 All right. Hello everyone. Thank you so much for being here. It's so great to see so many family and friends and comrades here. I am going to pass it to Dina, but I just wanted this good evening to everyone and thanks for being here. Dina, I'll go to you. Hello everyone. My name is Dina John. She, her pronouns and I'll be your monitor for Freehurst 2022 Kickup Forum. I have been a member of Freehurst since summer of 2022 and I'm on a talk tour of this organization through Dina. And please take a moment to introduce yourself, your pronouns, why you're here, and while you can put your introductions in the chat below. And while doing so, I will explain why we are here today. First off, I just want to say thank you for the community for joining us for such a special night. We are here because we all want what is best for Vermont. And that is not a prison. We are standing in a pivotal moment where we can choose to continue to invest in incarceration for decades to come, or we could break the cycle and reimagine our communities, Burlington, and the way we interact and care for each other with them. Many of you may know already, but for those who do not, the state has proposed to build four new prisons for a cost of $250 million. Yes, $250 million. And the state already spends over $160 million annually on the Department of Corrections. This prison campus will be able to car straight between 2055 to 2184 people. That's members of our town, our community, with the likelihood of many more beds being added later down the line. In addition to this, there are plans for juveniles to occur facilities for youth. Our state is sending chilling messages about their priorities for futures, and it's up to us to stand up against this. And as someone who works in the courthouse and deals with juvenile cases, I really, really advocate that this is just not the way to go about it. We know Vermont is in dire need of housing options, public transportation, new schools, expanded mental health resources, among other supports that actually keep people safe. And our guest speakers will further discuss why it is necessary with reinvesting community supports over incarceration. But I just want to thank you, everyone, for being here today and spending your time to hear more about what our movement is all about. And of course, we want to give a special shout out to our sponsors, FoodNotCops, the Caroline Fund, Vermont Freedom Fund, Tempest Collective, People's Kitchen, Rights and Democracy, Industrial Workers of the World, Burlington Tenants United, the Vermont Institute for Community and International Involvement, the Central Vermont Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, and Arts are Wonderful. Thank you for your continued support. And we are honored to be in this work with you. And now I will hand it off to Gina. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much, Gina, for that great introduction. So my name is Gina Ossoff. I use sheer pronouns. And I'm one of the organizers here in Vermont. And I just want to say thank you all so much for being here. It's really inspiring to see so many folks come out to hear more about our efforts in our work. First, I think it's important to talk a little bit more about the background of Freeher and the National Council for those of you who might not be as familiar with our work. So Freeher officially launched in the fall of 2022 in response to the state's proposed prison construction plans that Dina was mentioning before. And we unapologetically worked to end the incarceration of women, trans, and non-binary folks. Our group consists of activists, organizers, educators, social workers, child and healthcare professionals. And to quote from our collective agreements, we are lovers, nurturers of life, advocates, student teachers, caregivers and freedom fighters dedicated to centering humanity. As a group in which most members are directly impacted, we only engage in non-performative activism and pursue collective action that de-centers the ego. We recognize our movement's long legacy and that we are learning from an even longer line of abolitionists who have left so much for us and we in turn must leave something for the next generation. We are force multipliers building a revolutionary family. So I just wanted to share that because I think that encapsulates our passion and our energy and how serious we take this work we do. So that's who we are. And we're a small group of active volunteers, but we're growing and our work mostly focuses around policy right now, reimagining communities programming, legal work and shifting the communities. For policy, a lot of you know about our prison moratorium bill. That's why you came out tonight to learn about that. So our prison moratorium essentially halts prison construction for five years, but does not stop necessary repairs or maintenance. And we hope that in this five years that the state takes a step back and thinks about what else they can reinvest in to push us towards thriving. So that's what we have for the prison moratorium. And we're also pushing the elder parole bill, which advocates for releasing aging incarcerating folks. And we also are working on improving the state's furlough program to expand pathways out of prison. For our reimagining communities programming, our first step has been to secure basic income guarantee for two incarcerated women in CRCF. So we will be giving $500 a month for year to two women in CRCF. And for legal work, we've been doing some of our participatory defense work informally, but we will officially be launching our hub in 2023, which will allow us to help community members with their legal cases and support them through that process. And as always, our goal is shifting the narrative. So many people have not had conversations like this. And we believe that it's the necessary first step to start changing mainstream ideas around incarceration, prisons and harm. So this is just like our fourth official month of the campaign, and we'll constantly be building and evolving. So please make sure to stay in contact with us. And also before we go on to the speakers, it's important to share that our work is part of a national campaign led by the National Council for Incarcerated and Informally Incarcerated Women and Girls. The council was founded in 2010 by a group of women incarcerated in federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, and they lead us and guide us in our work and vision today. They work to end the incarceration of women and girls through policy, legal work, reimagining communities, the national free her campaign, and our next initiative, the Free Her Institute. The Free Her Institute is an abolitionist think tank founded by women and girls impacted by the criminal legal system. We conduct policy research and support of ending the incarceration of women and girls and experiment and lead in creating models of what different looks like. And they also organize against the incarceration of women globally through their international network. Their headquarters is in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and they have amassed an incredible people power movement in response to their own state's plans to build a $50 million prison. They were able to push their prison moratorium bill to the governor's desk in just one session. And they've mobilized massive amounts of community members to come out to dozens and dozens of direct actions to get stakeholders attention. Among the everyday supports they provide, like their community pantry, hydroponic farm, participatory defense, and several other programs that bring the power back to the people. So thank you, everyone, for just letting me share a bit about our history and background. I'll pass it back to you, Dina. Thank you, Dina. All right, everyone, let's take a moment and we'll hear from our speakers about why they believe. Sorry. Thank you, everyone, and we'll take a moment to hear from our speakers about why they believe when to vest in communities and not incarceration. Our first speaker is Representative Brian Cina. Thanks, Dina. It's good to see you on Zoom. So I was asked to speak tonight about a few things. So I'm going to just look at the notes. So I stay on point and I have about seven minutes. So I'll do my best. I'm Representative Brian Cina. I live in Burlington, Vermont. I'm currently at my office on Main Street in downtown. But I represent most of the East District and part of the Old North End, which is chitin' in 15. And I've been a state representative since 2017. I won in the same election that Donald Trump won president. So it was an interesting time to come into a role in state government. And I've worked on many issues over the years, but one that has been passionate for me is the idea of, I think the way we're saying it now is dismantling the carceral state and looking at how to shift from a society grounded in using violence to try to influence human behavior and to one that creates regenerative social and physical environments that promotes healthy people and a healthy planet, which we know then addresses criminal behavior and to tie it into the idea of corrections reform. I was asked to talk a little bit about my personal connection to the bill or to this work. It's complex. And I can't do it in seven minutes. I will say that I'm descended from people who were incarcerated. I've seen the impact it had on my family. I grew up in a community that was very violent and saw how the violence of the state leads to people into personal violence. And I'm just committed to trying to change the structures of the state so that it that the state doesn't harm people and supports people in reducing the harm they cause each other. And we'll start with talking about this moratorium bill. So I was asked by free her to introduce a bill that would place a moratorium on the construction of new prisons. And I have a copy of the bill in front of me. Specifically, what the bill does is we have some findings where we say that the social determinants of health affect public health and the social determinants of crime impact public safety. And these are intertwined social determinants. And so something I should say up front is that we put a little spin on this bill in Vermont. There is a moratorium on aiding new school construction. So the state has a ban on helping build new schools. So what we decided to do is make a statement about the school at the prison pipeline. And in the same bill, we are banning new prisons and we're lifting the band on new schools. And so there's a finding section that explains this. And it talks about how the social determinants of health and crime are interconnected that education is one of those social determinants and housing and living conditions is another. And that harsh physical and social environments in our schools lead to incarceration and prisons. And the harsh social and physical environments in our prisons lead to recidivism, trauma and further harm. So we say that is the intent of the General Assembly to invest in a physical and social environment that reduces harm, promotes recovery and builds resilience by stopping construction of prisons and by aiding construction of schools. And like Jaina mentioned earlier, we don't ban renovating existing facilities to maintain with building code requirements or basic maintenance. But we do stop conversion of existing facilities into additional detention facilities. We ban the expansion of the capacity of the existing correctional environment. And we ban the studying, planning, designing, acquiring or leasing or searching for new sites to construct correctional facilities in this bill. And then we lift the ban on the aid for school construction. So we don't necessarily create the system that's going to be needed to fund that, but we lift the ban that is in existence in the same bill that we put a ban on building new prisons. So that's what our, our more, our moratorium bill does. I think it's important for me to point out that we also need to come forward with a solution to, to, to what prisons are supposed to do. And so we are working on a bill, it's getting close to being ready for people to look at, in which we propose that a working group be created of that centers, the voices of impacted people, people who are, have experienced incarceration, who've worked in those settings, people who've done research and studied different approaches. And that this working group come forward with a plan to implement a pilot project that would replace the woman's facility with something with housing. I mean, that's really what it is. If I simplify it, that we are replacing prisons with housing that prisons won't exist anymore. And in that bill, we are saying as of 2021, there's, whoa, there was like some kind of like voice robot coming in. So I don't know how much time I have left, but, but I'll just finish the thought about that maybe that was like my hint from the universe that I need to wrap it up. But the working group would come forward with a plan for a pilot project. And really what we're proposing is like the next level of the Norway model. And people could look into what happened in Scandinavia, like Residivism rates went from like 70 something percent to 20 something percent. It's not perfect what they do. And we need something that suits our society and our, you know, our state. But this we're hopeful, I'm hopeful that the working group can look at the successes and failures of Norway and other places and look at Vermont's strengths and challenges and come up with a plan to create investments in housing from the most secure to the least restrictive for people who go through the due process. And it's determined that their freedom needs to be restricted because of actions they did that harmed others as a crime. And that this that these that people would not be segregated, but they, but rather in that these secure residential facilities would be embedded in communities and wrapped in community based services that follow people throughout the whole continuum of housing. So the idea is instead of building new prisons, let's build more housing and let's build secure residential for the people who need it. Let's build transitional housing. Can people mute themselves? I think someone's unmuted. So I'm having like flashbacks from the pandemic. And so basically, you know, finding a way to house people who are currently incarcerated in the housing continuum in the appropriate housing with the services they need to recover and to heal as a human instead of being punished and further traumatized by the actions of the state. So that's kind of the idea of the second bill. And hopefully we can share that with you soon. So to pivot back to the moratorium bill, what can the community do to help pass it? Once it's introduced, like we're almost ready to get cosponsors, it would be helpful if you reached out to your legislators and asked them to be a cosponsor. And then once the bill is introduced, it would be helpful to write to the committee and ask them to let us have some time for testimony. And if we get time for testimony, I would really would like to center the voices of people with lived experience to come in and talk about why a moratorium is the way to go right now while we, but making the point, we need, we can't just have a moratorium because the worst thing would be to put this moratorium in place and have people languishing in the current prisons, which is what is happening. And I can't say how many people I know who've been incarcerated in the last few years and like the horrific living conditions that people are being exposed to and how it's further traumatizing and further driving criminal behavior because people come out really wounded instead of healing. So, so yeah, I think I got muted. Was that me, my time is up or was that a technical glitch? I was just going to say last, the last thing is that what you can do to help is contact your local legislator and ask them to reach out to me to look at the bill and sign on. And we can maybe send out something if there's a mailing list soon with a copy of the bill and some talking points for you to just understand it. And then when it goes to committee asking the committee to take testimony and then we'll see where we go from there. Because if we can, the idea is that the committee it goes to is going to be corrections and institutions and they pass the capital bill that's usually a big money bill that has many pieces about the institutions of the state. And so our hope is that this moratorium bill and that the the alternatives to incarceration bill, I want to come up with a more positive name, but for now I think that's good, that they take testimony on those and that it would be wonderful if the capital bill instead of including a study for new prisons included a working group to imagine a new way forward. So I'll end on that note. I don't know how much time that was. I'm sorry if it went over. No, you were great. Thank you, Brian. Thank you for sharing. And please maybe you as well as state Reptroy can leave your contact emails below just so people can reach out to you. You're the representative. If you do not know your representative, please take the time to find out. We have to use them. They're supposed to represent us. So let's make sure the hero's out. And up next we will have Sandy Baird. Please welcome attorney Sandy Baird, lawyer. She's a lawyer, a mother, grandmother, feminist and the founder of the Caroline Fund for Women and their Families. Let's welcome her. Thank you for coming. Thank you for asking me to participate in this very important forum. As Dina said, I'm an attorney. I've been an attorney for a very long time. I wish all of you others would become attorneys. It's a great way to sort of make a living at least when you're representing poor people. It's not certain, of course, which I've done all my life. But it does provide a certain independence that other professions, if you're on your own, do not necessarily provide if you have to always be employed by somebody. But I'm going to speak about, I'm going to speak about why I think well the work you're doing is so important and why the work I've always done all my life is also very important and totally necessary at this time. I've always wanted to abolish prisons for everyone. And but I am especially interested right now in ending this bill that's in the legislature that's going to create so many more new prisons. As people have said, we really don't need prisons. We need to get at the reasons people commit crimes. And I would comment that the reason that most women commit crimes that I can see and I see women in those situations every day, including my own daughters, is that they're poor in general. And that these crimes that women are incarcerated about have to do with poverty. So I have worked all my life and I plan to continue to continue to do that work. Probably I don't have as much time left as all you others. However, I still plan to use the rest of my life to end poverty, to end racism, to end classism and to do something about ending war as well. Because I think war is fundamentally the creation in a lot of ways of a violent society. As long as you approve war, you're going to approve violence, particularly on behalf of men, that's violent toward men as well as sponsoring the violence in other countries for those men. But let me say what I'm doing recently in my life. I have the great privilege of working here at the Association of Africans Living in Vermont. This organization helps many, many new Americans who I see and they've asked me to have an office here at a reasonable rent because I help mainly women get through our legal system. As I said, I'm a lawyer and right now it is extremely difficult due to a lot of reasons. It's always been difficult, but it is especially difficult now for poor people to have access to the courts. I see on a daily basis, however, specifically black and brown women who are mothers and who have been totally neglected by this community. They're not the ones who are committing crime, but they are the ones that are trying desperately to bring up children with no resources from the state. Zero. Many of the women that I see on a daily basis have very large families, large new American families, but these families that they have are not, these kids are not any longer new Americans. They're African Americans and they're being brought up in this society with American values, conflicts with their parents, perhaps who are really residents of the old countries. And these women are kind of stuck and more important, absolutely neglected by our government. All of the state house, everybody has neglected the fact that we have in our community, Burlington, Onuski, we have many, many mothers stuck with the responsibility, not stuck, of course, they love their kids, but they have the responsibility of bringing up large families where they are single parents. They're single parents for a lot of reasons. Many of them have been the victims of domestic violence. Many of them have been abandoned by their mates who are largely male who have left them. They are not receiving child support. They are not receiving any help really to learn English or they, you know, they do have some help in that regard, but they're often in their homes and unable to access that. They have little access to the internet. Most important, they have little access to education. Most of them, many of them that I see don't even don't know how to read and write because they've come from societies or from refugee camps that they have not been taught. I've had young women, 20, 25 who have never been in a classroom in their lives. So they arrive here with no skills. People don't even seem to know this. And then they are often abandoned and they often have children and they are totally neglected. These women therefore are responsible for bringing up these children who hopefully will become law abiding, prosperous, educated citizens of our society. It's just too much though to see this total neglect. I'm going to mention one other thing. If we had strong, prosperous mothers, I believe we'd have a lot less crime period in our society. But I'll just tell you one struggle that I was involved in. I call myself a feminist. I am a feminist strongly. One of the things in second wave feminism, it was first got get the vote and then second who dealt with a lot of the economic issues surrounding women's lives. One of the things that happened, I was in the legislature. In fact, Brian Cina is my representative and I think I held his seat when I was in the legislature. One of the things that was discussed in the legislature when I was there was the cutting off of welfare. Can you imagine that? The cut off welfare payments to single poor parents of both sexes. Mainly however, poor mothers are the ones that suffered the most because they're the ones that are mostly single parents, poor people. And that was in the Clinton administration that welfare payments were cut. I was part of a group in the legislature who fought like hell to keep those payments coming to families. And of course, we didn't win. We were 25 of us who tried to oppose that legislation. However, we were not able to do it. So we have now mothers who do real work, who perhaps do the most productive work of our society, which is bringing up kids. We have mothers in this country and in this state who don't even get welfare anymore. And when I was also involved in the struggle, we had a whole group called Welfare Rights Organization, which recognized that women's work should be paid for, particularly the work of mothers because they do some of the hardest work and they do the most productive work in bringing up the future generation. I can't tell you how much I think that women should be and mothers and fathers who are single should be paid for the very important work that they do. If so, if their work was regarded as real in bringing up children, I think we would have a lot fewer crimes committed by women in the first place, which are largely financial. And we would have a lot less crimes if our children were brought up in prosperous families. And so that's what I've noticed. I'll continue to work probably until I'm older even on this very important subject. But thank you for and the Caroline Fund just to describe it was put into place in 1998, where my daughter who was an adopted African American girl was murdered by her domestic partner. And at that time, my family founded a fund for to help women and their families, which include men, but women and their families meet their immediate emergencies like paying for their lights were out or paying for security deposit, stuff like that. We're still in existence. We're still growing. And anyone who is in an emergency session should contact me for the Caroline Fund. But thank you. Thank you for all the work that you're doing. Thank you. Thank you. While you are just so incredible, we're truly honored to have you here and for speaking. Thank you for the work you do. Next up, we will have Tiffany Harrington. Please welcome community expert Tiffany Harrington. Yes. My name is Tiffany Harrington. And I'm really honored that I was asked to speak tonight. And I hope that I make sense and don't go to, you know, roundabout here. But at any rate, I just wanted to talk a little bit about some of my experiences on being incarcerated. I'm a single mom. I have five sons, 23, 21, 17. I have a five year old that's adopted. And then I have a three year old. Four out of my five sons I raised by myself. When I was really young, I ended up, I had always been kind of a goody two shoes, but I ended up committing a crime, catching a charge. And long story short, I took a plea deal. And it was the first thing they offered me, which was stupid. I had a public pretender. I didn't even have a real attorney. Well, I mean, not that they're not real, but I mean, the one that I had was particularly not helpful. And there is literally no transparency with my sentence thing. I did not realize the implications of taking a plea deal, the plea deal that I did, because what happened was about a month after I arrived in jail and I'm serving my sentence, a month into it, I received a letter from your defender general's office saying, Hey, the answer we told you was incorrect. Actually, the law just barely changed. And now you're going to be classified as this. Sorry, basically. And I didn't realize it's time, obviously, the huge, like enormous negative implications I would have on my life going forward forever, basically. So anyway, fast forward a little bit. You go from being in the community, working in society, feeling like you're helpful, taking care of your family by yourself, being proud of yourself, feeling good about yourself, you know, to basically having your social circle becomes other people that are incarcerated. I just moved to the state. I didn't know I didn't grow up here. So I didn't know like people from high school or whatever. And, you know, basically, I had also beforehand, I've been in some domestic violence situations and some things like that. It definitely was not perfect by any means. But the people that became my friends in the state were women that I knew from being incarcerated and their mutual friends and, you know, the guys that they knew. And all of a sudden, the stuff that would have seemed so far fetched for me to have ever seen, experienced, witnessed, taken part in anything, you know, became like the norm. So all of a sudden, I'm numb to things that I definitely never should have been numb to. So all of a sudden, my perspectives just on everything are changing the way I look at things. You know, I worked super hard. I actually have a bachelor's degree. And I was one class away from a master's degree. And I cannot use, I can't finish my degree because it's a practicum and I am a continent of violent offender and I'm a felon. And so here I have all this education and all of these skills that I can't use. I can't even get a job at McDonald's. Mind you, I've always found a way to get a job anyhow. And I've always worked and figured it out. You know, most recently that the work that I've been doing is, I'm a janitor, basically. I'm a clean job. And that's fine. I'm not, I am proud of that. I get a good job. But I do feel like it's not fair sometimes, like the access that other people have to employment, to housing, to stability, to resources, it's just something that's foreign to me, completely foreign to me. I literally struggle to figure out like how I'm going to just make it through, like, you know, each week, literally when I say paycheck to paycheck, it's literally paycheck to paycheck. I had two of my sons in jail, my 17 year old, when I first started my son, and my three year old, the one that I have that's here running around right now. And that's obviously, like, really hard and really detrimental and traumatic to deal with. It's devastating. And not only that, you know, when you're in jail, everybody talks about how people need programming. And, you know, the only place they can get this programming is in a prison. And bottom line, like, there's like no access to programming at all. Every time I was incarcerated, which was usually for minor infractions from FSU, by the way, they pulled my resident and I'd be in jail for a year for being poor, basically. So I would have to wait on a six month waiting list just to get into a group, let alone anything else. So basically, like, the argument that there's programming or that, you know, people need punitive measures or, you know, at least they'll have medical treatment or whatever is totally ludicrous. Like, the medical treatment I received when I had my second son was honestly, like, disgusting. I, or, you know, my prior son, I'd all had preeclampsia with when I had them. Well, when I had my last son, my three year old, you know, the doctors didn't really want to send me home, but there wasn't enough staff. The staff turner was so high, if they didn't want to keep sending a CO to be there with me. So they said, okay, we'll send her there. But you guys have to check her blood pressure that day. The 10 second thing is not invasive procedure. 10 seconds. I started feeling really sick. Every day I was getting worse and worse. I could hardly stand up. I would see nurses three times a day at med path. And I put a med slip in every night. And every night they'd say just put a med slip in, just put a med slip in. Finally, I could barely walk. One of my friends called one of her friends who happened to work at ACLU and thank God she did. Because they were able to convince the, present that they need to at least check my blood pressure. And they did. And sure enough, I was about to have a stroke. They wouldn't let me walk back to myself. I had to go immediately by ambulance and I was in the hospital for about two weeks. I thought I almost died. But the staff treats the women really poorly. Like we were sexually harassed. Some were sexually assaulted. There is a lot of abuse inside the prison. And just on parole or FSU or probation also. There's a lot of bullying. Like I'm hearing impaired. And I was made fun of constantly by a CEO who didn't believe that I have this physical disability, even though there was paperwork on it and everyone knew about it and blah, blah, blah. And so he refused to tell me, which he was supposed to come physically tell me when it's time for meals. He refused to do that. He would say, oh, you have selective hearing. I don't believe that you're hearing that. I mean, I don't know who says that like who makes fun of somebody for not being able to hear things. But anyway, basically, there's just the behavior that occurred that happened to me and I have to do a ton of friends of mine. It's not going to end. It's not going to stop. Over the last couple of years, just the women that I knew from my supervision and being incarcerated, most of them are dead now. Literally, most of them are dead. I'd say it was last four, like two years by about 40 or 45 women have died. And I, people get out in the trauma. They already have trauma when they go. They get out and things are so much harder. You know, you can't get jobs. Nobody wants to let you live there at their apartment. Nobody, you know, you don't have the social circles that you should have community members and family members and stuff. And you just basically get, you really get like shunned, you know, and judged everywhere you go. And even if you don't, you start to feel like you are, and it starts to be hard to go out in public. And it starts to, it just starts to be like a real struggle, you know, to keep going. And obviously I'm really lucky. I'm really fortunate that I have really advocated for myself and I reached out for help from a lot of places. And then that's great. And I'm receiving that. And that's awesome. But at the same time, like, I don't get housing assistance. I don't get, like, there's a lot of things I don't get that people assume I get to have a single mom. But, you know, it's like every other day, I'm constantly thinking about like, how am I going to make sure I keep a roof over my head? You know, when you're thinking about basic needs, you stop thinking about like some of the lines become blurry. Is this right? Is this wrong? So as far as winning crime, I would 100% say it definitely makes a huge difference if you can't like take care of your basic needs for your kids. Obviously, it's going to, you're going to do what you have to do sometime. But bottom line, I think that prisons are just, they're not helpful. They call it permanent correction. And it's supposed to be an agency of human services, but they don't treat you like a human. So really, who is it serving? And it's like power trip people, I feel like. But if it's 250 million dollars to build a prison, that means that they're going to have to fill that prison in order to justify spending that money. So that means that what they're going to have to start like just charging people left and right and putting them in jail. Like the whole time I was incarcerated or on supervision. And even now, I only knew like between 150 to 200 women, roughly in the entire state that were on supervision. That's it. That I knew. Like they have lists and stuff. So I mean, think about that. There's not ever some giant amount of females that are on supervision. Why would you need to build a $250 million place when you could be using that money for like housing? For a way or less? Or, you know, helping pay for maybe transportation, like a good news garage, but for people that are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated that want to work or have families and need to get to doctor's appointment, stuff like that. I mean, there should be other ways to, to like help people and to actually serve the society instead of putting a prison in place that's literally just going to penalize people and further traumatize them. I mean, I honestly look at myself up before I had started this whole journey with correction. And when I am messed up, I've been for a couple years, but I look at it and it's like I had so much hope and so much like, you know, it's a belief that if I worked hard, I could do it, you know, and I always worked hard. Now I believe, you know, if I was honest and I'd be fine. And I was, I was accountable. I said, okay, you know, hey, blah, blah, blah. I messed up. Let's, let's move forward. And you know what? That really, those values have not served me, unfortunately, I am sad to say. And I just really would hate to say any more females, any more families go through the types of things that I've gone through, that my friend had gone through, that my family had gone through, my children have seen. I remember being thrown in the back of an FSU truck and my son wanted to give me a hug when I was leaving. They wouldn't let me stop, hug my 16 year old son or my, at the time, my one and a half year old son. They wouldn't let me give them a hug. And my son knew that I hadn't done anything wrong because I was there with him the whole time. But when they'd have like GPS, like violations or whatever, because they have old shoddy equipment, it wouldn't matter what I said. It wouldn't matter who stuck up for me, all that mattered is what they thought in their head. You know, and it's like, honestly, at the end of the day, I really just hope that people can really start to look at ways to help people, to treat people like individuals, and to actually make good use of this, like make use of this money, make use to help people, actually like serve families for one, serve the individuals, instead of just putting them further down, further down, and further down on the totem pole. Anyway, I think that's all I got. I apologize if I went over, I probably did. Have a great night. Thank you, Tiffany, for sharing your story. Really, really, that's really, no words. Thank you so much. And I think you share your story reminding us that, you know, for those of us who aren't in your position, we're really privileged in that when we fight for these matters and issues that we recognize that packs real people's lives, and that for all of us to take a moment to recognize that when we just, when we advocate, we're advocating on someone else's life. And that's not something we should take for granted, and we should always allow you all to have your space, because it's your stories that matter. Thank you so much. Thank you. And up next, we're going to have Amelia Glickman, please welcome the leader of the Union Prison Partnership. And I want to thank you, Amelia, and all of you students for sharing. I think it's so good of young people here advocating. So thank you. Thank you. Go ahead. Thank you so much. I hope everybody can hear me and I apologize. I'm going to have to look down a little bit. My notes are on my phone just so that everybody in our club can see you all and we can say hi. I first just want to say it's been so wonderful hearing everybody's voices. And this has been a great learning experience for us just being here. So I really appreciate that. And thank you, Tiffany, for sharing. That was really powerful. So just to introduce myself briefly, my name is Amelia Glickman, and I'm the president of the UVM Prison Partnership. We are a student organization who just recently this year got recognized as a university organization. And we have been doing various outreach work, which I'm going to touch on a little bit to give you a quick background on how I got involved in this. I have been involved in restorative justice work in the school systems in the state of Vermont since I was about 15. And it's always been something I felt very passionate about. And so here we are. A lot of myself and a lot of other students here who care about these issues. And we wanted to do something through the University of Vermont because of the power that this institution has, especially in Burlington and in the state as a whole, to be quite honest. And so we're here to partner with FreeHer and support everybody's voices and everybody who's spoken so far to give a little bit of background on who we are as an organization. As I mentioned, we're a brand new group, relatively speaking. Many students have been volunteering in the Chittiden Regional Correctional Facility very close to UVM for several years with some sociology professors. And they've had a lot of success. And we finally have built this specific club to become that and also a lot more. We have been partnering for this last semester with FreeHer to do phone banking and canvassing and all sorts of other political outreach work. In addition to that, we've done a lot of educational outreach at UVM itself. We have tried to emphasize presenting to classes at UVM in all subjects so that students who are not just sociology majors or social work majors who are aware of at least to a certain extent what's going on in our criminal justice system, but also students who are business majors and majoring in biology and other classes who might not be exposed to this information, have an idea of what's going on in our world, and specifically the criminal justice system in this country and in the state of Vermont. So that as our generation of college students right now grows up, no matter what people's occupation is, they have an awareness of what's going on. And so that's something that we think is really important as a group. And it's been one of our big missions this year. We are really excited to have been able to volunteer at the Women's Prison every Sunday playing volleyball. And it's a wonderful way to get off campus and connect with all of the women. And we will begin volunteering at least one more day a week. We have a lot of new members and are really interested in doing some film projects coming up as well as potentially a book club in the prison and arts and crafts as well. So there's a lot of different things that we are doing right now. And we would all love to hear any suggestions from the community or questions from anybody in the Burlington community or greater Vermont area about ways that we can partner with all of you and get involved in all of that stuff. So I guess the last thing that I will say is if you would like to contact us, you can email me. It's Amelia.Glickman at uvm.edu. And we will soon hopefully also have a prison partnership email so that several of us can be looking to see if there's other people in the community that we can connect with. So and thank you to whoever put that in the chat. I appreciate it. So that's about all we have here. And once again, thank you everybody for speaking and we're so happy to be here and getting involved. Thank you. Thank you for all the speakers all everything you all share was so so important. I think we all felt it. And I feel even more empowered even more to keep doing this work. And I know all of us do too. It's really great. And now I will pass it off to Jada who will be doing the intermission. Thank you so much, everyone. That was an amazing discussion and I really appreciate all your perspectives and all the work you're doing to get us closer to an abolitionist future. So and just like having conversations like this, it sheds light on the true realities of incarceration and the consequences when we continue to invest in caging our communities instead of taking care of them. So right now we'll take a quick time for intermission. But during this time, let's all take a moment to do one call of action together and contact our legislators in support of the prison moratorium bill. Like we mentioned earlier, we made it super quick and easy for folks. So you can use the link in the chat that one of our chat mods are going to drop to access our toolkit and it quickly identifies who your representatives are and provides a template message for you. So you can voice your support for the moratorium in just a few clicks. So let's all just like do that. It'll take just a couple seconds. And as we know from our comrades in Massachusetts, it's going to take a lot of noise and a lot of people power to get this bill passed. So let's start tonight by sending a strong statement about where Vermont stands around prison construction. So please use that link. It'll only be a couple seconds. We'd really appreciate it. And let us know in the chat when you're done. Also, our chat mods will be dropping some more links in the chat. The first link is for the council.us backslash free her that goes to our events page. There you will find events not only in Vermont, but across New England. And you'll see our town halls coming up, our other canvassing and outreach, and some other good office events that are pretty fun. And if you don't, if you don't think you can make an event, or you have other ideas for how we can collaborate, fill out the form the council.us backslash volunteer. And once you fill out that form, you just know what skills or interests you have, and an organizer will loop back in with you. And yeah, just think about this is going to take all of us. So just think about how you can plug it. Are there groups or orgs that you know that we could come speak to? Do you want to do outreach in your own neighborhood? We have materials we can set you up. Do you want to work on policy or research? Do you have graphic design skills? Campus organizing, we've got our UVM folks you can plug in with. There's something for everyone to do. So please figure out how you can plug in and we can grow this together. So yes, we're going to play another song by Benny for a couple of minutes. Well, folks, fill out that contact your legislators, hopefully sign up for other events, and we'll circle back in a couple of minutes for Q&A. Thank you, everyone.