Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: I was told that I can't do that on Friday afternoon, so it's getting out of my system.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So welcome folks. This is House Corrections and Institutions Committee. It is Tuesday, February 24. We're beginning our week with trying to grapple with the pretrial supervision program and trying to get our hands around how we move forward with this. Do we do it? Change the whole structure of the pretrial supervision program in terms of who are being supervised, what's their risk level? And if so, then we have to look in terms of the level of supervision that DOC would be required to

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: do.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Do we try to connect this with the expansion possibly of the accountability docket within our court system? So that's what's before us. And we do have a new draft 1.1 that was dated the seventeenth February. And it doesn't really address some of this. It addresses some of it in terms of trying to get more people into the supervision program by taking out two requirements for them to participate, which one will be violating a condition of release to begin with, or the other, have five or more pending dockets. Doesn't talk about the risk level of folks. It's just sort of arbitrary five or more dockets, and you would be eligible for this program. And according to testimony that we've heard is that the defendant it's up to the defendant to decide if they wanna participate in this program or not. It can be recommended, but, ultimately, the defendant would be would need to say yes to being in the program. It's voluntary. It's not required. It's voluntary. So that's what's before us. Questions? Yeah,

[Conor Casey, Member]: I think I can dance, but I'm having trouble seeing the plot overall, I think, because it just depends on, you know, like different people you talk to, it's to increase public safety or it's to reduce the number of people we have incarcerated being detained right now. So I don't even really know what the purpose is at this point. I think it's gonna be more clarity on the number of positions and the money. That's the first step. But I almost feel like, when Jay Johnson was sitting here, I always feel like I need to go back and see what's the proposal, really? And just like you're saying, chair, how does it intersect with the accountability court? And how is it separate and can stand on its own without the accountability court? So to me, those are like big questions, right? Kevin?

[Kevin Winter, Member]: To me, what I thought we were doing was I thought the five docket was identified as a way to break the log jam in the the backlog in our course. That was the pilot project. That's the pilot project. Wasn't to exclude people. It's just these are the highest priority ones because the paperwork's getting balled up and slowing everything down. And that's why the five dockets. So I'm all for opening it up so more people can participate. But with the idea that we want to prioritize those that have the most dockets, we drain the swamp, if you will, in addition to providing supervisory help so that the people can succeed if they are out instead of being incarcerated. So, that's the dual program in my mind of what we're trying to do is the most efficient way to drain the swamp of paperwork and get people the help they need by hooking them up to the services that are available. And that's where these additional people would be sitting in on the accountability docket or pretrial days and doing things in parallel instead of series. The series has given us a backlog that we can't get rid of.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So I don't wanna confuse the five dockets or more. For the accountability court, that was a standalone five dockets or more. When we did the pretrial supervision statute, it was two years ago. And we weren't sure if there was gonna be a whole rush of folks into the pretrial supervision. So we set up some parameters. And there were two parameters. If someone violated current conditions of release, they could qualify for pretrial supervision. Or if they came in with five pending dockets. That was not connected to the accountability court two years ago. That was for the pretrial supervision. When the accountability court was agreed to through negotiations with the mayor from the city of Burlington in the governor's office, and then with the courts the state's attorney and the A. G. Office, because of the backlog, they hit on the five or more dockets. So I don't wanna confuse the five or more dockets because one is for the accountability court. K? If they roll out the accountability court, we don't know what those parameters will be. If it will be the same as it was for the Chittenden pilot project or not. The pretrial supervision, if you just do the pretrial supervision program, regardless of what happens to that accountability docket, if that accountability docket doesn't get carried out throughout the state, do we still have that pretrial supervision program? And what does it look like? That's the question. Do we still do it? What does it look like? And I know maybe I'm putting words into DOC's mouths, but there's an opportunity for DOC to beef up their field staff by seven possible new folks. So I'm sure they're gonna want seven new people regardless if there's pretrial supervision or not. And that's what we'll have to balance for that.

[Kevin Winter, Member]: Forgive me, let me try it one more time.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: You're right with backlog, the five or more, that was part of the pilot project.

[Kevin Winter, Member]: Melding together, my impression was we wanted to take all the good things that were going into the accountability court and do some of it in pretrial. And one of the some of it is the additional DOC employee, FTEs, being part of may not be a full accountability court everywhere, but it would be the same kind of idea so that we could get the services to those people who determines which ones get to go through the pretrial supervision first.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Well, if they have the wraparound services, they would not be in the pretrial supervision in theory. So I don't know. I mean, I feel like we're going around in circles and spinning and trying to figure out, and there's a lot of money at stake. There's at least 1,500,000.0, if not 2,100,000.0 for that. So let's start with the testimony and I'm gonna start with you, Kef, whether you want or not. The safety attorneys. I don't know if you you've heard some of our discussion here. I don't know if you can help us focus a little bit. You folks around the ground, you know know what you're seeing in the courtrooms. You know what you're seeing with the defendants. Well, I'm gonna turn it over to you. Maybe you can give us some direction. See what I can do.

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: For the record, my name is Kim McManus. I'm with the Department of State's Attorneys and Sheriffs. When we were in here last, I think the question was raised, how would we wanna spend the money if we had the choice other than giving it all to us? And I had said, it was thrown out there as an option, by representative Casey. It's not something that's going to happen. And the answer we had given at the time, and I think it's still our answer today, is right now with what we saw, the progress we saw with the accountability docket, we think it's the majority. If you're pooling all that money into one bucket, the majority of the money would be best spent being able to put up replicating the accountability docket in the counties that need it. As we mentioned, not every county is going to need that sort of intensive court time. But I believe that Judge Zuneau said six counties off the top of his head, and we would probably go back and forth a little bit. But being able to roll out the accountability docket where needed and having the support of DOC in the courtroom, we think that's the money best spent. In that, the individuals who pretrial supervision was originally designed for are, for the most part, the folks who are being addressed in the accountability docket. The folks who we are seeing agreeing to pretrial supervision are the folks way at the other end of the spectrum, the folks who would otherwise be detained and pretrial supervision is a step down from being detained. Very different populations, very different needs by the Department of Corrections. To have that level of supervision in the community, it would be a question for DOC whether they have the capacity to give that with the number and maybe with having one in each of their probation officers enough that DOC can provide that information. But I believe to Representative Winter's point, if DOC has flexibility in how they use those positions between supporting accountability docket and pretrial supervision as you decide who you want it to be. That would be, I think, the ideal so that DOC can shift their person power as needed depending on the numbers going in. So that's our overall comment. I do just want to reiterate, and I said this last time, I want to be careful that it's not necessarily going to be one day a week when these accountability dockets are set up. It might be, again, depending on the county, it might be Chittenden five days a week initially and then down to three, down to two, down to one. That's more likely the scenario or say three, two, one. So again, Department of Corrections would need to factor that in if they were able to be in the courtroom. And part of that is the agency of human services. They were doing the connecting of services. In the accountability docket, Department of Corrections, the benefit of their role being there was being able to talk to defendants up front about the what if. What if I go on probation? What's that going to look like? What if I do a split serve? What's that going to look like? And defendants really feeling they had that assurance of what was coming and even potentially who their probation officer might be on the other end. That's where we saw defendants utilizing them most.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So the goal of the accountability document, I think we need clarity on that. What is the goal? And this is beyond our purview. This is really house judiciary. I wanna be clear about that. But that kind of figures out how we use DOC in that world. What is the goal of the accountability docket? To clear up the backlog? Or is it a deal with those hard cases?

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: Those are two different modes of operating. Yes. Primarily addressing those cases. The five or more, that there's a reason why those individuals are collecting those cases. One, because, yes, the first case is taking too long, so that's part of the backlog. But it was never about just clearing the backlog. It's that the individuals who are picking up multiple cases, they have needs that need to be addressed. By bringing all the players into the room, AHS, DOC, defense attorney, prosecutor, and having the judge, they were able to deal with the criminal cases, but also address the social issues that are more likely than not causing people to have that criminal behavior. So whether it's because I mean, it's always not always, but often they're all intertwined, right? But we're dealing with folks who are unhoused, who have mental health issues, who have drug of all issues. If we're able to connect them, and we're not saying that it's going to be one and done. We expect to see some of these folks back, and that's okay. It takes a few times to get this. But while they're out on supervision, sorry, while they're out on conditions of release and just collecting cases, they're just being referred to services, but they're not necessarily engaging in those services. By being able to dispose of their criminal case and having it part of their disposition, that they are connected with various services and they're actually literally handed off to the individuals, whether it's DOC or AHS representatives, we believe in what we believed in the beginning and what we saw throughout is that that's working for many.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So you may know where House judiciary is. Are they still looking at that threshold of five dockets or more? The accountability docket is spread out, is rolled out. Are they still looking at the triggers five dockets?

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: I don't know if they've spoken specifically about that. I know if they asked us or if this committee hearing was to ask us, we would likely We argue not to have a set number in statute because what we're going to see in Chittenden more than likely is that, yes, they started with five. They've been able to reduce that to such a 10 that now they can open the doors to the three or more, not wait till five. Maybe it's the two or more that we would want that discretion as we're able to lower those numbers. But again, for those repeat offenders, we wouldn't want that repeat to necessarily be defined in statute because then every year we have to come back and ask you hopefully to level it.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So it almost seems like the accountability docket rollout has not been baked. It hasn't cooked up yet. It's not in the oven yet.

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: Well, it's

[Conor Casey, Member]: in the

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: oven, but it hasn't been there a lot.

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: There are discussions right now of who would be the next county that would be a viable place to do this next. But of course, this is all then tied to money. So yes. But if we're given the message, the signaling that money is going to be available to roll this out, I believe between judiciary, state's attorney, all the parties involved, we will actively roll this out.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So what we've also heard is if you roll this out into a few courts, the money is already in the system because those folks are already in the system. So if you designate one day as an accountability docket to move these cases through, it's not gonna cost more money because those cases are already in the system. We've heard that in testimony. I would disagree. Putting it out there because that's the testimony we heard. Doesn't mean in reality it would happen.

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: And why would you disagree? So simply we'll just choose the judge in the extra courtroom that we need to focus on these cases. If these cases stay in their docket as is, again, they're competing with our violent felonies for court time. And they will just stay and continue to get pushed out and get resolved at some point, but not quicker. So you're spending money on more time. Now, what I don't know, and I'm not a mathematician, is over time, if you paid for the judge and for the extra individuals to have another courtroom set up, do you at some point break even instead of having those cases linger for years? Probably. I wouldn't be able to do that math for you. But I believe there would be the initial cost upfront, absolutely. But at some point, that would break even. I just

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: don't know what that would be.

[Conor Casey, Member]: This is helpful, actually. So like, I think as I first saw it, the one day a week would be sort of instead of everything else going on, but it would be the same courtroom, same judge. You're saying for it to work, you need a different courtroom, you need more space and you need to bring somebody, maybe a retired judge out there in addition. So if it's Mondays, you've got a couple of judges working at the same time here, right?

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: And again, it's going to depend a little bit county. That's where it depends a little bit county to county. But in the larger counties, the other docket needs to keep going and that judge can't step out to do this. We need another judge to address this. In some of the smaller counties, it might be that there is a court day, one day a week, where the judge could do this focus docket, and the benefit is for the defendant to know every Friday you're here or every other Friday you're coming back or if you miss a court date, you just walk in on Friday. We'll take care of There's that benefit. So again, it's going to depend a little bit on the county.

[Conor Casey, Member]: I'm just wondering, Washington County, we don't have enough courtrooms as it is. So that's a big problem for us. That could take us out of consideration.

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: Or just being creative about finding that other

[Conor Casey, Member]: space. There

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: are spaces around and we surveyed our state's attorneys to sort of talk about, is there an empty courtroom or a space that could work for this? So we'd be happy to help find those spaces.

[Conor Casey, Member]: And you're seeing the population pretrial supervision going back now, right? Most impacts is not people who would otherwise be released on their own reconnaissance, but people who would be detained otherwise. This is an alternative to them being detained.

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: That's my understanding. And I think there is a difference, though, between Orleans, where it started and Chittenden. Chittenden, there was two people who overlapped. I would defer to DOC. They have the numbers. And I believe they said last time we were here, we fell on that five or more docket of lower risk, so to speak. Whereas the Orleans individuals who agreed to it were on the other end, that they were more likely and maybe not detention, but maybe you heard about the twenty four hour curfew and chose pretrial supervision instead and had sort of higher restrictions placed on them and chose pretrial supervision, some lesser restrictions. So they were used slightly differently, if I understand it.

[Conor Casey, Member]: Thank you, Chittenden.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So we're not gonna solve the accountability for DARPA here. That's over there. They have to figure out. So then that leaves us with the pretrial supervision. If we don't have the dual role of the PMP person, Can we stand up, continue to stand up the pretrial supervision program and have people go to it where you're dealing with more than one or two folks per county? That's the question. So I don't know, Kim, if you wanna weigh in on that from what you're seeing from the prosecution and is pre trial supervision on its own cost effective in achieving what we really want to achieve, which at the time was more public safety in the community. Again,

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: I went to law school because my math is not ferment tool. So I'm not gonna answer the cost effective, I'm sick of my sworners, by the way. I do believe taking out the restrictions to accessing the program is going to widen the net of possibilities. Absolutely. As I testified the last time I was here, to be fair to the program, it was really up and running for about a year or so when we started getting information from it. So that's a piece. So don't unclear. I wouldn't be able to tell you how many numbers how many people would come your way. One thing I did wanna point out, and I apologize, if there's a draft, it's from the Did you say the seventeenth?

[Troy Headrick, Ranking Member]: Yeah, I don't have that either.

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: I have February 10 that was in the folder.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Oh, I didn't have all my glasses.

[Troy Headrick, Ranking Member]: Oh, two points. Points.

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: Which is February 10.

[Brian Minier, Member]: Yeah, 2.1, fantastic.

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: Fantastic. I did want to point out one thing in this draft. Page two No, just kidding. Page three. Starting on line 19. There

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: is a 2.7 draft.

[Troy Headrick, Ranking Member]: What's the number of the draft?

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: 1.1. So I have got 2.1.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: 3.1 has all the highlights. We put that one away. When I walked through Hillary walked us through this when she was here last time last week. Two, what? The Tucson. One point it's draft 1.1. It's h five twenty nine. We're using 529 as the bill.

[Troy Headrick, Ranking Member]: It's on the 26. No. It's

[Brian Minier, Member]: on up here.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: It's five twenty nine because that's the bill that's in judiciary. And that would be the vehicle for the pretrial supervision. Draft 1.1 of H529. It's too many nines. Have five forty nine,

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: 80 559.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Now we have 5 29.

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: Let me just pull that up so I don't say something that maybe is already not in the bill. It's made and addressed already.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So it removes those statutory requirements to participate? Right. And you had to have the multiple violations, conditions of release, and you did in order to be pulled back. And we took that out. She could have right now to have an issue for a warrant of arrest. If they're in the pretrial supervision program, they would need to have multiple violations of supervision. And the change in this draft is that they commit one violation. Then they are subject to a warrant for an arrest if they're participate when they're participating in a pretrial supervision program.

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: You recall what day last week? The eighteenth. Thank you.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Thursday. Was it Thursday she was in?

[Troy Headrick, Ranking Member]: I actually just posted it to today.

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: Oh, I just found it. Thank you so much. I just wanna look at one thing. Otherwise, I can move along in

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: the of corrections.

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: Nope, my issue is gone. Wonderful.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: And your issue, how is it addressed?

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: How DOC is being pulled in to do the assessment. That process, it's been addressed in this draft and I don't want to touch it. It's good. In an earlier draft, it had been in the committee bill. It was isolated to the Department of Corrections assessing anyone who would be considered for detention. And it was sort of automatic without any of the other players being involved.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: And they took that

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: out. They took that out

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: because that's the conversation I had with the chair of the committee. It's like, how can DOC assess when I don't even know the person?

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: This version, this is great. I apologize. I had the other version. That was perfect. So I don't know if I gave you any direction, but that's

[Kevin Winter, Member]: You tried.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Yeah, we're just grappling. You heard our conversation, we're grappling. Do we continue with the pretrial supervision, regardless of what happens to the accountability? Do we set up this pretrial supervision thinking we've opened up the gates a little bit? There isn't this log jam necessarily of people not getting in. We roll it out statewide. In order to do that, we have to hire some more folks. Don't know if hiring seven to make 12 is the ideal number or not. And also one thing, Kim, you were saying, it played out differently in the counties where one county may have high risk folks go there. So then that's played out a different way in terms of supervision versus other counties. It may be a group of folks who are lower risk and don't need as much supervision.

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: Right, but who need more support, that sort of supportive helping to access services piece. And so I think that is the question for the Department of Corrections is, could they handle either end of the spectrum? Can they resource

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: And both

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: obviously, there's a limit at some point to that. But again, those are two very different types of supervision, so whether or not they feel like their supervising officers would be able to do that. And again, I think there is a place where pretrial supervision can be helpful if DOC has the resources to provide when we if we're saying to a victim, this person may have been detained, but they're not going to be because they're on this strict pretrial supervision program. If DOC is properly resourced to provide that high level of supervision, that is a plus, I think, for a number of the victim, the defendant, but only if DOC can truly give that level of supervision.

[Kevin Winter, Member]: Talking of two kinds of risk. If there's risk to the community, I personally don't see that individual as being appropriate for pretrial. If it's risk to the individual because they can't comply with services that are being offered, they need parental supervision. If that's the high risk, then I would agree. So that's where I see you saying both ends of the spectrum. If they've got five dockets because they just can't get to court or they can't get to their doctor who's helping them or whatever, that kind of risk. I think that's fairly clear. We wouldn't put someone on pretrial if they were a risk to the community.

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: Well, unless the court decided that the supervision in that program would mitigate those public safety risks. The example I'd given last time, person accused of driving while intoxicated wouldn't necessarily be in this program, but maybe it's their fourth or fifth time. So maybe they would be. Then there's specific conditions and maybe they're being tested every day by their supervising officer that they're not drinking. That's then potentially mitigating the public safety issue. But to your point, if the program could address the very specific public safety issues that would have us concerned, then it would be more utilized.

[Kevin Winter, Member]: And if they're being detained because they can't make bail or the bail is so high, that indicates to me that the court thinks they are a risk to the community. Mm-mm.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Risk of flight. It's risk of flight. Bail is risk of flight. Okay.

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: But again, that's where I've

[Kevin Winter, Member]: that through my head.

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: And I don't wanna make the defender general's arguments before him, but that's where a defense attorney would argue, you see my client as a risk of flight. Can we lower this bail? And we'd put him on pretrial supervision. Supervising officers checking in every day, is driving by his house, etcetera, etcetera. That would be the argument for it. But again, if that was resourced to do that, that's a lot of

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: in person work. Bail was risk of plight by our constitution. I am gonna shift to Matt Valerio, our defender general. Usually Matt comes in towards the end, and I looked and Matt was here. So I wanna to give you a chance to before you have to wait out for everybody else to

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: Well, there are a lot of people tugging at me today. So

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: I just want to give you a chance.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: I will say that what was posted on the website for me to comment on is not what you're talking. So I have I have no idea what that says. Whatever whatever Jim had the benefit of just looking at, I've not seen. So

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: But we're trying to

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: I can answer a lot of questions about what you were

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: talking about.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: What do we do with child supervision?

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: Yeah. I mean, I know what I'd do with it. What would you do with it? I'd pitch it. We

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: were there about ten days ago to be

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: You know, I don't think you get bang for your buck with it, to be honest. Because there are assumptions about how it would be used and where it would be used to kind of fly in the face of constitutional requirements for bail and conditions of release. And as I said the last time I was in when I was talking about it generally, this is not a program that would be widely used. And it wasn't widely used in the pilot, and it wouldn't be widely used statewide because it'd only be a discrete group of people who would consent to doing it. The way the I mean, I don't wanna give a whole bail conversation here, but the bottom line is bail is only designed, as you said, to ensure appearance. Conditions of release, you have to be put on the least restrictive conditions of release to ensure that you show up and to guarantee public safety. This is a high level of intervention compared to the various levels that could happen on conditions of release. So before you ever get to this point, there are a whole bunch of other things that could happen before you get to pretrial supervision, where you're effectively on probation before you're ever convicted. And, you know, there were the bill, as written, I had some issues with just relative to some of the requirements. And I don't know what the new one says, so I couldn't tell you. Know, there's a let's talk about this conceptually first. I don't think you're gonna get very many people in it. I also think that we're further along the road with the multi docket courts than you guys seem to understand. Because we had a meeting on Monday in Rutland regarding the next rollout of it. And every county's gonna be different as to what resources they need or what resources are available. And for example, in Rutland, there is sufficient courtroom space. And there, the plan is to bring down the superior court civil judge, who is much quieter there, and they tend to be in every county, to be honest, unless it's one of those counties where the one judge sits in all three courts, you know, like Addison County, you know, family, civil, and criminal are all one judge. Right? But Rutland has family court judges. They have a civil court judge. So the the civil court judge for one day a month or every other week is gonna come down and handle that extra docket so it's not extra judge time. It's not extra, it's not a space issue. You know, my guess is whatever extra money is gonna be spent, it's gonna be spent on two things. Number one is either, you know, core security or staff. And the other is going to be what we decide to do, what the Defender General's Office decides to do, like what we did in Chittenden County, which is provide liaison between whatever happens in court and whatever services are required so that we can make sure that the clients get to where they're supposed to get to. You know, if you're having trouble showing up in court, or you're having trouble complying with conditions of release, because you have mental illness, you have substance abuse problems, you have both. You might have any other number of problems, childcare issues, transportation issues, you name it. But the social work aspect that we provided, while making sure that the services were appropriate. And Chittenden County was, in my view, a key to making sure that what went on there worked, being able to clear this clear those dockets. So Who

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: set all of that up for the social services to be there for the person in the Chittenden project? Who set all the What?

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: The part that for me?

[Brian Minier, Member]: Was it

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: all the defense counsel that set that?

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: Well, no. We were the ones who they had administration had AHS, and I think they had an agreement with the Howard Center. And I don't know who I don't know who everybody was on the AHS side who was actually providing services or directing people. That was administration side. Also, the Department of Corrections was in the room every day, which was huge. That, you know, that doesn't happen normally. And so the fact that that did happen helped make everything work. You know, I don't like the term the warm handoff. But that's, you know, we had a social worker and licensed clinician or clinicians with Therapeutic Works, who we contracted with for the period that this court was It actually ends at the February. So there's a carryover for thirty days after the court ended, you know, the the full week thing. And they made sure people got where they needed to go, and then provided actually after hours services for, you know, drop in centered food, coffee, someplace warm to go when it was freezing out. And that's what they did. And so you can't replicate exactly what went on in Chittenden County everywhere else, but you don't have to, because every county has different needs. Washington County has a whole bunch of unique needs that have you know, it's different. You know, Rutland is a good place to try to do something right now because they have a jail right next to the court. I mean, it's 200 yards or whatever from the court to the jail. So the transportation issues aren't the same as Washington County, for example, where you're bringing people from St. Johnsbury or whatever, or the women's facility, or some in Springfield, even. Washington's a different thing, but every county's different. Some may not be amenable to doing it at all because of the barriers there. But I think you'll get a lot of bang for your buck with that program as opposed to this. Now, on the one hand, and I feel like I'm a broken record compared to what I was saying this morning, talking about work group. You know? Do defense lawyers tend to like it? Yeah. Because it's another tool in their box that they can access when they are are trying to get stuff done for their clients, resolve cases or whatever. Is this a would this be another tool in the toolbox for defense counsel to access for those clients who've done every other thing and not succeeded, and pretrial supervision would be a place for them to go that wasn't jail? Sure. I don't know that you're gonna get much bang for your buck overall doing that. So this was conceived at a time you know, Dick Sears had this idea. He was working through council of state governments. He did something like this in Illinois. They've done things like this in Massachusetts, done some of these things. They do this in federal court. Probation, for example, and pretrial supervision is attached to the court. It's actually That's where the basis of power is, so to speak. Same thing happened in Illinois. We don't have a Department of Corrections or probation and parole that is attached to the court. It's its own entity. So some of the things I saw in the original bill, where, you know, like a probation officer would advise the court that somebody violated something. And then I saw a version where it was like, they could advise the state's attorney or the court. There was never any good reason to advise the court, because they can't do anything. And it would have to go through the state's attorney, for example. You know, this is like the weeds of if you decide to do it at all. You know, to me, I saw the clearance of the dockets happen in Chittenden County. I saw people get connected with services, in the first instance, at least, in Chittenden County. I saw what it was trying to accomplish began and was working. Now there are issues with that, that we're seeing even just a couple of months into this that are you know, but it ends up that does what it intended to do. And I don't know that this I don't know that pretrial supervision aids anything that the current system plus the segregated docket, multi docket thing doesn't cover. There's a little bit, little I mean, a little teeny bit for those unique people who might access it. But I don't think you're gonna see a lot of it. And that will also be different county to county, as Kim said. I think that you are gonna have some state's attorneys who are gonna focus on, the high risk, high need people. And then you're gonna have some who are actually probably pulling people out of, like, diversion to do pretrial supervision kind of thing, depending upon how they look at how it's supposed to work. And we've seen this before with other with other dockets. You might remember, I don't know, ten, fifteen years ago, the Sparrow Project in Windsor County, which, by the way, is still on the books, but no money.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: It's the same thing as the accountability docket, pretty much. It was a free trial monitor.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: Well, it was actually part of the resolution of the case. So it wasn't and and a little bit different, but they have a the whole thing is to try to connect people who are amenable to services. That's what we keep doing, pushing that, pushing that, pushing that. And it for some, it works, and for some, it doesn't. You know, I I'll do preliminarily on the on the three b, so to speak, docket out of Chittenden County, resolved a lot of cases. Now the prisoners' rights office is seeing a lot of furlough violations. Because the people who couldn't comply with conditions of release when they were on conditions of release are not able to comply with conditions of furlough and probation and other things while they're post conviction. So we're seeing those start to come back already. Didn't surprise me. The thing is it's kind of off the docket now. It's in DOC's hands, and it's coming back to us on the probation side and on the furlough violation. But you don't have cases that are four years old either. So we've got it's a different type of control of that group of people and dock it. So I think it'll take some time to really see, you know, how it sugars off relative to, like, recidivism. And, you know, can we kind of help these folks at all? You know, we can get them off our docket. Step know, one. That's just step one. So, you know, I've said basically the same thing last time I was here. Is the I don't have the new version. But is does the new version still have the thing where if you violate something, the court shall issue a warrant?

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Yeah. The the current law is you need multiple violations. What's a draft before it commits multiple violations of supervision requirements or heads up Does it

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: say the court shall issue a warrant?

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: May. It's still a May. And

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: The one I

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Instead of multiple, it's one or more violations.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: Yeah. The that's the law anyway.

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: Right.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: I on what I saw on draft two point it's 2.1, page six and seven right at the top, It says shall issue a warrant for the rest of the defendant who meets the criteria.

[Kevin Winter, Member]: That's gone.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: Yeah. Because I don't think you can do that.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: That's gone.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Because we're working on five twenty nine, which is in judiciary committee. That's the one

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: that we have. That wasn't alright.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So what it does, it does it takes away the statutory requirement for defendants

[Kevin Winter, Member]: have

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: Five or more.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Charge with bilingual condition of release or five or more dockets, pending dockets, gets rid of those two items, which is then open to more defendants. The pretrial supervision program would be open to more defendants.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: It's something that'll be recommended Because you're gonna go go through this progression of, you know, what type of violation is it. Is it, you know, a technical violation, or is it a new crime? You know? And, you know, what's the severity of it? You know, all of these things that would be all covered under our bail law as it is. The difference is that if this existed, once you kind of rise up the level of stop screwing up, now you get to this group, a small group of people who would be part of this program. I don't I don't see that it necessarily changes kind of my analysis of it.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: That's what we're grappling with, Mark. It's like, do we keep this program in the current structure? Do we try to change it in such a way that when the accountability dockets are rolled out, that we have DOC folks, that person sitting in the court that particular day, and then coordinate with the Department of Health or Department of Health or all the other folks to provide wraparound services for those folks while they're in the community awaiting trial.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: You know, this concept floats around in all kinds of different, you know, sort of forms over the last twenty years. And, you know, the Sparrow Project is one of those things. If you remember the RIC program in Chittenden County, that started with a grant that myself, TJ Donovan, and Andy Folito, who's the corrections commissioner at the time, we got from Senator Leahy for $250,000 And there was a screener, there was a lawyer attached for TJ's office, and there was a law enforcement officer who had checked in on people who got screened into. And the whole idea was to connect these people with wraparound services till the money ran out. And then, you know, then we tried to do it again, they did call it something else. Yes, there are people who need services. We know that. We keep coming back to that. The question is at what level are we going to you know, what level of severity are we gonna get to before we ask them to do that? And what is the best way to make sure that they actually take? You know? It hasn't traditionally worked well, where just the court says, You shall do x, y, and z, because they walk out the door, and, you know, they're trying to figure out where am I gonna sleep that night. And they're not really worried about, you know, where's my screening for my needs assessment? Washington. You know, the need the screening is, I need a bed for tonight, and that's as far as it goes. And that's you know, we're seeing some of that post, you know, post resolution of these three B docket cases in Chittenden County. But, you know, they're along the road, they're quite a ways along the road as of Monday in Rutland already. I mean, it's gonna happen.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So if it happens in Rutland from your you were there in this discussion down in Rutland. What would be the role of DOC down

[Kevin Winter, Member]: in Rutland?

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: It's just as I understand, it's the same kind of thing. They would, They would be at the table one day a week, having somebody there to assist in the resolution of these cases. So you're not chasing around a caseworker or the like to try to figure out what the impact of this sentence or probation suggestion or furlough sentence, what the impact's gonna be, what can we do to make sure this person just like in Chittenden County. You know, we could they also one of the things they also did in Chittenden County, of these furlough sentences, you know, you'd have a zero minimum. You know, and oftentimes, you get a zero minimum. You still have to do some jail time before you actually, figure out how to program you out. But that didn't have to happen, because all of that was resolved by the screening, by what you did when all of the parties were together, got people onto the treatment without dealing with facilities and that kind of thing.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Then their status was on furlough out in the community.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: You know, some of them. It's not all of them. I mean, some were just probation cases. I mean, thirty something percent of the cases were dismissed. There's a whole bunch that, you know, all kinds of things, all of them dispositions that you could There was nothing special about the dispositions overall. The bottom line is everybody was together making the decision at the same time. And so that got the case resolved. Rather than saying, Oh, I gotta figure out what the sentence means. If I talk to somebody from DOC, everybody's on the same page, understood what it was supposed to mean, because they were all in the same room making the deal together.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: And that's the key.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: Yeah. Any

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: thoughts, questions of Matt? Because I do wanna get to DOC. Does this help? Does it make it clearer where we go?

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: Yes. It

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: should. Yeah. Yeah. I think he's put a couple of Jersey barriers up on the thing.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: John? I mean,

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: you know, it's just

[Unidentified Committee Member]: quick. It what what what

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Sorry, man.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: Sorry, man. Apologize. That's the high point of my day this morning.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: You said that that this that it was

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Illinois. Oh,

[Kevin Winter, Member]: am I?

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Well, now you're okay. So you're okay now.

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: We go back to what it

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: was. Okay.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Right. But you had said something about Illinois working. Do you have data from them? Or can we get data to see how it was working there?

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: Well, what I do know and excuse me for not looking at you.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Maybe I am. When

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: when senator Sears at the time brought this back as an idea from his work with the council for state governments, Illinois had just implemented it. And he thought, boy, that's a good idea. Why don't we try something like that? And that's why it was a small thing, and it was a pilot, to see how it would work. Illinois was one example. The Feds is another example. Massachusetts has something similar, but not exactly. The difference with all of these is just how are they connected with the courts, opposed to an independent department of corrections from a probation standpoint. And, you know, I'm sure that I don't know that anybody ever followed up with Illinois to see what happened there, only because we were probably ten minutes behind them in implementing ours. And it was like, conceptually, the idea. And it probably is a good idea, because we keep coming back to it over and over and over again.

[Kevin Winter, Member]: In different

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: in different forms.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: This is wraparound services.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: Yeah. And to try to get people out of whatever cycle that's causing them to be violating the law. And it doesn't always work, and it probably doesn't even work the majority of times. But if you can reduce the number of people who are coming back into the criminal justice system by like 30%, huge win, Massive victory. You know? You can't be looking for, like, ninety percent success rates or fifty percent success rates. You gotta look at these things incrementally. What does this program do as a piece of resolving this problem? What are the things we're trying to do at the Department of Mental Health that are resolving a portion for that thing? Well, how do we deal with the drug side? Big issue for us that we don't deal with well is co occurring disorders, because we have no place in Vermont that treats those folks. We have to go to New Hampshire if we're gonna actually do residential treatment of those folks. So that's like an ignored Exactly. But we aren't adequately set up to deal with those folks. So we deal with them in artfully.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Yeah. Peaceful. Conor?

[Conor Casey, Member]: Yeah. I mean, just looking back. So at one point you were saying, like, somebody has to agree to do pretrial supervision, right? And I I think I'm just trying to wrap my head around. How is that preferable? I could see it being preferable to be entertained. Right? Whatever there are some other options, it's you're gonna do pretrial supervision or else what? What are some of those other things?

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: Well, you'd probably be held on bail or you'll held be held without bail. One of one of the I I see this as the step just before now you're going in before your case is resolved. You know? It's the highest level of intervention with a person short of going to jail. So it's high on the scale of us messing with you.

[Conor Casey, Member]: So it's pretty much that or jail?

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: That's what it that's what it seems to look like. Now there are gonna be some people who might just say, no, no, no, no. I want these services. This is the way I'm gonna get them. And they'll do that. I don't discount the fact that there might be a few who do that. I think it'd be not so many.

[Conor Casey, Member]: So for someone to say this increases public safety?

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: It might, but it's incremental, you know? And it's for a small number of people. Like, we can do a lot of things that incrementally, on a small level, impact public safety. I think this would, but for a discrete number of people.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Thanks. Any other questions for Matt before we move on to DOC?

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: Thank you, Matt.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: Yeah. Thanks. Somebody I heard that there was some rumor that you might want me back here tomorrow.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Well, we're gonna have the judge tomorrow, judge zoning to

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: talk about this.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: We have to make a decision on where we're going with this pretrial supervision. So I'm not asking you to be in the room, but we may have questions that pop up. We've really gotta get off the dime and make a decision, and I just didn't know how this afternoon was gonna play out.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: Yeah. Okay.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: We couldn't have Joe Luneau wasn't available today. He's available tomorrow at 01:00.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: Yeah. I I have to tell you, it's a little bit difficult for me this year, not that this is your problem. I'm the only one doing this stuff. And during the last month, we've had multiple, like, 20 person busts in Bennington and in Windsor County. Awesome. And, yeah, cut it up. Then Awesome. And and, you know, so I literally had dozens of people sitting without lawyers that I had to find, like, pull lawyers out of Chittenden County to come down to handle cases in Bennington County, and similarly in Windsor County, just because they, you know, they arrested, like, you know, they arrested Hardwick or something, entire

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: town,

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: all at once. And they all need lawyers. So, you know, to me, some of the times where I might be sitting around listening to people, now that that's a bad thing, but I gotta make sure these people get lawyers. That's number one, Joe.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: You wanna be respectful of your time. But just wanna make sure you're in the loop in whatever decision

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: we make. Can yeah. No no problem.

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: Matt, or I should say, Shawn, don't say goodbye to Matt too loud. You scared him.

[Conor Casey, Member]: I didn't know there was somebody there.

[Brian Minier, Member]: I thought

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: Right on your shoulder. Watch

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Watch him on your back. I mean, I feel obligated to be here tomorrow or to listen.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: I might be.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Might be.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: It just depends how I think I'll have most everything resolved.

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: I'm sorry, Bennington.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: So it implies that you're not at all obligated.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: I I I appreciate it.

[John Murad, Interim Commissioner of Corrections]: Zoom's in.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: Can all and you have myself on this call.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Yeah. Zoom is available to you too. YouTube, if you can't make it. It's just we've gotta make a decision because I know Martin is holding off on the bill. And I don't know where we're headed. If the committee members know where we're headed, let's go there. But I go back and forth between all the options.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: Well, you know, the thing is it's not necessarily a the thing is it's not a wrong answer.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Right. That doesn't help.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: Well, it's not a wrong answer. I, you know, I look at things, and I've done this within the DG's office for twenty five years, is, you know, where do I get my most bang for my buck? And, you know, I figured that out kind of with what I do unlimited compared to the stuff that is going on here. So part of what is I look at it is where are my clients going to get potentially the best result? And so, you know, I made a decision. It doesn't mean that it doesn't mean you can't do everything if that's what you wanna do. But I think you'll spend a fair amount of money for a small relatively small amount of people. That's all I'm saying.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: I I just want a question. This is, yeah, generally off topic. But how often do your clients have delays in adjudication because of difficulty in in transport to to the courts?

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: That's been an issue. That's been an ongoing issue. It's very interesting to me. You know, for 200 years, one way or the other, we brought people to court. We had the pandemic, and all of the infrastructure that we had to bring people to court, like, disappeared in two years. Now nobody owns a van anymore. You know, it's unbelievable to me. And to me, it absolutely You just, like, hit a little nerve for me. It absolutely has increased the age of dockets, because people who are, like, who are being held, in my view, are being held longer because they don't come to court as much. And the video arraignments alone, they don't meet their lawyers. They don't know who their lawyer's gonna be. And they've regionalized the arraignments. So you've got, you know, a lawyer from Rutland is if they're the ones up doing the regional arraignments, they're arraigning somebody who's from, you know, Brattleboro, who you know it's never gonna be that lawyer. They don't meet with the lawyers in advance. All the things that were promised to us, honestly, about video arraignments, adequate ability to consult with clients before, during, after, doesn't happen. Half the time, we don't know where they are. That means that that means we don't have ways to contact them, so we don't know how to figure out how to tell them where to come to court. The only the only good you know, is the people who are held. At least we know where they are. And but they aren't brought to court so that we can get the cases resolved, like, on a regular basis. They come to important particular important hearings or once you've worked out a deal. But the infrastructure that we had to help move cases that included transports doesn't exist. Now I know it's very complicated. You might remember that we did before COVID, we did no less than four study committees

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: Got it.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: On transports.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Yep. Studies. Studies.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: And every honestly, every single one of them found it was gonna be more efficient to transport people than it was to do things by video. Mhmm. But, you know, this was a thing we wanted to do. And and by the way, during COVID, we had to do it. So that was the the good excuse to get all this through. But there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that lack of transports to court delays the resolution of cases, and they stay in jail longer than they would have otherwise.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: You redirect the money to transport.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: Well, the money money is interesting. It tends to evaporate.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Yeah. It does. It's to get a hold

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: of someone. Redirected. It used to be it was there. You know? It's not if around,

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: you'll hear arguments on how it gets spent, but you'll never hear the argument that it shouldn't be spent. Yeah. You know?

[Kevin Winter, Member]: It's fungible.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: Anyway, I should leave before we get That that the whole transport issue is it's a totally separate thing, but it's

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: All part of the package.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: Yeah. Well, it's one that really annoys me. Yeah. But, anyway Thanks, man. Thank on the list.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Thank you.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: Thank you.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Now we'll ship to DOC. I don't know who's coming up for DOC. Who wants to be on the hot seat? The

[Conor Casey, Member]: boss just told you.

[John Murad, Interim Commissioner of Corrections]: I will sit here very quickly, not for very long because it is too hot, but also because I think that both the people with me today have more information than I. If you're gonna introduce yourself. I shall. John Murad, I am the interim commissioner for the Department of Corrections, and I'm grateful to be called, and thank you all

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: for being here too.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: You may not be grateful afterwards.

[John Murad, Interim Commissioner of Corrections]: I think what's important to remember is that pretrial supervision is separate from the accountability docket or the 3B docket or the five dockets or more docket, whatever it is that we want to call it. It predates it. It was created under legislative fiat and by a legislation, fiat may be the wrong term, but it was created by the legislature as

[Kevin Winter, Member]: a tool.

[John Murad, Interim Commissioner of Corrections]: And before those, the accountability court existed, and it has a real purpose. We can discuss the scope of that purpose or what we think the numbers will be or not. I certainly respect the Defender General's assessment about numbers. And what he described was in fact what we encountered when we first piloted pretrial supervision in the Northeast Kingdom, in Newport. He described a situation in which it was really only used when defense attorneys saw it as a means of keeping someone out of jail who otherwise would have been placed in jail in in advance of trial. And the eight or so cases that we ultimately had in the Northeast Kingdom, I believe six of them were that, were cases in which the defense had agreed to it rather than it being something that was pushed by the prosecutors or the court. And it was done because otherwise, those particular individuals would have likely been remanded it is something that's out there and is able to be used, and it does serve a purpose. There was a reason why the court, excuse me, why the legislature created it and why DOC was supportive of that and worked to put together the program. It's because there are individuals who, while out under conditions of release prior to a sentence, are not capable of following those conditions of release. And we do not have a mechanism for routinely observing whether or not they are following those conditions of release. Certainly, there are instances in which people have given false addresses to the court, addresses that turn out later to be completely made up. There are examples of people who are not following curfews or requirements to stay at certain locations during certain hours. And the only way we currently know that is when those individuals are incidentally encountered by other law enforcement. So in other words, they are supposed to be under a curfew and only at a certain residence during, you know, they can be at work and they can go to court and they're allowed to go to doctor's appointments, but they are not supposed to be out and about in any other way. And they are encountered out and about by law enforcement, whether it's because they are actually causing a ruckus or committing an unlawful act, or whether it's because they're with people who are causing a ruckus and potentially committing unlawful acts, and they get identified police. Police run them and say, oh, you are supposed to be at this location and you're not. Ditto, a person who gives a false address and says, I will reside at this location, and the court says, good, you shall reside at that location, only if that person then is in one way or another encountered again by law enforcement, and law enforcement says, well, why aren't you at this address? Holy smokes, this address doesn't exist. Are they held accountable for that? For certain individuals who are consistently unable to abide by these kinds of conditions and who are having real problems with these rules, I don't believe that that kind of incidental encounter is sufficient. I think that we owe it to the community to ensure that if they are going to be released, that somebody be keeping them as it were honest about the conditions that they're supposed to follow. And I don't believe that there is a, I'm not an attorney, but I don't believe in my experience as a law enforcement officer and in this role that there is constitutional issue with that if it has been ordered by the court and understood by the parties that have agreed to it. It is also exactly what we expect of them now. There's simply an additional level of assurance to make certain that the people are adhering to the rules. It is not going to be a large population almost anywhere, but it is a tool. It was used three times in the process of the 3B courtroom in Burlington out of 79, I think, total. I believe the numbers were about 79 total individuals that went through that court. 66, I think, of those individuals ended up being in DOC custody in one way or another after the outcome of their case. Other words, 10 or so were dismissed, perhaps in the interests of justice, perhaps because they were determined not to have done what they had been accused of doing on all five dockets. Others were, there were a handful that were held to be on orders of non hospitalization, etcetera, but 66 ended up having some kind of resolution that resulted in them going under either custody or supervision of the DOC. And of those 66, three ended up in this, excuse me, six ultimately ended up in pretrial supervision, and only one is currently there now. So the other six had, you know, went into one of those other resolution buckets. So it's not tremendously high volume, but it was a tool available to that three v court. I don't mean to muddy the water that I tried to clear at the very beginning by pointing out that these two things are separate, but it's a tool that will be available to, that is available to other courts as well. And the rollout of it across the state was the vision of the legislature and of the department long before the governor proposed the 3B Court in 2025. So with that, I'll certainly take any questions, but I'm probably gonna end up deferring to Gary Marshall, who is our Deputy Director for Field Services and knows a ton about not only the history of what this body and DOC did to create the program, but also how we've been implementing it and its efficacy. I'll simply say in closing that I do believe in this. I do believe that it's a good tool for us to have. It is not one that is going to significantly affect the workload capacity of our DOC teams in the field as they currently are constituted. I do think that additional personnel are helpful for it, but I also recognize that in all likelihood, the volume in most counties will not equal a single individual caseload. That individual will end up having other kinds of things in his or her caseload. But having this tool available to us is important, particularly in a system where irrespective and separate from the backlog issues, we have individuals who we do not wish to incarcerate, and we have given multiple opportunities to avoid incarceration, and they have failed those again and again, and we need to have one more tool before we actually do incarcerate. Absent this, I believe that those individuals should probably be incarcerated while they are awaiting trial, because they've proven that they cannot abide by the rules that have been given to them. So if we don't want that, I think this is an excellent way to prevent it.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Questions? Wait for it. Conor.

[Conor Casey, Member]: Yeah, make me more a Gary one, Commissioner. Just wanted to talk like caseloads a bit. 12 is a pretty specific number to land on. I could see one for each field office,

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Conor, Gary will come on.

[John Murad, Interim Commissioner of Corrections]: Yeah. So shall I? Oh. Does anybody else

[Conor Casey, Member]: want you off the hunt?

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: No, no,

[Brian Minier, Member]: no. Thank

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: you very much.

[John Murad, Interim Commissioner of Corrections]: Thank you. But before I go, it's your prerogative, ma'am, not mine. But does anybody have anything for me? No? Okay.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: I think we're ready to train. Awesome. Transition here. Come on up, Gary.

[Conor Casey, Member]: Sorry to launch into the question, Gary, before you get settled.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Gives them time to think.

[Conor Casey, Member]: Yeah, something said. 12 positions, but we have 12 field offices. But obviously, there's bigger needs in each field office. Right. I And guess I think one of the things I'm struggling with is for this to be a success, we need to have some metrics on it. And those metrics entail coming up with some guesses. We think it's not going be too many people it impacts. But we have to have a sense of why do we have 12 people there to accommodate this population?

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: Gary Marwell, Deputy Director of Field Services. That's pretty simple. It's one per office. Yep. That's basically We have 10 permission parole offices and two satellite offices that have small populations. I think it would just be easier if people are allocated to a specific office to have an officer there so they don't have to travel unnecessarily. That'd be very hard, like, if you're having to travel two hours to see your I

[Conor Casey, Member]: guess, your pretrial officer. But couldn't Chittenden have a much, much bigger caseload for pretrial supervision than one of the smaller ones, which could be like eight we were talking, you know?

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: Yeah, I think the problem is that, like we talked about this last time, we don't control the inflow. So the theory we had was that initially we would get a large influx. Because like I talked about last time, we were looking at potentially a thousand people that might meet the criteria where DOC is pending. And we were expecting that to be pretty robust. To the commissioner's point, it looks like it's gonna be received at a lower level. That changes how we'd use the resource. We wouldn't be using So to draw a comparison, we have what's called telephone reporting or administrative POs. And they mostly do low level people that are out for low level crimes, nonviolent crimes. And they have large caseloads. They can have up to 150. That is so they can facilitate basically making sure that people aren't getting in trouble referring to sources, but not really meeting with them. They're mostly just kinda checking on their case and making sure it's progressing through supervision. If you're looking at a smaller caseload, then we can use that resource in a very different fashion, more similar like the FACT model in Burlington, where you're meeting with them more regularly. You're probably using intervention skills that we train people in. It's just you get more bang for your buck when you have a lower case load.

[Conor Casey, Member]: So generally, do you think throughout the system, there's a need for lower case loads? Mean, that almost resonates with me more. It's like, oh, we've got really high number of cases. We need more people.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: Yeah. So I mean, if I were to look at how these cases tend to Cases tend to have sort of like a trajectory and then they sort of peak in instability and then they sort of even out. I think people that are in a pretrial circumstance are typically in a more unstable place in their life. The evidence shows that pretty clearly. The tool we use, the ORAS pretrial tool. So a high risk individual in that tool would We were talking about risk earlier. What that tool evaluates is the likelihood that they're going to fail from the program, so just not be able to succeed in free trial. That usually results in being bounced from the program in some fashion. In some jurisdictions, that means going back to prison. The next thing it looks at is the likelihood that they're going to violate one of their conditions through trial. And then the last thing is that they commit a crime. So if somebody had a high risk score, it'd be like a twenty nine percent, 15%, 17% in those categories. So it's a pretty high rate that they're likely going to pick up a new client. So that's how I look at it. We talked about this last time as well. My thought is that success would be if they complete their pretrial circumstance, they adjudicate it however they adjudicate it, whether it be dismissed or they're sentenced to probation or something, and none of those things happen. So if we can engage with them in a fashion that helps that to reduce those numbers, then I think it's a success. Thanks, Gary. So

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: in order to achieve that, can some of this be absorbed by the current staffing in some of the field offices? You need to place one new person in each field office because we don't know what the numbers are gonna be if we continue with pretrial supervision. So could this work be absorbed by the current staff in some of the offices?

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: Theoretically, in some of the offices, could be done. But the problem we have there is that we have caseload caps statutorily in those offices.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So high risk with the cap.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: The risk management. And really more of the risk management POs are providing more what we're talking about here in terms of the level of engagement with a highly unstable population.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So you're saying what's required in statute for the ratio, caseload ratio would be an independent? If you could look at that ratio, we could have maybe a carve out.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: Well, if anything, I'd say that ratio is dated Because the level of intervention that we provide now is higher than it was when that was established, what, ten years twenty years ago. So I mean, my officers told me that. And I'm kind of going off of the fact that this is the closest analog in our system. And I've had probation officers that were assigned to that tell me, put 20 as the cap on that. That was sort of our choice. And they're telling me, Really, it's more like 12. It's a very, very unstable caseload. They struggle with getting to court. They struggle with I mean, we're talking about they get in arguments with their neighbors on a regular basis, and their POs are going over to kind of mediate between them. Engaging with them just to keep them in their residence, going to doctor's appointments, basically keeping them from falling apart completely. And that's probably what you're dealing with if you're talking about people that are being referred by the court to something like this. At least if they're in that high category, that high risk category.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: What if they were in the low risk category? They just need kind of like a weekly phone call in or a monthly phone call? What about that?

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: I I given the nature of what we've seen, given the level of instability, we're talking about the people that have multiple dockets, those are probably higher risk. Those are probably higher risk at because they're already looking at a violation of conditions. So they've already kind of bumped into that category.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: They didn't play with that.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: I don't know if they need an intervention.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Think that's part of the proposal to do away with that. Right. That there isn't those violations of conditions that they've already done or they have five or more dockets. The proposal before us is to do away with it. So then there'd be more folks. The thinking is there might be more folks eligible for pretrial supervision.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: You could put more people in it. I don't know if they need the intervention. I mean, of the scores low risk has scores at about a zero percent chance of picking up

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: a new prime. So why supervise them?

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: So why supervise them? Exactly. They're probably just fine on conditions of release.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So if we took the tact of having a dual role for the folks in DOC, where that person would be sitting in the court on the accountability docket, and really work with the other providers within the system

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: to

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: coordinate those services. But then there would also, that same person would be able to do the actual supervision of folks in the pretrial supervision program that's separate from those folks that went through the docket, the accountability docket. Is that workable in your world?

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: Yeah. I think it is. I think because they think they're pretty close. The the tasks are very similar. You're you're going to be talking to the court a lot. You're gonna be coordinating resources a lot, which is what the court wants for the accountability court apparently, which makes sense. I think that makes a lot more sense than having a probation officer do it because they have a different job, and they write pre sentence investigations. They're doing pardons. Mean, there's all kinds of things that they do that is very separate from the court process.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: You would need seven new people to do this on top of the five that you've already been allocated?

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: If you want one per office and you don't want too much travel for folks, that would be because because if look look at it this way. So if you're in Essex County and, you know, so Gil Paul and the officer for that region is in Newport, you know, it's I don't know the exact drive time. People here, like, hour and a half or something. So I I wouldn't wanna make people you know, especially if they're very unstable, we were talking about transportation and things like that earlier. I think that would be an additional barrier that would probably make it harder for them to succeed. And I also don't think it'd be realistic to have the pretrial officer go down there because if they have people spread out over several counties, I mean, mean, Orleans County, I think Newport to Canaan takes a shower. You know? So and that's

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So where where are your field offices up in the Northeast Kingdom?

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: We in the Northeast Kingdom, we have one in Saint Johnsbury, we have on Newport. And is Morrisville considered part of the Northeast Kingdom account number?

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: No. So

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: yeah, that's Those are the things.

[Brian Minier, Member]: They wouldn't say so. No.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: No. No, they're not. So you'd have one pretrial supervisor in each one of those three offices. You'd have three people out. They still would have to travel.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: Yeah, I mean, you can't. Yeah, it's a rural state. You're still gonna have to do some, but it'd be about what we expect out of people now. And there would be, with a low caseload, the expectation I would have to my office is that they would do some field checking as well. So there'd be some connection there or, you know, but I wouldn't want them to be traveling an hour and a half to do that.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So the Morrisville field office would take care of Lamar County, right?

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: Yeah, that would make sense.

[Kevin Winter, Member]: If I were to ask what the credentials of these 12 individuals, could you give me a little description so I have some kind of idea what kind of background?

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: I mean, right now it's the same credentials we have for provision for all officers. So what would that be? We look for people with case management experience, law enforcement experience. I mean, the bottom tier is not really where we land usually. Like, I can hire someone with, let's say, five years of law enforcement experience. I would typically, if I were comparing that to somebody with, say, that and then two years of case management experience, I'd more often go with that. Right. You kind of need a little of both. Right.

[Kevin Winter, Member]: So, yeah.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Sometimes folks come from a corrections facility and the BOP offices.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: It's pretty rare, though. I will offer that's pretty rare unless they're a caseworker. They need to kind of know, they need a certain writing ability. There's certain things you want to make sure that they have intact. Social skills. Troy.

[Troy Headrick, Ranking Member]: You have five positions now. Three are full. My questions are, is that the fullest of Ben? Have you always had those two vacancies? Have you done any consideration of why you continue to have the vacancies? I'm a little worried that we're adding seven more physicians at 2,100,000 that are going

[Brian Minier, Member]: to stay vacant. That's my worry.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: I think it's because we haven't figured out what the direction of the pretrial program is going be. I think that we kind of need to figure out the rollout and when it's operational in each county.

[Troy Headrick, Ranking Member]: But you've had those five positions posted. Yeah. No. No.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: Oh, you haven't? No. We've had two officers. I I believe it's two officers hired. I didn't know. Actually, a third that we

[Troy Headrick, Ranking Member]: had hired. Oh, maybe I I flip flopped. It's really

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: too. I I could tell you it's been a little but I don't blame it. It's been a little confusing because we had a rollout plan, and that kinda changed, and we're gonna have different rollout planning. But I can tell you, we decide that we're gonna move forward, we would have that physician hired, and then we would start working with the court to get a caseload allocated as quickly as we could. If it wasn't being used for free trial, then we would use it for the court liaison. We'd want that person to be doing whatever we're gonna do with the accountability court or whatever analog they have in that county.

[Troy Headrick, Ranking Member]: So you haven't necessarily tried to have all five positions filled today?

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: No, no, we haven't posted them or anything like that, To be frank, I don't think we'd have a hard time. Mean, we generally get a good number of applicants for PO positions.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Kevin?

[Kevin Winter, Member]: With Judge Matt's hot button of transportation, would these individuals possibly be able to fill that kind of a role?

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: We generally stay away from transporting people who are in trouble. You kind of get into a blurry line if things go wrong in the cruiser. It's Not a good We have done it. We have done it in rare instances, but there's liability issues. There's there's things that can go wrong there. They can like, do we search them? Like, you know what I mean? Like, we don't wanna be searching people that don't need to be searched. We don't wanna put people in the cruiser that might have weapon. There's all kinds of issues that can cause that.

[Kevin Winter, Member]: But I don't understand. Theoretically, you're supposed to have two people transported. So if they were one sheriff was the other, is that still

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: We don't usually team up with a sheriff like that.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: I think you're talking about sheriff transport, getting offender who's detained to court and using a PNP person for that.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: We don't usually do that. We don't usually mesh up and run with the sheriff.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: That's what you're talking. Right?

[Kevin Winter, Member]: I'm just thinking of.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Well, problem is the problem is that PMP officer may end up being their probation or parole officer once they're out in the community. So you've got that inherent conflict if they start transporting while they're still incarcerated.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: Yeah. You get into jurisdiction over.

[Kevin Winter, Member]: Just brainstorming, trying to get us someplace closer to something real.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Yeah. That's good, but sometimes there's inherent conflict and some of that.

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: So I can

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: I could just see one of your staff transporting a detainee, and then all of a sudden, they're under their supervision once they're out on furlough? And, boy, you'd have a problem.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: Or they commit a crime in the cruiser and we can't arrest them because they're not in their jurisdiction yet.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Big problem.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: It's slippery slope. Mhmm.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So I don't know what to do with this pretrial supervision. I'm open ears here for what committee members are thinking. While DOC's in the room, I know the other two in have left, the judge coming in tomorrow. Where are we here, folks?

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: We haven't solved the conundrum whereby there aren't gonna be individuals subscribed to this program. Even if you remove the the five dockets and or what what's the other violation?

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: It's the conditions.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: You're still not gonna have subscription rate. And so I understand the intent, and that's good. But I I I don't think that it's a good value for for what you're not going to get. It's just it's my opinion.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Oops. Because there's money on the line here. There's $2,200,000 being proposed in the budget for an additional seven positions in PMP, which is on top of 1,300,000.0 that's already there for pretrial supervision. That's your base funding. It goes on year after year after year.

[Kevin Winter, Member]: Has any of the 1,200,000.0 been spent?

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: No, because it's for FY '27. Right. It's the upcoming budget. Right. It's the upcoming budget since we go forward. So we're not gonna know how much of that will have been spent till until June or July '27. It's not in place yet. It won't take effect until July 1. So what's being proposed for the next fiscal year, which begins in July and ends in June, is 1,500,000.0. Where the base right now is 1.3, with a 200,000 request to bring on seven more folks in for an ongoing base cost of 1,500,000.0 for 12 employees within PMP for the pretrial supervision program. That's what the proposal is out there. So where are we folks? Do we keep the program? Do we scrap it? Do we tailor it back to saying, let's give it another year or two and have dual roles knowing that maybe Rutland is gonna have the accountability docket, give it another year or two just give those move some folks maybe down to Rutland. Got three positions that are filled, two that are not, maybe those two that are not target Rutland and use that for the dual purpose of sitting in the courtroom for the docket, accountability docket, but then whomever is sent in Rutland County, regardless to pretrial supervision, does that supervision work as well. I'm just thinking outside the box.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: I can offer that to replicate what the Defender General pointed out as being highly effective with the accountability court. We would need a position. We would need someone to guarantee. We do an ad hoc, really. Like when there's an available officer to go down to the court to answer questions and things like that. If there's not a full time position to do that, it's going to be sketchy whether or they're going be able to get down there and do it when it's needed. But if we have somebody who that's their primary function, that's that would be their primary function. We'd be expected to be there.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So you've got three people right now that have been hired for pretrial supervision. Where where are they based right now?

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: In court, there's a position in Saint Johnsbury that hasn't hasn't been up and running yet. And then the that we've been using the accountability court

[John Murad, Interim Commissioner of Corrections]: in Chittenden. Chittenden.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So you got one person in Chittenden. You got one person up in Newport. And then you have one person in St. Jay or that hasn't been filled yet?

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: I I believe we've hired that. We've filled that slot, but we haven't but it it's not up and running yet. We don't have the It's not. We don't have the pretrial going. There's the court, so they haven't been able to do their job as it's as it's been hired for yet.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: The person's been hired?

[John Murad, Interim Commissioner of Corrections]: Yes, but I wanna be clear that the person is not necessarily the person who's going to be doing the pre trial supervision. That could be another case, it could be another PPO who's already there. And in all likelihood, it will be an existing employee. The individual who's brought aboard is in that respect, those two positions are somewhat interchangeable. And I don't mean to make light of it in that way. I just mean that we are not literally hiring a person who is going in the same way that although we did bring a person into Burlington P and P with the money allotted by the pretrial legislation, that is not The individual who sat in the accountability court was a longer term PPO who's been with us since before pretrial existed. And pretrial, as I said, predated the accountability court, but this individual predated both. But he was assigned to that task and did it really, really well.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So the other person that you hired kind of filled in somewhere else within that field office.

[John Murad, Interim Commissioner of Corrections]: Affirmative. But as long as we are getting the pretrial done, that's what the task is.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Right. So freed up a current employee who had a lot more background experience, freed up that person to go into the court. Correct.

[John Murad, Interim Commissioner of Corrections]: And function there in a really effective way of being able to know what options were available, and having real world experience about these kinds of services are things with which we can connect you. This is how we do assessments. This is how we judge whether or not somebody is a good candidate for not just pretrial supervision, but also for probation or parole or what have you. You can't

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: be an effective court liaison if you agree. I mean, have to really know the system. You have to know, because you have to really answer the question to the Right, court's

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: and I have a newbie there. That's right. Shawn, did you have your hand up?

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: I

[Unidentified Committee Member]: did. Can you hear me?

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: Yes. I'm

[Unidentified Committee Member]: just struggling because, you know, the budgets are so tight and I totally get where they wanna go with this. But the fact that everyone was coming in telling us that it wasn't happening when it was supposed to be happening. And it's just, it's it's I wanna say yes because it sounds like it's gonna be great. But then I don't really have a great understanding of all the people that work in all these offices and how maxed out they are or how unmaxed out they are. I guess I wish I understood that a little better. It's just as a a guy who runs a business and moves people around to make to to make things happen, I just I I just don't know if it maybe everyone is working forty hours a week and they're maxed out. And I understand I I could wrap my head around it, but it sounds like this two people that are working are not quite doing I wish I knew what they were doing or, you know, and it would make me feel a lot better because 2.5 or $2,100,000 is a lot of money. You know, it just is. And I'm just I'm just struggling with a little bit. That's all I just wanted to share that with everybody.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: I think we're all struggling trying to figure this out.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: On average, our officers are are getting close to cap because the numbers have been growing up. One of the one of the side effects of the revolving of these pandemic era dockets is that we're getting more probationists predominantly, but the but the numbers are gradually creeping up. I I I want to say, don't quote me, but I I want to say we're getting around 40. I think that's about the average around the state. Last time I checked. 40? People per officer. So it's getting it's getting close to that 45 cap. It it's it's growing it's going up. I I would presume it's gonna continue to go up because that's been the gradual trajectory we've seen as more cases get resolved.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: You had said that there were a thousand people you would think that would go into this program or less, five, six, 700?

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: No, sir. When we were initially looking at the criteria, we were looking at the dockets and we asked the judiciary to give us, of the people that are the judiciary system right now, how many people could theoretically go on the program? Like, how many people had either a violation of conditional release or five pending dockets? And and the numbers we got looked like I think it was actually over a thousand people that could have theoretically been assigned to this program. So we didn't know what to expect because ultimately, it's the court that orders it. So we were looking at you know, for all we knew, it was gonna be maximum amount. We were really kind of flying blind on that one. Because, again, we don't control the inflow. We don't control the people that ultimately end up in the program.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So, Shawn, what Yeah. When we we were working on this initial law two years ago, that's the numbers that we had. We knew we didn't have enough money in the budget to roll it out statewide. So that's why we did a limited in one or two counties so that DOC wasn't going to get swamped. Because we only had about 660,000 at that point.

[Matthew Valerio, Defender General]: Right. Yeah.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: And as it turns out. And I haven't many people of the thousand potentials. In the system.

[Kevin Winter, Member]: Brian,

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: you had your hand up.

[Brian Minier, Member]: Yeah, there are too many different things going on. I guess I'll just stick with one of them, which is the idea as put by the Defender General Matt Valerio is we're using we've used different programs over the decades and now we're hoping to use this one to tie people to surfaces or to get people into their surfaces. I had thought until testimony, I think from this group, that the short straw, the shortcoming was going to be the folks who provide those services. But it sounds like

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Be that too.

[Brian Minier, Member]: Okay. So it sounds like maybe there are some services available. But without this DOC presence in the courtroom, maybe you can't tie folks to those services. So I guess let's get to the question, which is there's this money that's supposedly going for ultimately a dozen positions. And I guess the question for Gary Marlowe is like, Okay, suppose it's a half loaf. Suppose there are six positions. Suppose you can only do it in some of the counties and then you could use another portion of the money for services in those counties or something. How would it look if you only got a

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: portion of what we're talking about? Well, I can speculate. I know there's going be accountability courts. I don't know if they're gonna be everywhere. It seems like one of the things we could do is have one of the officers there. I would also wanna presume that the pretrial would be tried in those courts as well. Yeah. So it would make sense to put them there. If it was something where we were given those positions and then we were being told to do pretrial everywhere, we'd have to regionalize it. We'd have to have an officer that would cover, you know, two counties, which I don't think would be ideal. But we make use of the positions based on what's happening in that in that court. We do our best to to make sure that it's it's getting adequate use for the money that's being invested. Yeah. In terms of the service thing, I I I wanna really clear that sometimes it's not a matter of whether or there are services, although that is often the case. Sometimes they're not the appropriate services. One of the issues you run into is that it's really, we're talking about a forensic population. And case managing a forensic population is very different from somebody who just simply has high needs. They might also have higher risk. They might also have, there might be security things to take into consideration when you're going over the house and to help them connect. But I mean, that's really what we specifically train our staff to do. And I think we get better results than an average case manager might at a nonprofit in part because a nonprofit might not have the luxury of keeping someone on their caseload when they've not showed up for a few times. We don't give up on people because they don't call back two times and then they cut off. We go to their house and say, Okay, that's the problem. It's a very different model. And you're not gonna get nonprofit workers generally that'll do that, except in the FACT program where we had that as part of the contract, and they would go with a probation officer. They would help negotiate the dog that was stolen by the neighbor or whatever the issue might be. That's an actual situation. I know.

[Brian Minier, Member]: Like the color.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: Yeah. Yeah.

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: Mary, would you add something? The difficulty for me is even hearing about the positions, and I understand you don't want someone green going in to be helping place people in the services they need, But I guess I'd look at it if we're putting money towards certain positions, then we should get the qualified people for that and have them there. I think where I have seen over the years, we're well intended or we think we're well intended of putting money in positions or whatever here, but then they kind of get shifted here, here, and here. And I know with any DOC, it's been tough with, at times, getting the personnel that you need. So I'm just trying to get my arms kind of around that is how do we do this, do it right, not shortchange you for the needs that you have to really roll this out to work. But I'm just, it's still not connected.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: I could speak to a little of that. One, I wanna clarify. About 700 of our employees are part of the facility operations. So, and that's where the meat of our retention problems are. We really don't have that same level of issue in the field. So just to draw that distinction, the divisions are

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: That's good too, though.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: The the other piece is that so if we're given a position, often what happens is an officer who works within the office currently says, I wanna try that because I'm good at it, and I know how to work with the court. So what would typically happen is they they would go into that pretrial position if they're appropriate, and then that opens up the PO position over their old job. So that's what happened in Burlington. We took a very experienced, very skillful officer, we gave it to him because we knew he would do a good job with the court.

[Mary A. Morrissey, Member]: All of that, I understand and get it, and it's the right thing to do, but it was just kind of like, oh, we haven't hired this person yet. Money's sitting there, and are we going to? And then we're told, well, then it's not, the program's not working, or pieces aren't, and it's kind of trying to pull it all together to make it sensible for you folks to implement it and work through with the pretrial folks. I guess that helps a little bit.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: And part of that is we don't want to hire someone and then find out pretrial is getting repealed because then we have to figure out, you know, do get riffed? You know, do have to go back to their old job? Know?

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Yeah. So you've got one person you've hired for Chittenden and one person in Newport that you've actually hired. And then you have a position in St. Johnsbury you're looking to hire. That

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: position in St. Johnsbury there, we're using them for interventional supervision right now because we don't have a pretrial program. We don't have accountability for it in Saint John's right. So

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: could one of those, Newport or Saint Jay, could one of those be transferred down to the Rutland?

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: Well, we've already hired that person. So unless that person wants to move, we'd have to we'd have to have an opening in Newport, and then we'd have to hire, you know what I mean? We can't, like, we're not like New York, where you can just make our officers go to the other part of the state.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Oh, that's why I asked the question. Hailey, did you wanna weigh in? No, I mean, I agree with what Gary said. Don't I think it would make much sense also because we still do have those other two positions that are funded right now. And so if we were to move someone, if we were to use an existing position and shift them over from either Newport or Burlington or St. Johnsbury, we would have to cease the programs in those counties. That's then the question that we're grappling with. If we know the accountability docket is gonna be rolled out in Rutland, And if we want a DOC person to be sitting there in the courts that particular day, that would be the same person that would be doing the pretrial supervision in that County. So you could Possibly.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: Those

[John Murad, Interim Commissioner of Corrections]: two positions are not automatically the same. And we don't yet know Rutland County, if the Rutland County is, if Rutland is where the rollout is, and I don't know that that's been officially decided or not yet, but if it were, yes, as Haley mentioned, we have additional positions that we could hire that were already authorized for and funded for the person who, if it were in Rutland, or if it were in Washington, or if it were in Bennington, we would try to follow the model that we believe worked in Chittenden, which is to Washington, Barrie P And P office or the Rutland P And P office. And then the idea of rolling pre trial out in those locations would potentially wrap itself up. I mean, I think one of the challenges is that because the accountability model decided to anchor itself to five or more dockets in the same way that the language of pretrial supervision did, the two became inextricable and they're really not.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: They're not, right. They're two separate things, okay. Well, it's 03:00 and we're supposed to shift to parole. Good. I'm for any further along here, but I think we need some committee conversation in terms of different scenarios. You do have authority for five positions right now. We've hired three, but pretrial supervision was only occurring in one county.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: We have, I just, I don't wanna make it more confusing. There was one case we took from Caledonia, but predominantly that position is covering the Orleans County Court. The one, the first one that got hired. Correct.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: And then we've got one in Chittenden and then one in St. Jay for what we don't know because we're trying to see if we carry through pretrial supervision. And then if And we got two openings. We seem to think that the accountability court's gonna open up in Rutland. I'm assuming the one in Chittenden is going to continue, but we haven't heard one way or the other on that.

[John Murad, Interim Commissioner of Corrections]: I think that has been formally discussed. I think State's Attorney George has said that she will keep presence in that 3B courtroom. It will not be five days a week as it was under special prosecutor wait, but she has pledged to keep it going in some capacity. So we do anticipate continuing to participate in that.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So one of those two positions could be for the Rutland Court, but then that would free up a Rutland PNP person currently that could maybe do the pretrial supervision in Rutland County. I know, but I'm just thinking, so how we should pre trial.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: I want to clarify, just to make sure that I can't The two positions that are full right now, I can't move them down the road. I can't move those into position.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: You've got five positions. You got three that are full, two that are not filled.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: Yeah. Right. The ones that haven't been full,

[Kim McManus, Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs]: we could

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Talking about the two that haven't been filled could be connected with the rollout of the accountability for pretty sure it might be happening in rough. So one of those of the two could go to Rutland and that person could be that then frees up a person to sit in court, and that new person could be with a pretrial supervision for Rutland.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: That could happen.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: Yes. That could happen. And then you've got one more position. I'm just trying to think how this rolls out. What I'm seeing is it's gonna be a year to year thing. Because I don't know if we wanna do all 12 for pretrial supervision in all counties if it's not if pretrial supervision isn't something that we support or not. I haven't got a feel from the committee yet. Some people feel we don't need it. Some people feel we might. And the accountability docket, I've heard, would go to Rutland, Chittenden, Bennington, Wyndham, Windsor, and I think Washington. But it may not happen all in one year.

[Kevin Winter, Member]: Maybe the judge will tell us more to buy. Yeah. I think, Commissioner, you've made it clear that pretrial and accountability docket are two very different programs. Yes. The question is, think I'm hearing you saying you think that's the only way it is. You can't have one person doing both, depending on the workload or depending on the rollout of the programs or whatever it is. Am I hearing that?

[John Murad, Interim Commissioner of Corrections]: No, I think you could answer what you could. Mean, to the extent that sitting in the accountability court is a task, and to the extent that as of right now, our experience has been that pretrial supervision is a relatively low caseload per person. There is a logical overlap between those two for a single employee with the right experience and the right combination of sort of how he or she approaches this work. So there's certainly room for that, but it's not an automatic overlap.

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: No, no, no.

[John Murad, Interim Commissioner of Corrections]: I'm sure. Similarly, the rollouts of the two

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: things

[John Murad, Interim Commissioner of Corrections]: are utterly separate. If this body were to approve the additional funds that had been requested for 12 pretrial, we would proceed with the hiring and the rollout of those irrespective of what does or does not happen with additional courts based on the three court model, irrespective. Those two things are separate. We are going to do the pretrial across the state, irrespective of what happens with the so called accountability court. However, if the so called accountability court is expanded to other locations, there is a logical overlap, as you just pointed out. And therefore, it's easy to use individuals in dual capacities, but the two things are ultimately separate. Now that does not speak to whether or not this body chooses to approach one or the other. That is your prerogative, and I don't mean speak for you or speak to outcomes. I am saying that if that is the outcome, that's our intention. And with regard to the money that's already been allocated, assuming that that remains in our purview, we'll roll it out to the locations where we think there is going to be the most usage of it. That would be ironically, we've already by piloting it in one of our lower caseload locations, you know, that might not have been a place that we would have done it if we once we decided to roll it everywhere. But if we rolled it, you know, we would look at Bennington and Brattleboro and in Barrie and these places where there is a certain amount of caseload, Springfield, and determine which of our 12 offices are going to be best suited for this if we only have the seven positions or five that we currently have. That's where we're to stop. That's what we would do. But those two things are the accountability core rollout might be a component of a decision like that, but it is not the thing that makes it happen.

[Alice M. Emmons, Chair]: So we as a committee need to decide, do we do pretrial supervision on its own statewide? Or do we do it in some parts of the state and see how it works before we do it statewide? That's one policy decision. The other piece is, do we tie it more to the rollout of the accountability boards and have that dual function with that PMP person? That's what's before us. That's what's before us, to make that policy decision. So on that, I'll take a break because we've been here for a while. We got people out in the hall wanting to come in and talk about parole board. Gary gets to get off the hot seat and take a quick five

[Gary Marshall, Deputy Director of Field Services, Department of Corrections]: minute