 I think we should start. I noticed Connie Crosney, a woman I haven't seen in a hundred years. Hi, Connie. Nice to see you. Anyway, so I'm going to just introduce Sarah, who will then introduce Chesa. But I was saying, this is Sarah George, who's the state's attorney here in Chittenden County. And we decided to have this session tonight for the Vicki opening session, because I read a brilliant article by Chesa, which appears in the nation about six months ago, commenting on it was really a very moving article. As some of us know, Chesa grew up with his two biological parents who were imprisoned from 1981 for quite a while, all during his youth. And he has other parents also, Bernadine Dorn and Bill Eyre. So he has basically four parents who've loved him forever. But while he was young, he was separated from his parents because they were imprisoned, some of them in New York state, I guess all in New York state, where I have to know his father, David Gilbert. And as I mentioned to him, I visited David in jail and was always impressed by his intelligence, his articulate, able to speak, and his total commitment to political change in this country. Anyway, so with that, I'm going to turn it over to Sarah George, our state's attorney here, who will then introduce Chesa. And thank you, Chesa, very much for doing this. Thank you. Thank you, Sandy. I think you did just introduce Chesa. But I will just say that I am Sarah George. I'm the Chittenden County state's attorney. So for those of you who aren't local, I'm in Burlington, Vermont. I am lucky enough to introduce Chesa and to have a conversation with him tonight about the importance of parental contact during incarceration. As Sandy just said, and many of you may have seen from the invites, Chesa has a pretty incredible story, especially considering he is now the elected district attorney in San Francisco. He was elected in 2019 and sworn in in January of 2020. I think that I could tell a lot of his story myself like Sandy just did, but I can tell you from hearing it a lot that it is much better coming from him. So I think we'll just dive into a conversation about this topic. And if people have questions that they want to make sure are included, just send them to me via chat or they can send them to Jenna. And if you're not engaging in the conversation, if you can make sure that you're muted just so the background noise doesn't take over. Yeah, let's get started. Chesa, thank you so much for taking some time to do this with us today. Thank you, Sarah. It's really great actually to be talking to a group of Vermonters and I appreciate your work. I'd love following your work from afar. And it's just sad that I can't come out and visit in person. I have really fond memories of summers during high school where I worked in the area around Plainfield, Vermont, which somebody may be familiar with, down near Montpelier. And I spent those summers building houses doing carpentry work. I absolutely loved spending summers in Vermont. And as was mentioned earlier, my father was incarcerated for quite a while just across the lake near Plasper, New York. And the easiest way to get there and the most fun was through Vermont. And so I would usually fly into Burlington or drive up through Vermont, visit friends in Burlington or back in Plainfield and then drive across Lake Champlain, catch the ferry or go up north and go across on the bridges. So I love, I love Vermont. I love the work that you all are doing there. And I'm really excited to share some of my story and some of the ways in which the work we're doing in San Francisco dovetails with the work. I know Sarah and her office are doing right there in Shendon County. So thanks for having me. We will definitely make sure to get you back here soon. So as we talked about, we're going to talk about the importance of parental contact during incarceration. And as Sandy just said, your, your parents were in fact incarcerated when you were a child, one of which is still incarcerated. So I think wherever you sort of feel like it makes sense to start, if you want to just share some details about your childhood experience and we'll, we'll kind of go into the where that led later, but just for right now talking about your childhood. Yeah, absolutely. When we start right in the beginning, you know, I was, I was born in New York City in 1980. And when I was just 14 months old, my parents, Kathy Burdine and David Gilbert left me with a babysitter. And they headed off to participate in an armed robbery of a Brink's truck. During the course of that robbery, the folks who actually committed to the robbery, my parents were driving a Swiss car and they weren't armed and they weren't at the scene of the robbery itself. But the robbery went really wrong in a security guard was shot and killed, others were shot and injured. And then after the switch was made into my parents' vehicle, the vehicle was stopped by police in Rockland County, New York, and two police officers were shot and killed. Even though neither one of my parents was, was armed, even though neither one of them personally or directly hurt anyone, three men died that day. Men with families, men with communities, and both of my parents were arrested. Needless to say, neither one of them came back to get me from the babysitter. My mother would end up serving 22 years in prison and my father received a 75-year minimum sentence. My entire life, I grew up thinking that my father would die behind bars, thinking that my own children would have to get to know their grandfather only after going through metal detectors and steel gates. I've been visiting my parents since before I can remember. In fact, my earliest memories are visiting my parents when they were in the county jail, awaiting sentencing, and then growing up on weekends when my friends were going to amusement parks or birthday parties, making the trip from Chicago where I was raised by my adopted parents back east to visit my parents in prison. And so I've been acutely aware, really my entire life, of the ways in which this country relies on incarceration and punishment to the detriment of public safety. I've seen how our system of mass incarceration, right, how the United States leads the world and locking people up, how that approach has failed not only to heal or restore those that have been harmed by crime, but also how it fails to rehabilitate people who've committed crimes and how it creates an intergenerational cycle of trauma and incarceration in the process. And so my whole life, I've been motivated by a desire to do better for the next generation, to end mass incarceration and to reinvest the resources we save from closing jails and prisons in crime prevention and in victim services. Anyway, let me stop there, Sarah, because I know we've got a lot of work to cover. Yeah. You said that you have a lot of memories of visiting your parents in jail. Do you have any recollection of an understanding of why you were visiting your parents in jail and what for, like, and at what point do you remember that information being shared with you? Yeah, so I don't, I don't remember the first visit. I started visiting well before I have any living memory. And in some ways it's sort of a funny question, but why was I visiting? I actually did, because so many families with an incarcerated parent don't bring the child to visit or in some way discourage visitation or are dishonest about what's happening when visitation does occur. My family was always very much committed to being honest with me about where my parents were and why they were there. And they were also committed to supporting and encouraging visitation with both of my parents as long as I wanted to do it. I wasn't forced to go once I was old enough. There was at least one occasion I can remember when I was on the runway in Chicago in an airplane on my way to see my dad in upstate New York. And the plane had mechanical issues and they made us deep plane and there was delay after delay. I must have been about nine years old. And I got scared. I got scared about the plane. I got scared about it being late at night. I got scared about our plans being thrown so off course. And I told the flight attendant, this is of course well before a cell phone. I said, I don't want to go anymore. I want you to call my adopted parents that have them come get me. And they did. They drove back out to the airport. They picked me up. We canceled the visit. So all of my parents, all four of my parents, my entire extended family was very much committed to having me in the driver's seat. And also to encouraging visitation. And so to your questions, Sarah, why? Because they're my parents. And because so many of the challenges that I had as a kid, which we haven't talked about yet, but which we can, were related to their incarceration. And so let me just take a moment and kind of dig in on that for a minute. I shouldn't share with you all that my own first child, my son was born less than two weeks ago. And this is actually my very first public event since my son was born. I was on paternity leave and since coming back, have just been doing staff meetings with my office. And I really can't think of a more fitting topic of conversation than this one. For me, at least as I am embarking on one of life's greatest adventures of fatherhood. And, you know, kids, my son cries a lot. He cries when he's hungry. He cries when he needs his diaper changed. He cries when he's cold. That's his way of communicating. And of course, as we get older, we get words. And we start using those words to express ourselves. And so I want to share with you some early things that I said as a child to illustrate the real emotional toll that parental incarceration takes on kids. When I was maybe five years old, I was seeing a child therapist who was helping me work through a lot of the behavioral issues that I had stemming from my parents' incarceration. And at one point I said to him, if only I could have talked, I would have told them not to go. I was 14 months old. And at five and six and seven, I somehow felt that it was my responsibility to have warned them that this crime was not going to go as planned, that they were going to get arrested, that people were going to get killed. Other times, getting off a phone call with my parents, I would break down crying and say to my adoptive parents, maybe if I'd been more lovable, they wouldn't have risked losing me. Right? And so in those two short childhood formulations of emotion, you can kind of see the extremes. And the other extreme manifested in temper tantrums, in outbursts, in challenges adjusting and integrating with my brothers, adoptive brothers and my social group, it's normal for children who have had their parents separated from them. I was still breastfeeding. I can't imagine the harm that that causes to an infant, to my son, as I think about him and how dependent he is on me and his mother right now. At 14 months old, I was just from one day to the next ripped away from my parents. And I was angry and I was scared and I felt guilty and I felt ashamed. There's a tremendous stigma that comes along with it. And my broader family was absolutely committed to using restorative practices to help me get to know my parents as more complicated, as more nuanced than simply criminals or murderers or people who abandoned me, but actually people who loved me and were good caring people, compassionate people who had done something terrible, but who weren't defined only by that terrible act. And it took years. It took years for them to regain my trust that they had broken. It took years for me to forgive myself for the harm they had caused. And that process of working through the anger and the stigma would never have been possible if we hadn't had visits and phone calls and letters. And if my family had been dishonest to me about where they were, that would have reinforced the distrust rather than restoring trust. And so I am tremendously appreciative that my family recognized the why, why visit because they're my parents and because as much as they had hurt me and hurt others, I loved them and I needed to know them and all of their complexity and nuance in order to forgive and move forward with my own life. I never would have gone to law school, been a Rhodes scholar, been elected to serve the people of the city and county of San Francisco. If I hadn't had the opportunity to work through that early trauma on prison visits and phone calls. Yeah, so to that same point, I know that there are skeptics or critics out there that would say that children whose parents are incarcerated, especially long term, should not have that contact, should not be going into jails, especially if they're adopted. I take it you don't agree with that. Look, I want to be really clear. There are some parents, whether incarcerated or free on the street, who simply cannot and will not ever be good parents. Right. That's a reality of the world we live in. Some people don't have the skills or the desire or what have you. But the fact of incarceration in and of itself should absolutely not be a ground or a basis to say, therefore, we're going to terminate a parental relationship. Even if you disregard the rights of the incarcerated parent, even if you say you have committed a crime as a result of that crime, all manner of punishment, including termination of your rights to a relationship with your child are appropriate. Even if you go that far, which I don't, think about the best interests of the child. That is the legal standard that we use all across this country and across the world for making decisions about things like child custody, for making decisions about things like education or medical procedures when kids are too young to consent. And I can tell you could I know from my own lived experience and from having watched an entire generation of young people grow up visiting their incarcerated parents in the same prison visiting rooms that I was in. Those visits are a critical part of our development. Just the same way that my son's relationship with me and his mother is going to be a critical part of his development. Whether one of us makes a mistake, serious enough to result in incarceration does not in any way undermine or minimize our son's need for us in his life. And that is true for children all across this country. We have millions, literally millions of young people with an incarcerated parent on any given day in this country. On any given day, millions of people do not have parents in the house with them because they're behind bars instead. And that is something we need to reconcile, we need to recognize undermines public safety, doesn't promote public safety. It creates a likelihood of future incarceration, of future trauma. We know that hurt people hurt people. And if we can find ways to intervene to heal the harm that parental incarceration causes, to support young people in coming to terms with their identity and learning that they have nothing to be ashamed of simply because their parents made a mistake or committed a crime, we as a society will be safer and stronger and more resilient as a result. I was really taken with in your The Nation article that you wrote about your actual visits and you're not knowing really the specifics of what Vermont has to offer for families. Can you talk a little bit about what you were offered, what you called I believe the trailer? Trailer visits and what you were able to do with your parents while they were incarcerated? Absolutely. So here are some kind of examples. This is where the emotional side of my life visiting meets my professional and academic interests. When I was in law school, I did a research project comparing all 50 states in the country and looking at their prison visitation policies. And I did it. I can try to pull it up and find the link in a minute and share it with folks. The reason I did that is because I knew that I had been tremendously privileged given that my parents were incarcerated. Why do I say that? Because New York State has some of the most child-friendly visitation policies in the country. Not only does my father's prison and all New York State maximum security prisons allow visits 365 days a year for between six and eight hours depending on the prison, but they also have a program that you mentioned, Sarah, called trailer visits or a family reunion program. And New York is one of only I think now just four states. It was five at the time of my research. Let me see if I can pull up. Give me one second. But I have the link here. For folks who are able to use the chat feature, I've just put a link to the article. And this is an article I published almost a decade ago. So it's a little bit out of date, but I learned in that research that New York was one of just I think five states at the time that had family reunion visits. And those are essentially overnight visits or conjugal visits. And I bet your, is your father in prison? Oh, you're probably getting prison, bro. Yeah, we talked about that at the beginning. So you probably deserved it. Stupid bitch. Okay. Jenna, can you rape kids by any chance? Oh my gosh. Sorry. Can you remove them, Jenna? So the problem... Yeah, I'm sorry. I was muted for a second. I think that I've got them out unless you can identify someone that's still in the room. People can listen if they want to listen. They're just disruptive. I hope your father drops like that. Do you know who that was? Is that Lisa? It keeps, the name keeps changing. Okay. I'm removing that one. I caught it. The family reunion program is a program in New York state and a few other states that allows for overnight visits. And the father was a little bitch, that's what he was. I would have beat the shit out of him. The basic, the basic theory behind the program is that you want to incentivize those who are incarcerated to behave well while they're in prison. This gives them an incentive, it gives them something that can be taken away if they misbehave in prison. You also want to have ways to ensure that when people are going to be released from prison, they're released to communities that they have a relationship with, to families that know them and care about them. And it actually makes reentry more successful. Those are sort of the narrower kino-logical goals. But from my standpoint as a child, it also meant that I had the opportunity to visit my father and to get to know him in a very different context than what I mean by that is the traditional visiting room setting is you're sitting across a big wide table, it's loud, there's bad acoustics, if there's any food at all, it's vending machine, it's vending machine food. And if you're a four-year-old or an eight-year-old or even a 12-year-old, trying to sit across the table for several hours at a time and have a conversation with someone, even a parent, it's challenging. It's particularly challenging when you're working through all of the kinds of emotions I talked about earlier, things that are really, really difficult for anyone, even an adult with all of the expressive capacity of language. But when you're a child, you need a safer space than a prison visiting room and you need one that has more time to work through these sorts of feelings. And so I was able to go into my dad's prison for up to 44 hours at a time, basically a full weekend. And we brought food, we could watch TV, it was basically a trailer home inside prison. He could help me with my homework, we could take very short walks in front of the trailer back and forth. He could put me to bed, he could cook me dinner. And those sorts of basic normal things were a critical part of how I was able to build a relationship with him, get to know him. And I know if and when he's released, thanks to the fact that he was granted clemency about two weeks ago, is now eligible for parole. I know that those overnight visits will be a critical part of what enabled me to play a role in supporting his reentry. So I wish more states had those kinds of programs. I know they make a difference in terms of good behavior while in prison, in terms of successful reentry, and in terms of the healing process that's so critical for families of the incarcerated. Yeah, that's really important. It's not offered in more states. It seems I don't, I'm really interested to look at your, your link and I apologize to people. This is really unfortunate that somebody's taking over people's chats, but I'm just going to assume that nobody's actually writing the things that are that are being put in there and we'll just try to move on. So you mentioned really briefly going to law school and the Arrow Road scholar, you sort of breezed over those things. Can you talk about how, if you can put this into words, sort of how your decision to do each of those particular things to go to law school or to become a public defender and specifically, and then district attorney, were impacted by your childhood experience? Yeah, so I, you know, I, as you mentioned, I went to Yale College, I was a road scholar, and then I went back to Yale for law school. I was tremendously privileged to go to some of the best educational institutions in the world. And one of the things that I really was acutely aware of was how unusual my experience, that of parental incarceration, was in those settings. Now, I'll just tell you one little story to illustrate. My first week at Yale College, I was 18 and we were doing kind of ice breaking, getting to know you activities in our dorm. And one of the senior counselors set up a game called Two Truths in a Lie, where you tell the group three things about yourself and one of those things is not true. And so I said, I speak French, and I'm a really good soccer player, and my parents are in prison. And one of the other people in my group immediately said, well, of course, that's obvious, of course, the lie is that your parents are in prison. Nobody at Yale's parents are in prison, right? In some ways, it wasn't fair for me to do that to them. It was such an obvious trap that I knew they'd walk right into it, but they did, and they did predictably, because there's this assumption when you're in privileged spaces that mass incarceration doesn't touch our lives. And the reality is it does. Nearly half of adults in this country have an immediate family member who is either currently or formerly incarcerated. This is a defining part of American culture. And so for me to own that experience, that lived experience, have come to terms with it by the time I was in college meant that when I was doing icebreakers or when I made new friends in a biology class, I wasn't ashamed. And I wasn't scared to share that experience with people around me, many of whom had never been exposed to the criminal justice system, many of whom had no inkling that the United States leaves the world and locking people up. And so I felt really in some ways like it was a duty to share my experience and talk about the realities, not because my parents are innocent, not because it was unjust for them to be punished for their role in a deathly serious crime, but simply to make people aware that what we do in this country is more draconian, more punitive, less restorative, less healing, more expensive, less effective in any other civilized country in the world when it comes to punishment and crime. And to share that experience through organizing and advocacy, to channel some of the resources of a place like Yale College into the local community. So I organized a busing program where Yale students would volunteer to drive Yale vans full of New Haven, Connecticut residents up to a prison that was inaccessible by public transportation. That's just an example of one thing that I was able to do well in college that challenged the tremendous, excuse me, channeled the tremendous resources of a place like Yale, and the good intentions of so many of the students there into concrete action to support the broader community that in so many ways was disconnected from the little Ivy League bubble within Yale. In law school, we had kind of more concrete skill sets. We had the ability to actually do legal research and legal advocacy. And one of the things I did in law school was the research that I shared earlier in the chat. And we dug in and literally looked into the visitation policies in every single state. And we worked with the Association of State Correctional Administrators, and we presented our research to them. And we did that kind of advocacy around things like solitary confinement and visitation. And I wrote a blog journal article on the rights of the child, essentially trying to reconceptualize the way that we think about visitation so that it's not about the right of the incarcerated person, but rather about the right of the family member left behind. And I published that research. So it's definitely been a thread throughout my life, not only because of the need to travel through metal detectors and steel gates to see my father, to give him a hug, not just because of the need to have every single one of the phone calls I've ever had in my life with my father recorded and listened to by the Department of Correction, but also because of my passion for this work and for finding more humane, more cost-effective, and ultimately more successful ways to respond to crime than has been done in the past in this country. So it's still the work that I do. I love this work. I love thinking about the issues and recognizing fundamentally the humanity of every single person, whether a crime victim, whether a person accused of causing harm, or whether one of the family members or community members impacted indirectly by the interventions of the criminal legal system. You are now the district attorney, but you were a public defender before that in San Francisco. Can you talk a little bit about your experience as a public defender and why, like everything that you just said, why you became a district attorney instead, because I think a lot of people are still kind of thinking of what you just said as the role of a public defender to be out there talking about those things and not a district attorney. Obviously I disagree, but can you just talk about why it's important for the role to be switched? As a question of Chesa, you were elected, right? Correct. As a district attorney, I was elected. It's an elected position here as it is in Chittenden County, and my election was in November of 2019. So I'm not even halfway through my first term, not even two years into office. But as public defender, I was not elected. I was a deputy public defender. So it was a trial attorney job. I tried cases. I tried more than two dozen cases in front of San Francisco juries. I represented over a thousand people accused of committing crimes. And so Sarah's point is well taken. It's sort of the opposite side of the aisle. The lawyers, my staff, I have about 300 staff in my office, they go against the public defenders, my former colleagues in an adversarial legal system. They're on opposite sides of every single case. I've filed over 7,000 new criminal cases since I took office. In every one of those cases, there's a defense lawyer, often a former colleague of mine advocating for the person that my office is now prosecuting. And so it is a very different position to be in. But what led me to make the switch, let me be clear, I loved my work as a public defender. I loved being a trial lawyer. I loved having an attorney-client relationship with people who were often in their lowest moment and their worst crisis and who had very, very, very severe sanctions on the table for what they were accused of. I liked that work because I recognized that our criminal justice system wasn't going to solve the problems that had led to their arrest. Because I recognized that sending them to prison for life or imposing the death penalty was not going to undo the harm they were accused of causing. And also because I recognized that our system does, yes, tragically and shockingly still convict innocent people. And so I wanted to make sure that nobody who was innocent got convicted and that we were mitigating the harm that the criminal legal system caused to those accused in their families and communities, mitigating the harm, in other words, that could create future criminal conduct. But over the course of that work, I started doing more and more impact litigation, more and more policy focused work. And I really, I grew frustrated with seeing the ways in which the systemic failures repeated themselves case after case, day after day, year after year, things like money bail, a system where all across this country, when someone's arrested, if they are wealthy, they can buy their way out of jail without regard to how dangerous they are and where someone who's poor but arrested on flimsy evidence, low level charges, who presents no public safety risk can languish behind bars simply because of their poverty. It's a system that undermines public safety even as it makes a mockery of equal protection under law. And I saw that system, that money bail system impact my clients day after day after day as a public defender. And so I decided to start challenging that system through legislation, through litigation. And I increasingly started doing work that really wasn't focused on my individual clients, but was focused on systemic change. And it was that shift that led me to realize I could do far more to reform a broken criminal justice system as district attorney than I could ever do as a deputy public defender, one case at a time. And so in 2019, I made the decision to run and the voters of San Francisco elected me. And it is a tremendous challenge, I have to say, to wake up every day and not just think about what's in the best interest of one individual client who I serve, but to think about what's in the interest of justice, what's in the best interest of all of the people of San Francisco, those who are victims of crime, of course, those who have been accused of crimes as well, and all the rest of us who need to live in a system where we have trust and faith in the integrity of the process and in the integrity of the outcome of judicial proceedings when someone is accused of serious crimes. And that's the system that we try every day to build and to improve. And so happy to be able to do it in partnership with folks like you, Sarah. Thank you. And family members of incarcerated individuals, I've seen in a lot of articles that they are referred to as hidden victims, victims of the criminal legal system that aren't really acknowledged, and they're not given a platform to be heard. You know, we often in cases will have victims compensation funds, but they don't, of course, apply to the children of the individuals we're putting in jail. Have you seen any specific or do you have any specific policies or practices that DAs or communities can sort of implement or try to implement that could help address this? I think you put your finger on one of the fundamental contradictions, in my view, in our criminal legal system when it comes to how we allocate resources. You know, we do have crime victim compensation funds, but the amount of money spent on victim services and victim compensation is a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket of all that's spent on policing and incarceration and prosecution. So I think big picture, we need to spend far more on supporting victim. We also need, and I think this is kind of the heart of your question, we also need to broaden our understanding or our definition of who qualifies as a victim of crime, who's worthy of those meager services and supports that do exist, right? So let me give you two concrete examples of policies we've implemented since I took office in this vein. One of them, and this is actually the first policy that I put into effect after taking office right in January of 2020. We launched a primary caregiver diversion program. This is a program that recognizes that we are all safer and our communities are stronger when primary caregivers who are willing and able to be loving parents to their kids or at home taking care of their kids rather than in a jail cell or racking up new criminal convictions that can prevent them from going to work and earning the money to support their family. And so we created this program for nonviolent offenses where if we have proof that someone is a primary caregiver, instead of going forward and seeking a criminal conviction, that person can opt for a diversion program where they take parenting classes and they engage in court supervised programming for up to two years, depending on the details in the particulars. And if successful, then at the end of that time period, the charges will be dismissed. That program has already in its first year, we're now nearly at the end of its second year, but in its first year, we refer to over 100 primary caregivers. And there were only a couple that dropped out or were kicked out because of a new arrest. Many of them are still working their way through the programming. It is rigorous. It does take time, which I think is appropriate, particularly when someone's accused of a felony. But other people who have completed one way or another, we have over 90% success rate. That kind of program can incentivize people who are struggling to get back on track and focus their priorities on what matters most and give them the tools and the skills and the infrastructure to succeed at what all of us need them to succeed at more than anything. We need them to be successful parents. And that's just one example of a program. Another one I want to mention is a little bit different, but I think it also bears mentioning. We recognize in the wake of the murder of George Floyd that all too often when people are harmed by the state at the hands of police or sheriffs, they're suffering. The injuries that they suffer or the death inflicted is minimized or ignored. They're not treated as victims. And so I started a policy in June of 2020 that recognizes victims of police violence as victims of violence, just like any other victim of violent crime. And I guarantee that even if the state Victim Compensation Board refuses to recognize victims of police violence, my office will provide the same, whether it's funeral costs, burial expenses, trauma services and referrals to trauma-informed care. We will provide the same services and supports to victims of police violence as we do to any other person who suffered from violence. And I'm really proud that that policy is now a model for a state law that hopefully will be signed by the governor in the next couple of months. That's amazing. And so an example of that would be when the officer involved is not charged. Is that the idea that it doesn't matter whether criminal charges brought, you would support that victim regardless? That's right. And let me explain why that's so important. As you know, Sarah, the instances where an officer uses physical force or discharges their firearm causing injury, sadly they continue to occur all across this country. They're not as frequent in San Francisco as they are in many parts of the country, thankfully. But when they do happen, the investigations often take months or years. And families, especially families that have just lost a loved one to state violence, cannot afford to wait months or years for the investigation to be concluded to bury their loved one. Mothers should not have to rely on a GoFundMe page to bury their son. And that's what's happening all across the country when police use lethal force. And I want to be clear, sometimes police use lethal force lawfully. Sometimes it's in self-defense. Sometimes the law allows them to use lethal force. And therefore an investigation will not result in criminal charges being filed. But does that mean that the mother of the young man who was killed should have to go bankrupt, burying her son? Does that mean that she should have to go into the internet and beg for alms in order to see her son's ashes, her son's body cremated and turned into ashes? Of course not. If someone is a victim of violence, even if the use of force is lawful, we should be there to support those who are suffering. We should be there to support families that are impacted by violence. And when that violence is perpetrated by the state, by people that are armed and uniform with our tax dollars, even if it's lawful, even if it's permissible, it doesn't mean that we should punish the entire family that's left behind. And so our policy is aimed at recognizing that the more we can do to heal people in a moment of crisis, the more we can do to support families that are grieving, particularly when their grief is connected to our work, the safer and stronger we will all be, the more equitable our society will be. Do you have any advice for the community members on this call or that might watch this later about what they can do to either help support programs or policies like this or do themselves to try to support not just the children of incarcerated parents, but also the parents who are incarcerated and trying to be good parents? Yeah, you know, there's so many things to do, Sarah. And I appreciate, you know, calls to action are always important. And in some ways, I want to flip the script a little bit and put this question back on you a little bit, because so much of it does depend on what's available locally. But I'll throw out a handful of ideas. I mean, it really depends on your particular skills and interests and, you know, what your local prison or jail or district attorney is willing to do with you. Having people who volunteer to drive me up to the prison prisons are usually located in remote rural parts of the state, far away from the urban areas where most families of incarcerated people live. Having, I mean, I can't tell you how many hundreds of people over the years before I had a driver's license volunteered to drive me to visit my parents. People who, you know, by me having me on the way back from the prison or who would be there waiting at the airport when I got off a long flight from Chicago, people who took time out of their day and kindly and generously were just a safe, loving companion and means of transportation to get me to the prison gate or back home from the prison gate. That's a simple thing people can do. Donating toys so that incarcerated parents can give Christmas presents or Hanukkah presents to their kids. Obviously they can't work, they can't buy presents for holidays or birthdays the way that they would want to do, the way that their kids expect them to do. And when you're growing up as a kid and your friends say you in school, hey, what did your mom get you for your birthday? And the answer is nothing, she's in prison, that can compound stigma, that can lead both to, for mother and child to a sense of despair and desperation and guilt. And so finding little ways like donating toys or supporting through transportation can make a really big difference in the lives of individual children. The other thing that's I think critical is to be, if you're more on the legislation and policy side of these issues, be an advocate, be a forceful advocate at the local level for the kind of reform minded policies that folks like Sarah are implementing in their office. You've got to step up and support people because I will tell you there is tremendous political risk. You all heard the kind of attacks that we get for trying to implement reforms. You heard them earlier on this call. That sadly is a constant feature of public life. Sarah and I and other reform minded district attorneys get pushback from folks who are desperate to double down on the failed policies of mass incarceration. Whether they be police union representatives, whether they be people with mental illness, there is a really intense on Twitter and social media, there is a really, really intense wave of reactionary dishonest, hateful intimidation against folks who are trying to engage in the kind of leadership that I know Sarah is doing for all of you in Burlington and broader Chittenden. We need our community to stand up behind us to stand with us and to say this represents our values. This makes us feel safe. These policies are humane, they are data driven, they are family first, and they are exactly what we are electing folks like Sarah, folks like me to do. Being that voice of reason on next door, on Twitter, at town hall, at public comment, at your state legislature will help create political space for policies that can really and permanently disrupt the intergenerational cycle of incarceration that I grew up witnessing day in, day out in my parent's prison business. I'm wondering Sarah, can I ask a question of both of you? Sure. How the heck did either one of you get elected? In a way, I mean especially you too Sarah, I mean you are known I think as a reform-minded prosecutor, but Chesa, didn't your parent, didn't that whole experience of your parents being jailed, influenced? I mean didn't you, how did you get elected given that that was your kind of politics and theirs? You know I have three answers for you. I got elected because I am part of a national movement, part of a growing recognition from coast to coast right, from Burlington to San Francisco, from Portland to Atlanta, from Boston to Philadelphia, from Chicago to St. Louis, of folks that recognize the tough on crime policies of the 1990s did not work, they did not make us safer, they bankrupted local governments, they deprived our communities of resources for things like education and housing and healthcare that can truly make us safe. Part of a movement that recognizes that we need to invest in supporting victims, not simply treat them as pieces of evidence in order to secure yet another criminal conviction and lengthy prison sentence. So there's a movement, there's a context, a national context for the first time in any of our lifetimes. There's a recognition that we need a different approach to criminal justice, that's the first reason I want because I ran in a moment when there is a national reckoning. Second reason I want is precisely because of my life story, is precisely because of my experience. I wasn't any shyer about talking about my lived experience with the San Francisco voters and I was on that first day at Yale College. I wanted people in San Francisco to know what I know, I wanted them to see what I have seen and I wanted them to believe as I do. With tremendous confidence, we can do better, we are doing better. And I was detailed and I was specific and I was transparent in my campaign platform about exactly what I was going to do to make our community stronger, to make our community safer, to make our justice system more just. And the third reason is I worked harder because it is coming from the heart. This isn't a stepping stone to some political career, this isn't about needing a job, this isn't about wanting a life in politics. I would rather be changing diapers right now but I love what I do. And I am so lucky to have this job so humbled every day that the people of San Francisco put their faith and their trust in me to try and do something bold and brave and creative, to try and move away from the known failure to an unknown promised land that I believe we can achieve in San Francisco and in Burlington and everywhere in between. Yeah, I just want to really stress the part that Chesa was talking about with being really clear with voters when you're campaigning on these issues because if you're really, really clear about your politics and your policies and where you're coming from and you have an overwhelming vote and win, there is nobody that can really get in when you start to implement those policies and they start to work and you start to have data to support the efforts that you're making. The voters are going to continue to have your back, the community is going to continue to support you because you're doing exactly what you promised them they were going to do and I think that's what not just Chesa but a lot of us around the country are seeing. Robin, did you have a question? Yeah, I wondered Chesa how your father has changed over time living in prison and grown, I guess, in certain ways and when do you expect to see him out of prison? How long will it take? Yeah, my last question you Chesa was going to be that also to share the recent news and give a little more information about that. Great, thank you for that question as well Robin. 40 years is a long time, I'm 41 so it's a lifetime to me. My father's been in prison 40 years and will be 40 years in just over a month so he's been in 39 years, 11 months. If anyone of you thinks about the kind of person you were, what your likes and dislikes were back in 1981, right? I mean what were your favorite foods, what were your favorite athletic activities, what were your favorite hikes, right? Who was the person you had a crush on? How did you listen to your music? I bet it was on a record or a cassette tape. You think about how you've changed and it's such a hard question to answer Robin because for decades, I mean he's a different person. I can't tell you that I knew the person in 1981 because I was only a year old. I don't remember him but I can tell you that over the decades, I've known him in prison, I have seen him grow and I have seen him change and I've seen him evolve even as his back is a little bit more hunched, even as his hair is a lot more gray and thinner. You can see where I get it from. I also have seen him come to terms in a very, very profound and personal way with the harm that he caused. Not just to me, that was the beginning of a process but to three families that lost forever, irrevocably, but no way to undo the harm. Three families and an entire community that still has anger and fear over what happened now nearly 40 years ago and I've seen him come to terms with that and own that in ways that are far more personal and profound and remorseful than what he would have been capable of back in 1981 or 1982. I know that because I've read the news stories and I read the court transcripts of his trial and I know who he was back then, even if I didn't know the man myself. To your question about when you might get out, Governor Cuomo on his way out the door granted clemency or commutations of sentences to nearly a dozen people. My dad was one of them and in most of those cases what Governor Cuomo did was he basically said you're released. I'm ordering you released and as soon as the prison would process them for release they would be released. He did something a little bit different from my dad which is he made my dad eligible for parole. He didn't guarantee that my dad would get out but he converted a 75-year minimum sentence into immediate eligibility for parole. My father goes to the parole board in five days on Monday and within a week after that parole board hearing the parole board will tell us whether he is being released or whether they're going to ask him to come back in a year or up to two years. So if they do order him released then he'll get out sometime in October. It'll take a couple weeks to process him and by my hope which is in many ways something I never would have even let myself dream about until Governor Cuomo granted my father clemency. My hope is that my son Aiden who's upstairs right now won't ever have to go through metal detectors to meet his grandfather. Any kind of idea of what the parole board will do? I wish I could predict I mean I know my father you know if anybody is worthy of parole he is. He's been in prison for 40 years. He presents zero risk of recidivism. He doesn't have a single discipline violation on his record in 40 years. He's done life-saving aids education work well in prison. He's been a peer mentor in anti-violence programs. He has letters of support from literally half a dozen or so Nobel laureates. People like Archbishop Desmond Tutu have weighed in to support his release. If parole is a process based on deciding who is safe to be released, who has served their time in a way that shows they can be reformed, rehabilitated and re-enter safely our community then my father will be released no questions asked. We know that the process is political. We know that the process has to do with lots of things far removed from public safety. It has to do in many instances with resentencing people because of a particularly serious crime or notorious crime and the police unions are mobilized. You heard them on this call. You heard the level of hatred that people who've never met my father who don't know him or what he represents or who he is or the guilt and remorse that he carries with him every minute of every day. You all heard that on this call and those same people are lobbying the parole board. So I can't predict what the outcome will be but I know that at 76 years old having served more than half his life in prison as someone who never even picked up a weapon or personally harmed anyone it's time for him to come home. Are there, go ahead Sarah sorry. No I was just I don't know if there are other questions I want to be really cognizant of Chesa's time. So if does anybody else have a final question for him before we wrap up? Okay I honestly can't thank you enough Chesa not only for joining us but joining us on your first day back after paternity leave. It's really great to see you. I miss you. I hope that we're all hoping for you and your family that you will get to see your father soon that Aiden will never have to go to a prison to meet him and please keep everybody posted and for those of you watching I would highly recommend reading Chesa's Peace in the Nation. It's called Across Prison Walls. I felt my parents love. It is a really incredible piece. I think it really highlights a lot of the issues that we're talking about and check out organizations like We Got Us Now. They are a really incredible organization. They're a national advocacy organization that's built by, led by and about children of incarcerated parents. As a justice group, another good one. One final question. Your mother is out also, correct? Yeah sorry my mother got out in 2003 so she was actually released after 22 years right when I graduated from college and right before I headed off to Oxford. So my mom's been home. She is dedicated to my father, dedicated to visiting him. She's been doing great. She earned her PhD after she got home from prison at Columbia and she was a co-founder of the Center for Justice at Columbia School of Social Work that focuses on policy and reentry planning for people coming home from prison, whether it be around medical needs and continuity of healthcare, whether it be around job placement or other things and that's what she's done with her life in the 18 years since she came home. She's a grandmother. She was here in San Francisco with us. She lives in New York but she was here in San Francisco with us for the birth of my son and she came over every day to help give my wife and I a little bit of support until yesterday when she had to fly home to New York. Well it's been wonderful to know you Chase and thank you so much and I guess thank you Sarah too but yeah thank you and Chase I want can you say that last organization again before we sign off that you mentioned? Yeah when Sarah mentioned we got us now which I want to echo is a phenomenal group. You know to your question earlier Sarah about how can you get involved? There's lots of ways, there's lots of groups doing this work and they need support, they need volunteers, they need financial contributions. We got us now as a great one that's buying for family members of the incarcerated. SE Justice Group is another amazing organization that is led by women with incarcerated loved ones. It's a women led women run group that mobilizes women all across the country who are directly impacted by incarceration so SE, ESS i.e Justice Group. Those are just two examples of phenomenal organizations doing work on the ground supporting families and communities that are impacted by incarceration. Thank you Sarah, thank you for your work and your leadership. It is great to speak with you all and next time I want to come out to Burlington in person I want to bring Aiden, I want to bring my wife and we'll do this we'll do this in person and also we also urge everybody to vote, right? Yes vote in your district attorney. Officials okay great thank you so much thank you all thank you all so much thank you Chesa