 Our next speaker is Jennifer Verseret, who is the Executive Director of the Texas Inmate Family Association. I'm sure you're the type of person that's celebrating their 20th anniversary this year. I'm the Executive Director of TEMPRA, which is the Texas Inmate Family Association. I'm a lot like Margarita, they're there to support the families and friends of those who have people in the car circuit. Support, educate, and advocate for our families. This is important because we've been around 20 years, so we've been meeting with GDCJ, working with the young folks, and we have a relationship with the person. As unfortunate as that sounds, as we do. And that's the service we offer our families. We not only understand what they're going through, we can help them problem solve when they have issues inside. Because that sometimes, for a mom especially, is the worst thing you can go through. It's being so helpless not being able to help your child on the inside. As far as education, we teach them how to navigate the system, what to expect, how to talk to state officials. We also teach them parole packets. When you start in a class, we have workshops on how to prepare a parole packet so that families don't have to go to that expense, hiring an attorney to do that. Because the parole ward is always over and over again. You don't have to have an attorney for that. As far as advocating, I'm in Austin. So I spend a lot of time testifying and visiting office down at the State Capitol. I work with other groups in Austin. I work with the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, the ACLU, the Texas Civil Rights Projects, all those groups in Austin, to where when they have bills that they want to get through, they need family members to testify. They call me, I'm a retired state employee, so I'm available to go downtown and to fulfill that need. We have 17 chapters around the state. It's important that we network and what the power that we have with our chapters around the state is when there's a bill that we need to support, we have constituents that we can organize. And we can organize like that. We're going to really build our, try to organize and build a power base for the next session. Tiffa also belongs to a national cohort. We did a letter campaign on ban the box. Well, we took letters to Washington, D.C. and presented them to the office of President Obama to let them know that it is not only important to the individuals as they return home that they get a chance at fair employment, but the families need it as well as we need them supporting their families and being a productive citizen in the state. Once again, I'm Jennifer Gershendek, the executive director of Tiffa. I got involved with this situation because my son is in prison. I got him into school. He graduated with an associate's degree. He got out this summer on parole. But during that, it was very emotional. And not six months. We have been happy six. He didn't do it alone. It was a family affair. But going down this path through some of the stuff that I did with Tiffa, one, as I mentioned before, was the parole packet workshops that we did. Well, during one presentation down at the Darrington unit, I presented to the seminary school there. And I can't tell you how hungry people are on the inside for information from the outside. So it was just an inspiring moment for me. And now I can't leave the system. They asked me, some of the field ministers are now field ministers out there. They graduated from the seminary. They're now field ministers. And they have been dispersed throughout the state. They asked me if I would be interested in helping them change the laws as to when they would be eligible to be in legal parole. They wanted to know if their good work in the seminary could be counted towards their eligibility. And that's all they were asking. New diligence, their new diligence in their good work would help them be parole. Now these are all guys with very long sentences because that's what's required to get into the seminary as a free program. But I want to know if a field minister inside a prison can do good work there, why could he do the same good work in our communities? And I can't see any reason for them to deny these wonderful people. They didn't make a bad choice that they have changed. People can change and that's the point. So what can I do to help these men, these ministers come up before the parole board? And so that's what I'm working on. I'm working on new diligence with 3G offenders, which are the violent ones. We have to think about separating out the people who need to stay in prison and those who can really change the age of criminality. I'm working on a second look. If you were under the age of 25 and committed a crime, you were a different person than you are now at say age 35. There's a different, there's a science to it. They've all changed. My son was 21 when he committed his crime. He changed at 25. He's now out. He got out in June. Three weeks later he had a job and he has a little bad sense. He can change so can others. So these men and women deserve a second look. They don't need these 40-year sentences, these life without rules and that's the next thing I'm going to talk about is life without the rule. Recently the state of Texas in 2005, they decided to take the death penalty off for some of the capital crimes because they felt it was easier to get a conviction if they could put life without the rule on the table instead of the death penalty. So this was trying to step back from the death penalty. What happened was more often people were getting convicted for life without the rule. We went from five people in prison to 763 people now serving life without the rule in 10 years. 44% of those people were convicted under the age of 25. 41% were African American. So if you want to talk about disparity and a cruel and unusual punishment, let's talk about a 20-year-old never ever having the chance to even come out with the rule. Those are the people I think we should take a second look at and consider sentence reduction for those people. And then the last thing that we, DEFA, and our associates, because that's part of what I'm doing here tonight is I'm networking with you guys because I need your help. We are going to look at compassionate release for those people over the age of 55 who are sick can no longer do anything and their families want them to come home. The state pays an exorbitant amount of medical expense to keep those people in the hospitals. They use a lot of the hospital beds and they cost the state a lot. So let's have a reasonable look at those who those people are and bring them home. So that's what we're looking at with DEFA. Okay, I think I have a minute left over though for the first time. So what I'm doing is networking with people because I want to need your support. I'm going to need you as constituents to contact your representatives and your senators. I need you to tell your story and I need y'all to understand. I need you to learn your facts, to be honest with yourself about what's going on and be able and not be shy to visit those offices. They really, really do want to hear from you. They do. So I encourage everybody to study as much as you can on the issues and network with us and come together and help us solve these issues around criminal justice.