 I'm sorry for my lateness. I had another meeting this morning. But thank you, Katie and Eric, for your hard work on this draft. I think most of you have a draft in front of us. I briefly had a chance to skim the news this morning. And I understand there's been another incident where a person who had been charged, I think, in your area. Springfield. Springfield area who had been charged and not guilty, but is in insanity, is now back in jail for a new crime. So I think this is very timely. It's a problem that's Vermont spacing. And while it has Sears, Lyons, and Clarkson on it, certainly any other senators welcome to sign on. And House is welcome to introduce companion bill or whatever you want to do with that. Would that turn it over to you? We're going to call David Cahill to listen. The late David Cahill. He's not dead yet. Oh, Jesus. He's alive. He's working certainly. If he retires, he'll wow. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. David Cahill. David, you're on speakerphone. A number of people from the press are here. This is Dick Sears. Good morning. And Joint Justice Oversight Committee. First, before I turn it over to Eric and Katie, we want to actually, on behalf of this committee, express our thanks to you for all your hard work, both as executive director of the office of state attorneys and now a state attorney of Windsor County. To work with this committee and both Judiciary Committees and Stellar and we wish you nothing but the best in your future endeavor. Thank you. And Mr. Mumb. We like the Mr. Mumb role. Go to John Tracy. He was a mom too. Anyway, thank you, David, for all your work. Thank you. Good morning, everybody. Hi, it's Eric. It's Patrick with the Office of Legislative Council. Here with Katie McLean from our office as well. We're here to talk to you this morning about some proposed legislation regarding the insanity defense and the issue of competency to stay in trial. Katie and I have both drafted some of what you see in front of you, so we're divvying up the language that you have. I'm going to talk about Section 1, which has to do with some court processes and Department of Mental Health procedures regarding insanity defense. And then Katie's going to segue in after that and talk about Sections 3 to 5, which have to do with some data gathering, recording requirements, and the creation of a task force. So we'll segue sort of in the middle after a few minutes. And before actually I get into Section 1, I kind of want to remind the committee that we have David on the phone right now and James Pepper here in the audience as well. The committee will probably recall that I think a couple of meetings ago you would ask that David and James come up with a proposal regarding some of the issues that the committee had to thinking about regarding the insanity defense I think the committee was particularly concerned with victim notification with the length of time that the Department of Mental Health initial commitment order last so those issues are addressed in the bill. But just to remind the committee that that's the genesis of where this concept came from and I can certainly answer any questions you may have about how it works, what the language means, what the structure is. If you have questions about, as opposed to that approach, and it's good they're on the witness list who'll be able to hear from them afterward. But those sorts of questions I think they'll be better to answer than I would. But as far as how the language works I can at least get you started on that but you know what the proposal is and any other questions about why those approaches were taken I'm sure they'll be able to answer after that. And I mean obviously this is a draft bill that can be changed before it even gets introduced but when it does get introduced it'll go to a committee or two committees I think both Senator Lyons and I are committed to taking it up in the Senate Health and Outfair and Judiciary Committees jointly this year hopefully in January so I if people aren't able to testify today or speak on the bill please recognize that we'll be given plenty of opportunity to take it up in earnest and one of those committees are both. And as you mentioned Senator Sears we're actually getting a pretty early start on this so there's going to be plenty of time for any changes you or any of the other people have suggestions they're free to send them to myself Senator Lyons or Eric or Katie. One other quick background before we get in here it's just interesting I thought the committee might want to keep it in the backs of your mind just that timing-wise the insanity defense case that's pending before the United States pre-court right now was actually argued last week it was the first oral argument of the court's new term this year doesn't deal with the same sort of process procedure issues that you're looking at today but it does deal with a very significant issue of whether or not it's permissible constitutionally for a state to repeal the insanity defense completely that case involves the state of Kansas I think there's three other states and the question is whether that's constitutional or not so I think you can be fairly safe in predicting that the court's going to have some broad general statements to make about the insanity defense either before this year or after early next year so it's good to keep in the back of our mind when we're working on it in the Vermont legislature as well so with that in mind as I said section one sort of deals with procedures and processes related to insanity defense section one before we get into the weeds of the language I'll just mention a big picture of what's going on and what the proposal is there are pretty detailed provisions laid out in statute for the procedures that have to be taken by the department and by the courts for defendants who are found not guilty by reason of insanity when their competency is at issue that's very, very specifically laid out in statute and what the proposal does is it essentially makes a card out that's the it takes from the general stats to our procedures in these sorts of cases there's a card out for a particular universe of cases and these cases are where a person is adjudicated not guilty by reason of insanity for a homicide or an attempted homicide so in that particular range of cases what the proposal does is it says okay so there's going to be a different set of procedures that apply and that's kind of the big picture sense of what's happening as I say it makes a card out for a criminal case when charges are brought based on homicide or attempted homicide so with that in mind what are the specifics of this procedure how is it different from what you have in existing law for cases generally and as you may recall I talked about this last time I was here when a person is found not guilty by reason of insanity the court has to hold a hearing the court has to hold a hearing and determine whether or not they're addicted to the toxicity of the Department of Mental Health and that's based on whether or not the person is a danger to themselves or to other people and that's right there in existing law if you look at lines 4 through 12 that's what that provision essentially says the court finds that the person the term of art that you've heard many times is person in need of treatment or in need of further treatment but what that really means is are they dangerous to themselves or to somebody else and if the court finds that they are a commitment order to the Department of Mental Health that's the general way that the existing law works now if you move down to subdivision 2 there starts lines 13 to 19 also existing law this generally says if a person is committed what procedures apply you may recall that not only is there this forensic approach for people who are coming into the Department of Mental Health system from the criminal angle there's also a civil commitment process and can voluntarily commit themselves they can be involuntarily committed civilly even though it's not related to a crime at all and with this existing language says right here is that the language that governs those sorts of procedures that's what applies in this criminal context as well so if someone comes into the Department through the forensic process because they've been found not guilty of a crime or incompetent to stand trial and then they're committed to the Department the procedures that apply certainly we have the same ones that apply when someone comes in civil so that brings us to our very first point of how the particular types of cases are going to be treated differently in this proposal you see line 13 there this says accept is provided in subdivision 2 that means that this is the carve out I was mentioning so carve out is accept is provided in subdivision 2 okay fine the Department of Mental Health handles these folks in the same way as they would under the civil process you may recall the fact that under that civil process the initial order of commitment is for 90 days so that initial commitment order is 90 days and then they can always continue get an order of continued treatment for the person those can last for up to a period of a year and those can be brought continually one after another one of the circumstances are appropriate but that initial one is for 90 days under the civil commitment procedure so you see here the carve out that is made in subdivision 2 lines 20 through 2 on page 3 is an initial order of commitment pursuant to this that shall remain in effect for not less than 3 years you see that so that's the first major policy difference here if the person is committed under the order which is not guilty of every step of insanity for a homicide or a tentative crime so that's big difference number one in those type of cases initial order is 3 years rather than 90 days and maybe Katie can answer this where are they held as a forensic patient are they held in a maybe I'll ask the mental health department that but where are they going to be held if we have I don't know how many beds we have I know institutions committees and the senate and the house but I don't know better than I how many beds we have but I've heard there's a shortage where would they be held under DMH or DLC they're out in order of hospitalization and they're in the custody of the commissioner of mental health so since we don't have a forensic unit they'd be held we're up with the department I think that's great for 3 years initially well that's something that might come up so you mentioned forensic unit so would you think that that would be in an existing facility or would it be in a different facility I have no idea I have no idea what the administration would recommend we're going to ask the administration for recommendations such states show an interest in this one we're hoping to work with them on something that will be acceptable to them something that and the reason I ask is because it gets pretty not fuzzy but who has who's are these folks under the control of the DMH if they're going through a DLC facility they can come under American control unless there's an MOU it gets really really slow under current law I believe that if you're under the department of mental health department of mental health would be responsible for where they're held that's how it works currently if it's a 90 day or longer placement they're in the department of mental health so right but I'm on a different topic area unless we want to continue this discussion hopefully we can get through the bill no I'm still on this so just to be clear we are now saying this is proposing that a court could order somebody held for three years period or okay a minimum a minimum of three regardless of what happens I I'm being held for three years even though I have overcome whatever I'm back on my meds et cetera there is no presumably been found guilty of murdering somebody but because of insanity the fact that you because I was found insane at the time of this as I understand it the David Cago I think explained that at the last meeting they've been found guilty of the crime but not guilty help me here David have they been found guilty of a crime yes good morning so a person who is adjudicated not guilty by reason and insanity the people who are covered by this change in law are those who have been adjudicated to have actually committed the offense but are excused from legal responsibilities because they were insane at the time of the effect yes so so a court has found them guilty period and it is the same case but they haven't had a trial they do they use those words ok so what this means is that there is a final adjudication so Jeopardy has attached all the due process and the criminal side has occurred and the verdict is that the person actually was the person who committed the murderous act and then the defense has proven the affirmative defense that the person was insane at the time which is what it used them from legal responsibility that verdict is either handed down by a jury or if the defendant waves a trial that verdict can be handed down by a court my question would be if they are then committed for those three years but in the first two years of that commitment they go through treatment and then the department of mental health says in the treatment they've overcome that mental illness that caused them to commit that criminal act are they still remaining under the custody of mental health for that extra year? yes so one thing that is interesting about this language is that the terminology is order of commitment not order of hospitalization not order of non-hospitalization line 7 so if you look at she's referring to line 7 thank you so to me that's an umbrella term or a more general term versus the specific order of hospitalization or order of non-hospitalization so as we know a person has to be treated in the least restrictive setting and they have to be receiving clinically appropriate treatment so if a person initially is committed on an order of hospitalization they're receiving hospital level care until the clinical staff determines that they perhaps do not need that level of care this order of commitment language would also cover a transition into the community perhaps under the order of non-hospitalization where they would maybe require to have continued counseling or require to take particular type of medication the upshot of that is that for that three year period they would have to be committed to the custody of the commissioner that doesn't necessarily mean that they would be able to do that why don't we go on I think the other language it's a minimum and the other language further into the draft I had the advantage of reading the draft before I got to it but not on the way up I was right but maybe we could go into some of the other language that describes it's a minimum and then there's a hearing held to determine can I just ask currently it would be a 90 day the initial would be 90 days and then it could be up to a year it would be a similar situation as far as oversight if after 90 days the person was on medication could be released from the hospital yes it's a clinical determination where the clinical practitioners are always trying to hold somebody in an effective setting necessary to treat their conditions so if after the 90 days it was deemed that that person no longer needs hospital level care then there might be an order for continued treatment filed but perhaps it would be an order of non-hospitalization so they'd be in the community and in this proposal for homicides or attempted homicides it would be as drafted and it doesn't specify that it would be under an order of hospitalization or non-hospitalization just as a commitment Mr. Chair before we leave and I understand you want to move on in the draft but before we leave that spot on page 2 what was the thinking if any of you can tell me behind 3 years being another we're going from 3 months to 3 years is there a specific asset that goes along with that I think the state attorney carried out the office of state attorneys and I think there was some victim input that is correct I could speak briefly to that if you'd like please so New Hampshire has a 5 year order and frankly I knew that I strongly suspect that the committee would not reflectively do what New Hampshire would do and that they would want less time I consulted with my colleagues and victim advocates and thought about the prior cases we had had and we decided in the 3 year term proposed because that was the amount of time that in our opinion a lay person would take for a person who had been saying committed a murder when this treatment got stabilized got medicated then perhaps decided that they didn't like being on their meds, started to act out again and resume their cycle in our view that's the period of time that's required for the staff observing the individual to see the full cycle not just the upswing of I'm on my meds and I'm feeling better we want to see them come back down again decide they don't want to take their meds to see what they act like when they do that and if I could I understand that if I understand the proposal though I have committed homicide alone it's also people who have attempted homicide yeah, that is sure so do you see no difference between those categories well, look if I stab somebody in the neck intending to kill them my intent is the same regardless of whether they actually bleed out before the EMP gets there but could there be less violent attempts well, you know the Vermont Supreme Court which with great specificity defines what attempt means in the context of Burner and I think we all know what falls short of it making plans to shoot up the schools without starting the shooting falls short of attempted murder, it's not so in light of that narrow definition I am going to stand with my assertion that attempted murder in Vermont is the real deal okay, let's move me right along I'm cognizant of the time I know I got started a little bit late I asked a question which I shouldn't have done yes thank you Senator so yes, moving on to the next piece so as we're just discussing how long the initial order of commitment has to be this next section proposed changes sort of continuing along with the idea of this carve out for homicide and attempted homicide has to do with what happens when the person after they've been committed there's proposed to be a change of the person's status whether that be discharge or some other change of treatment or status and what needs to happen at that point and this existing law right here on page 3 I'm going to speed through it so we're cognizant of the time but that basically lays out the process that applies generally as I say we're making a specific provision now or the proposal makes a specific provision for homicide attempted homicide that's different than what's existing law for crimes generally so obviously that brings up the question how different we specifically say there you see the language lines 1 through 4 that lays out when it applies this subdivision applies only when the person is committed after having been adjudicated not guilty of a reason for homicide or attempted homicide so in that universe these separate provisions of procedure apply so what are they well first of all you see that at least 10 days prior to discharge you see that but what has to be done is that this notice has to be provided to the state's attorney a victim of the offense and the criminal division of the Superior Court so how is this different from what has to be done now three ways you can take a look at that paragraph first of all the existing law only applies when a person is discharged see that line 5 so notice the difference between this and how the defendants are treated see that line 5 notice provision only kicks in when a person is formally discharged I think David and Matt and James and the department will be able to talk about this in more detail than I can but my understanding is that a formal discharge is not the only way in which a person's level of treatment may be changed and that a person either because as you see it goes on there not only a formal discharge or if a person treatment of the person is discontinued in a secure residential recovery facility that's middle sex so that's not a formal discharge but it's another way in which a person's treatment might be discontinued or line 6 and 7 a determination not to apply for an order of continued treatment remember because after that initial 90 days they can apply for continued treatment for up to a year they may just decide not to do that in which case sometimes the person then leaves custody of the department but that's not a formal discharge so the idea here that's different it's a broader range a broader sweep of actions by the department which could trigger this here so it's not just a discharge a discontinuation of treatment or a determination not to apply for an order of continued treatment going on who does the commission have to provide notice to the state's attorney that's the same as under the general law but you see a major difference there in line 9 any victim of the offense see that victim notification is required for this year in the homicide context is required in the general provision that applies to other types of offenses and you see lines 9 and 10 it's the criminal division in the general provision it takes place in the family court it's in the family division so you see three main differences right here it's a broader range of proposed actions by the commissioner that can trigger the hearing the victim gets notice and it's in the criminal division not the family division can you see that with the three primary distinctions there so the commissioner that what happens next there has to be what's called a public safety hearing that's on line 12 that's a different terminology that's used but it's similar in the sense that a hearing is required but again you see something very different in the next piece there the state's attorney and the victim both have standing to be heard at the hearing so they statutorily give the victim standing to be heard something else that's new to this provision you see in the next sentence says the party seeking the proposed action shall have the burden of approving by a preponderance of the evidence that the proposed action will not cause an unreasonable risk of public safety that's different than what the process is generally in a couple of different ways that are very significant the first is that the burden of who has to prove that the person is no longer a risk is on the party seeking the action it's not on the department anymore who has to prove that the person is still in danger to themselves or others it's the person seeking either discharge or and sometimes that might be the person's legal representative might be the person in her cell and the burden is via the preponderance of the evidence more likely than not and it doesn't use the danger to sell for other standards unreasonable risk of public safety so it's a different process as I said than it's currently existing where the department has the burden of suggesting statute for other types of offenses and it's similar to actually the federal law as a very similar provision the federal insanity defense law is a very similar process to this that the person seeking discontinued treatment has to prove that they're not at risk of public safety anymore and actually in the federal law it's a clear and convincing evidence for more serious cases and only preponderance for less serious ones so that's pretty much it if you look at the proposals on that you see that the court makes that finding by a preponderance that there would not be an unreasonable risk of public safety by this proposed change of treatment then they issue an order permitting proposed action to go ahead whether it be discharge or discontinuation of treatment not applying for an order of continued treatment that sort of thing and if they don't make the finding then they issue an order of things you can't do it I take testimony from people and I realize there's three or four more pages of reporting requirements but I'd prefer them to be taken up by the regular committee so I think that can be massaged and people have concerns about those requirements let us know but I think we've been through the hard of the thing is there anything you want to add Katie to that? Nope, I was just going to cover the reporting requirements I think the hard of the matter is here and I want to make sure we have time to hear we've already heard from David Cale and do you or James Pepper have anything to add to what's been said so far? Just very briefly Senator first because it's made me my last chance to talk to the committee I want to thank all of you for your work on this issue and for the years of working together physically I want to thank Senator Clarkson Spears and Lyons for getting this bill going and Eric for drafting it I just want to make a few quick observations which are that it is critical that we consider the interest of the 99.999% of Vermonters who are not murderers and not attempted murderers and we also need to keep in mind that when these people are released into the community it's often not going to be into your neighborhood or my neighborhood, it's going to be into the neighborhood of people who right now are too busy at work to even be or trying to get a job to even be at this hearing or paying attention to this hearing and it's not an academic issue one of my insane murder defendants who was put in DMH custody in December 2018 was out in Springfield, Massachusetts this October he was in DMH custody by my math it's about 10 months and just the reality check on that is that on the federal side John Hinkley Jr. who shot President Reagan and James Brady he was in a secure facility for 35 years they really want to make sure that he was not a threat before he got out and this is not speaking ill of the department of mental health they're following the law and they're doing their job and they're going to be here in this room asking the right questions today what we need to do is re-imagine the law to do a better job protecting ordinary Vermonters who don't want to get shot, stabbed, or bludgeon and that's really what it comes down to and I'm happy to answer specific questions when the time comes I would note that HIPAA is probably going to get bandied about healthcare privacy law it's a federal law that also contains an omnibus carve out for state exception so if you wish to create an exception to HIPAA such as that statutory scheme can work with the public safety hearing and with the three year commitment period you can do that that's within your authority with that I'll turn it over to the others thank you very much David the next Pepper do you have anything to add the only thing I would add James Brady, Department of State's Attorney and Chair is that before this was a bill and it was just concepts that presented into the State's Attorney and our last State's Attorney's meeting there was just universal support so that's all I would add thank you Matt Beluru would you like to add anything or do you want to wait I'd rather wait morning Fox of the Department of Mental Health for the record morning Fox Deputy Commissioner Department of Mental Health I'd like to start by saying thank you for having this time I also want to thank Senators Sears, and Clarkson and the legislative council for drafting this piece of legislation I think this is a very important piece of legislation and I think it deserves the attention that we're providing it and I think it also deserves the time and effort to discuss all the final points I think overall the department feels very very positive about many aspects of this legislation and we're moving in a very good direction there are some pieces of this piece of legislation that I think over time and in different committees as Senator mentioned will be brought up in January I think we'll need to have some of those discussions to tweak the finer points questions around HIPAA and privacy and abilities to do that three year commitments as brought up by Representative Cooper and Mr. Nash around the question of if someone's treatment is doing better then at what point can they discharge some of the clarifications I think that I think are needed due to time I'm not going to go through point by point throughout this piece of legislation one point that brings up a concern for me just in hearing today I first want to say there were very few points of concern I actually was very pleased the description from Eric in this piece of legislation when we get to a hearing for a discharge and a court decides yes move forward that's one thing but when a court says no don't move forward and that brings up the question of then where does that person then resign as has been mentioned in this committee today and at other times as Eric and Katie both mentioned as well the department in mental health treatment has to be in the least restrictive environment both by state statute as well as federal regulations and so I think there will be any need for further discussion around what would that look like and where someone would go if the hospital is determined that a person no longer meets hospital level of care and yet a court has decided that the department cannot discharge where then shall that person go the concern that I would have at the department is that at some point we would either be in conflict with the state law or our federal regulation and that's a fairly untenable position to be in not looking forward to violate a state law nor violate federal regulations which could put our federal funding at risk and so I'm happy to answer other questions but I think from a broad perspective in knowing time is short today I wanted to just kind of mention those I think it would be fair to say that this bill does lead us to questions about our ability to hold forensic patients throughout the system whether it be for this crime or other matters where we you know we just don't have that capability and most other states do and I think that if nothing else this will allow us to begin to talk about how we should be dealing with forensic patients so I just have a question for clarification to be the most least restrictive setting by statute is that specific for folks with mental health within the department of mental health yes so but that's shifted over to DOC DOC does not receive any Medicaid dollars it's not under the global commitment CMS has no jurisdiction over DOC that is correct I was just wondering about the oversight once a person is discharged or you know we're here questioning who has the jurisdiction where it goes where that person goes but what kind of oversight is there and what does that entail in regard to the department generally as is set up now if someone is discharged well first of all let me clarify discharge from a hospital is different than discharge from the care and custody of the commissioner as I think it was Katie who mentioned earlier that this piece of legislation speaks about commitment not hospitalization and so there are more people who are committed to the commissioner who are in the community than are in the hospital there are people under the care and the commissioner are what are called orders of hospitalization and so it would be under that guys would be my expectation as we're describing as far as what type of oversight does that have orders of non-hospitalization have been a fairly hot topic in recent years and for quite some time actually around what level of oversight does it actually provide what impact it does or does not have on public safety and things of that sort the tools that the department of mental health has at its access to our tools to help people to engage in treatment to help encourage people to continue to engage in treatment and to work on their mental health issues we are not set up our tools are not set up to provide that strict oversight in public safety as might be found in through the criminal justice system corrections, probation, parole et cetera final question technical one for Eric in a moment I'm just hoping that the department of mental health and I guess corrections will be looking at how do we staff how do we fund this how do we manage this as this moves through the legislation through our process we're going to have to be asking some really hard questions about how are we going to make it work that's going to take a lot of work on your part so I'm not asking you to answer that now and I would just not in an answer but just in a response piece of this legislation that we can get to earlier around the task force or study group I think is a fantastic idea I would even add to it the idea of bringing in an outside consultant who has worked in other states helping develop forensic systems of care I think that can only add to the benefit of our own conversations I think we've been having a lot of internal conversations for the last several years around this topic and so bringing in some other expertise to really enhance that work as well I want to point out as a resident of Bennington long before mass shootings became a factor we had a shooting in a workplace in Bennington that we're fortunate only one person was killed but before HIPAA we all knew who that person was and we have followed her throughout her journey and there were other people too who were very high publicized this problem exists today whether we passed this bill or not and that is we've been avoiding discussing what to do with it we've discussed what to do with the forensic population we haven't solved it yet and if this bill forces us to deal with that problem that in and of itself will be an improvement you know it's amazing to me when I think about my years of service here I came here shortly after that and we're still I haven't moved forward that's 27 20 odd years ago I'm younger than her wait a minute 10 years less than me I understand so I think that that's sort of like it's like it's saying well the problem won't exist if we don't do this bill anymore I'm not suggesting that I just want to make sure that if we do it or whatever the outcome of this process is that we're putting the resources in the right place to take care of it and that we haven't made ourselves feel good by passing something I appreciate that I need to mention that the problem exists and the department a lot of folks have been asking us to do this so this is an ongoing this is ongoing many of the issues that are embedded here in the bill are things that we've been talking about but I think the recording section is absolutely critical and I'm happy to hear you say maybe an outside consultant is needed because if we're going to do it right we need to do it right and be effective with the results there are many models throughout the United States and I think it's important for us to look at what will work for Vermont because what works in other states doesn't necessarily work here so I think that's an important point I said Mary was the final butchist just a final question so this bill brought forward the results of what happened in June and Common and is that going from SA to CA? Actually I think it was a dinner conversation with Allison Clarkson and David Cahill about what happened in Chittenden and what happened in Springfield with the person who David was speaking about and was it Springfield Mass? It was both Springfield and Carter was in Springfield, Vermont and then he was on the street in Springfield Mass this October That's what I thought you said Zyde That's the... There's nothing to change the authority of the state's attorney to dismiss and charge prior to prior to the adjudication in the courts I don't know that it deals specifically with that But I did hear change say that all of your colleagues were on board with this James Packard I think I'm going to say that all of your SA's were on board with this legislation as an avenue to not have to discharge all of the Congress Exactly, I think it would have changed the calculus in Chittenden had this bill built Thank you all very much and if you do have suggestions feel free to contact myself, Senator Lyons any member of this committee and those Canadians Thank you Thank you All right, we're going to switch gears and... Where is he? Oh, I thought there was only one person on the phone Well, I'm going to hang up and call David Sharer David, I'm going to hang up, okay? Thank you, bye All right, thank you I had no idea I apologize, Mark, that we're running late and I apologize to the witnesses from the house that were running a little bit late Still my goal to get to one before the other Hopefully this is... I wasn't even... We're going to be a lot of plans We're going to be a lot of plans It's a complete call, see you on your local e-mail Sorry, guys There's still some sketch There's still sketch David David David How are you? David He's on the phone Justice Oversight Committee is here Waiting for Senators Sears Go ahead, David, please Any comments on this legislation? Thank you for inviting us, Senator, and just briefly a few comments. Our office certainly supports the goals of legislation. We believe that we, as a state, do need to have better mechanisms in place to assure public safety on an ongoing basis for these cases, especially as it's provided for in this legislation. For the most serious cases where there is an adjudication of not guilty by reason of insanity. I apologize that we're not able to have somebody there this morning, but we are reviewing the bill carefully. We're also doing our criminal division is working on a review of a 50-state survey to gather the best wisdom we can from other states and be as helpful as we can be to the committee, to the committee and to the legislature moving forward to try to get the best bill we can. And we are eager to work with you on that. Great. I look forward to working with you. Thank you very much. Thank you. All right, we're going to switch gears. At the last meeting we ran out of time for Mr. Hughes. We didn't have time and the discussion was packed. What's the act number? Act 64. I get confused with all my acts. Thank you. Thank you all very much. So, Mark, if you want to, I think everybody knows Mark here. We're good. Hello, Representative Cooper. Thank you. My name is Mark Hughes. I'm a resident of Burlington. I've resided in Vermont now for the last 10 years. I'm a retired Army officer and I'm a lifetime member of the Veterans of Foreign War and also a member of the William Miller chapter of the Veterans for Peace. I'm the executive director of Justice for All and also I'm the current interim coordinator for the racial justice alliance. I'm a commissioner of the Burlington Police Department and I'm also the architect of Act 54. Racial disparities in the criminal and juvenile justice system advisory panel. As a result, the work of Justice for All and the racial justice reform coalition, as well as countless committed hours to Remoders and tireless hours from new legislators, that was made possible. So, thank you for that. And thank you for having me testify. Before you, I understand we're supposed to be done in six minutes. Wow. Okay. So, just trying to gauge what I want to give you here. So, I'm going to kind of skim what I prepared and I will modify it and offer you testimony, written testimony and moving forward. How's that sound? That sounds good. But please feel free. I mean, it's not your fault that we're going to talk 10 minutes. Well, maybe it is. You and I were meeting. So, how about we split the difference? Would you shoot for maybe a 15 minute session? Maybe I'll think we'll try to save five for questions. Yep. That would be good. Thank you. After two years of community outreach and engagement and collaboration and relationship building with the public officials and also a deep analysis, Justice for All created a comprehensive plan to address systemic racism. One of the things that I wanted to share with you is just part of that deep analysis. Vermont has prided itself in being, I'm quoting from the report, the state took up the first day to abolish slavery. A closer examination reveals that the Vermont Constitution acted in 1777, updated in 1786, in 93 and amended in 2010 constitutionalized slavery from minors and also for the punishment of crime from the beginning to this day. So, it's just some of the analysis. One of the, just briefly, also this whole, and I want to properly premise the testimony and also properly frame why it is we're talking about the criminal justice system. This conversation started surrounding a discussion about systemic racism, which we'll talk more about here in a minute. One of the other components of that particular piece of deep analysis was international research. The year that this was done in the United Nations in response to recent events in the United States issued a formal warning under an early warning urgent actions procedure, the committee which monitors implementation of international convention on elimination of all forms of racial discrimination, stated that, quote, there should be no place in the world for racist white supremacist ideas or any similar ideologies that reject the core human rights principle, rights principles of human dignity and equality and the quote. They concluded by calling for the United States government to investigate, quote, investigate thoroughly the phenomenon of racial discrimination targeting in particular people of African descent, ethnic, ethno, religious, minorities, migrants, yada, yada, yada. So, there's a lot of deep analysis that has gone into our efforts to move this state forward in addressing systemic racism. The other day, a couple of days ago in Burlington, I conducted a forum on systemic racism. It was called systemic racism roots, impacts, and solutions. One of the things that I presented in that presentation is a preeminent researcher, and his name is Joe Fagan, and he's just about as white as everybody sitting up here to step from the sky and almost as old as our chair. So, this gentleman here is... I think the guy looks older. I think he is. This is one of the quotes from this gentleman who moved straight into that testimony, systemic racism includes the complex array of anti-black practices, the unjustly gained political economic power of whites, the continuing economic and other resource inequities along racial lines, and the white racist ideologies and attitudes created to maintain and rationalize white privilege and power. Systemic here means that the core racist realities are manifested in each of society's major parts. Each major part of the U.S. society, the economy, politics, education, religion, the family, reflects a fundamental reality of systemic racism. Again, Joe Fagan, if you don't have the opportunity to pick up his book called Racist America, Roots, Current Realities, and Further Reparations, you may want to try one of his other 69 books. So, after a little while, we built a coalition in moving a legislative agenda in 2017, and the Racial Justice Reform Coalition put forward age 492 in 2017. The bill was a formation of a racial justice reform oversight board, was the theory, with the responsibility of conducting management and oversight of the implementation of racial justice reforms across the state, including within the criminal justice system. These responsibilities included compliance oversight, compliance oversight of the fair and partial policing policy as well as race traffic stop data and data collection training, titled 2023-66 and 2358, which you were affectionately referred to as FIPP. Other responsibilities that were initially sought in this legislation included providing a number of recommendations to the criminal justice training council, and the Vermont Bar Association surrounding data collection, model training, and policy for law enforcement, prosecutors, public defenders, judges, and correctional officers to recognize and address the implicit bias and conduct statewide oversight on the adoption and the implementation and advising the criminal justice training council, model training and policy to use the force. So this was in play almost three years ago with the introduction of what would become Act 54, which ultimately would produce the racial disparities in the criminal and juvenile justice system advisory panel, which is what we're here to talk about. Now I want to stress that the bill further mandated that the panel educate, I stress, educate and inform businesses, educational institutions, state and local governments, the general public, about the nature and scope of racial discrimination and the systemic and institutionalized nature of race-based bias and advising consult with the executive and legislative branches of state government on the assessment of racial impact of policies and legislation. Again, this was the input to Act 492. Act 492 required that the board report to the general assembly provide as a part of that report recommendation on methods of oversight and professional regulation of the criminal justice system, including statewide program for civilian oversight of law enforcement, processes and methodologies to achieve an independent prosecutorial body for investigating and prosecuting law enforcement or alleged law enforcement misconduct, instituting a public complaint process to address misconduct in the criminal justice system, expanding jurisdiction of the board to address institutionalized racism in education, health services access, employment, housing and the like, prohibiting racial profiling including any associated penalties and requiring law enforcement to expand its race data collection practices and finally amending the constitution to ensure that it was clear that slavery is prohibited in the state of Vermont. Act 492 mandated appropriate use of force training called for immediate adoption and prescribed an update process for the fair and impartial policing policy and it also gave the board responsibility for the management of the centralized, a centralized race data repository. Now act 54, which resulted from age 492 which obviously comes out the other end of the pipeline for others who are listening, it created a racial disparities in the criminal and juvenile justice system advisory panel which I think for the interest of time I want to kind of skim over that part of it because I think everyone on this panel understands what that, what resulted from that particular legislation and what it produced. I will just want to be very clear that age 492, and this is incredibly important, age 492 was crafted to create an organization with the authority to manage and oversee the implementation of racial justice reform across the state including within the criminal justice system. That's what age 492 was created to do. However, act 54, the output established a panel to review and provide recommendations to address systemic racial disparities in statewide systems of the criminal and juvenile justice system. It calls for the attorney general and the HRC director to provide recommendations in other systems and extends the deadline and provides updates to the fair and impartial policing policy. In our analysis, act 54 directly addresses five of the 20 original intended goals. That we were trying to implement to address systemic racism in the state of Vermont. And we are here to talk about a portion of that. Most importantly, act 54 requires the attorney general and the Human Rights Commission to jointly report to the Justice Oversight Committee on a systemic racism mitigation strategy for housing, employment, education, health service, and economic development. And my hope was, that's what I was here for. My hope was is that, and my hope is, is that it would be this committee who would call our attorney general and our Human Rights Commission director back into accountability for the report that was released on December 17th, 2017 regarding all of these systems as they impact systemic racism across the state. And I ask you, I implore you, I implore, I implore you, I implore you, I implore, I implore if I can say without a pull to Mr. Chairman to do so. And here's some of the things that came out of that report. Just briefly, equity, equality remains elusive for many people of color, both nationally and within Vermont. These are all quotes from that report. Disproportionate numbers of people of color in our jails and prisons. Here's another quote. White people continue to control virtually every power structure in the country, including federal, state, and local governments and their agencies, corporations, businesses, and schools. Quote, in 2010, white people had eight times the wealth of black people. And by 2013, the rate was 13 times. Here's another one. We live in a white supremacy culture, all of these being quotes from the report, the aforementioned report, from the HRC and the Attorney General. The need for white people to understand implicit unconscious bias, white privilege, white fragility, and how these contribute to the maintenance of non-white systems we currently have. Here's one. The status quo is unacceptable. Nothing short of a comprehensive data-driven approach will alter the landscape of Vermonters of color and indigenous Vermonters. Second to the last is we must undertake a statewide analysis of ways in which state government actively or passively contributes to these disparities, collect data to determine our baseline, and set goals for reducing those disparities across all agencies in areas of service. And the final one is people of color have waited far too long for the equality we promised in word but not deed. It's time to remedy that wrong, all quotes from that report. I did come prepared to, but am not going to provide a deep analysis of the assessment that I made from the panel. And I will say that could you work with Mark to get us a copy of that report so you can send it to the committee. But I'd probably have it somewhere, but I've lost. So 18 months ago in 2018, then chair and I, the vice chair at the time of the racial disparities in the criminal and juvenile justice system advisory panel, we submitted a report to the legislature. I see that it's posted now. As of September 6th, it was posted on your side. I thank you for that, Mr. Chairman. Obviously lost it. That report was also delivered to this entire committee on my last visit. Okay. That is it. All right, good. Thank you. So in addition to recommendations to the criminal justice training council and the bar association, the report provided a discussion on specific charges of the panel as well as a segment addressed to the general assembly with specific recommendations. And please note that the process and the scope of the document is at the fore of the document. I will not bore you with that detail, but please take the time to review the process and the scope of how that document was actually prepared. I think you will find it interesting at best. The legislative recommendations in the report are essentially as follows. If you do have that report in front of you, you can go ahead and go over to page I think page 8. How about if we start with page 7 at the very, very bottom if we're all formatted the same way. And what you'll see is the legislative recommendations and this is as per Title III, 168, that's 4 and 5 and 6. The recommendation 1 is to clarify that the Human Rights Commission's responsibility, clarify that human rights commission's responsibility and re-allocate resources towards explicit bias training. The second one is mandate that the Vermont Criminal Justice Training Council report progress of the Attorney General Working Group and report that directly to the Attorney General. And then 3 is designate the Human Rights Commission as the primary agency responsible for fielding reports of alleged explicit bias. 4 is allocate resources to use the Community Justice Center network as a satellite locations for fielding reports of alleged explicit bias. Again, this report was released 18 months ago. This predates the Attorney General's implicit bias reporting incident bias reporting system. Allocate resources to use I beg your pardon, 5. Classify racial profiling as a criminal offense under Title 13 of the Vermont Statutes and revise Title 2366 by adding requirements to collect use of force data. Additional legislative recommendations are provided as well. You'll see there there's a mandate for appropriations. For the development and deployment Mr. Chairman goes to our conversation this morning of a centralized data management platform which enables the management of statewide race data collection provides user friendly viewing of collected data and also serves as a tool to enable supervision and support individual accountability. I will just note with this and I do so strongly is as we've been collecting data for a number of years now across 79 agencies. We'll wrap up in the next 5 minutes. Wrap up in 5 minutes it is sir. And where we are right is if we surveyed the folks in this room and you asked by a show of hands where that data resides and if anyone in this room has seen that data I think the outcome will be poor and we all know that. So the question is not so much as you said this morning Mr. Chairman, not so much how much data do we collect but what are we doing with it? So this data repository I think is pivotal and it also supports H-284 which you'll hear more from the ACLU one of our Alliance partners on later in the session. Assigned management of data platform to an agency that has systemic racism mitigation, our hope was that would be the office of the racial equity executive director. We must be careful not to place a cape on her because I think we all know she already has too much to do and we should also be having conversations about what we will do about creating a staff of people around her. A mandated conjunction with stakeholders, race data collection, model fairness, university policy systemic racism awareness training for the entire criminal justice system to include the community justice network the crime victim services network as well as justice systems contractors create an independent and funded equity commission to mitigate systemic racism and since this has been written we have implemented Act 9 and I thank you for that. Wrapping it up, a further discussion on racial disparities and criminal juvenile justice advisory panel absent proper framing it really misses the larger justice oversight concern because this racial justice, this mitigating systemic racism is still a justice oversight concern. As I yield and wait for a possible question I would say that the questions that I would ask is are we placing a proper amount of time and resources into dismantling the systemic racism and what does it look like beyond the criminal justice system. Our existing government structure was not designed to disentangle this apparatus from its DNA. It was designed to protect itself, to self heal and also to adjust. To change this requires new thinking and also a willingness to transform the fail stage that enabled the existing system to protect itself to one that auto corrects to justice for everyone. No matter what you look like. Justice in housing, justice in education, justice in employment, justice in health services access, justice in economic development and yes justice in the criminal justice system. I yield for your questions. Well thank you Ernie. I think you got a touch on this mark that I think often times discussions about racial equity it's framed around criminal and juvenile justice but I have the Attorney General's report in front of the NSD education, labor and employment, housing, healthcare, economic development and as I look at your agenda it's been pretty consistent so what have been some of the obstacles from us getting past criminal justice so we can get to these other points that you kind of touched on? I think just really briefly on that because I think I'd like to talk more about what's been working but really briefly on that I would say of course being on the other side of the table within the criminal justice system racial justice sounds a lot like criminal justice to them and obviously there's going to be a level of defensiveness there when you say hey we want you to collect all this data we want you to implement all these policies we want you to do all this training and I think obviously you know there's been pushback in the justice system but don't just put it on the police I think that we've diverged from Act 134 with Susie Whizzerwaddy in 2012 where we originally thought to go after the entire criminal justice system and then due to nobody's fault we just kind of focused at the police because I think everybody thought it was low hanging fruit well I think enough is enough I think what we need to do is we need to start looking beyond the law enforcement I mean there's a lot of stuff that they're doing far more than any other component of the criminal justice system but if we keep looking at the criminal justice system we're never going to be able to look at housing to education employment and health service in a manner in which I think we should now let's give ourselves credit for Act 1 the racial the Ethnic Studies was just passed, thank you so much for that, that was done and we can't walk and chew gum at the same time but I think though that there are Act 9 is another one, Act 9 is a beautiful thing and I think there needs to be some building out of that in terms of the things that we're doing right and I think one of the most important things we're doing right is we're having these conversations as well but I would just strongly encourage the committee to lean into systemic racism, I think one of the most important things that we can do is that educational component and that is not just educating folks out in the community or organizations or businesses but you that you would come to understand but systemic racism really is so you can properly legislate around it thank you Mark, I'm sorry to break it off but I appreciate your testimony I want to say, I appreciate the time there is a bill in the House and the committee I think that they're going to take up on the data collection I think it's critical I agree with you I also want to say that just your remarks are helpful in looking at them we're set up in committee structures here and so we parse out portions of this problem and we don't get to look at it as a whole I mean you mentioned education you mentioned health and welfare you mentioned opportunity and jobs and housing and it encompasses the whole but unfortunately a lot of our work is sparsed out here, there and everywhere so when I function and look at it I'm looking at it from a perspective of the criminal justice and juvenile justice system not necessarily the problem over here so that's part of the we need to look at things more holistically somehow we had the same similar issue very briefly we had a similar discussion in this room when the attorney general and the HRC director was doing this work and what we broke out into is what we call the horizontal section I know now that's not reflected in the report but one thing I hope you keep us keep in mind and keep us honest on is the one of the things that comes up from time to time is not only the how the criminal justice system responds to someone who is accused of a crime but also when somebody has a complaint of a crime committed against them is their bias there you know it comes up with the migrant community recently in Addison County back up equal protection whether there's equal protection for those groups when someone is thank you very much Mark I really appreciate it I apologize for rushing through the agenda but I think you got a little more of that I think I did I think the committee as well Mr. Chairman thank you thank you I apologize to the house members but you must be used to it us being a little bit late so I'm going to start with the representative Larky and ask and then follow the representative Taylor and my representative Devon I know we're I think most of the testimonies regarding corrections so we just had a big headline of correctional facilities part of our goal was to have the commissioner after lunch and part of the reason for 1145 lunches we're hoping to beat the elite peaker crowd if that's possible so hopefully explaining why we're here but why we're oh and while we're getting Peggy setting up I went to a meeting at Bennington college two weeks ago a week and a half ago regarding closing Rikers women's prison interesting that Bennington college also think of removing people from Rikers when we're dealing with the same problem during the month that's Bennington college and they got the money to do it from there and I did have a long conversation with them and they're very interested in working with us on issues related to Vermont and our corrections system but it was fascinating because many of the same issues we've been talking about here in terms of the women's facility are going on at Rikers and I just saw on the news on the way out the door this morning the city council in New York City has closed Rikers so I don't know I mean that won't be around the corner but they're talking about new facilities for women and what's the best way so with that welcome John. Well thank you I represent John Calacchi and I'm in South Burlington and the women's prison is in my district so I just wanted to share this past few months I've been there three times first as visiting with women's caucus which was really terrific and then in response to letters I received from inmates who are not even safe and I think you all know far better than I about how ill-equipped and under resourced our facility is and there are many complex physical emotional psychological issues present exasperated by intergenerational trauma when I was visiting there I was told there were four mother-daughter pairs living in this facility more therapeutic and vocational opportunities are desperately needed as well as a paradigm shift in the internal culture of this institution during my first visit with the women's caucus many issues need to be addressed and I just want to make sure because I'm bringing forward the voices of the women that spoke to me they don't want to be forgotten as we look to create a new facility there are capital improvements that are needed desperately in the current facility from my perspective many of the women are being warehoused the gym equipment is shoved in a crowded room the living conditions are very very crowded many of the women were sitting on their bunk beds glued to their screens the most vibrant room was the room where the children get to visit with their mothers but that's as you know on a new basis I mentioned in that visit that this was in my legislative district so people should feel free to contact me and one inmate told me well I've done my time and I said well great so why are you here she said well I come from Rotland and my mother offered to put me in her house but there wasn't a separate bedroom and there was no transitional facility available so she was on a waiting list to leave prison even though she had done her time in July I received a rather dramatic and lengthy dossier for one inmate detailing alleged guards misconduct clearly the inmate was triggered and emotionally traumatized from the incident included numerous copies of complaints filed what was interesting for me as a company this was a package was a short letter from they have open ears coaches in the prison where they appear to appear that you help people work things out and I want to quote from the open ears coach letter the problem here is that there was a young woman who came to this facility to serve her time and in doing so take full responsibility for her actions that led her here instead of entering into an environment that is intent on correcting negative social behaviors she has experienced trauma she is not alone in this the current process available to address staff misconduct does not work it compromises these women's safety and mental health these of them feeling unheard and without hope so when I got this letter I called the superintendent Teresa Stone and subsequently met with her and the assistant superintendent Laurie Perkins I was told an official investigation was done about the alleged misconduct and all that the superintendent said she could say is the guard still works here at this meeting I asked if I could meet with the open ears coach who had written the cover letters and she stated that many other women did not feel safe they were feeling unheard and without hope so assistant superintendent Parkson I met with this woman and at that meeting she reiterated her concerns about the lack of safety in the prison for women she herself had filed three complaints about abuses and never heard back from any of the complaints Parks said she would investigate this because they were filed before she was employed there and subsequently the superintendent assistant superintendent told me she had gotten back to the inmate and had been resolved in September then I received another letter with a cover note for a mother of the inmate and she wrote my daughter asked me to send this to you in this letter the inmate she detailed various issues lack of outside recreation being out of stock of several medications including antibiotics antidepressants and suboxone and from her perspective severe understaffing this inmate claimed she was physically assaulted by a supervisor and filed a complaint receded the second letter I emailed commissioner Michael Duchette asking if I could meet with him because I wanted to share these letters with him he was great he emailed me right back and he's I'm quoting a quick retrospect if you have information about a lack of safety for women at CRCF I prefer to hear about it now I didn't address any immediate issues he said along his cell phone number we had a great conversation immediately I really appreciate the commissioner as well as the superintendent assistant superintendent for meeting with me in separate conversations so both the superintendent and the commissioner really mentioned that more training was needed for the guards this seems imperative particularly how to work with women that are experiencing such trauma although I sit on the house general housing military committee I feel it's important that I represent these women in my district trying to bring their voices forward to you I look forward to working with all of you you all know a lot more than I do and the progress has been incredible but I think we really want to continue to improve the conditions so when these women rejoin our communities they can be successful really important and desperately needed in the current facility therapeutic and vocational opportunities must be expanded administratively a more transparent complaint process needs to be instituted and inmates need to hear back in a time nearer manner and guards and all administrative staff need additional training to more appropriately act with these women thank you for what you're all doing and thank you for letting me speak on behalf of women in the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility I appreciate it thank you for the rest of us who have lived in the Chittenden County area and have worked on this for many years your perspective is very helpful so I do have a question have you been in any other facility in Vermont? I haven't because we have approximately in state approximately 1,750 offenders incarcerated of which 150 are women and 1,600 are men and I'm very careful in saying this but women are experiencing many men experience as well and some of our facilities as well do not provide therapeutic setting and proper areas for educational and also there are issues within those facilities as well so I think when we look at these issues we need to work the whole system I so with you on that I just felt like I was bringing forth from my district women's perspective that they wanted me to appreciate it we will get a response from the commissioner after lunch so I apologize for the timing thank you very much thank you that would be great representative Debra Debra I'm the one that asked suggested that they come in Kurt has taken some tours of some women facilities in other states the first one being in Maine where they have a new therapeutic re-entry facility in addition to their regular incarcerated facility Carl DeMorrow went there with corrections folks to take a look at it and they have some information and next couple weeks from now in November there's a new women's therapeutic facility in Comfort and four of us five of us are going to go over there along with the folks of DOC and BTS to take a look there so I thought it would be good for the committee to see how some of our other states are pursuing issues with re-entry and therapeutic needs of our incarcerated population so Kurt spring of his slide show here but I've got for the record Carl representative Carl DeMorrow from Corinth I've got some information from Maine on that they used for their design of their re-entry facility and there's a brochure on the re-entry facility and the same contractor or architect also designed the new women's prison in Concord, New Hampshire that represented them and vice chair mentioned so I'm going to do a very quick run through on the Maine facility it is adjacent to the Maine state prison which is a male facility it's in the northern part of the photo there the women's unit you can see it's a darker unit to the south it or well it will be south on the slide but that unit houses 100 women and you can see the two living wings on the bottom end of it between those wings is a very large common area which has two tiered common area with couches and sort of a comfortable sitting space upstairs downstairs is more desks and places for people to do work the main guard station is just adjacent to this and then the other part of the facility you can see the north if this was geographically correct that larger piece is programming and services so the mess hall is there there's a hairdressing facility there's a gym, there's a library and family visitation space is there as well it's all very open there's a lot of natural light the building was built in 2002 and in my mind it's an example of what is possible when we talk about building a facility that does not re-traumatize its inmates and the remarkable thing about it is if you've spent any time in prisons this summer I've been to five prisons four of them here in state and one in Maine and I usually roll my eyes when people talk about this but you know you hear about there's certain energy in the room but when you go to a prison that energy is something that you key into really quickly the women's unit there the energy is very different from what it's like in Chittenden because it's open it's not it's not disorienting in the way that Chittenden is for those of you who have been to Chittenden there aren't doors slamming or yelling they're really geared towards making sure that the facility there itself is not re-traumatized on its inmates can I interrupt? is that not the re-entry center but the women's prison so that would be comparable to what's at Chittenden right now except for folks who are being held they're all they're not ready for re-entry yet they've all been sentenced to separate county facility for detainees so that's the women's prison built in 2002 and then you can see the re-entry center and that's on the brochure handing out there's also that electronic version of that brochure with the testimony materials for today so I want to interrupt you again so we've got the main state prison and then the women's unit it's connected so the main state prison also is housing the males and how many males are in there do you remember? I seem to recall 500 and how many women are in the women's unit there? 100 just for the women's unit? yes the women's unit houses 100 the women's re-entry center houses 100 so they have 200 beds total for women and they have 500 is this the only place in Maine that houses the women? that's correct with the exception of detainees and men? do they have another facility? they have two other facilities for men okay they have a pre-release facility and then they have the main state prison which is higher security so I did say something about the energy which is different there and normally I'd roll my eyes if someone said something like that to me but it is palpably different than Chittman the women are calmer there there's an overall much lower level of stress than you find I would say in any of our facilities here the re-entry facility is just downhill from it it was built in 2017 and houses 100 women women go there when they are nine months and one day from their minimum release date they are pretty much immediately given a job and some of them work there's a laundry facility there where they do all the laundry for the prison up the hill they do guards uniforms there as well there's a culinary program within that facility that is run by the former White House pastry chef and then just across the street you can't see it but the main society for the protection of cruelty to animals has their horse stables there so some of the women go over there and work and they have other employees of Dunkin Donuts and other folks so that's a very quick very quick high level review of what's going on in Maine can I quickly ask are any of these pamphlets representative of what's inside the women's unit no that one is that one is their re-entry facility so with the re-entry facility and the women's unit they've got a total of 200 beds there so how do they get to the re-entry is everyone automatically when they have nine months and one day left they don't have to earn it they don't have to earn it there are some they have drug free I believe they also get tested a lot in half that facility and they know that if they are found dirty then they end up going back up to the other team so there is that incentive the supervisor the superintendent there she says and she said this numerous times she took times during our visit she said that they have the best carrot in the world there which is that virtually all these women who are incarcerated there have children and they are able to use that carrot to get better behavior and if you see the facility there you can see how that really works it's really geared towards these women dealing with whatever trauma they've had in their life getting the help they need and then moving on to the reentry facility do they have more contact with the kids when they are in the reentry both of the facilities have large family visitation area you mentioned that they get like a week one visit I don't know what the I think it's probably one of my favorite main bases you said something about horses yes the reentry folks some of them work with horses do they have dogs there by the chance I don't know they may very well have dogs but they were stables across the way but they have stables and the guards have them admitted by the horses no I don't think the guards accompany them to work they go off site they go off site to work give some might check we're taking off the dogs after I don't understand I just really committed to understand previously 20-30 years ago we allowed to guard the community unsupervised and this is the same concept here in this facility that was the original concept Burlington and Rotland that are all the two that go left there was Woodstock and St. John's St. John's Burlington St. John's and Woodstock were all sections for reentry there was another interesting before the term reentry was another interesting thing regarding the visitations was the facility down they were able to not have razor wire fence around it in the visitation place you look out and you don't see a big fence you see a roof they get much more many more visitations because the kids come in, the husbands come in the wives come in and it's an atmosphere that makes them feel as if they aren't in the prison and so they're more comfortable bringing their kids you can really see that in the brochure there it doesn't appear to look like a prison at all so that's it for me unless there's another question on me hi in name did you hear any comments it's a male-female compound looks like in the main state prison females down on the lower end in males in the upper end about 500 were there any comments about the male and female being on the same site so the one comment that I heard was about the booking the booking area there when women come to the prison there because they don't have any sort of close custody or segregation section of the women's facility they have a they have a housing unit in the men's facility where the women go for say in close custody when they come in to the facility in the county system it's and they they said that it is not ideal they were very clear about that but aside from that we didn't hear a lot about problems with that type of thing once they're moved out of that they go to the women's facility and there's not it's far enough away that is separated enough by the grounds and other ancillary facilities there it's not really an issue I don't believe there was fencing between the two but I may be wrong about that between the two there's a fence that goes all the way around between the men's day for a senate residence I didn't think that there was thank you so do the males there have as much opportunity to I know you probably didn't visit it but is there buildings similar to the women's unit in terms of the atmosphere or is it more is it more similar to what we have for male facilities maybe you didn't visit it I couldn't really speak to that I didn't go in there I know that they have a separate they have two separate pre-release facilities for men in another part of the state yes bold look in the mountain view so they would go from the state prison to there if you start at the top of the men's prison that's I think the oldest and you walk down which is what happened with me then you go from the oldest to the newest there's a variety of things that are facilities there when you stand in the middle of the women's unit the women's prison there you can look down the corridor for each of the housing units and see virtually all the doors in those you can also see the two different areas and you can look back down the corridor to where all the services are and there's an enormous amount of natural light it is not a facility that is in any way disorienting the way the bars are or closed in in terms of hallways also I'll butch in response to your question there representative Shaw in response to your question there I've heard the same that there's difficulties but the women that are in that other unit separate from the actual women's unit it's part of the men's and the problem is you have to maintain sight and sound separation between men and women so they had to clear the whole hall before the women could come out and go to program it was a real encumbrance what was it? deficiency in the construction of that not in the outbreak so did you see the issue? I saw this so I I did have prepared testimony which you have a copy of and I'll just go through it quickly I'm Kirk Taylor a representative from Colchester and I visited about nine different facilities facilities related to many of them related to Vermont but including the one in Pennsylvania when we had Vermont's inmates there and Mississippi and the women's facility in Maine that we saw and also now in Michigan I went there to visit their women's facility I was given about a two hour tour by the Warden and my wife actually accompanied me and that happened in August it's called it's actually the women's Huron Valley Correction Facility which I'll call WHB it's in Upsilanti outside Detroit so it's fairly close to a large population center even Ann Arbor has a large population which is also close to it's only women's facility in Michigan also county lockups and house women temporarily and all the inmates in this facility are over 18 years old 18 years old it was built about 2005 and 2009 three Michigan facilities were consolidated into this the inmates there held at three security levels originally they were called medium custody and close custody those names the names I have up here those ones no the first custody level allows for the women who are since the seven years or less they're allowed more freedom the facility a limited number of minimum custody inmates are allowed to leave the facility and leave the double razor wire fence for work details only on the prison property so no inmates actually go out and work in the community the facility has a capacity of 2400 women that's more than the total number of men and women incarcerated in Vermont it is a big facility the slide here shows down a lower right-hand corner the Correction Facility in Vermont we'll get a comparison of the size of ours related to theirs and along the top you can see a number of inmates in each of the building types we've talked about the buildings you can see some of them are V shaped where there's a wing and a wing in the central area where you can look out both wings and you have a common living area all the others are similar to that the contemporary prisons I visit that's the design to have a central, airy common area and the wings going out so that you can see down each wing and see the doors make sure the doors are closed the economies of scale are significant as you can imagine a female inmate in Michigan costs about $39,000 a year which is a little more than half of the inmate costs in Vermont but Vermont does not need a facility with 2,400 women though the Michigan facility in many ways does not compare to Vermont's needs I did learn some interesting things from it and some valuable things from my visit there I find that when I visit facilities I never know what I'm going to come out with a lot of them look the same you get lost in them you pick up little details I learned from visiting this facility and sometimes it's surprising after visiting the Mississippi facility what I took away was one of the things I took away was I never realized how transgender inmates are here that whole issue of transgender inmates relating to male and female it's not something that just came up during that visit could have come up with any prison so in Michigan I learned a couple of things one was that every state's department of corrections is the target for litigation the legal library when we walked by it was filled with female inmates doing research in 2018 Michigan DOC was dealing with 740 lawsuits in the mid 1990s several lawsuits were filed against the state of Michigan that resulted in nearly a decade of litigation and 140 million dollar settlement to the victims there's a lot of difference between large states and small states but I suspect that even small state could be hit with 140 million dollar lawsuit and it also required changes to the way women are incarcerated in Michigan according to the agreement Michigan DOC would develop and maintain a policy regarding sexual misconduct sexual harassment and recaliation the settlement also addressed screening of prospective employees, staff training prisoner education in the process for investigating allegations of misconduct as a result restrictions were placed on which supervisory positions can be performed by male corrections officers so in the facility that here the living units were supervised by only female corrections officers which when I talk to some people say that could be an idea even though it does perhaps reduce the possibility of harassment but it's an open issue whether that's a good idea or not anyway there was a court settlement sorry to interrupt you just curious what was the rationale for it getting bad well I was told talking to Jennifer Speck are I not sure what her time was Jennifer Speck she's our pre-coordinated pre-coordinated for DOC here I asked her about that and she said well she's not so much in favor of it because these women have a whole history with men and if you can be the kind of corrections officer that counters that history then you're a very good influence on that and makes development so yes if we have good corrections officers we know how to handle women and how to deal specifically with women to make and make a very big difference where a woman sometimes has the attitude you know I struggle to get to this point you know man you can handle the situation I do because I'm a woman so it's a different dynamics going on there's also an additional weeks long training course for any corrections officers that are going to work in this facility and including guidelines on how interactions with female inmates are different from those with male inmates when considering long-term plans for Vermont's correctional facility construction we must consider the legal landscape that not only dictates how and where a facility is built but also the potential for lawsuits regarding those incarcerated concerns that any new facility in Vermont have adequate lighting program space atmosphere as representative Dunblane mentioned are important but the qualifications training, salary, and working conditions of those who work in the facilities is equally important my Michigan visit made me realize that the men and women whose primary job is to oversee inmates and interact with them daily must also be considered the planning of future corrections facilities and policy questions on Michigan or Maine what type of programming and training opportunities were there in Michigan there was lots of building new something like skills village a whole unit there in the process of building for women to learn a number of different skills the interesting thing about is that we try to we've always tried to be gender neutral in my thinking but in terms of a women's facility you sometimes have to push that aside and say okay what's the reality of the situation so they have programming and cosmetology programming and these things that are very more women related and you think shouldn't they also have other things that they did in jobs in mail but they said they won't get those jobs so we train them for the jobs that they're most likely to get and you want to get to them and so it does lock that stick that skills to do the other jobs so on get the job you train Senator Alliance Senator from Chittenden County would like to ask you a question so in terms of the health care for women and prisoners what is available for them and how is that handled they have a separate clinic they have a separate facility area this is where you hit the economy scale because they can have a full time psychiatrist a lot more doctors and nurses and things like that and it makes it that much more available so do they have behavioral support systems behavioral programs as well as psychiatric or mental health programs and physical health programs I'm trying to remember the exact words that they used for the kind of therapy that they used but I can't remember at the moment but it's still sourced Senator Baruth has a question a question that builds on that a little bit so am I right that this facility has capacity for 2400 so I'm struck by the contrast between what you described facility with 100 max and 2400 max you are talking about energy and the feel of the place would you I don't know if you shared your information I know you went to different locations but is there any lesson for us to take about appropriate scale and benefits to be had from small environments as opposed to large these were small units within a larger unit so within these small units you might find the same atmosphere and atmosphere that he's talking about I'm going to just add one thing to that last week I was at Southern and Springfield and getting a tour of that facility and the superintendent said that one great thing about Vermont facilities is we have small facility problems and at larger facilities problems with gangs and that type of thing is much more a challenge for staff and at our smaller facilities in Vermont we don't have the sort of population levels that would create a problem like that so I was thinking about Michigan a little bit the racial differences and the population is quite different so I don't know how you can determine racial disparities in a simple single visit but observations or data on that it's really hard to compare facilities across states the whole judicial system may be different the culture is different the history is different one of the things all of them both Michigan and Maine have is they're not unified systems like Vermont so you have a number of women being held for example in Maine which may be more comparable but they're held in county jails or other locations so they have that ability for short term so you end up with a more long term part of my frustration with our system is that it's becoming more clear to me anyway that part of our problem is the housing of the folks who are on detention with the folks who are long term long term being anything over a year and it would be good if we could ever get back to a system where people who are short term were held much closer or on detention much closer to their home area than those who are long term and what we have now is I see people in the male population in a way getting sent from Springfield to wherever to make room for somebody who's you know the commissioner will talk to this more but I think that's one of the things that when we look at our system that presents a problem and I hope we'll continue to consider the detention population separately from the the sentence population final question I noticed that you have you know that there are 43 people in high security is that one of those separate facilities segregated that way and I guess I have the same question on the mental health side do they have a particular building that is devoted to people I believe so that they would be separated the units that you see that are kind of identical those are all would not have the special dance or the close custody ones one of the interesting things about New York City is they're putting programs in realizing that they have a lot more to do they're putting programs in various bureaus and I'll like the bonds so we're trying to put thousands in those places so that the people get closer to them as they try to get rid of breakers thank you both very much for coming over thank you so as I said when we started there's a few more things to put down to call it as an answer because they have a similar program so Fudge and Mike Carl we have seen the GS I'll be at the facility last year when are you doing that this is going to see my daughter we'll try to get back in order of just for a little bit later we've got a majority of the committee here and Mike I do want to say that I hopefully I'll get a chance to read this that was hard to it was important it was dense racial disparities and beyond you know data came up today with Mark and data keeps coming up those of us on the justice reinvestment too working group one reef update is there difficult to getting that doesn't exist you know pulling it together I guess something we really have to look at yesterday during the meeting of the Child Protection Committee there's lack of data there too DCF saying they just can't communicate in the courts different systems is it because of IT stuff or is it they're switching from their system they say is 25 years old DCF DCF that's across all systems though we were working in Burlington with the Code for America people on trying to create an open source tool to aid from our legal aid with expungements and they're talking about that from court records and they're like what are we doing here they wanted to be more aggressive with trying to make it easier so you could speed up that process but they're like we don't basically just have to scrape that data because it's not compatible with trying to create a tool and a lot of it was paper driven and everybody is way out over here and aren't stupid government paper driven okay well Commissioner Tuchel is here I did not presume to be facilities in Maine and Michigan I didn't I didn't know you were going to Michigan I did not go to Michigan you don't have to talk about Michigan I really am interested in Maine what you saw there yeah so what I'm trying to do right now is I was hoping to show some additional pictures of the reentry facility and I think I just figured out another way to do this so are you going down with Congress too? I won't be available that day and apologize I know that Al Corbner will be joining his executive I think while he's doing that reminder everybody that our next meeting is in St. Lawrence what's going on? that's next that's November yep we have a meeting on the 13th I believe in Montpelier somewhere yeah that's going to be room 410 that's a board room yes okay the board that's at 133 there's a possibility the state house will be back actually we just had another email saying that room closed at least until 15th I wonder if they do this in New York I can't imagine you know this is why don't get me going I shouldn't say you know does any other state house in the union get closed for two weeks for wiring I mean my God we're doing a generator we're doing generator well for God's sake I can't imagine are you responsible yes we are we are well I'll tell you what if I'd seen that I'd go against the Capitol I don't know any other state that would close their state house you know I got a call the other day from a staffer from Massachusetts for a state senator in Massachusetts and I'm thinking can I talk to your staff and I said no I am the staff can I have the staff can I have the staff can I have the staff when they re-modeled the USAS that's why billion dollars into part of the cost was for two new office buildings one for the House and one for the Senate behind the existing state house well we need I need an office building for my staff you're that big my staff shoes you take it away yes for me do you complain butch them Well I'm glad to know who's responsible. Well cheer up. I've already done what we did. The first day of the session I'm going to ask to change my vote on the capital bill. We do lots of stuff on the capital bill. 10 and 11 are going to be close until the end of November because of a painting project too. Commissioner, while we're building a new facility maybe we could have a new capital down in Bennington. There's irony to this conversation and that this is what our correctional facilities experience all the time. They can't move that. You don't get to close. No we don't get to close. Anyway, your trip to Bennington. Yes, thank you. So I'd like to share your corrections. I appreciate the opportunity to further the conversation about our business to other correctional facilities in our country. To be clear I did not attend with Representative Taylor in Michigan. I did go to the main women's correctional facility this summer with a number of different people. There's a schedule trip to the new women's therapeutic facility. I only have one coffee of this. Carl's hand and some of those. Okay this is a little bit different. I'd like to show you some actual pictures of the facility from the inside that are more than what you would actually see. As we scroll through these pictures the one person that I consider to ask myself is in which environment would we expect any human being, regardless of a criminal conviction or not, to thrive, to be engaged, to be well. And if you've walked through the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility in contrast to this, again that's a question I ask myself and I think it's a fair question perhaps to ask of the committee too, is when we're looking about how we can best achieve the outcomes that we're no more capable of, but in many cases limited by the infrastructure that's available currently. This is kind of where my head is going. In an environment that is not only conducive to the treatment and well-being and being trauma and gender informed, it's also important to realize, and we heard this directly from the wide staff at the main women's reentry facility, they would never ever go back and work up on the hill again because this environment fosters people with human beings, fosters a sense of community and their stress levels have significantly diminished because we haven't created this environment where it's all about immediate accountability. I know where you're at, your doors are locked in, if you're engaged in inappropriate behavior, we're going to hold you accountable to that. The whole dynamic is different and it's evident from the time you actually get drive-on to the canvas where you're greeted happily by staff and by offenders that are just walking around. There's no fence around the facility. They're free to walk around. It was like we were walking into the state, any state bill, right? So I know we're focusing on women because for us we're looking at the Chinatown facility, but also would this also be appropriate for males? Absolutely. I don't want to lose sight of that. Nor do I. Nor do I. So to be clear, this is a minimum security facility. All of Vermont's facilities absent the work camp side of the St. John'sburg facility are all mediums custody facilities. This is a minimum security facility, so there is less security. Yes, sir. I'm sorry. My question fits in with that. Just the abundance of glass, for instance. Yeah. Is this special shadow-resistant glass or something? They would be if they were in the Senate's piece. That's correct. If they were in the, if you recall a bigger picture, the bigger facility up there, those would have been plexiglass, they would have been strengthened and hardened. This is just like you would find in any consumer retail space, quite frankly. And again, it's the environment that fosters good citizen behavior as opposed to building this infrastructure that's designed to anticipate bad behavior, which oftentimes can't promote bad behavior. 60% of the Vermont in-state population, both males and females, are minimum cussing. 80% of the males out of state are minimum cussing inmates. 80%. 80%. Which is not surprising. But our folks in Mississippi are minimum security cussing. Minimals are based upon facility behavior. Facility behavior, not upon the nature of the crime. That's engagement and there are case plans. That's not given in trouble with DRs. That's participating in groups. And so this is not surprising to me, quite frankly, because people that, quite frankly, the group that's out of state are pretty significant heavy crimes, murders and so on. And oftentimes that's a singular offense. And it's not, a person doesn't necessarily, not, certainly not in all cases, but generally, they don't have a lengthy criminal history. They have a significant one single crime. And so that's not surprising to me that our state population is minimum security. They have a long time to serve. They're generally an older population. So they're less inclined to be reambunctious. And so it's, I was surprised by the number of minimum cussing inmates we had both in state. About in-state again. State's 50%, just about 50% for both males and females. So I'm just going to quickly scroll through some of these pictures and I want to talk about some of the features that I think are really impressive to me and thinking about thoughtful design. These are all sentence people. These are all sentences. They're not to take. That's correct. Yeah. This is the library area. All of the lighting and all of the paint schemes that you see in these pictures, this is the general entrance area, were designed so that the paint and the lighting was all picked out by a psychiatrist. And it was supposed to be some science behind color schemes and lighting that help improve people that may be struggling with depression and mental health. This is a common area. Again, there's no fencing around this facility. The ladies can feel free to walk out here and have lunch if they'd like to. They have board game, visit with their family members. This is their chow hall. Again, they have a culinary class there. Their pastry chef was incredible. George Herbert Walker Bush ate very well. Well, he's only down the road. Down the road. Another area of the library. I apologize. This is just an exercise room. It's built right into just off of the general living areas. As you can see, there's no lights out in that room and there's plenty of light. So you can see just over here that there's a fair amount of lighting. They have a problem with contraband. No. And here's what we heard from the staff very directly is it is so people don't want to lose this opportunity to live here that they're willing to really work on recovery to not lose this and go back up on the hill. While the hill, the women's side and the actual prison component is still substantially better than what we're offering to wherever Monty Mates here, just by and away, is so rewarding and humanizes their experience at the same time and no walkaways and on occasion they do have people that have relapsed. So what we heard from Representative Demro is that they are nine months in one day from their release date. It's when they can qualify to be here. But up to that point, they're up at the main facility up on the hill. That's correct. Which is a medium security. That is medium. They have one section that is close custody, but that can be close. Custody is can be built within a medium security generals. So do all the women go end up going through this reentry program? There are sentence. Yes. If they're sent. That's correct. Yeah. And what if they don't stay clean? They go back up to the every case is is individual. And that's kind of like what Vermont is. I don't think I heard Maine state that any violation in your back up on the hill. You know, I think as people are transitioning to a normalized lifestyle, sometimes that can be a challenge, particularly if they've been in cars for a very long time. Their approach, much like Vermont's, is don't throw away the data in the bath water. It's let's understand what the behavior is and how that became how it's manifested as opposed to the actual behavior. Representative Shaw. Thanks. So you say a population go there is there within nine months in one day of their release date in Vermont. Do you have a feeling for it? I'm sure you have. How many females eligible for that criteria? And is that the right number? Would that be the right number for Vermont? The hundred beds. So there's two ways of looking at this. One is the actual point of reentry or how far they are from reentry. The other is really possible. And so I think that's it. That's the decision point that we have to work through is are we going to say housing environment like this is going to be contingent on when the release date is or we got based on the overall security needs are. So I think in between the balance of their, you know, being mindful of public safety and victim's concerns, I think we're going to strike a balance there between release date and what the security required. Representative Cooper. I'm not thinking about this correctly. Help me. When we start talking about reentry, it is the day I am eligible at my minimum sentence day. So talking about reentry. Yes. Well, theoretically, it does. Well, I think the law says you do. That's right. We do. But upon your men, you are eligible for. For release. And so that we actually planning happens well in advance of somebody's actual ability for release. And that's, again, as our, which is the six months prior to minimum lease. And then there's CR, which is at their minimum. The law. I don't know how much the laws fall, but the law says that you have to start planning the day they're admitted sentence. That's that's accurate. So that actually is not the crux of my question as much as I'd like to have a discussion about that. What I was trying to ask is transitional housing. The main is providing is they're providing prior to their release state. And they're allowing people to go out. Is that what this is as opposed to the way we do transitional housing? And I use the wrong words. I'm sorry. I said reentry planning. What I meant was the release state. And we look at transitional housing from the day. You're released from a facility to transition into. And so are we talking about changing our model so that and are we also talking about the state running transitional housing as opposed to what we do today, which is contracting for it. Very good question. Thank you representative. So this facility kind of reckons back to the late 80s and early 90s here. We actually had a cohort of males and females primarily out of the Chippin original correctional facility who would go into the community during the during the daytime, get the services work, etc. Return to the facility in the same time. That's how this facility is run in regards to transitional housing as we know it here in Vermont. I don't have a good sense whether our main uses anything even close to what we use. One of the distinguishing differences about Wyndham County in this facility is this county want they work. They wanted this facility there because they've seen such a value added to the communities by having this population. We integrate that it was profound considering some of the challenges we find here in Vermont to have a community in the community. The only contingency they put on this facility to build it there was you cannot make it look like a prison. That was the one and only contingency that they put on the main Department of Corrections as they built this facility. Looks beautiful outside. It's incredible. Inside and out. It's beautiful. So were they more receptive because it was a female population, not a male population? Yeah, I don't know. I can't say for sure. I didn't ask the questions. Other than the fact that the community has seen an incredible benefit by having those people who were entering the order force. Mr. Lovett. If we were to go in this direction, similar to Maine with the reentry shouldn't we consider the old model of perhaps reentry closer to home? I mean with this model we'd be putting everything in Chittenden County somewhere wherever the Chittenden County would accept it, accept it and having you know say it's 75 and 75 beds rather than 100. Would it be better to have 30 beds in the Rutland, Bennington County, 30 beds in the southeastern Vermont, 30 beds up in Central Vermont and maybe 50 beds in Chittenden County. I think there's value to the old model that we got away of only because of construction and other issues. Security issues are the primary issues. Security issues, you know that we should take a look at why we were doing that 20 years ago or more than that actually. When 1970 something. So it all began in 88 or 89 and that was the vehicle to a lot of people actually. But the facility overcrowding that you're facing you don't face in a women's facility, right? It's not a comfortable level, quite frankly. It's not a comfortable level, but it's not anything near as huge as you have with the males. We don't have people sleeping on the floor of the place in the women's facility. We're at 147 this morning and we have an occupancy of 175, big asterisk in that 175 is all of that. So that includes our infirmary, our booking, our segregation, our mental health unit and those where frankly cannot be used 24 hours a day, seven days a week for just anybody. What about the attention numbers for women right now? What are those parts at the top of your head? Around 4 or 50 I believe. Let me just take a look. So the 170, 40 to 50, are there any other attention? 200. They'll look like that, they'll have to be confused. No, part of it. No, I'm just saying attention plus. No? If it's 145 or there, probably 44 to 55. Oh, I see. So that's 150. I guess the reason I'm asking, it doesn't need to be the exact number. 38. 38. The reason I'm asking is that whatever we do, in terms of if we do have a new facility or facilities for women, it seems to me that the hooves us to have separate, at least separate, some separation of the detention population from the sentence population. I agree. And it may not be, there may be, I don't know how to deal with that. It's a problem because your main thing, you've got detention, I assume, is detentioners and county jails in Maine. That's right. That's right. And we absolutely agree. We should not be co-housing, pre-trial, pre-detained or pre-judication individuals with persons that have been sentenced under the presumption of innocence. And often, if somebody is not guilty of a crime and they're now being housed with a person convicted of an aggravated assault, we can inherently increase the full risk for that individual just like that. And there are certain risks that need to be considered for a pre-child individual that are more likely to be keeping their head low and behaving because they're trying to get through this process. And if they get stuck with somebody who is problematic, they oftentimes feel compelled by virtue of the environment to engage in that. Moving right along. Thinking of pre-trial and pre-judication people, we tend to say we came to this around here. Could the possibility exist that we could house that same population in one facility segregated from each other? That population being who? The detainees. Detainees in the sentence? With a properly designed facility. The answer is always yes. The question is who are the impacts and who are the stakeholders? And so access to courts will be a real issue, particularly if somebody has to travel. I mean, currently your detainees and the women's facility are all, most of them are all in children. You just take them where they go. Correct. Unless only after they've been arranged. So if they're being arrested down in Benton County, they'll spend a day or two in Springfield until they're actually arranged in this kind of determination over there. This is a way longer conversation. I would think the model of keeping the detainees separate from the sentenced folks and also keeping the detainees closer to their home would be much easier to attain with the male population than the female because you already have those facilities. You've got Rutland, you've got St. Johnsbury. When Springfield was built, that was built also as a regional facility and central to replace the Woodstock. So that's there for the region. And then you could also go back and convert it and then back to the regional facility for males. The question then becomes what do you do if you were real clear that those regional facilities for the males were for detainees only? It's easier to achieve that for the males but now what do you do about the women? What do you do about the women? Do you do a facility for the women that has to be located someplace and then you physically separate the detain women from the sentenced women within that facility? I want to be clear that this environment is not just specific to appropriate for a female population. This is appropriate for about 50% of our state population. I think we got the picture and I am so pleased that you're going to solve that problem you just described. We all agree about the regionals that they should be operating for detainees but in order to get there you can do it better for the men than the women. We could change the law and give it back to the counties. We have county government. Put it on the property tab. I still need to understand the male-female issue. I heard this morning that in Maine there can't be any sight or sound. Please explain. Sure. The Prison Rape Illumination Act established this clear guidelines for all custodial residential institutions across the country to ensure that people are not subject to sexual harassment or sexualized behavior. So part of that is certainly a separation between the male and the female population and we actually did that many years ago in Chittenden and they actually did they had co-ed education and recreation and having an officer there at the time I can tell you I fully understand why we have pre-empt to that point. Would that apply equally to a re-empty facility? So there's one question that is not clear to me but generally the answer would be yes. The question that is not clear to us and we've asked our PREA out of there to explore this a little bit further is at what point does the custody, meaning does if it's a transitional housing program we grant money to transitional housing all over the state and they're not required to follow PREA because even though there's donor or supervision they're not in the direct custody of the Department of Correction. We're trying to think broader and bigger than what we think we can do really want to explore all options that are potentially available to us and thinking about how we move forward. Are there questions about facilities if we can move to the to the dogs? Sure. Can I ask you to hand out the facility? You're not getting away from some ways. You're not. I'm trying to keep us under I'm just real quick you may not have the answer right now but did you get some budget analysis for all of this? One-third of the cost proposed by Vermont BGS $100,000 has been saved so much money they added on more beds by this construction. Because it's not built to that higher level of security. It's incredibly energy efficient there's a fair amount of savings there. The typical prison construction we've done in this country for the last three decades is not needed it isn't needed but we built that with one goal of mine that's containment so it's time to really think about moving towards what we're going to take infrastructure that's necessary. One-third of the cost is $100,000 bed. When we go to St. Oldman's on the 8th can you keep in mind this whole idea show us how when we're on a particular wing how it would be different if we were in Maine or wherever how it would be done done differently. It might be easier when we're right there. It might be but probably it's going to be I think if I understand the question they asked correctly there's operations that we can change but the environment doesn't change itself. How would it be different from what we're looking at right this minute. Obviously I'm in a room unfortunately going to be closed because of the housing institutions for months and but I would like to have this seriously when I'm right in the middle of a facility easy to see when I was at Woodside what would this look like if we were to do a new one and how would we do it and one of the things obviously would be at least as cells that were a little bit more humane like that. One of the things they had on the re-entry facility for New York is the women actually had the key to the room. That's right, so does Maine. So that was a huge chip for them and this is a private space too and you can see this is a far cry from any cell that we have in the state or not. Humanizing the experience. Single occupancy? Some are single, some are double. Thank you. You're welcome. Just as a backdrop Senator Rash and I and I had visited a facility somewhere I think it was in New York State where they had a program for inmates to work with animals and then we talked with Sheriff Joe's office down in Arizona before he went to jail and received his pardon from the president but one of the Sheriff Joe wasn't known for progressive things at all but one of the things he was progressive about was using animals and horses, that program for dogs. Anyway, the program I saw in New York had dogs, inmates training dogs to become service animals. There were puppies who would then become service animals. It just looked so good and I came back and Senator Rash and I worked hard on Senate Judiciary Committee to get this program in place and then all of a sudden one day I find out it's no longer in existence and we could start there. I don't expect to understand one of the dogs bit a guard and that's how it ended. Yeah. So I appreciate the opportunity to talk about this. For the record the idea, the purpose, the intent and the value behind this program, the decision to end the program is not a signal that we don't support the initiative. It was, we had partnered with the Blue Star Mother of Vermont to train and provide veterans returning back to Vermont who were suffering from PTSD with therapy dogs. That was the purpose of the program and quite finally who can't get behind that, right? We followed that at two facilities and within a month of the start-up of the program we had one male and we had one female it may have been rather pretty significantly with one officer who almost had his hand torn off and he did about 32 stitches to put his fingers back together for being bitten by a dog. Because all these happened within a week's period of time we suspended the program concerning the safety of the population and our staff. At that point we didn't have confidence in how the dogs were being bedded and determined to be appropriate in the environment and part of this environmental impact that goes to the environment and most dogs, most pets are not accustomed to an environment that is loud, that lacks natural space and so I think it's a good indicator of the potentials as we think about new construction and facilities. The ability for a canine to adapt to a prison environment are equally as difficult as they are as a human being. So that program did suspend and we do have interest in pursuing that. In fact, we now have continued interest in the Blue Star Mothership, a lot of continued program. We also have the Chippin County Community Society also interested in starting the pilot program. Frankly, I don't know that we don't have the capacity to foster two separate programs given the staffing resources, the space and the capability to do two programs. I did inquire if the two would be willing to partner with each other somehow and there was a clear no. We're not interested in doing that. In addition, the Vermont State employees, given the employee who has been requested that any reintroduction of a canine program to a correctional facility go through impact marketing. Impact marketing is simply how does this new program potentially have an impact on an employee if the employee has an allergy to a canine? How are we going to ensure that they're not in an area where they're going to be exposed? If they have a fear of a canine, how are we going to ensure that they're an exposure to those canines or men? Within the last couple weeks I've had a conversation with Commissioner Faustigi from the Department of Human Resources. We've made with the past couple of years that this impact marketing with the Vermont State Employees Association has not happened yet. What Commissioner Faustigi has recommended is that we get a program as close to ready to implement as possible and then she will ensure that impact marketing take place with the SCA. Again and not a signal of our desire to engage in either one of these initiatives I really have to think about and learn capacity as they do this from a human resources perspective and from a space perspective. Having experienced now the safety perspective is we certainly don't want to expose our population or our staff to bites that can be pretty horrendous. So that's our history and that's where we're at. Appreciate that. Commissioner why don't we take a break and hear from Tom Dalton and we'll go on to another problem. It's coming soon to your district. We're going to talk about one that's coming soon to your districts. Mike How many folks are at the St. John's Berry facility and how many are Marvel fellow? So from the original side 135 St. John's Berry and Marvel Valley Do you want real numbers today or do you want 135? What's the capacity of St. Jay? St. Jay and Marvel Valley are the same 135? Right, the exception with St. Jay is being the word catcher. Then that's another 50. Would you like to know that we're running a little early? Judge Cashman been a long day. Two days. And others from the court that was running a little ahead of time. Tom Dalton from Vermonters for criminal justice reform. So when I heard that this was going to be a topic I reached out to an incarcerated person that I had remembered had participated in a canine program in the past to ask him about that and he explained that he had participated as a inmate in Bigville, Kentucky and a private prison there they had a canine program and he spoke very highly of it he explained what the structure was there was a trainer and an assistant trainer for each dog and three of them shared a cell together so that you know if one of the trainers was at Wreck or Chow or something there was somebody else that could be in charge of the dog making sure they were picking up after the dog caring for the dog and he said that the he felt like it was a very positive experience for everybody he said that he almost never heard any complaints from staff or people who were incarcerated and he said that the way they were doing it is they were taking rotations of dogs a humane society giving them six weeks of training I think was the minimum and then they were getting adopted out in the community having had some dog training and so part of the responsibility was that the trainer who had themselves been through a training program to do dog training would keep a file and would keep records about the dog's behavior and things like that which I think they found to be an interesting and valuable experience but also gave that dog gave the new owner information about that dog as well so he said and I wrote down a couple quotes he said it allows for an easy vibe and people can let their guards down interact with the dogs and I think it is very therapeutic he said it developed compassion in a place where there is not much of it and it sort of brings it out and he said that the dogs were allowed to go anywhere in the facility and that only one unit had the program but when they were going to the rec yard or other places they could bring the dog with them so all of the people that were incarcerated there had a chance to interact with the dogs and benefit from that and I think we all know that there is lots of trauma throughout the criminal justice system and I know from Sarah George that they recently put a therapy dog in the state's attorney office and that they have been raving about that that it has really helped them a lot because obviously they deal with a lot of challenging cases of secondary trauma there is one in Bennington is there? I think it is a golden dog golden dog and I know that a lot of police officers bond with the canine officers so I think we have already seen a lot of examples where having dogs can make an impact in the system and I hear the concerns about dog bites it is certainly something that is serious but I also want to point out that there are risks involved with not having therapeutic environments and trauma informed environments there are suicide rates among corrections staff and incarcerated people are very high PREA has obviously some important benefits but one of the downsides is that it prevents people from having healthy human contact with each other I remember pre PREA I would visit Vermont correctional facilities and a lot of times you would see people greet each other with a hug and now they are not allowed to do that and there is also very limited opportunities to have contact visits so it increases the importance of having the opportunity to be able to have physical contact with another living entity so I think that is something that the person that I talked to said that they found really therapeutic to have that non-judging positive, happy being in their space really made a difference for them and I really appreciate what I hear from Commissioner Touche before this committee and in private I really feel like the department of corrections is making a very sincere and sustained effort to make correctional facilities more trauma informed and therapeutic and one of those initiatives is the open years program and so one thought would be which I have not discussed with them because I am having lunch with Annie Ramisiano soon and I am going to float this to her because the open years program is kind of her baby but one idea would be to pilot it by having open years coaches have dogs and instead of bringing in dogs that are not trained yet start with dogs that are already certified therapy dogs and let that open years coach as they make their rounds around the facility because they go throughout the facility and they meet with people that are vulnerable with their mental health and let that interaction happen with those people and I think that while they are having conversations with them being able to focus on that dog and pet the dog and things like that I think would really help the interactions as well and plus the open years coaches have already had a lot of training they have already demonstrated a certain level of responsibility we are giving them the responsibility to interact with their peers in a really significant and important way so it was just one thought of maybe a way that we could look at starting something again and they bring therapy dogs to meet children in hospitals I think that if we had that kind of a dog we would minimize the risk of dog bites and things like that I also talked to somebody in California they have something there called the honor program and it's bigger than the canine program but the canine program is part of it and part of what they agree to to be part of the honor program you have to say that you are going to um you are going to agree that there is no substance use no gang involvement no violence and no racism no collaboration with peers of all races and as part of this program you can participate in the canine aspect and I thought it was interesting that the person I was talking to in California said that the California governor recently commuted the sentence of three people who were serving life without parole sentences who had participated in the honor program and in the canine program so I think one of the things is that if we want to give people opportunities to change we need to have opportunities for them to demonstrate that they have changed and if we don't have programs that allow them to demonstrate that they are behaving in pro-social ways it's really hard for them to show us you know what's different for them so thank you Tom question for Tom climate one point of clarification about the last year last year now first visit every month we do allow physical contact that's why I said limited okay, fair enough I like the idea of providing therapy dogs for the open years but again I think that's an issue that we're going to have to negotiate with the BCN one of the problems with the dogs in the state office buildings special dispensation and BGS so anyway I wanted to since we got a few minutes here before the next subject which is the more I get into it the more complicated it gets and that's security in our courthouses but for our visit on the 8th to St. Alden's what one of the things I want to do is have the opportunity to talk to guards more correctional officers other staff about their concerns about overtime there was there's been a lot of discussion about the impact of mandatory overtime on many of them proper staffing levels and so forth so I'm hoping that we'll get the opportunity to talk about that if there's other things that you all would like to talk about hopefully we can discuss that so so senator waltz folks are still walking in on that I mean I asked the commissioner a question in the appropriations bill we authorized 32 correctional officers have they been hired we have 15 positions are still I think they're being through by DHR right now adding 30 at one time so we're starting with 15 we have 13 people in the academy currently 30 people in the academy currently so about 5 million new positions actually get onto our boats we'll do just the time so for those and then is there a plan to bring the next 15 on yeah because we have a number of vacancies already actually we're down with that can we improvement is a challenge not only for corrections but maybe we can have maybe it's St. Alden's we can get enough data I want to make sure we have full discussion of the staff but also the situation of the new positions and what else is needed because we sure try to address that issue so speaking of problems came to my you know it's been constant working on the appropriations committee on the judiciary budget as both myself and Representative Rupert do it's been a constant problem of funding everybody and courthouse security has been a concern but more I get it once for whatever reason Bennington seemed to be a place where the problem got out of hand and they cut the hours at the little courthouse on Main Street which houses probate court and some other functions of the civil division and talking to the probate judge part of the problem is people who want to access the probate court work 7 to 3 can't get there in time to access the court so as we found out more discussion and private discussions from the sheriff from Rutland County indicated that in some counties they're receiving $75 green amount of power for example when they're providing traffic duty when there's a tree down or whatever they're receiving $65 an hour from mental health when they're transporting a mental health patient but if they transport a murderer they get $23 an hour I don't know who's more serious it makes no sense at all then I find out BGS gets to pay $65 $50 an hour if you work for BGS if you're courthouse security in Bennington County it's 25 28 if you're in Windsor County it's 34 if you're in another county it's a different number so we have the courts not only do we have a problem but we have them negotiating with 12 or 14 different sheriffs so that's the problem that I hope to highlight and we all agree that courthouse security is an important function now we'll add more confusion is over at the state office building where in Bennington where it melts to the courts are the hours haven't changed at all so this is where most citizens go is to the other one, the one that's in the picture and the lawyers obviously are upset so starting with John Gerstin or whoever want to come up to start the discussion I've asked folks from Joint Fiscal to join us as well as Adam Gerstin I don't know if we solved the problem today we just highlighted I think we certainly need to talk about it the different rates is what really gets me I mean why wouldn't the sheriff want a covered green mountain tower I don't know I'm sure other construction companies pay the same and it's not a problem that just happened this summer with Bennington it's something that's been building up to this and it's getting more to the point but for purposes of this committee I think you'll get more information about the court then myself we have Chief Finance here Gable the court administrator and our security I'm here I'll answer any questions you have but I think for the kind of information why don't we pull up some extra chairs and let Pat and Greg and anybody else want to join them I think I did a good explanation of where we're at and how we got into this mess but maybe a conversation about how we get out of this mess should we introduce ourselves for this Patricia Gable State Court Administrator my name is Greg Molesland Chief of Finance and Brian Greer Chief Superior Judge and we really appreciate that the committee is interested in hearing a little bit more about this topic because it's been a it has been progressing for a while and I thought before I turned it over to Greg that we'd talk about the details of our security contracts and I've mentioned as I've mentioned in a couple conversations with Senator Sears that the problem we're seeing in the judiciary with security is not an isolated problem it reflects a broader problem in the state regarding the ability to recruit qualified law enforcement for various purposes and so we have issues of recruitment we can talk at another time if you want about why that would be but certainly in the judiciary pay is a particular problem because to the extent that people in law enforcement are interested in that kind of work they're looking to get pay and benefits if they can and also many of our sheriffs employ part-time deputies in order for them to be qualified as part-time deputies there's a certain investment that they have to make in training there's a certain amount of time it takes to do it and so these are various aggravating factors the other thing we pointed out in the materials we've provided to you is that we have for a number of years been bringing this problem both to the governor's office and to the legislature because we could see back when we had each of the counties actually did a study a couple of years ago at the request of the legislature to look at security issues there the point there was is there somewhere we could save money and what the counties actually found is I'm sure you're not surprised is that it was quite the opposite that really it required more investments and so I've included in your materials the report we did back when we had those stakeholder groups because they did contain stakeholders that were provided as outlined by the legislature and now we're at a point I'll just give you a few anecdotes and then Greg can explain why this is so recently at the barry courthouse a full day of magistrate hearings had to be cancelled because there were no court officers available from the sheriff's department really from any sheriff's department and for those of you who follow the judiciary you'll know that scheduling of cases and case flow is very important and makes a big deal of difference as to whether or not people have access to justice in the washington civil probate division their court officer had to be moved over to the family criminal division in barry and multiple occasions because we're sure handed in washington county and that left the probate division without a court officer to cover the probate hearings during a september jury draw in the barry court the court operations manager had to take on the role of the court officer for the jury because we didn't have a court officer and so she was managing the jury the way we normally have security but then the fire alarm went off in the building and she had to take care of the jury so she was not present in a leadership role to deal with the evacuation of the building that normally takes place like chaotic not a good outcome the schedule for court officers in barry has been operating on a day to day basis for several weeks and the court operations managers who are trying to schedule cases never know from time to time whether or not there will be a court officer present because we have to do scheduling out well in advance this becomes a problem and we have a murder trial in barry in two weeks and one of the concerns we have is that we are not able to assure the court officers are going to be there Judge Beerson may need to reschedule the hearings to the different counties so I mentioned those, those are anecdotes but it's a developing story as the security situation is eroding and so Greg maybe you want to go through and highlight a little bit of what you're doing so we have 24 courthouses in all working counties and for the most part we contract with the county sheriff to provide the security in those courthouses there are exceptions to that particularly in the last few years as that system has somebody wrote it in window county we hire a private security firm to handle those two buildings they're also providing security in the jitney several buildings so those three buildings are protected by private security firms and not sheriffs and this past year as we try to establish contracts for the remaining 13 sheriffs it was evident that they were struggling to try and make this system work at the rates that we were paying and there continues to be four counties that were highlighted as problematic Senator Sears you mentioned bennington county that was one that I was talking to the sheriff early to figure out how we could make this work I'm not blaming the sheriffs they communicate well they're trying to make this work and their dedication to the courts are valuable and we were able to make that work in bennington by establishing a temporary two month contract why we tried to sort out how we were going to pay for an increased rate we chose to reduce the hours of the probate building shaved off about an hour and 45 minutes a day which adds up to 455 hours a year and we took that savings and we put it into his hourly rate and we were able to establish a year-long contract there in Windsor county we have a contract but we're not feeling comfortable that it's going to stay that way the sheriff has expressed his concern that he cannot make it work at the rates that remain and the two counties that remain very problematic are washington county and orleans county where we don't have contracts at the moment that are working in washington county we did sign a contract but then the sheriff experienced turnover and has not been able to recruit replacements and so we are struggling very specifically at the very courthouse where we have a number of concerns going on on a very small daily basis we're canceling hearings we're concerned about people's safety it's not just judicial employees in that building there are executive branch employees in that building as well and we're not quite sure what the long-term, even medium-term solution is going to be there and in orleans county the sheriff again experienced turnover was not unable to recruit he's already given up the county-owned building and we're still trying to make it work we leaned on the lamoille county sheriff who had a position so they're covering one building in orleans county the other building we're still trying to negotiate with the sheriff to establish a contract there and we're not quite sure how we're going to make that work so it's a situation that is rapidly deteriorating and we're expected to continue we've got ongoing conversations with private security firms to try and step up and increase their presence in the different courthouses and we are internally looking at cost-saving measures like the one we did in bennington where we shaved down some hours in order to increase the hourly rate that report that that the court administrator mentioned just a moment ago from 2016 that looked at our security structure and we mentioned that without addressing the funding issue that the system is going to deteriorate and crumble and the sheriff would continue to have trouble recruiting and filling positions it was about four years ago now and here we are, they can't fill positions to bury specifically the report suggested that there would be 10 court officers in that building and right now we have four and one of those positions is a temporary employee so it's really handled right now by three sheriff deputies and actually one of those sheriff employees is not even a law enforcement officer notice that and one of the persons at the door was a uniform, I think he does finance and stuff and you're just out there to help out because of the lack we're leaning more and more on security guards and not law enforcement I'm just wondering this is all a money issue have you or your office or everyone together all part what it might cost on a yearly basis to bring things up to a reputable standard yes I've done that math, the question is what's a reputable standard our rates right now, every sheriff contractors unique they all have different rates and right now for us is between $25 an hour and $33 an hour by contrast the executive branch pays $50 an hour as I mentioned and in some cases transports are even more than that so to bring everybody up to $30 an hour the shares that are below $30 to bring them up to $30 it costs $750,000 per year going forward so if you, let's say we went completely crazy and went to $50 an hour which is what other agencies are paying to know that figure I did not run that scenario but I bet you it's probably in the $3 million or $4 million range the reason I bring it to the justice oversight committee this is an access to justice problem and certainly that's part of our role here and I don't know if there may be other solutions besides $50 an hour but it doesn't make clearly I know there have been times here when the sheriff will be speaking shortly but I know that they've had difficulty in getting help for the state house when we've had events like the governor's speech and things like that but the other thing that gets me is the wide variance in payment you would think at least when you're dealing with the state there would be one rate but there seems to be various rates that why is there various rates it's a sheriff's that are driving this it's not that we have a set rate from the state, correct it's also different departments contracting for different services but when we're talking about courthouse security for you folks to contract with a sheriff who's driving that conversation is it that local sheriff so it's 14 different negotiations and historically it's developed that way because each sheriff is an entrepreneur they have to make fees to pay for their project to make it a little more confusing if you take an individual who is in the criminal court and they need an abat competency evaluation we will order the local sheriff to transport to a nearby hospital for an evaluation once they're in DMH custody there is a separate contract between DMH and that sheriff so literally he could get paid one rate when we order him transported to the facility and paid a different rate if he was transported from that hospital to another DMH facility there's a separate contract to pay a different rate another interesting factor is that there are a number of executive branch agencies within courthouses and we've come to learn through informal discussions that they like to be there because of the security and so there have been circumstances of space in the courthouse but they didn't want to leave because they had the protection of judiciary security it's true in Bennington the department of labor DCF, the state's attorney a couple of other agencies are covered by the courthouse security that you're paying at the front gate I wanted to say one the judiciary has clearly been bringing this message to us for several years I feel the need to acknowledge this I've read the report we haven't funded we added a wee bit more money this past year because of your side of things but we're still you were zero over the last two years you and the governor were zero zero we went to oh I didn't realize that we went four then five the question that I have so we are understanding the urgency of the situation we are talking about sheriffs because that has been the historic way of providing these services going way back in time I would hope that in looking at an appropriate solution that we think about how to manage this today and so I wonder if in fact the judiciary should have its own security force or however you want to describe it so that you have more complete control over what your needs are and you're able to move people around so that would be one alternative way of looking at this and I'm sure there are many other ways to think about this but rather than just saying we need to increase the rates for sheriffs I would wonder about what is the best way to solve the problem it is true that there are some states who have their own marshals services Connecticut may be one but I know Maine is one and Maine ended up with their own judiciary marshals services for reasons that are similar to what we're facing here that's a very expensive alternative because what you'll be doing there is creating a larger state workforce which that may be the good policy answer but it's important to realize that that would not be a cost reduction approach the other issues related to a judiciary marshals service if you will is right now we do not have employees who are armed and so we engage the sheriff who provides armed law enforcement who can arrest and the like in window that was the first sheriff we lost a long time ago then contracted with Securitas which is a private company we do have some armed officers with them but they cannot arrest so although a judiciary marshals service may be an answer that I think if we're doing problem solving one would hope that there's a number of ways we can look at it I do think that it's a state you know we're a unified court system now we're not a county based court system and it's security to a state run system so I think the idea of having a uniform contract and having some reasonable expectation that either the sheriffs are required to provide the security and if not we need to find other options but I will say the judiciary or its Securitas or its the sheriffs the recruitment issues will stay the same unless there's sufficient motivation for people to do that work so I wanted to go back to the ballpark figure you gave me because it strikes me that my question was about bringing existing employees up to the $50 an hour mark I believe that's what you were quoting me but we're also talking about the problem of substantial under employment in various places around the state which is another aspect so in addition to bringing the hourly up hiring more people in places like the place in very near 10 and has four if we went really crazy adequately staffed and raised the hourly rate would 3 million go up to $5 million or the really crazy aspect just to revisit that the report suggested that based on best practices in court systems that we should have 30 more positions than we currently have and we've made a request I think it was FY17 for half of that we were trying to get I think it was about 18 positions just last year we asked for 5 new positions in those situations where we have temporary employees we just have to have a court officer there and those are not budgeted positions and that's not something we can sustain so having more positions is part of our desire in particular we found that in courts where there's not a roving law enforcement officer but they have more problems responding to incidents because everybody's stationed somewhere and somebody's got to lock the door or cancel court or clear the court room and you know how to respond so we have a number of programs that in the Bennington case where you have the story from the Bennington banner that's one person I mean they're only talking about one officer and some of the courts hours are being cut in some courts there's only one and some of the bigger buildings you might have one or two people at the screening and then ideally you have somebody in the hearings but then in many of the civil hearings we don't have an officer in there we just can't afford to have them you're competing with a number of problems not the least of what do you think a solution might be to have one contract with the department of state attorneys and sheriffs I don't know one contract is feasible I know BGS I believe is going from one contract to many for reasons outside of financial what I would like to see is that we get to one rate that we simply have a rate that the judiciary is paying for sheriff support and I did run some scenarios that I didn't run them all up to $50 an hour but I mentioned if we brought everybody up to 30 it would cost $750,000 additional above the 2.7 to bring with a $33 an hour just $2 an hour more that would be $1.1 million and $35 an hour would be $1.3 million how would you deal with a winter sheriff you go to 30 and he's getting 33 would you drop it to 30 for him the rate would be extremely difficult are those numbers factoring in the additional staff to get everybody up to being full staff so when I said I bring people up to 30 that leaves the people over the sheriffs that are over 30 at their current rate just brings the lower end up so I'm understanding that money's a driver I think I understand $50 but you pay the sheriff it's not with employees that's getting something under that and that's frankly going to be your business with the sheriff pay is important how much of this shortage of people and I think I've heard it from a very very real that they just don't have the help and they can't either hire to find the help if it's not a desirable job if you're paying $20 an hour or $22 or $23 an hour is that factored into that like the whole rest of the economy looking for help everywhere so I think there are several facets and certainly that is one we know there's very low unemployment at the moment and so in general the labor pool is smaller but we're surrounded by states that also pay more and so once you look at someone who's invested in becoming a law enforcement officer they do have options and I think you'll find that even within the current sheriff's department that they might move from one to another or move from one police department to another or the state police depending on what the compensation is so I think you have the general labor market you have the fact that there's an investment to be a law enforcement officer of time and money we're surrounded by states that are paying more and I think this is a factor where I would defer a professional law enforcement they might disagree that there may be image issues right now in terms of the way the media is portraying officers in the news that probably makes it more challenging to attract brand new people into the profession but clearly good pay is going to trump a lot of those issues those lines we're working with BPD and retention and recruitment has been a consistent problem the chiefs there have said that that national image of law enforcement right now has been a problem for law enforcement agencies across the country in terms of bringing new people in dealing with that kind of new perception of law enforcement right now and getting people to say we're going to invest now into a 20-30 year law enforcement career when I might want some more opportunities to move around careers I just don't want to be associated with law enforcement that's been a big issue we have seems to me one of the things you mentioned early on maybe the elephant in the room we have sheriffs who are entrepreneurs but are also independently elected officials who have their own police forces who provide various services to the state to private organizations and and independence and we're trying to and they're negotiating individually for various services and the state has seen fit to have several different rates that they pay depending upon the service and the judiciary is out there somewhat alone in terms of the lower rates seems to me Department of Health can pay more for some reason when they're transporting people BGS can pay more I don't know what hospitals are paying when they had sheriffs covering the emergency rooms so it's all kinds of different contracts and we pay for one or two state deputies and for the sheriff's salary we state and then we pay the security that you negotiate as a state but just I don't know that that's a very efficient system well you think it's maybe a good opportunity for us collectively to do some problem solving and obviously we're hoping that we'll be funded in a way that we can secure the courts but we're also willing to engage in that bigger discussion which is looking at all the different ways we need law enforcement in the state how can we do that I don't want to identify good guys, bad guys in between here because I don't think there are any I think it's a system that's just developed over the years that's now reached a boiling point that's extreme need for courthouse security particularly and the need for transport which the corrections commissioner gets into people are going back and forth it's causing him nervous nights we need to solve this as a state and work together on it and I the probate judge said you're kidding me are you really saving $10,000 by cutting my hours that my office is I think you said 12 that's not a lot of money in a $5 billion budget that we're saving $10,000 in Bennington by cutting our $12,000 cutting those hours it just doesn't in the overall scheme of things it doesn't make a lot of sense no but given our discretion that's kind of the context in which we're working we can shave just a little bit here to try and solve it I forgot to ask her if she'd pay that out of herself statewide to really solve the problem it might take $750,000 but what you're saving in Bennington is $10,000 to $12,000 very small numbers it's not like rocket science but it seems like this can't be something that we let be the consequence well luck either has been an incident so that's the other thing that we haven't talked about is just and I'm thinking of the very courthouse where the entry way to bring prisoners in is honestly just horrifying and so yes we are really lucky there's structural issues as well one of the things I visited the Springfield State Office Building it's shocking that there hasn't been something worse there the parking lot down below which is really unsafe for the employees anyway thank you all thank you very much are there any other questions right now Adam Greshan is next I don't know if you have any person here and I just it's something that's developed but it does seem rather odd that you've got money to pay those other departments more each other you know the one thing I would caution you on is when you compare sheriffs I've heard many times BGS is paying $50 an hour make sure it's for life work it's not necessarily for life work alright difference between a sheriff that might sit in a courthouse or whatever that term is someone who you can call on when you have an event or when you have an emergency that would be a different rate so just make sure you're comparing the same rates is there a way that joint fiscal could receive a copy of all the different rates from the judiciary and the administration state attorneys and sheriffs so that we could at least know what they are we can work with you guys that would be helpful at least and what type of work they're doing yeah and what it is that we're paying for you know I would simply say that we heard the judiciary at their budget hearings they've come to speak to us and they listed as a high priority security in the three years that I've done this each of the years security has been a high priority I would note too that the legislature provided additions to their security budget each year not nearly as much as they would have wanted however there were additional changes put into security you know last year I think you guys agreed to 45,000 the year before was 100 to 5 before that was 175 so there's been small increases and notably it's small relative to what they are saying that they need and you know I agree with that and it's not that we haven't heard that I would say however that to get to the level that they are saying would bring them up to a market rate as I think someone said it's a money thing it's just money so we could do that but we would need to do less of something else and it would be very challenging and I could also say that at the beginning of budget reviews that we're starting in and that you shortly will share with you there is a stress across the entire criminal justice and protection system and we see it every year this year you know we're starting out just to give you an example this morning we met with the criminal justice training council they want money to expand training from basic training from 16 weeks to 20 weeks because they can't cover all the material they are expected to cover in 16 weeks states attorneys we met with them a couple of days ago they need more deputy states attorneys to keep up with the crowd of attorneys evidently that the defender general deploys you know they also need more money for expungements you know expungements are a problem the defender general not to be outdone he needs more money because he can't afford to keep that crowd of attorneys because his crowd is sitting out he can't pay a market rate I don't need to make light of it but you know this is going on we haven't heard from the AG yet but you know last year you made a very passionate case that court diversion community based is costing him a fair amount of money and to do it right he needs more funding the judiciary we haven't heard from them yet but I'm sure we will you know last year they got some addition for court interpreters they got budget adjustment for title IVD some extra money for expungements but I can tell you that we see this and we see the stress in the system and our budgets are our attempt to prioritize what we have available I know none of you by the way so well we but some of the ideas that I think we're coming to would be that they would contract with private security to cover the courthouse and then having a roving deputy and I don't know that that's something that I want to support but that may be what it's coming to and we end up with renaissance in our courthouses and I'm sure that's where we want to be I know it's a bad term but it's always to call them UVM back when I was there we didn't have our own police force UVM I guess just to say that we will face in January in the same situation we face in prior we're going to be running pretty tight and we'll have to make choices and maybe one of the choices is as you said earlier or someone mentioned earlier that it's an access and you might call it the cost of doing business we could decide that we would need to figure out how we're going to plan well I mean I don't know that it solves your problem one of the other ideas would be to charge for example in Bennington charge DCF charge state attorneys charge everybody else that's in the building for the courthouse security that they're receiving but then that comes out of their budgets it's just a different pocket I know but it helps the judiciary do you remember that their pocket is different I mean they are a separate branch and they are effectively providing security for the other I know I would hear if we had some way of parsing out the Bennington courthouse so that the court security was on the second third floor you couldn't get up the whole everybody on the first floor would be terrified that they wouldn't get any security but in Rutland they don't have that at their state office building at Springfield they don't those are just some of the thoughts we're talking about costs and if the courts are having to reschedule and which to me says stretching out their hearing times I mean there's this cascading effect of costs throughout the system so maybe we saved a buck here but the downstream costs are way more significant that we need to pay attention to too any other questions for Commissioner Gresham Commissioner thank you very much Sheriff last but not least thanks for coming over so all right Sam Hill Washington Sheriff and your side of the story sir well it's a long sad story so I mean I'll just go over some of my thoughts over the I became Sheriff 15 years ago and when I got to the office I looked at my staffing law enforcement for 20 years prior to that and saw the trends of law enforcement I've taught at the police academy so I see what goes on there and I told my staff that before I leave I can see our ranks deteriorate to the point where we're only going to be able to do our state-made functions which our transport prisoners serve a civil process because we're not going to be able to find the help and they were beside themselves would be making that statement they're now seeing that that we're not able to replace the inter-year-old deputies that are retiring and nobody else is able to step up there's several reasons for that the full-time academy is always full attracting part-time certified or level 2 certified people is becoming more of a challenge to the point where this September class was canceled because there wasn't enough deputy or enough officers throughout the state to host a class many reasons for that are the the stigmatism of law enforcement the level 2 certification which many small departments and sheriff's departments need has become really unwieldy where if you have a full-time job and a family I always give the example of 25 years old with a spouse and a couple of kids they have maybe 5 or 10 days off a year the phase 1 of the training is 2 weeks there's about another 3 3.5 weeks of week-long and day trainings that they have to go back to the academy for plus additional trainings they can take with us and online phase 3 is they say it's a minimum of 60 hours with a field training officer we find it takes at least 150 hours to get someone comfortable on their own so when I sit down and I give this field to someone that I really want because I've lost two people that I've given this field to taking the job and within one to three months of the training said I can't possibly do this because I have to work we can't afford and it was mentioned earlier the outlier of fun I can't afford to pay somebody for 6 months while they're not working while they're in training before I can put them into position sometimes the frustration is I have a guy ready to go in 4 months but the last required training that the academy offers is in front of 2 months so we're sitting on that person waiting to get them trained and that's not anybody's fault that's just the nature of when things are offered and when they come around so that's part of the recruiting problem the other problem is when I started in the administration of the administrator's office was different we actually I had to negotiate environmental court civil court criminal court family court and the supreme court all separately because everybody wanted their hand into it and I said we're going to do that we're going to do one global contract with everybody's piece included and that simplified a lot but at the time that through the court administrator's office and things have changed a lot but at the time it was a secret that nobody could really find out what the other sheriff was getting paid and that made it really hard and that's where the disparities came from and then as time went on and we were all making a go of it because we really feel sheriffs in the court is the right thing to do so we have tried very hard to do it but when several years many years since I've been here where we've been level funded or you know 1% and I've gone to the administration said what happens when you level fund but your health insurance goes up oh so we have to fund that well I do too so when I have court officers that are working for me and I get level funded I'm either taking away from them or I'm taking from another contract that I'm working to pay the health insurance for my person to work in court my court reimbursement is so low that next Thursday we work very well with the courts and sometimes I fill in just because there's nobody else to do it and you don't get charged for that but next Thursday the officer at the Supreme Court is going to follow the justices and I'm putting another officer in there I'm going to lose $3 an hour all day long on that officer that I'm putting in there so that the court is covered because the reimbursement fee isn't what I'm paying my other deputies so it's an overall global funding things have changed where we tried to work with the court administrators years ago where for instance myself in Chippenden County there was a contract that we were only going to charge for health insurance when we had somebody that needed it and if you were working for me today you said my wife has better insurance I'm going to take hers, I'm dropping yours I have a good little court administrator's office and say cut this line we're not going to charge that our monthly bill isn't going to include that anymore but in eight months if I needed somebody we'd add somebody else in we're no longer able to do that so I'm caring insurance somebody has a guy that needed insurance in the court administrator's office this year said I'm sorry we don't have that money so he's debating can I keep that one person that I have in the court because should my other contracts supplement having the guy in the court the funding that we've been able to secure we've kept some person my one guy that's left at the courthouse of Barry is actively looking for applications into six or eight different departments because we can't pay him what he will get paid somewhere else I've asked retired people do you want to come and work at the courthouse and when I tell them I'm not able to pay they say no I can go here and make three or four dollars an hour more so it really comes down to funding and over the years I've lost so many of my deputies including to the courts to work the security for the courts because they're making more money and having better benefits being the family court officer through the court administrator's office rather than working for me because now I'm a state employee and I'm getting state benefits and retirement and they know the difference because I paid for the platinum plant for my full time staff and one of my employees with the platinum and I paid 80% of it went for an MRI it cost him $900 a week later I went for an MRI with the state insurance it cost me nothing so they know the difference is when they have the option to think can I take a job with the state and then the state BGS security is making more than any one of my deputies that work in the court non-certified law enforcement so in a nutshell throughout the security makes more than they're making more than some of the starting state paid deputies transport deputies they realize the BGS charges throughout the government so they don't have me really I'm surprised I also like to believe I'm sorry we all have to bear down I'm shocked okay and the issue let's circle back to the issue of Barry the issue of Barry has just been my numbers have dwindled I had some unfortunate incidents that occurred in court where we had to let go let some deputies go I'm able to replace them so I went to the court administrator's office and gave them a month's notice and said I'm sorry I just can't fulfill this anymore the other hard part with fulfilling the court contract isn't even the full time people for instance in Barry there was talk of magistrate court at one point we had our criminal court officer in the two screeners out front we were also filling Mondays and Tuesdays for magistrate court when they had magistrate court Tuesday morning for relief from abuse orders depending on now it's in the morning arrangements on Thursday morning for half a day we'll come up with employees that are available to work only Monday or Tuesday or only half a day when I say hey do you want to work half a day for relief from abuse orders on Tuesday they said don't you have an all day detail open and rather work that all day detail get paid all day so it's hard to have the staffing because I can't have a full time person to work two and a half days a week do you think that if there was one unified contract it would help that would scare me we've talked about it over the years about just a unified contract without a mandate that we have to put in I think it would help some departments to recruit because I could encourage other people to come to work for me because I could pay them a better salary what scares me was a conversation that we've had in the 15 years that I've been here about putting them under our executive director's office the court security and having the state pay them to make more state deputy positions that makes me have to fill those positions and I can't fill them now so that would be a real fear for me it's just that we're still going to be in the same boat of not being able to fill those positions I also want to say that buildings are a problem we really want to be able to fill these positions and not a good day for me to go down and talk with Rob and say we can't do this anymore we just don't have the people to do this anymore you just had that conversation with him so I asked that question I'll ask you how many positions do you have within your department or are you full I can hire as many as I have open positions for in a barrier I had two open positions that I gave up the memorial is now filling because I couldn't hire people while not seeing the court system other officers that you contract out to various down spores track control folks all the various other jobs that you can do it's a that is an open answer because many as I need to do the work and unfortunately I haven't been able to find those people so some of my patrol contract tracks are covered by part-time deputies because Worcester has a contract for instance for $500 for a year so it's a patrol every couple of months so one of the part-time guys may go out and put a little patrol in there so I can't necessarily support all of my contract with full-time people so I could use right now if I had two more full-time people I could take the court contract back so it's not even a matter of how many and then the other issue we have because there's been times where we had people that we could have hired within the department that we could be really busy also along with the construction and whatnot but what do I do with that person for December, January, February when there's no construction so we have to wait out that can I afford to pay somebody to sit in the office for three months because I don't have work for them and it's tough I mean it's a tough issues of how the Sheriff's departments were designed years ago to operate where our state mandated functions of the transport prisoners and service civil process and other than occasional carry-forward money when they might buy us a few uniforms and we have to work all these other paying details to buy the cruisers' uniforms and equipment to do our state mandated functions so when the discussion was do I want to put a guy in court or send him for a $65 an hour job I'd much rather send him with a $65 an hour job but we don't when we have the contracts we're filling those contracts and when we had people in court it was tough knowing that I'm breaking even on this guy in court as a pastor and I'm having to give details to some other county because I don't have the people to fill so it would be nice if at some point the court was it ticed us with a little more money so there was a little bit of a money-making operation so that we wouldn't have to use I have two guys that have worked nights all summer long construction in Waterbury and on the interstate but I can't use in court because I need them to make the money to support the rest of the apartment if we took away the state mandate to transport prisoners would that free up staff sheriffs to be able to do this? not necessarily because the majority of our transports are done by our state paying transport deputies it's a separate bucket of people but if you had state if you could use the state paid transport deputies to be providing security they're not going to they were hired as state paid transport deputies and that's their job but what I thought I was hearing you say is that we're having a hard time finding certified individuals and I'm assuming they fall into that area and if that job wasn't there anymore wouldn't they be available to do this other work? they would look for other work because they're getting paid a lot more and they're getting state benefits versus getting benefits through me with no state retirement so if the state paid transport requirement weren't there anymore rather than doing security there are none other opportunities for those individuals to find better paying work so it's all down to the pay they would mind you state paid deputies before working for security would go to work for another police department but if they were getting the same pay they might still go to another police department because they'd rather do police work rather than doing security work there are certain people that that's what they want to do they want to do that security work and I've had people that really want to do that security work but I couldn't pay them enough because they could make money somewhere else it's extremely frustrating because as I said the sheriffs really feel that we should be in the courts it's really hard for me to say we can't provide that anymore especially over my tenure of being able to build it up because when I started Barrie Court had private security doing screening and they had screening only when you stepped inside the criminal court and then I moved to family court there was a family court officer that worked for the department but that was the only person I had there it was the eight of them bringing a screener to the family court and then they moved the screening downstairs so the whole building was a secure building and then to be able to put the court officer in so we really built that program up with the staff that I had early on and I was very happy to be able to do that and now between and now I don't know if I'd be able to find the people to come back because those people that may have worked for me over the years have found something else to do it's very frustrating because they would much rather have the people there well I wish we could have solved this problem today but at least highlighting it making us more aware of some of the challenges we're facing I don't know what the solution is but we better find one yeah well it's really the two because even if you come up with the money it's still finding the people yeah and in to know that if I'm hiring new people especially level 2 certified it could be 6 to 8 months before I can even deploy them into the position and I just want to I know I'm dragging on here but things pop into my head that I really wanted to find out is the presence of the law enforcement makes a huge difference and I saw that even within my own staff at the court because initially the criminal court officer was in plain clothes because that's what the court wanted at the time and I argued and argued and argued saying just the presence of the uniform can take away a lot of the problems different staffing at the court I was able to convince them with the new clerk that I thought let's try it and immediately the incidents that we had in the hallway and in the courtroom calm down the court officer in the courtroom could hear something going on in the hallway and just open the door and step out they'd see the uniform and it would calm down so I think that the presence of the deputies at the court do really make a big difference as far as court security and comfort for the employees and staff that are there thank you very much thank you for having me well commissioner last but not least I've got to step out then we can talk about the problems on the parole okay if the executive director joins us absolutely I'll be right back sometimes sometimes you can come up with some questions from the director everybody's stretched for a minute I'd like to ask you a question may I be the director of the roll board I'd like to call over the executive director to send him to our incident can you clear the room can you clear the room can you clear the room I'm just the past same topic everybody would presumptively parole can you folks know what presumptive parole is what the thinking is yep alright so we're the testimony that we've been asked to provide is an update on our report that is due on December 15th of this year to the Joint Justice Oversight Committee I have read the the draft report that we put together quite frankly don't believe them, Jay's seen it yet it's just internal thoughts at this point the one thing I can tell you Mayor Janet if you disagree I don't think you will but if you do please feel free to say so everything when corrections is complicated then as we actually start to dig into this it's even more complicated than we had even thought it would be and to the extent possible we'll provide this committee with a comprehensive report but quite frankly I think we're going to find ourselves in a position that the report is going to ask more questions than it answers because of all of the complexities and if you the one of if you do one thing how does it impact another and then it will trickle down one very simple example is last year we passed the legislation that I have around good time and it exacted parole status from being recipients of good time if we went to a presumptive parole model we fully anticipate that we're going to have a cohort of individuals that said I'm not interested in parole because I can still be supervised and earn good time at the same time so this is one of those little probably a clear example for me anyway is the intricacies that we're going to have to track down and figure out as we go through this again I think as we will provide as comprehensive a report as possible but quite frankly I think it's probably going to require significant testimony and probably more research and data to work on sort this out so if we went to a presumptive parole system what would we do with folks who are currently sentenced and will qualify for parole would a presumptive parole be effective upon a certain date and then everyone who was sentenced after that date would have presumptive parole and those that had already been sentenced will be under the old system all those again all those with an LSMJ I think it's one of those areas I think it's really tricky it's trying to figure out what the impacts are not only to a sentence but to the victims communities to the prosecutors to the defender general's office those are all it's complicated and unfortunately our goal here is to make corrections so much less complicated but in order to get there we've got to dig through all of these intricacies that have been built up over the last couple of decades I think also to add to it a little bit is trying to figure out what the purpose behind presumptive parole would be necessarily is it what are the benefits to it versus our current parole system and our current furlough system because a lot of these presumptive parole candidates could potentially be going right out on furlough anyway or they might be paroled at their minimum as well so it's really what are the benefits to it what are we looking at gaining by having a presumptive parole system on top of our already many statuses but I think that was part of the thinking there's so many statuses out there in furlough there's so many situations where someone could violate their conditions not necessarily creating a crime but violate their conditions in furlough and after maybe not the first violation but maybe after two or three or four violations and they get yanked back into an incarcerated setting that those violations is what's driving some of the churn in the incarcerated population and if they weren't so many of them out on a furlough status parole has lack of another word not as strict conditions as furlough you have to prove that the person should not be paroled now you have to prove that they should be from my perspective I think going back to our testimony last two is a reflection of why we think the presumptive parole may have value here in Vermont one is again just to simplify the number of legal statuses we have not only from to make it easier for the prosecutors and defense attorneys to understand but the victims to understand and our community members to understand so when they see furlough and see parole and see all these statuses nobody can make sense of it in fact it's kind of an interesting and we talked about this earlier this week with the council of state governments we spent literally two days trying to sort through with CSG and trying to explain how complicated the immediate sanctions programs are here in Vermont they really highlighted for us that even we get confused on our own statuses and so it took us two days to get through one slide that was presentable to the work group of the council of state governments parole also offers the opportunity for our state to travel through the compact where furlough does not that certainly is a limitation because we have many many people that are under supervision of the community who are either work or need access to services or shopping across the borders that's probably to a large amount of our population those are two of the primary reasons and I think we have a real opportunity to think about how it was under parole has a place here in Vermont that said it's complicated how often do you disagree with a case plan maybe not maybe disagree with that word I don't have the data offhand but I I can give some personal experience since January I think oftentimes I've seen I took the rule on in January and I've seen if anything we grant parole more I think we grant parole more against DOC's recommendation versus not granting based on recommendation but I can't remember exactly how the numbers work the numbers I have here don't necessarily give the distance between whether or not the department has made a recommendation and the parole board denied it the DOC didn't make a recommendation and the board supported it the data I have right here but you do track that could you get that for us yes we could one of the concerns that we do away with parole and go to present the parole are we actually increasing the numbers of people incarcerated or is it decreasing right and so again I think as we look at the good time component of this that's a real possibility and so every action has an equal and opposite reaction right and so those what we're really trying to identify is if we say present the parole and we've disqualified parole as we're earning good time then we're going to have people saying keep me in jail I don't want to go in the community but we could change things what we're really informed about is making sure that we're identifying all of those potential areas that could be problematic and it's kind of going on the wormhole bit but I think it's important that we try to identify where those potential areas of conflict come in so that we're not to the extent possible that we're being as informed about this change as possible in one area we're already looking at and we're I'm trying to figure out an implementation plan now as we've looked at the early release statute for parole to build in because it does leave a lot of leeway in developing our own policy and procedures around that and how do we offer more of an incentive for good behavior to possibly be early released from parole as well of interest and Mary Janine if you have more information or different information please share but from what I'm understanding is there are several other states that do we presumptive parole status and in those statuses they're generally low risk nonlisted offenders in Vermont the parole program includes all of our offenders if they're past their minimum and have completed programming they're really selectable so this is a broader group of individuals we're considering and that's where it gets even more complicated is if we were to look at somebody who was a high risk or had a listed offense for the mechanisms that we need to do to evaluate fully the risk to the community the risk risk and need factors for the individual a really sensitive notification cases high profile cases we don't make sure we do our work with our communities and the victims and so this is again we'll provide very I think what you're going to find is we're probably going to have a lot more questions to ask and probably some more work to do to really kind of understand the breadth and impact of the system I met with people from New York who are looking at Rakers Islands one of the things we talked about was in our system and the woman from I can't think of her name now she runs the she's a professor at Bennington College and she does art and she does corrections I figured that she said well what is your number of people who are being held beyond the minimum I said around 184-185 I said well that's the number you should be looking at and I'm wondering you know maybe it's that obvious so maybe we should instead of looking at when there's presumptive parole for a little whatever looking specifically at that 185 people whatever the number is and what is it about them that has not allowed us to release them why is it we haven't released them well is that the answer but is that I mean that's one answer but I don't know if that's why we haven't released them I know programs are not available they've been unwilling to participate that's right but the big reasons are housing and sex those are big ones for the past men eligible for release there are a number of people who are past minimum for example who have refused to engage in this reduction program and based on their risk we would not release them without completing that program they've had numerous bites in the community and they continue to pick up charges whether they be misdemeanors or bellies they could have a sanction to serve for misdemeanors of anywhere between as a sanction imprisonment sanction anywhere between one or five days and up to a year before we would review them again again those are the people that have had multiple multiple bites in the community and just have not found success and I'd like to add that we also those are the cases that are not being rolled as well because of those same factors really their risk a woman I'm not sure if you're aware of this yet who came back in her custody today and she's got 13 previous felony escape referrals she's serving only her time right now for the escapes from our previous iterations of escape and it's she has certainly had her struggles to try and reacclimate the community escaping aside I mean the conviction that's keeping her here the stabilization isn't there for doesn't record of escape figure into whether you get furlough going forward any conviction while you're previously supervised in the community is it's not an absolute no it is certainly part of the overall continuum of consideration so but I mean somebody getting to 13 escapes you'd think on number and they'd say you can't have furlough wouldn't you you might you might at the same time you know we're trying to maintain some confidence in our abilities to support and rehabilitative work that we're well but do you want them out knowing that they have a history of double digit escapes from the program just and so we do have those cases that are we've determined that will max out but you know I think an important thing to consider here is if you run the ACLU blueprint I think this is these are some of the cases that you'll they noted that the DOC has too much discretion in these cases authoritative discretion on incarceration I think those are some of the cases that are going to be directly tied to that and they're not wrong in that having too much is I would argue but we do have that authority and it is oftentimes those type of cases because the escape question was she doing something bad when she escaped? this is an individual who has struggled with social, financial, employment drug addiction a whole host of risk-indeed areas that have not found any success and just and so we've used transitional housing programs you know gender specific or non-gender specific that are we're hopeful to try and help find some successes even small successes in a case like this are quite frankly paramount but I guess the bigger question is so what if she's escaping as long as she isn't creating more crimes well that's where I think that there was change to the escape language was really intent to do is in many cases the previous last year if you escaped you got the new felony conviction in many cases that was the first ever felony conviction which seems totally unfair and frankly our experience is when somebody takes off they're generally they're a substance user and they relapse and they'll be returned to prison that should not warrant a new felony conviction and that's part of our gateway to the rehabilitative approach to larger issues that play in the community so I haven't got any notes we've been talking about this in an area I think I've got my mind here a little bit what I'm talking about is the words on the different scope and meaning in lack of housing I don't think it's a fair term that we use but it's a good catch-all term how do we have you thought about that anymore as we're moving forward with some of this work you know how do you define that population if it's the 180 or whatever the number is today that we need to be looking at we've been Senator Shearson's advice to do how do we get away from that to be a catch-all for a myriad of other problems it certainly is and that's kind of like the final straw is that we can't find a place for this person to live but what that doesn't tell is the history in there and that's that they've had exercised every possible resource whether it be their personal resources to the family and friends or through local housing opportunities or through a transitional housing it's not welcome back to take another shot here so ultimately they probably could be released so long as all the other case planning things are in place if we could find a place for them it would be possible for us to meet with a few of these folks so that maybe we could hear from them why it is are there going to be frequent clients? I understand you're currently you're incarcerated but you could be released if we found a residence where the barrier is to I would like to meet with three or four people to talk about that who are past their minimum and haven't been released or have they been released and then they got back in generally that's the case unless there's probably small court or people who are not from Rogers or not well established in Vermont that might I don't know how the rest of the committee feels but it seemed to me to be most useful to meet with people who got out, came back in and what happened I only caution is they may not tell us the truth they may not give you the whole truth I understand so how many situations of those folks who could be released they say that they have housing that they could go to in their mind but the reality is for you here a family member or whatever they say I don't want this person but I can't tell how many times do you put in that position fairly routinely and it's a tough situation to be in I will say to one of us visiting I have a place to go but DOC is not allowing me to go there it's not a preponderance not a preponderance of the cases but it does happen we're not going to swear them in but that's some of the testimony we heard this morning that a person could be released but they said well the bedroom in the place and I'm thinking well maybe there's more to that story so interesting Judge Gerson and I weren't able to connect today but we were hoping to connect because I was hoping to connect with them and say when a judge orders as part of the probation condition that you reside is directed what are the factors that are determined making that decision and everything judicial of course is complicated so there's no easy answer to that but I'm hoping to connect with a judge to learn more about how the judges used a housing condition as part of the supervision process and is there an opportunity from an internal policy perspective for us to do it as we look at how we determine whether or not the house is appropriate from a just from a realistic point of view I would much rather supervise an individual in the house because quite frankly when we're done supervision they're probably going to go there anyways so we'd supervise to the house and the potential risk there or we try to create a small environment for the period of supervision and only to have them return back to the environment without having adequate support for the supervision while they're there so those are the things that I'm going to say with you right now good point so we were asked by a lot of people the house committee was at I was astounded by the number of people in sickbay and the number of people to service those folks and I'm hoping that you can go in that area again over there just so others can see whether there's matter reduction or whether it's just a normal flow so they don't have to be firmly there now there's a sickbay there's a sickbay the protesters are about to shut down State Street so if you want to get out of here I suggest we leave State Street you're parked on that side so you can get out there okay yeah but I suggest that I don't want to see butch running over protesters frankly you do we don't want to house you State Street you're out of here it's a good point to adjourn on we'll have a report to you see you in St. Paul