10. So kids under the age of 10 years old cannot be charged in the family court as a delinquent. There is one carve out exception to that, that carve out exception being murder. As you can imagine, it is very rare that a youth, a child under the age of 10 would be charged with murder and it would be exceptionally rare to kind of prove that that would be a murder. It's very unlikely, but that's the only carve out in my understanding. Beyond that, 10 is the minimum. There was conversation last session to raise this to 12 years old. And the bill that passed that had other elements to it, but that was one of the elements in it of what is about raising the minimum age of juvenile jurisdiction to 12. And so I'm glad Judge Davenport is here with us today. We actually had some of this conversation this morning in a different meeting, but the Council for Equitable Youth Justice has supported this increase. It is something we still have talked about and we're still thinking about. I imagine it will be something that the legislature is looking at again this year. And the objective here for the purpose of this presentation is to have an understanding of what the RADAPS stance is and what we would like to do. Let's see. Great. So this is the way the country looks. I think I misspoke to you at 1.8 ton. I had said the majority of the country is ahead of Vermont in this. I was mistaken in this. This shows kind of a color coding of where the country is at. It looks like about half the country doesn't have a minimum age of delinquency jurisdiction. And then you'll see the different ages you have those that looks like Florida has age seven, there are certain carve outs, then Washington age eight with certain carve outs. And then there's a handful, age 10s and those are the yellow ones. Nebraska's at age 11, there are no carve outs on those. We are in the category along with the other yellow polka dotted ones, whereas age 10 where we have the one carve out for murder. And then some other states around us, Connecticut is one that's kind of similar. We are often fairly close in policy to Connecticut. They're also at age 10, but New York, you'll notice New York and Massachusetts who are often aligned with in terms of similar matters. They are at age 12, either with a carve out in the case of New York. Also Utah and California, Massachusetts is strictly at age 12. So any young person under the age of 12 cannot have a delinquency in that state. New Hampshire is along with, it looks like Maryland at age 13, so New Hampshire and they have carve outs built into that. So that's kind of where the country sits. We're probably in the top part of that if you're looking at it from the perspective of we have protections for some youth, but we're certainly not aligned at present with some of the states that we most closely kind of connect to on similar matters like Massachusetts, New Hampshire. Witchie has a question. Oh, go ahead, Witchie. Thank you, Ethan. My question is what kind of research has been found on benefits and detriments to children being incarcerated with an age variance in that research? I'm probably, I don't know if there's anybody from the crime research group on tonight that I don't think I heard anybody. I don't know that I could speak to what research is available, but I can speak to generally as we're taking a carceral approach with young people is challenging to obtain kind of good results. I could speak to the older youth because I have followed the raise the age initiative when we're talking kids on the older end of the spectrum. And a lot of that research supports the idea when you incarcerate kids who are otherwise developing, you actually are more likely to solidify criminogenic behaviors. So often you have factors that they're more likely to become entrenched factors. And I see Judge Davenport just raised her hand, so I'm gonna let her chime in too because I know she has some thoughts on this. But that's the general idea that we've been going with was if you're incarcerating kids that still have a developing brain, they're more likely to become entrenched in the behavioral patterns you're looking to move them away from or have them move away from. And in some cases doing nothing at all is better than overreacting or in many cases with a juvenile brain. So I'd move that to Amy to see what you'd like to add to that. I would just add the numbers are incredibly small for looking at, we have looked at the data, the Council President of Youth Justice has looked at the data for charges that have been brought against 10, 11, and even 12 year olds. And the numbers are really, really small. So it's very hard to draw, and I expect the same is true for a lot of states, it's really hard to draw conclusions from those numbers. But if you think about many of the offenses for which one might be charged, they include an intent factor or an intent element, very hard to prove intent when you're talking about a 10, 11, even a 12 year old actually, but certainly a 10 and 11 year old. So there's not a lot of data and we don't really have national data on, for example, Florida, if you notice that Florida is age seven with carve outs for lower than that, I don't know what their data is about what happens to the kid, how many kids actually ever get charged and how many of those kids ever end up in a secure facility. They, I mean, that's the other part of your question really is what happens to those kids when they're in a secure facility. Given that young age, the likelihood that they're gonna go to a secure facility even to start with, even if the minimum age was, even if they met the minimum age requirement and there was a conviction, you know, there was a disposition unlikely that they're gonna go to a secure facility because of their young age and because of the recognition of how detrimental it can be. Thank you, Judge. And I do wanna share that we have some data slides coming up too. So you all be able to see some of that. Yeah, I appreciate the comments. I'll just say a few bits of things that stood out to me and let you carry on with either other questions or the presentation. The first one is, cause I kind of had a counter question to your comment, Tyler, about the fact that, you know, that research shows that if you're incarcerating developing brains that kind of solidifies the behavior and recognizing the fact that in modern science it's understood that brains are still developing till about 27 years old. So just really putting that into perspective but to Judge Davenport's point of proving intention that sort of balances out, I think that or counteracts that argument. I also wanna note about juvenile justice system and just thinking about the reinforcing of behavior and thinking about the disparities within our adult incarceration system and remembering that, you know, we do still have those or else in school, right? We are BIPOC population skews younger. So just things to think about that part into my brain that I thought I should share into the space. Thank you. I appreciate your sharing that, Wichita. And I would say, honestly, your first point, I don't see that as a counter point. I'm agreeing with you on that, that the developing, you know, brains do continue to develop in many ways they continue to develop throughout life, but there is a distinct difference up to 25, 27 years old. And I absolutely agree with you. So I think as you get younger, it only becomes more true in my opinion and view of that. So thank you. I think those are excellent points and I appreciate you're bringing it up. And this is really focused on just how we're talking about those younger youth with this first part of it. Here's some of the data. These are- One minute, Tyler. Let me- Yeah. There's one question I think before we go to the slide. Sheila. Thank you, Aitan, appreciate that. So I had a similar sort of comments to Wichita a little bit. I was just sort of curious. I was also going to mention about the brain developing until about the age of 25 and wondering if there is specific research of brain development around intent. Like, you know, does intent in brain research start developing at the age of 10? Or does it start at three years old? Or does it start from birth? Like, why I'm kind of curious since we're talking about data and statistics and we're talking about the brain development, then I would be like, then, oh, then nobody should be charged 25 and under, right? If the brain's still really developing, but then there's this caveat of this intent or intentionality. And I'm sort of curious if anybody has some knowledge specifically around brain development and intent. And then the other question I had was around the racial makeup of those other states and what is the racial makeup of those other states and why they may have a lower number versus a higher number and how those sort of coincide with each other and is it disproportionate or not disproportionate but is it reflected in a way of sort of what I think which he was alluding to one of the things he was saying was that, you know in different areas of populations are racially different. And so seven in Florida, maybe, you know if it's more racially diverse might be a reason why that has a lower number than let's say something like I'm not reading the thing but something that doesn't. So I just have some curiosity around those two things. I would, I would certainly, I appreciate those comments too, Sheila. I think I'm not an expert in this arena and I don't know what the makeup is across those states. I will say that the intent question, well before getting to the other states, I'll talk about, I think the conversation of what Judge Davenport was talking about with regard to intent is kind of a legal distinction. It's a standard that a judge needs to find in order to issue finding or issue ruling. So if you have a charge type you have to prove that A, this person did this and this person did this with intention. And I think at some point that's a judgment. I don't know quite what the data is around connecting the legal, the law of that and how a judiciary, any judiciary views intent and where that's grounded in science or not. I don't know Judge Davenport if you have any insight to that but it's a fascinating question. You're muted. Yeah. Thanks, sorry. I can give you an example of a case that I had involving a 10 year old, I think she was 10 years old, maybe 11 years old girl who was charged with assault because she threw a toy truck, a small toy truck. She threw it at her brother who was three. That charge got dismissed because a 10 year old can't really form the intent to harm in the same way that an adult would form an intent to harm. I think the thing to understand about the development of the brain is that they're stages to that. And yeah, maybe a 16 or 17 year old could understand intent to harm the three year old by throwing the truck. But a 10 year old probably isn't developmentally able to do that. So I think that, yes, we can talk about development but development comes in stages and we know that the developmental stage of a 10 year old is way, you know, they're just on a spectrum. It's on a spectrum and that there's a big difference between the developmental stage of a 10 year old and the developmental stage of a 16 year old, for example, a 16 year old doesn't have a fully developed brain, that's true. But it is certainly more developed than the 10 year olds. So I think that, and Tyler's right that the intent factor, that's just an element of a lot of crimes is that they have to have an intent to actually harm. Okay. I guess to Sheila's point and your comments, Judge Davenport, is that if it's a judgment call, right, we're leaving that judgment to the judge, right? And not all judges will think the same. So I think part of maybe what Sheila's trying to get out and Sheila correct me if I'm wrong is that our job as a legal advisory board is to say, right, at 10 years old you do not have the development of intent and therefore you should not. Right, versus leaving it up to the bias of whatever person is judging that act and judging the kid. Right, although the judge may well be informed by expert opinion on the subject. I mean, it's not like you're totally, that was my case. I think I dismissed it without even going to the lengths of having an evidentiary hearing about whether this child could have had the intent or not. I just suggested that maybe this wasn't the right way to approach things and they followed my suggestions that I'm happy to say, but you could theoretically, if it was really a sticking point between the attorney, the state's attorney and the attorney for the child, you could very easily end up with a evidentiary hearing where you heard from psychologists who gave expert opinion about the intent. So it's not just a total conclusion by the judge based on their own knowledge. Yeah, that was the other thing I was thinking is which he was framing that question was, there is subjectivity to human development to child development. We all develop differently in different ways too, which is why there is a case by case element to this. But I think the purpose of this conversation is to step back a little and say, generally speaking, when we're talking about 10 and 11 year olds, intent is really difficult to prove on any of these and how many kids are we really talking about and who are we really talking about? And that's what I was hoping to get to with some of these data slides. Why don't you just go ahead Tyler? So I'll move us into this slide. This is DCF data. You'll see these are the number of cases. These are ages 10 through 12. So this isn't just 10 and 11 year olds with that bill had proposed, but it also includes 12 year olds. And these are cases that actually are in DCF system. Either they have a delinquency, those DCs, these are delinquent cases in our custody. Those DP cases are delinquencies that are on probation only. They're not in DCF's custody. And those DYs are delinquencies that are pending a petition. So they're gonna go one way or the other. So the grand total in all of those years of how many cases, and this is duplicated data, is 21 cases that we're talking about of DCF cases. And some of those might be cases that spanned over years, so counted twice, so on and so forth. So I guess what I'm pointing to is these are small numbers that actually make it to DCF. And the next slide will get us one degree. You know, there will be before DCF, this is court data. These are the number of juvenile cases filed. Now this data we were able to extract and break apart by race. And so that's where it becomes particularly meaningful for this group to me. Small numbers, we're talking about 43 cases total between 10, 11 and 12 year olds. We've included 12 year olds in this data set just because we included that in the last slide too. And you'll notice it jumps up quite a bit when we're talking about 12 year olds. There's 31 cases there as opposed to 11, 11 year olds, 110 year olds. And I think this is just for the last year. So this is a much smaller number of cases. One of the things that occurred to me as I was looking at the slide, and Judge Morris, I'd love to get to your question just a moment, but I wanna get this thought out is these are actually filed cases. This isn't factoring in kids who might have an intervention with a law enforcement officer or something where the state's attorney never files a petition. This doesn't get to the point of case. There might have been a traumatic experience where there is a law enforcement interaction that never turns into a case. And we're not seeing any of those data. We're not seeing the number of youth for example, arrested for a quote unquote delinquency. But these are relatively small numbers. And then before I get to the questions I just wanted to show the breakdown of how we break it down. When we're looking at those 11 year olds in the state of Vermont, we had five white 11 year olds or five charges. I shouldn't say they're distinct. I think these are distinct cases, not distinct individuals. So there might be some that have repeated charges attached to them, which is a whole nother conversation, but equal amounts white and black 11 year olds that were charged. And then we have an unavailable blank column, which again is its own conversation. So I see, Judge Morris, you put your hand down but I'm hoping that you still have a question or a thought you'd like to talk. My question was what you just barely raised was if it's cases or individuals. So looking at this, for example, it could have been one black 11 year old and one white 11 year old who committed five crimes together. Right, I mean, so that was, and you just answered that question about whether or not it was charged or individuals. So that was my question. So thank you. You're welcome. And I will say that when we tried to, we didn't, the data we had, we didn't have too much identifying information but we tried to take an educated guess at it. In this case, I think it was one black individual with multiple charge types and then all separate white individuals for the others. So again, that raises questions of do we have one young person who is really reckless and wild or has really attracted the attention of law enforcement in the community or the ire of the local charging, but we don't know, we don't know that data, but that also, those also raised questions. And I think for us, there is some merit to this idea while this N is so small, these numbers, you can't do really meaningful analysis with numbers this small. It does seem to suggest at least anecdotally that there is a disproportionate response when we're talking to youth of color. And I think that tracks with what we know nationally of our kind of American propensity to adultify youth of color more than white youth. And so again, I don't, I can't say that from a evidence-based science perspective but it seems to be aligned with some of that thinking. Witchie. I got three questions. Sorry. The first question is, do we know if when the data was collected that they were allowed to click multiracial as a choice? I am not sure about that. This is from the, I think it's called the, somebody else on this might know better, but it's the 101. Is it the form 101 that's filled out? And I think that it's left blank in situations. It's not required that it's completed. We actually have a slide that touches on this and then it's lighter too. All right. There is no multiracial, there is no multiracial option. It's white, black, Asian, but there's no multiracial. Currently there's no multiracial option in the court data. Okay, that's good and interesting to note. The second question is, do we know the proportion to the amount of children that are in Vermont? So like, you know, 26 out of blank white children and five out of blank black children. We haven't looked at the data in that way. And again, these are cases filed, not individual children. So we probably couldn't do that with these data. Got it. Yeah, cause I think that would give us also like an idea if the disparity is similar to the adult court. And the other thing that I want to mention is like, because these are cases and not individuals, I don't know if this is what Judge Morphew was trying to get at, I'm sorry if you were and I'm repeating, but I guess this doesn't tell us how many juvenile individuals were charged as adults, right? None of these would have been charged as adults. They couldn't be. I believe, yeah, they couldn't be at the age as they are. They couldn't be at that age. Oh, at that age, yes, yes. Okay, thank you, I'm sorry, thank you. Yep, yep. And again, these numbers are quite, quite small. So it's drawing too many conclusions about how this lines up to everything. It would be probably statistically impossible to get there with such a small N, but it does tell us something about communities. I also, the thought I had and I'll go back to what I said earlier is we're not talking about interventions pre-filing a case. So all along between the case being filed and the quote unquote delinquency occurring, there are avenues by which they could be diverted, right? Like they could, the law enforcement officer can say, I'm gonna not respond to this in this way. I'm gonna take this kid home or I'm gonna give him a stern finger wagging and move past, a state's attorney could get it and decide I'm not gonna file for this because it's gonna be very unlikely to prove it. So I'm just gonna drop this at this point. So we don't know what's happening in any level of those interventions here. We just know what the court actually gets with these. So there could be more if we were to, for example, raise the age of minimum jurisdiction, family court jurisdiction, there could be a broader impact in that arena when you have law enforcement that says, I can't charge this youth at this age, right? So there might be an impact there too, which I can't speak to, I don't have those data. Tim. Hey there, and sorry, my internet is shaky, so I'm just gonna leave my camera off. And just because you brought it up again, Tyler, I wanted to just pause on that for a second because what you're talking about is the improvisational space between contact with law enforcement or an initial kind of report or someone calling the police because police respond to calls, but also are sometimes embedded in schools as well. It sort of depends looking at this population. We're not talking about the high school population, so we're talking about potentially a call that an officer receives, as opposed to a resource officer in a high school unless it's a K through 12, but you're talking about a really interesting space, which is, you're correct, it could be an on-call deputy getting a call, deputy state's attorney in the middle of the night from an officer about someone in this age range and they have a discussion. Oh yes, actually that family is going through tremendous upheaval right now for this reason, and the state's attorney is talking to that officer, please do not prepare anything on this case. In fact, there's a pending, and this is a larger discussion, there's a pending chins proceeding happening with this matter, which complicates things certainly, but what you're talking about is a really interesting space that's hard to capture data because part of the space that you're in is that you're diverting, not even formally, you're actually diverting through this informal means and therefore there's a benefit to not having a paper trail because a paper trail later needs to be expunged, sealed, deleted, et cetera. So there's this interesting space that you're talking about, I'm really happy you dwelled on it because it's an intangible that I often hear about from our folks out in the field and from law enforcement officers, but the other thing I'll say is, I had a case where there was a person that was in this age range involving a firearm and we decided to do an extremist protection order kind of on the household, essentially where the firearm was, instead of filing a juvenile petition because it really was this larger issue of access to firearms and not an issue with the individual child. So I appreciate this presentation and wanted to paint some of the picture that I've interacted with. Okay, Reverend Hughes. Thanks, Etan. Tyler, I'm wondering with the data that we're looking at, it sounds like there's something that's largely being made that the youth who are having juvenile cases filed against them that the sole point of entry is law enforcement. Is, would it be correct to assume that with the Department of Children and Family being involved, say for example, truancy or, I don't know, it just, I don't know the process, so my first question is, are there other points of entry? This, I want to be clear, these are specifically referring to delinquency cases. So this would be what with a juvenile would be considered a criminal act. It's a delinquent act. DCF works with these families, as Tim was just talking about, through a Chin's direction. Now, Chin's is different. Like that's working through the child welfare perspective and Chin's D would be a truancy case. Chin's C would be a beyond control of parent case. But the kind of differentiation there is we are working with the family from that child welfare perspective, which is different from delinquency. These are specifically delinquencies. Okay, so just, sorry to hold everything up with the education here. So a Chin's would not ever be referred to juvenile? Well, it's the same court. Family court will see the same. So if you have abuse or neglect, a family court will see over that, but there's no age of minimum jurisdiction for that. You could have a newborn who is, within the realm of the family court for purposes of child welfare, right? If there's evidence of abuse or neglect or risk of, that's a different avenue into child welfare. This is specifically talking about delinquency. Okay, thanks for that. My second question is, is the RDAP, and this is maybe a broader question, maybe not just for you, but the larger group is the, I'm assuming that the RDAP is taking into consideration, taking this into consideration in light of the fact that by raising the age from 10, maybe upwards 12, 13, something like that, perhaps it would reduce the disparities in the system. It sounds as though, basically in this conversation that we're not convinced that disparities are evident at this point with this data, but I wonder if that's kind of overly objective. I think what we're saying kind of on principle here is though these numbers are too small to say that there is statistical evidence that suggests this rate of disproportionality, these data do track along with what we know nationally about how we work with youth of color compared to white youth in terms of what I said before about adultifying are we looking at a behavior as kids being rough with each other or kids being naughty or whatever and they need a stern talking to or are we looking at them as a criminal? I don't think these data will tell us clearly statistically, yes this, no that, but what we can say is raising to include this population would feels like it certainly would address some of what we see as disparity working with the younger populations. And Rebecca, I'm glad you've joined us here too because you're on this work group as well and I'm eager to hear your thoughts. Hi Tyler, hi everyone. Sorry to miss the introductions and come late. I just showed up 10 minutes ago so I won't be the obnoxious one and ask questions when I haven't seen the presentation but I'm hoping Tyler, can you share these slides or some now with the group so I can catch up? I haven't seen these numbers. I am on the subcommittee but I haven't had a chance to preview this presentation. And I might need to, there's not that many slides. This is really the first significant number slide we're looking at that you're looking at. The others have been mostly words and it was the stuff we talked about about generally speaking is the RDAP comfortable with the idea of raising the age of minimum jurisdiction. I would add then this comment to give some perspective. I hear I've heard you mention that these numbers are so small to be, I think I don't know what you said but the takeaway is perhaps that we can't take anything too much to heart because these numbers are so small. I've heard that shared in different contexts with this group and in other places but as I understand these numbers relating to whether or not there are racial disparities in our juvenile delinquency system, I understand that it is of significance that you look at the number of times this happens year after year after year after year and that while any given dropdown of a year may show small numbers whether these are individuals and are each individual cases but people when you look at over time and okay, thanks. That's the one I was wondering, Tyler if you talked about, but in other contexts, not just looking at the 10 to 12, I understand you sharing with the group, Tyler, that what we suspect is that racial disparities exist here too in Vermont juvenile delinquency system actually isn't I think a suspicion, I think it's been confirmed by the statistical likelihood that this could have happened and be reflected year after year after year even with these small numbers but please correct me if I'm wrong. I mean, I think I'm not an evaluator. I think I would probably want a researcher to answer that question. We have some researchers on the call they could get into that and when I refer to statistical significance though, I would say statistical significance is not the same thing as significance. One life is significant. So if we're looking at a number of one, it is still significant to me if we're looking at in terms of statistically significant that's a technical term, that's a scientific term that these numbers are, it's challenging when you have small numbers to have that finding but if you look at it over years, I think we certainly can see trends. I think we can certainly see this and I don't think anybody's really arguing that there is the capacity for disparity or injustice in these numbers and what I guess I'm also saying is I fairly comfortable with the idea that we should be responding differently to 10 and 11 year olds than we would be responding to older youth or adults. It seems to me quite possible to make a case in the report that's very nuanced that makes a distinction between something that is absolutely probative and something that is strongly suggestive based on other data and then to, I'm just off the top of my head folks so it's not gonna be real baked here but something to the effect of that analysis, that kind of work needs to be done before this is bought wholesale or whatever you wanna say but something like that does seem possible to me rather than necessarily coming up with a firm and fast answer that solves everything. I mean, I think this conversation is set to happen in front of the legislature this year that's my guess and I think it would probably behoove the RDAP to have a stance on it if we're able to get to that conclusion and that doesn't necessarily need to be grounded in a detailed bit of science and research that's done like what we know, what we believe to be true, what we know to be true generally and the trends we're looking for is this something we can get behind in support. I'll move on, I only have a slide or two left. I wanna draw everybody's attention to the unavailable slash blank column. These are cases where we didn't identify what the race of the youth that was being arrested in and those are lower, they're none at 10, one at 11 and then we jump up to eight. So while we see there were 20 white youth and zero black youth at the age of 12, there were eight youth that we did not identify what race they were. And it seems to me unlikely that those would be white youth but again, we can't from the scientific perspective make the assumption that these are black youth or Asian youth or Latino youth but it raises the question of what do we do with that data gap? And I know this report isn't about data specifically but that's a little bit of what we wanted to talk about also is when we're talking about race and ethnicity data requirements, I guess you can read, I'll kind of just read to you all but for years, more than 20% of the judiciary race and ethnicity data is in that category of unknown. That's a huge proportion of the people that are going in through the court system that are blank. The judiciary gets this data through the law enforcement record that form 101 I mentioned early, it's filed with the state's attorney, the state's attorney doesn't necessarily meet with his family prior to. I think what's on that or not on that is kind of what passes through up to the court level and that I think we discussed this a year or so ago about one of the limitations of the court data is there's this whole column of unknown and that's very problematic to us because it makes it really challenging to say how significant disparity would be because of this kind of ambiguous area. So the Council for Equitable Youth Justice looking into is can there be a requirement that that data is filled out? And that actually brings up the last questions for us about what is the best practice for gathering race and ethnicity data in incidents where youths are arrested? And so we've talked before about the conversation you have some youth or some folks who are saying we need to know the race of the youth or the race of the person who is affected here and that needs to come out of their report that comes from them. There's another perspective on that is if we're looking to understand where racism is impacting the system we need to be understanding the perception of the law enforcement in this case member is it what's their perception of who they're interacting with? And so, and then the other question that comes up is where is it appropriate to be asking a person to divulge how they identify? Do they identify as what race? Particularly during an engagement or experience that may be traumatizing or traumatic. So when should we be asking that question? And it's a little bit of a general out there where do we stand? What is the data we want? I mean, in some ways, ideally we want it all. And before I get to your question, which I just wanted to share how the child welfare side of DCF is kind of grappling with that question. Just this summer we've changed our centralized intake approach and this is the hotline. So when somebody gets involved with child welfare it's very often that a mandated reporter or somebody else will call the hotline and say I have concern about this family and explain what their concern is and then we make a determination does this get screened out? Does this warrant an investigation? What do we do? How do we respond to that? And in that we've made a concerted effort to say we are going to collect more race data at that point because we want to understand not just who we're working with and how we can work with them better but we also want to understand who is calling this in and why. And so the questions we have and here we mentioned there's two data points what is the perception of the person that we may end up working with? If we work with that family we find out from their perception what their identified race is but we're also gathering the data point of how does the mandated reporter identify the race of this family and we'll ask specific questions about country of origin. There's more than that and if you actually go if you look up reporting in Vermont reporting the hotline in Vermont or whatever child welfare reporting in Vermont you'll see on that it lists out the questions that our workers will ask and one of those questions is what is the race of the reporter? Which is beyond what I think is happening elsewhere but really that is to get at the question of where is the racism in our system? Where like what is baked in already? It's not just about understanding how do I culturally work with this one family with the most information I have? So that's another question to kind of lob out the group what is the interest of the group in terms of data collection for that? Which I, Judge Davenport I wanted to make sure to honor the hand that witchy had up unless you want to speak something to that. This is just to add to what you've just said what we know about law but what we understand about the law enforcement data is that if the child, the juvenile is not taken to the police station so they're just cited. They have an interaction with the law enforcement officer and then they get a citation. Then what we're getting, if we're getting anything then what we're getting is the law enforcement officer's perception of the race but if it's a more serious offense and the youth is actually taken to the police station then the youth is asked to self identify what race they are. So to the degree we have any data on race it's mixed, it's a mixed bag, it's perception if the youth didn't go to the police station but if they did go to the police station then it may be a self identification. Thank you for that clarification. Witchy, did you still have a comment? Yeah, can you hear me? Yes. Great. So one of the things that sort of, and it's interesting I've had this conversation with Eitan recently for the Criminal Justice Committee or I don't know how they're called but talking about data that's being collected and what we're actually collecting, right? The perception versus self identification so I'm very happy that this is the conversation we're having and acknowledging what it is that we're gathering. I further wanna ask if the folks are asking race and ethnicity data one of the things that we need to make sure is that the people asking are trained on why are we asking it? How do you ask that? How do you coach someone right that? Especially if you're a white person asking a person of color like what's your race and ethnicity and you're like why do you want that info, right? So really thinking about how are we training our folks to ask for this information? So people know that we're trying to eliminate disparities within race and not just asking just to ask. I just, let me point out here also that in this report we're not gonna get that far into the weeds with this that when this is sort of suggestive as were the two reports that we did about that eventually resulted in the division. It is suggestive of directions that the legislature ought to go in as far as we're concerned. These questions around the details are the sorts of things that get worked out in testimony or when they come back to us and I say this with a slight amount of humor, when they come back to us and go gosh, we'd love a rather report this summer or something of that nature. So just bear that in mind here that we don't have to have this completely worked out to the nth degree. And if you remember what we went through doing that for the division, it took two years. We don't have two years for this. So this is gonna be broad strokes, broad strokes. That's all. Just wanted to put that out there. Thank you. Thank you for just clarifying that scope, I appreciate it. Yeah, I don't mean to like, well, I don't mean to stop conversation but I also need to get us focused on the task at hand as well. So that's all. I could probably stop sharing at this point. I'm at the end of this and certainly would entertain any conversation but I think the guidance we were looking for is would we like this framed in what we write up for the report as a recommendation from the RDAP to raise the age of minimum jurisdiction to make a recommendation on how race data is gathered, what's the comfort, what comes up for people out of this? Rich, Wischie, you first. I mean, I would love for someone else to go first. Can someone go first? Rebecca. Hi, I'm sorry to again be a little late to this part of the meeting. And I wanted to say thanks, Tyler, for pulling the thoughts together and of what our subcommittee talked about in terms of what I'm hearing you share tonight, which is our two primary areas. We could make broad-based recommendations a time, your point noted just before, which is do we agree that raising the age? And Tyler, I don't know if you presented here specific age from 10 to what, I don't know. Yes, but based on the limited data that we do have, there is a trend of how this is connecting to racial disparities and disparate outcomes for youth of color and that raising the age of juvenile jurisdiction from 10 to 12, I think was 13. I don't remember the age that we've talked about. I think those details, I'm not sure we hammered out. But the bottom line in terms of it is that the Defender General's Office certainly supported that. The frustration, as you could see from the numbers, my frustration from seeing those numbers that Tyler presented is that how impactful is that recommendation overall in a system where there are many more youth who are suffering from racial disparities, right? And spare that impact from the juvenile criminal justice system, right? Here we were trying to drop in on the specific target. And again, Tyler, I don't know if you talked about the justification for why the raise the age. We're talking about raise the age of minimum jurisdiction when I presented here. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, just generally speaking, I did speak to like, this is the trend, this is what we see nationally. This is how we interact with youth and young people in general. We had a conversation around what is intent when applied to a delinquent behavior. And it's very hard to argue that an 11-year-old is displaying intent with a certain type of crime when they're only 11 years old. And developmentally, it's unlikely that they would be able to have intent to do murder someone or intent to whatever the charge type we're talking about. And in most cases, what these charges seem to be are like fighting, like kids fighting on the corner or something like that. And how are we interacting with those kids? Public disorderly sort of stuff. And so again, the longest short of it is that this is low-hanging food in terms of an easy recommendation to get behind because as Tyler said, this is the rest, I don't know how many, but the majority, I think, Tyler, is this right? Well, the other jurisdictions out there are already there. I don't, I would say- No, I was wrong about that, actually. I shared a map as part of it and it founds out about half the country doesn't have any minimum age of jurisdiction. We're in the top quarter of it, but we're not matched to like New York, we're not matched to New Hampshire, Massachusetts, other New England states are at 12 or in the case of New Hampshire, 13. Okay, so thanks for that clarification. So there was that overall. And then in terms of if I can summarize the data component recommendation, again, without trying to present a proposal that's too much in the weeds because we certainly don't want to relive the experience we worked on previously. But I think the overall theme on that is, A, I would hope we could get around a recommendation that underscores our further desire for the need for accurate data that reflects whether there's racial, no, the extent of racial disparities in the systems and how to go about addressing it. I think the issue about perception, we have consistency, right? How to enforce it and what kind of data to collect, self-identified or perception. I would love if we can get some discussion and agreement on some of that. I don't think that's too far in the weeds, but actually critical. I got all excited. I mean, Grant's not here, he's taking minutes from what Oracle Media is gonna put up. But I'm like, I got all excited when you were talking, Rebecca, because I was like, oh my God, this is it. This is it. This is what we need to be writing down. This is exactly what we need to be writing down because you were capturing what we know, what we don't know and that the need, and then also what we need to do, what correct action as we view it would be. And that's why I was all excited when you were talking because you were like summing up, even though you weren't here the whole time, you were summing up basically the entire conversation for the last 45, 50 minutes. Witchy, I'm sorry, go ahead. No, I really appreciate Rebecca going first. I think you covered basically a lot of my own insights. I personally would definitely vote for a recommendation with an and in it. I think it's important to recognize that when we talk about the Lincoln behavior and us as a society, how we deal with it, I think it's important to note that if we take away from the juvenile justice system, then we're putting more burden on our educators, on our caregivers, on our mental health systems, which are already strained. So I would wanna make a note that as we, for the right reasons, try to raise the age that we need to also make sure that resources are provided to transition and catch these folks who are the kids that are needing care outside of the justice system. And I just wanted to make a note. And Rebecca, I'm gonna try if you touched on this or not, my ADHD kicked in a little bit. But I want to note that I don't think there's enough information to prove that there are racial disparities. We can, and I think that's big, thank you. Tyler, do you feel from this discussion, you look a little frazzled. Let me, okay. Do you feel that there's enough from this discussion that you can draft a paragraph that we can then attack and pull apart and put back together? Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, I mean, unless I'm hearing somebody with kind of a distinct saying, no, this isn't a good idea. But I don't think we should take this path. Then I think we can kind of, we can put it, and then we'll pick it apart once I put it into writing. Yeah, I mean, we're gonna make sure people have the picture. Yeah, sure, sure. I mean, we're gonna pick the whole thing apart. So I, if you've got that, great. I could do that. We could do that. Elizabeth will help me. I'd like to hear from anyone else who's got something they feel that needs to be plugged in here. You've heard the discussion. You've heard the issues that Rebecca's raised. Witchie. There we go again. I just wanna, and maybe that's not for this meeting, it's for the next, but wanna get a clarification on what process we have for sharing, editing, reviewing, commenting. Yeah. Witchie, you always ask the questions that make me wanna shoot myself. Now I'm kidding. We have been using SharePoint, but as everyone knows, people like Singh have been having a horrible time with SharePoint. If Singh is having a hard time with SharePoint, there's just a problem with SharePoint, okay? That's just my feeling about Singh's abilities and that program. So we have been going back and forth and back and forth about putting these up on Google Docs. There are issues because a procedure, Erin knows this far better than I do, but that conversation, well, no. That situation needs to be resolved and will be in short order. Thank you. Okay. Anyone else? Sheila, are you good with what we've done so far? I'm interested in seeing what the mock-up's gonna look like, I don't know which way I'm leaving or going. I think it's an interesting conversation and like I said, I had those questions and so I'm just interested in the conversation that we'll have with each other. Okay, okay. Then let's get to the drafting. Let's get to the drafting because it's gonna move us to another level of conversation. Thank you, Sheila. And great. Thank you, Tyler. That was a lot of work. Appreciate it. You're welcome. It's a pleasure to do, I mean, because it's where the needle, we have to find places we can move the needle. Right, right, exactly. So, okay. Next, we will, if no one has an objection, we move on to the second look subcommittee and that would be our friend, Rebecca. Oh, okay. And Erin is here as well, who's on second look committee. And let me see if I see anyone else on that committee here as well. Ray De Ton and Witchie. I know that you have also joined. So I will, I see on the agenda, I'm to share an overview and update, but do you want something a little more focused in terms of the context of the report too, or? I would hope so, yes. Okay, okay. Let me say this. We do not at this time as a subcommittee, we have not yet landed on specific proposals to suggest to the panel as a whole. I think that's accurate to say as to what we should put in the report. So put that out there right from the beginning. So it won't be like Tyler's presentation on the Chief Justice Subcommittee. But here's the update because we are not also just twiddling our thumbs. The update is we have some materials before us comparing various second look legislation that's passed around the country. Again, second look laws are laws that provide statutory ability to revisit sentences imposed after certain threshold criteria is met. There's laws in place that are passed by Congress. There are, there's DC legislation that we're looking at. We're looking comparing to California, Illinois, and Louisiana. We are looking at model second look legislation that that's come out from the National Station Criminal Defense Lawyers. And of course, we have the big anchor which we're seeing this in the context of which is Bill S-155 which was introduced last session first biennium and is still there pending. And so could Bill continue to be considered this coming session. And that is a combined legislation but for purposes of discussion just the second look proposal there. And so we are as a subcommittee sort of looking at these laws and propose laws, model laws to see what are the themes, where are there differences? What are the various approaches to the overall approach of the concept of revisiting a sentence imposed to see whether it warrants resentencing. And in that context, we are educating ourselves but we are also planning a broader educational project by way of a conference that actually VLS, VLGS or the National Center for Historic Justice. Is that the name? How's it? VLGS are actually really sponsoring and paying for providing the physical space for providing all the logistics everything needed to throw a conference other doing with Jess Brown our panel member on our DAP and also a part of the subcommittee. And also I think her title is Executive Director at the National Historic Center and a professor at VLGS. She's been instrumental in making this conference happen along with key players at VLGS, Bobby San and a couple other professors I think that I'm forgetting their names. Erin has been joining me on these twice a month meetings that are separate from our art app second look dedicated to conference planning. There it's scheduled for November 3rd. I think save the date card was shared by Jess. She sent it out last week. She sent it to all of us. Yeah. It's a three quarters day plan conference of Friday, November 3rd at VLGS. Everyone here I hope can go and to please spread the word. We are not inviting deliberately. The focus isn't to invite Vermont speakers. I think the legislature will hear through testimony from various sources in Vermont on whatever is being proposed and get those perspectives. What we wanted to bring in or sort of approaches both from a data level like what is this? What is this concept of second look? Why do we need it? What are the goals that are hoped to achieve? And then, so that's sort of a beginning panel. And then we wanted another panel that talked from people who had coming from jurisdictions that experienced the roll out of it. How has it worked? Has it worked? Again, coming from I think a practitioner's perspective. What have been the wrinkles along the way? What have been the surprises going bad? And I think then the last set of speakers that's planned are to get perspectives from people with lived experiences. So people who have been victims of the incarcerated experience, right? And that's how sort of it's been discussed and raised as from that perspective. From the perspective of people, families or people directly impacted and harmed by the underlying crime, right? Those perspectives. And we are also hoping to bring in sort of a science based perspective on what is the brain science on recidivism when someone's been sentenced to what type of offense? To what type of, you know, the length of sentence, right? Do the studies that show, you know, whether recidivism rates go up or down, there help. And how does that inform second look? So that's sort of the conference planning, which is pretty exciting. I at least I'm excited for this lineup of incredible sort of education around this from others out there. Rebecca? Yep. Jennifer Pullman put a question in the chat. Will this also include victims of harm who were not supportive? What does a harm who are not supportive? I'm not sure I understand what you're saying. I can clarify. I know that from DOC that there are 14 individuals who are sentenced to life without parole. And I work with those families. And I'm just wondering if there's been any conversation with those families. And I'm sorry, Rebecca, I'm off camera. I could because I've been sick all day and I'm not camera worthy. But I'm just wondering what that conversation has looked like at the national level. I heard you say that there hasn't been any local level, but I'm just trying to figure out what the panel is looking like. I think if I understand you, right? I mean, I'll try. I'm sorry, you're sick. Whether or not people have made an effort to talk with specific families impacted with those life without parole cases in Vermont. Not in the context of this conference. Again, this is sort of a bigger picture look at specifically second, not whether or not second look laws should be passed, period, right? It's looking at whether in jurisdictions that have passed it, right? What has been the impact? That's I guess what is broadly being approached here. So I'm not sure if that answers your question, but in terms of the details of getting the specific voices of impacted here in Vermont, that's not the intent of this conference. That's everyone is recognizing that there will be that time opportunity in the legislative system or not. I think the goal of the conference is not to debate whether it's the details details of it. Again, I liked how Etan phrased it and got it redirected on the general justice discussion of that sort of place, time and place in the committee level discussions if that bill was taken up. It's more again, trying to get the benefit of both the practitioner's level, science level, experts and then people who lived experiences level. Of how has second look worked about it? And can I just add that in the conference planning, we've certainly talked about wanting to try to bring in voices from that perspective of second look laws that are victim centered. What does that mean? What does that mean from the perspective of what we know about what victims experiences with the criminal legal system might be? And to that, we are looking at ideas for various speakers, but the National Center on Restorative Justice is also thinking about this in terms of, bringing that restorative approach perspective, which is restorative approaches are very much taking into consideration victims voices and a victim centered approach. So I don't know who's going to be speaking precisely about what from that point of view, but it's not something that we are just studying aside or ignoring. And I'm not saying that you were suggesting that, Rebecca. I just wanted to add the piece about the National Center helping us with this aspect of it. No, thanks, Erin, and I appreciate that. And Jess, if she were here, she would have jumped in and shared that as well. So that's actually a very critical piece of this conference is getting the restorative justice perspective injected into this. Anyway, so that is sort of a three-quarters day plan this conference, sort of remarkable. We're trying to get people here with short notice. I don't know how many people we can get here in person with no budget, short notice. Anyway, so we're gonna have possibly we're moaning in speakers. There's lots of questions. I think Jess, someone asked whether or not anyone had thoughts on live streaming the conference as well, as opposed to just planning to record it and have it in person. And I'll actually pause here. If anyone wants to share thoughts on that question, it would be greatly appreciated to hear thoughts on this because this is sort of being debated right now in the conference planning team. Ruchi, thanks. I think I'm a staple of my generation. I always prefer things remote because I can do it like in my pajamas and ask questions also and be involved in the conversation. That would be my personal preference. Live stream remote, got it. Thanks. That was our instinct. Ruchi, did you have something else? Oh, no, sorry, legacy hand. Oh, no, legacy hand. All right, so I'll take that and I'll share that if anyone else was to share. Oh, Sheila. Yeah, I just, I'm not of that generation and love you, Ruchi. And, you know, it's a yes and, right? Like, of course there are benefits to being able to have it live stream online. And when you are having a conference, well, any conference, but specifically a conference with these type of topics that we're gonna be engaging in, I think it would be, I like vibe checks, I like body language, I like understanding people, I like me, like there's some essence to it. So I don't know if people wanna do a hybrid and see if that's an option, but I do think having something in person, there's some value to that, especially with these type of topics that we're discussing. I'm going to be the wet blanket. Rebecca? Yes? Are you basically saying that the subcommittee doesn't want to propose any bullet points or, you know, rough paragraphs until after the conference? Yes and no. So here's the thing, we meet monthly, but not until after our monthly Tuesday, we meet on Thursdays. And I'm hoping this Thursday that I can bring the subcommittee together on sort of these broad category outline points. And if I could just share, like the things that we're being, comparing the different laws and model laws and propose laws on, right? What are the threshold requirements for eligibility? One, what are the crimes or underlying circumstances that make one ineligible or eligible? Is this legislation specifically targeting youth only or is it more expensive? Is the petition process one where there is automatic notification of qualification or does someone just have to be in the know and stumble upon it and affirmative when apply, right? So how much is this sort of encouraging review on a predictable automatic level? What factors does a judge consider? What evidence does a judge consider? How much discretion do we want to give a judge to consider any number of factors? Do we want to actually identify specific factors? Do these laws vary on that? No law that's been passed has identified factor that you must consider race, ethnicity of the applicant before you, right? So there's nothing like that or anything actually specifically expressly identifying race. So that's something that our subcommittee noted early on. We have not discussed where we have fallen on it. Another category, who decides? Who decides the petition of review? Is it the original sentencing judge or is it important to have a new judge, a different perspective, right? What is the retroactivity of these laws? Do these, if this law passes, does it come into effect from here on out? Meaning that everyone else who's sitting in jails right now serving a sentence automatically not qualified for this set of laws, right? So what are these principles that that encompasses, right? Do we want to go there? If the petition is successful in terms of identifying evidence, eligibility, all this stuff here, you mean it? What should be the reduction? Is there a minimum reduction that the judge has to consider in doing the sentence? Right to counsel, is there right to counsel involved? Is there a victim involvement? I know there's been a lot of interest in whether or not and how and to what extent, you know? And then I think that's it. I think appeal to appeal process whether there is an appellate review. So I want, yeah. Let me just put it here. There's this wonderful sort of moment when you're teaching graduate students who are about to write the dissertation where they've got all these thoughts and they are an endless fount of thoughts. And there's always like, oh my God and I didn't think about and I didn't think about and at a certain point you look at them and you're like, okay, you have a couple options here. You can write a 600 page dissertation. And for those of you who don't know, that's crazy. Just I'm just letting you know that now. And you kind of have to sort of go, all right, there's got to be a cutoff point at which you just say, no more. I realize that I'm saying this as warmly as I can. We've got to do that with some issues that have really, really sometimes horrifying impacts on the lives of living beings. So I say that with that full knowledge. On the other hand, if we don't put boundaries around these conversations and come to a point of going, this is what we're suggesting. And maybe if it's amorphous, we come to a position where we're saying these questions are essential to any decision made about X and then give a list of questions. That sort of thing. And I'm trying to get us all to think about that because the thought here, I could sit and listen to you all all night without any problem. I mean, I really could, but we can't. We can't. I am sitting in, I have to testify to joint judicial oversight on the 26th of this month. I think at nine in the morning for anyone who cares, they just sort of wanna know what we're up to. The other thing that we're up to, and they kind of know this is, I'm also going to say hi. Everyone got flooded out of their office. We get an extension, right? Thank you, love you, mean it, bye. And that's kind of a big part of it. But that still is gonna take us probably to the end of January. When I was asked, how long do you want? I said, how long can you give me? Which wasn't quite what was wanted, but I did my best with that. I just wanna put that out there that all the utterances we're making now, we've got to somehow round into a written document. So that when we've got a list of questions, like the ones that you've just so wonderfully put in front of us, Rebecca, that maybe, I mean, my one suggestion was that, that just came off the top of my head. I'm sure there are others I could come up with, but that sort of thing is where we have to start going with this, because you need to remember here, not only do we have to edit this after we've got it written down to some form, we then have to take it back to the proxies. And if you all remember, that's like real joy. It takes, you'll all remember that, right? Please smile and tell me you remember what that process is like, where you're going to them and you're like, I really need the document. They're like, oh yeah, we know we're gonna have it for you tomorrow. Four days later, hi, remember that document? Oh, I know, we'll have it for you tomorrow and then five days after that. So we've got to build in all of that. And I have to keep that in mind for us that that's all gotta happen here in amongst all of this really, really wonderful conversation and thought. And the most I can say to you is believe me, there'll be more conversation and thought down the line, but I just, I need to just put that out there. I have to start sounding a little bit like Professor Ness Redd and Longo at this point. And, sorry. Can I respond to that with a proposal, listening and hearing what you're saying? On Thursday, our subcommittee is meeting again. And I think that we can land and identify sort of these broader, these questions, these categories that I just shared with you in terms of what we've identified as the significant sort of points of what makes each of these laws different or not. I think that the proposal this subcommittee will to drop down, be like, no, knowing this, not that they're set in stone, but what can we agree are the most important things for us? And whether it's, you know, and again, not get bogged down the details because we won't get out of the subcommittee enough to even talk about it. I think then hopefully if we can at least land on some common ground that I can then share, summarize something similar to what happened in the Juneau Justice Committee where we got together and summarized, got together. And I can share that with that subcommittee. Great. And we are having this conference on November 3rd ahead of our next big panel meeting. And then you can add to the agenda for next month for their big panel that will come together with these proposed principles. Perhaps we wouldn't have had the advantage, I think, with the timing of November 3rd in our next meeting to have met as a subcommittee. So that might be something where we then present it and then for those of us who are able to go to the conference and those who haven't, a brief summary of the hub points and what we want to integrate. So I think we can do it is my point. I think it's on. No, I'm sorry. Again, please don't all hate me. I just, that's my job. I've got to do this. I've got to say this. I've got to give us some form here and some direction. And it's not the most pleasant thing to do, I can tell you, because I'd rather just listen to the thought myself, but we have a job. So anyway, sorry. Thank you, Rebecca. That sounds like a wonderful plan, basically, for getting stuff out in that direction. And I think that that'll work really well. Sheila, you've got your hand up. Thanks, Ayton. Thanks, Rebecca. Of course. I am, I really like this idea. And I like the idea of when you were reading off all those questions, it's sort of, I feel like it's like my, how my brain works. Like I always think of it as this, this, this, this. And as a person who's done some consulting, a lot of times in the consulting world, you, people don't know what they don't know. And so you have to engage them in a way of even preparing people to ask the appropriate questions in order to get the information, the data, whatever we're looking for. And so I really like being able to throw out whatever it's from the subcommittees or otherwise of what are the topics that our DAP is really, really interested in putting in this report. And then having that narrative of those questions because I think that is a start of a foundation to where people can go from, because if you've never thought of that, then how are you supposed to proceed on that or look at things a different way? And so I think it's really important to be shifting questions by putting those type of questions in there that maybe we haven't thought about before. And something that you said, Rebecca, that I am very interested in moving forward and is around, we don't have, I guess I don't know if it's a law around asking around race, you said. And getting that information. And I'm just, it's very interesting. And so I would like to talk specifically more with the our DAP about that being one of our initiatives. Okay. Jennifer Pullman has put forth in the chat again. Is there a rope in or back to the Sentencing Commission at some point? I can't answer that. Not really being on the Sentencing Commission. I wait for that, because Rebecca's on, Rebecca's the vice chair and they used to be a subcommittee. And I feel like there's been a lot of work that's been happening here. And I'm just wondering if there's any thought about connecting back to the Sentencing Commission. So good idea, Jen. We can talk to Judge Zone. We're next to you on Sentencing Commission. I mentioned things on October, I think the 24th. The agenda's out there. But in terms of whether or not we have the time to both share this with Sentencing Commission and get a vote from there and try to work out some consensus or agreement before our report is due in our DAP. I see that as sort of a set, not appropriate. I think there are two different animals in terms of- I agree. I wasn't suggesting it would be inappropriate, but like the conversation has really taken a significant turn. He could really get into a lot of detail and a number of the questions that you mentioned that were raised. I know were raised by Evelyn and the Sentencing Commission. So it feels like at least a, hello, we've been working on this would be, would make some sense. Certainly that it's not going to be something that could be voted on, but I do feel like it would be helpful, Rebecca, in your position to report back at some point. No, that's a great idea. And for others who may or may not recall, Sentencing Commission, which does not have any community members, had a subcommittee created on second look and with many of overlapping members with our DAF and sex Sentencing Commission. That's why Jen Pullman has joined us for, it has been invited to be part of the, to the second look subcommittee meetings because Sentencing Commission agreed and knew about our DAFs. Efforts on this regard didn't want, I think for efficiency sake, for a lot of reasons sake, I guess it was a decision made at that level to sort of defer and let the work be done here at the our DAF. But Jen, good point. Bring it up with Sentencing Commission. Cool. All right. Witchy, you're not on the agenda, but you sent us a lovely document that got me all excited when it came in about half an hour before the meeting where you outlined exactly what your subcommittee is doing in terms of writing between now and November. Can you summarize that for everyone? Because I'm not sure everyone had opportunity to read it. No, no one has had an opportunity to read it except you, Juan, because you're so on post. OK. Yeah, so like this is just me gathering a bunch of thoughts from our subcommittee and what we've talked about and what we saw in the interviews we only read about and our notes on it. And Sheila, it's in your email. I don't know if you're checking your email while you're technically on vacation, but it's there. Oh, I've got it. I'm in it. Oh, great. OK. Yeah, it's just talking about, I think, three things that were kind of, well, two things that I think were pretty common across the reports. And one thing that got mentioned in the interviews by both folks, the two things that were really in common is just talking about the effectiveness of policing, like why police, what we police, and the impacts of it in our communities, and maybe some recommendations from these reports on what we can do about it. The other one was the effectiveness of training. There was a lot of conversation about not only what's in the training, but who needs to be the person who goes to training, kind of. There was a lot of talk about, you have to have the willingness to learn. You have to have historical context of who you are entering and what you're entering into. And the final thing that was not necessarily in the reports except the Burlington one, but God mentioned at the interview several times is the Citizen Review Board. And just thinking about what does that actually look like if that's going to be a recommendation that comes out and what it should look like, what does authority look like, what are the pros and cons of Citizen Review Boards that have happened in Vermont. And that's sort of, and there's a section for path for exploration, which is just like other things that God mentioned that we just didn't have time to go deeper in. So that's just sort of a general synopsis of all the things, Sheila. I don't know if you want to subtract, add, overrule, sustain. So everything's great. Thank you, Richie. Can I ask a question of you guys? Are you, is there going to be a moment, I had this idea when you sent it to me, is there going to be a moment in there where you make a suggestion to the legislature that these reports not only be encouraged, but also at least partially funded by the state, is that, I'm just curious where that's going to go in terms of recommendations to the legislature. We would like you to fill in the blank. So the way I, the way I see that is, this was presented to y'all at the last meeting, then there's this report that, which he is out prepared to put together, then everybody else on this panel helps chime in and ask questions like that to see if we, as a group want to do that, because it's a we situation anyway. So I would say that if that's what sparks from this, then let's make that a discussion of this group and see if that's the direction we want to go in. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. So that'll be on the agenda, I guess, for next month. Is that all right? Sounds perfect. Got it. Good. Thank you. All right, at this point, my God, where'd the time go? I don't know. In any event, new business, I'm not sure we have any, but if anyone's got some, fling it out there. Yes. This isn't new business per se, it's just a general community announcement. The state of Vermont, is that okay? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I don't know why I also ate a candy right before this, so, you know, the state of Vermont is hosting a series of community forums related to traffic statute enforcement, and it is a joint venture between the Department of Motor Vehicles, the Department of Public Safety and the Office of Racial Equity. It is a compressed timeline. I apologize for the late notice. The next forum will be taking place in St. John's Berry tomorrow from six to eight PM. It will also be hybrid. There's a Zoom link, and for those who can't attend virtual or in person, there's also an online feedback forum so that people can provide their feedback without having to attend a session. We'll be feeding people who attend in person, and if you're interested, I can provide details in the chat. This is the second of five. We're trying to hit every region of the state. We've already done the Northwest region. We are now doing the Northeast region, so the remainder are Central, Southwest and Southeast. Those are gonna take place over the next two weeks. All right, anything else? Thank you, by the way, thank you. Anything else from anyone? All right, I want all of you who are feeling, oh, hold on, go ahead. Can I? Even though everyone just wants to leave now. And I'm obviously not a member of the panel, but I'm just compelled to thank you all. I mean, I've been to now three of these meetings and just listening to the immense amount of work that's being done. I just really appreciate it as a legislator and understanding how much is gonna go into, how much goes into preparing these reports and how much thought and time and energy and research and I'll just say as one legislator, one member of the Judiciary Committee, which we'll be looking at all of this when it comes together. I really, really appreciate it and I just thank you. It really informs our work in a way that we can't do without folks like you partnering with us. So just want to appreciate all of you. Thank you, Representative. Mark. Hey, wow, I made it. So I wanted to just thank y'all for the work too, with like Rep Arsenault was saying. Other thing too was is that like the conversation that you and I had, Aetan, I think it's Act 65. Yes. I think it was Pepper actually and I who were speaking on Friday that prompted me to be reminded of that and I know you guys have probably spoken about it before, but it's a section 24A. Okay. Were you getting ready to say something? Go ahead. Well, I wanted to let you know and let the other people know what I'd like to do is when we're done meeting, when we adjourn, I'd like you, Mark, me, Susanna, Tiffany and Laura to stay on for a few minutes and Mark, I'd like you to address us about where you'd like us to go on that particular front. That's cool. And briefly, just for the rest of the panel. Yes, thank you. It's just the, if you were to look at, I could just drop it in the chat. The 24A is the panel, it's about equity and community reinvestment fund, the cannabis fund and the short background on it is is that when the marijuana commission went out and did their work, there was nothing that they brought back on equity. So even at this juncture, a year in the whole, the work that they've been doing surrounding equity is kind of being questioned specifically by probably more and Cummings than anybody else. So finally, we just said, fine, if you need some data, then maybe what we should do is just have somebody go and get you some data if that's what you need. So that's the long and short of it, it's really just that simple. The other thing that I was going to say is, Erin, if we can get an opportunity, I was hoping that we could circle around with the, I think it's big now, who's over at the Human Rights Commission. I wanna revisit the racial disparities in all systems and I wanna maybe sit down with you and big in Tutsana, perhaps at some point, because I think there's major implications there that we should probably at least revisit. I'm glad you're on. Sorry. I'm happy to do that, Mark. I would say another group I would love to convene with is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, since part of their charge is to remedy past harms. I think that could be a really important part of the conversation in general for the work of the RDAB, but however you wanna organize these convenings, I'm happy to be there. Yeah, I think we wanna do something in the community on it as well. That's all I had at any time. Thank you. Thank you. But also, I just wanted to point out the one thing I managed to leave this out. You'll remember a while ago, I did a sort of breakdown of what got done from the 2019 report and what didn't. It was a really fun meeting. Everybody was in a really good mood afterward. I had written an email to everyone saying, I will write that up as something to consider including in the report. I've somehow managed to miss this whole meeting and not say to you, I'm on it. I am on it. I am writing it up as we speak. Well, not like right now, but you know, I am on that, it will come. I will take that on. Witchy, and then we're gonna shut down soon, folks. Sorry. I just wanted to make a general note, especially in the markets you were talking about, the sort of racial disparities in all systems. For those of you who don't know, in a week and a half, I will be the new NAACP of William County president. And definitely would love to be part of those conversations and or have a representative be able to join in on those conversations as a rep from the Southeast as possible. Okay. All right. Yes, congratulations, Witchy. Or president R2. Oh, I like that. Okay, our next meeting, 14th of November, 2023. I imagine there'll be a fair amount of email that will go back and forth. And that's, I think what we have, can we have a motion perhaps to all go eat dinner? I'm gonna go eat dinner. Anybody also feel the same way? Somebody else feels that way. Everybody ready to go eat dinner? Yes, let's do it. Everybody who doesn't wanna go eat dinner? Everybody abstaining, because they really don't know whether they wanna eat dinner or not. Well, I already ate dinner, so. You know, you're not told some of us that we have to stay. That's right. I did say that. You're right, Mark. I'm sorry, God forbid. All right. Mark, Susanna, and the Laura and Tiffany, if you could just hang on for a few minutes. Mark's asking, what do you want? God only knows. Otherwise, all of you, talk to you soon. Thank you very much. Have a good one. Thank you. I have to keep this meeting going since I'm the host, but I'm just not, I'm gonna mute myself, turn off my video, and I'm not gonna eavesdrop. There's nothing wrong with you being around, Erin. Anybody could have stayed on the call. It's not secret. I'm glad, I'm always glad to have you in the room. It's really not secret. I just wanna go eat my dinner. Okay. And so, thank you for the invitation, and goodbye. I'll see you later, Erin. Okay, okay. Mark, the floor is yours. The thing is, it'll be really brief. I dropped the document in there, section 24A, and the vast majority of the thing is a strike all. So the policy is a heck of a lot smaller than it seems. It's certainly not that, you know, I think I'm on the 62nd page right now, which is nonsense. And it's really simple if you just get down there to the 61st page. It just, and I'm just gonna really insult you and read it to you. It says, the racial disparities in the criminal juvenile justice system advisory panel shall collaborate with local and national stakeholders to study the administration and funding of the cannabis business development fund and gather qualitative and quantitative data informing the establishment and funding of community reinvestment for individuals and communities disproportionately impacted by the criminalization of cannabis. And the study shall do each of the following, identify in an aggregated format the demographics of individuals who have been disproportionately impacted by cannabis prohibition in Vermont and nationally and identify communities most heavily impacted while not disclosing the identity of any particular individual and to identify the ways in which such individuals in communities have been disproportionately impacted by cannabis prohibition in Vermont, including rates of poverty rates, access to employment, housing and education and involvement with the criminal justice system. Any other issues related to the impacts of the criminalization of cannabis in Vermont and the United States that will improve racial equity and community reinvestment in Vermont, the panel shall convene not less than four times to complete its work. And then finally, the panel will provide recommendations on how to administer and fund the cannabis business development fund and fund and administer reinvestment in individuals and communities disproportionately harmed by cannabis criminalization to the Senate committee on economic development, housing and general affairs and finance on a before the 15th of January and that's in 2014. Sutsana is, you are, I know, intimately familiar with most of, you know, I don't wanna overstate it but I'm obvious, I can, I think I'm pretty confident that you've seen, you've watched this play out as far as how the idea of equity was pursued in the, Tiffany and Laura is really good to meet you both and I think I'm gonna put my camera on now because I feel really awkward right now. So, hi, so I can't see myself but wait, there we go, there we go. So, the, let me see if I could just give you brief background so I know everybody's hungry is that in 2018, the governor called for a, what we called a marijuana commission and you will find all of that on file on legislative file, there were several reports that came out of it, none on equity. So, given the gravity of the implications of legalizing a schedule one federal drug in the, you know, and obviously given the war on drugs and what we understand, you know, that has created nationally and also just the, systemic racism obviously being rooted in political and economic, the whole political and economic divide along racial lines. You know, I had some concerns right out of the gate, you know, as the market began to emerge and we have been trying for the last two years, three years to somehow or another attach some component of equity to the rollout of the market and there have been some efforts to do so. In fact, the entire market was premised on equity. Pepper was on earlier today, he's the CCB chair. The thing is, is that they just, it's just been an awkward exercise and I think part of it has been, you know, the whole idea about definitions and who is impacted and there's been this conversation about the fact that, oh, well, how do we, you know, how do we, you know, prove that, you know, this group of people are impacted. One of the things that we were looking to do was not just provide some kind of hand up for a person as far as, you know, you know, I would say, finding an avenue into the market or a career, but also how do we address communities as well? Like impact, if there are communities across the state that have been impacted, how do we reinvest in those communities and also, you know, how do we, you know, create a fund that's, first of all, sufficient, secondly, sustainable. And I don't think the fund to date has been either one of those. In fact, the administration of the fund has been somewhat of a train wreck and I think that Pepper would be the first one to tell you. In fact, I would think that he would be the first one that if I were you, I would consult or interview. Finally, I'll just say that currently right now that, you know, because of the strong emphasis from the administration on safety and prevention, there's been a significant portion of the excise taxes that have already been set aside. You know, now given the balance of the fund last year, they didn't quite know how to administer and it wasn't really, Pepper would agree, it was really not administered well, the money that they did have. And they just kind of at the end of the day just cut a bunch of $5,000 checks and just sent them out to many of the folks who applied as, I guess, impact. I'm sorry to interrupt you. We were kind of along the way for a lot of this. I guess my question is what is the, what's the baseline question on the table right now? There's no baseline question on the table right now. I think that, you know, just before I do respond to that, though, I will just state that what it sounds like is is that there are just probably upwards of about $10 million that they really don't know where, how it's gonna be administered in there. They're getting ready to go back into another calendar year, not understanding what they're gonna do with the budget, that which is budgeted. So I don't really have a question. The reason why I'm here is just to raise this to your attention, this panel's attention because with it, I'm one of the co-founders of the Cannabis Equity Coalition, along with NOFA and Rural and Growers and some of the other folks. And we were in a meeting on Friday with Pepper, some of us were in this, this topic came up and he was uncertain as to if and when and how this body would be responding to it. And what I wanted to do is just come and give you a little bit of background, if you will. And also just to make sure that you guys are off to the races on it. There's nothing else that I have to add to the conversation and there are no questions that I have, this is really just informational. And just to make sure that you had what you needed to get started on it is all. Do you have any questions with me? I don't. Okay. Good, do you, go ahead, go ahead, Suzana. No, I was gonna say, I don't really, we have regular check-ins with the CCB every couple of weeks. And a lot of the issues that you're raising, we had those conversations with them and kind of had to figure out how to navigate some of the, how to navigate the challenges of it. I think a lot of the decisions that, the decision points that you're talking about, we probably agree that we're dissatisfied with the outcome too for probably the same reasons. And I can also say that there were, some of those decision points were ways to avoid a worse outcome. A lot of it felt like, a lot of it felt like a Zugspang, you know, every move is a bad move. What? It's a German word I learned that every move is a bad move, right? Oh yeah, it's true. So the short answer is, I don't have questions right now. I do agree that the fund can be seen as the year that it was passed. If you're not careful with how, whether and how you maintain something like that, then it becomes a bright, shiny object that loses its luster once the headlines fade and then the equity's not really a commitment, it's just a talking point in the moment. So that's definitely not what we want. And I think if the purse string holders and policymakers claim that that's not what they want, then it's really clear that we have to do something to fix it this year. So we've been having some of those conversations, it's led to bigger conversations about who manages money and why and where equity work should be cited in state government. And that gets complex real fast. So, and I'm sorry for being so cryptic about everything, I'm just recognizing that we are still on with press and I wanna be careful about how I represent another agency's business. Yeah, I appreciate that and I appreciate your response. And I think that is just from my analysis and I don't have to be as careful with the press. But for my analysis, what it feels like, what it looks like is that over the last couple of years, we've been working to address the harm that has been done by the legacy of slavery and that is to the point that I was making earlier on the call where the attorney general in the Human Rights Commission as a part of the enabling statute that stood up this body created a report and acknowledged that there are racial disparities across all systems of state government and wherein two years ago to the entire legislature and joint resolution in their declaration made a commitment to address systemic racism wherein as the following year after this body was stood up that your position was created as well with the first position that was created in state government that acknowledged that systemic racism was an issue. Part of your charge as you know, to me it's somewhat troubling that we can have so much, there can be so much to do about systemic racism but at the same time that it cannot be acknowledged when we start talking about money that largely that there is a political and economic divide along racial lines and when we stand up something, especially something that represents what we're talking about now and that is what we've used to criminalize what we use to weaponize and to and also deprive black and brown folks for years of their liberties as well as their economic advantages that we would be still sitting in committees saying, well, prove to me that this affected black folks in this way or that way or communities in this way or black and brown folks. So it is somewhat troubling just this, just like it's troubling to sit around and listen to conversations about folks saying, well, you know, in the juvenile justice system I don't quite see the numbers where, it could be that there are racial disparities in these numbers. The book that I read is says that where systemic racism exists anywhere, it exists everywhere and I just don't know that we've kind of figured that out yet. I'm glad we've got folks to look at the numbers and that's great but I think we're gonna have to get past the quantitative analysis to move towards the qualitative analysis and move past our objectivity and become subjective in some of the work that we're doing here. But I'm glad you guys are looking at it and you know, it is frustrating though to sometimes to hear some of this stuff in committee especially from folks like the senator who's saying, the senator who's saying, well, I don't see the data. So yeah, hopefully you guys can take a run at that and maybe, I don't know, Suzanne, do you think that what is presented to them would be wise for us to also, and I read this by Pepper, would it be wise for them to conduct an analysis on some data points on what the cannabis taxation and the regulated program has produced year to date? I mean, I know that it's been up and running for a year. For example, the attrition rate of some of these minority owned businesses is horrendous. Would it be helpful in that data collection to analyze what the market is produced to date as well? Yeah, and I don't even know if there has to be CCB or if that can just be tax department giving those numbers or joint fiscal because they have that pretty square. Yeah, I mean numbers though. I mean, I would imagine there would be a few data points. Some would be the tax department, I'm sure, yeah. Yeah, I mean, all of these data I imagine would be really helpful. At the end of the day, I mean, this is about people committing to investing tangibly in what they claim to value and in inequity. So I don't think that it's not complicated, it's a matter of will. We have a lot of proposals on the table that came up from legislators and other people when this whole thing was first being proposed. The question about whether it's investing in communities or in the businesses themselves or in the people themselves, the question about well, can we just put it to the state colleges and give people vouchers to the college? How does that really help? For example, the black single mom who's 55 who's already done with schooling and doesn't intend to go back but has still been negatively impacted by enforcement. So I mean, I think that it's about wrangling all of the potentially good ideas that people have and keeping it really focused so that we determine, A, are we really trying to repair harm to communities? B, do those communities have to have been harmed by enforcement in Vermont or just in the United States or in the world in general? Because I think that's a philosophical question that a lot of people ask, which is what do we owe to people who this state didn't directly cause harm to even though you can always draw a line? And then the question about what are we gonna do about it and what's gonna be actually really meaningful for people? Personally, I don't think that vouchers to universities and other educational institutions was gonna be meaningful because I think that it pigeonholes people into one pathway that's proving increasingly not worth the effort and money in America. Not to mention it's just not a good fit for everybody. A lot of people have already pursued higher ed in their own ways and it may just not be the right timing for them. Again, investing in communities is hard because you have the geographic communities and you have the demographic communities, right? You could throw a lot of money into Burlington because that's where a lot of brown people live but you're not really getting at people of color statewide. You're just taking the easy way out by going for highest concentration and that's not really moving the needle or we could look for the demographic distribution but that's a little bit harder because you're distributing it across the more rural areas and then it's hard to really see measurable impact when it feels a little bit disparate. Then you have big name people who are trying to get in as well and like claiming, oh, we're doing this and we're donating 10% of whatever to black retailers or whatever and measuring what is really the impact of that. Is it helpful? Does the state need public-private partnerships? I think that these are a lot of free-floating questions and then once you figure out what you wanna do, how you wanna fund it, whether you wanna fund it, how much, then you gotta figure out which agencies are gonna be responsible. Right now they've got ACCD handle holding the money and for that reason, a lot of how it gets spent and when it gets dispersed and all of that process is largely dictated by ACCD. They tend to be subject matter experts on doing that kind of thing. They are not subject matter experts on race, equity, criminal justice or cannabis. So, there's a lot of questions about how the process should go and those questions are definitely leading to some pain points and frustrations behind the scenes and I just think that the board I think has been very cautious in how much it pushes in lobbies in the legislature. Rightfully so. And I think personally, I think I would like to see a little bit of a more firm stance on what I know they think. But... They're not gonna do that. I mean, as regulators, they're doing the regulator thing and we're lucky they didn't get captured at best. Most of your analysis, Dell was presented in more of a mutually exclusive type of scenario, either this or that. And I think it probably needs to be a whole lot more or yes and as far as how this work needs to be done. I think one of the reasons why they've done a bunch of nothing is because they've gone through this process and well, we could do this or we could do that. We could do this or we could do that. I think they need to do a little bit of many things. But regarding the analysis on whether Vermont has done any harm, I mean, we could be talking about truth and reconciliation which is really just a response to our reparations bill because they didn't really wanna have that conversation. And even if they do have the conversation to tie it to this, I think it's actually kind of a fool's errand at best. Because again, we know the harm. I mean, I got a bookshelf full of books that tells us the harm that has been done. And we've also largely acknowledged it already legislatively and in some ways on the executive side, evidenced by your position. I think that what I'm looking at here anyway, this is just my opinion and shoot me if it sounds kind of off base is this whole silly idea that somehow or another that we in a state that was 0.4% black when I first arrived 15 years ago that we're just gonna look and see how Vermont has harmed black people understanding that nearly every black person in Vermont came from somewhere else is just ludicrous and understanding that, oh, by the way, the legacy of slavery in Vermont is the legacy of slavery in Alabama because it is the United States. I don't know what people are smoking in the state house and I hope we're still being recorded but that's just bad math. It just doesn't make any sense to even consider an analysis like that. So hopefully what we'll do is take to them quantitative and qualitative analysis that's based on what we've already come to a legislative conclusion on in terms of the legislative intent on the establishment of this body and the work that's related to this body and many of the other legislative decisions that we've made to include land access opportunity, health equity commission, and so on and so forth. So I think that I hope that the report that y'all provide is bolstered with again, quantitative and qualitative as well as friendly reminders of what the legislature has already committed to. Mark, I think what's gonna happen is that the report, none of a, well, I shouldn't say none of us but most of us are not capable of doing either qualitative or quantitative work. That will come up. The recommendation is certainly something that we will be looking at making. And given that this is open-ended, I mean, I feel like I think we've got your point and I think we're gonna go from there. If you're okay, I mean, do you feel like, where are you? I got nothing further to add. I appreciate you giving me the time. I'm gonna go eat dinner. All right. Take care and thank you. Have a great night, y'all. You too. Be well. Bye. Thanks, everybody, for staying and I will talk to you all soon. All right. Thanks. Have fun. Bye.