Homeless Issues Committee - Regular Meeting

This is the meeting of the CJC, and I appreciate everyone being here in attendance, in person or by video. Let's take a roll to see if we have a quorum, if you would, please.

Thank you. Agard. Here.

Barrett.

Sheriff Barrett. Dillard. Furman. Furman here. Kylan. Here. Laufenberg. Here. Madison here mcnair. More your middle time. I miss something. Miles.

Miles here.

Miller.

Here.

Okay. I will ignore my reverb.

Okazaki.

Ozan. I'm here. Patterson, we have Nordquist listening in. Flush. Here. Middleton, did I miss you?

I'm here.

Did I miss Madison? I'm sorry. Nope, I said I'm here. Oh, boy. Wegleitner.

Here.

Let me just check.

We have formed. Thank you so much. The first item is the approval of the minutes from the March 26 meeting which were distributed with the agenda before the meeting. Is there any motion to adopt those minutes? Move. Ozan moves. Is there a second?

Second.

Second from Agard. Is there any discussion? Hearing none, all in favor of approval, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? They are approved. Thank you. We do have a motion as an action item. The issue has to do with ethics training and to ensure that others within the county receive the materials that are now available required, I think is the right term, to be utilized.

Chair, I'll make the motion to direct staff to distribute via email a video link to the ethics training and for staff to track the completion of members receiving that training by July 1st. And I'll explain it after there's a second. Is there a second?

Second.

Second from Agard. Go ahead, Commissioner. Go ahead, Mr. Miles. Sorry.

No problem. Yeah, so just to explain, there's circumstances near the end of the last board term that... made us aware that it'd be a good idea for us to require ethics training for all members of all of our governmental bodies um and uh and that that be done annually um the idea is to um um ensure that everybody is apprised of the provisions of our ethics ordinance, especially in regards to the obligation for members to disclose and abstain from discussion, debate, and voting in areas of conflicts of interest. And the other reason for the ordinance change is is to create some transparency so that the public is aware that members of all of our governance bodies have received that ethics information.

Thank you, Chair Miles. Is there any further discussion or questions regarding the motion? Hearing none, seeing no hands raised on line, let me put it to a vote. All in favor of the motion, say aye. Aye.

Chair, I just have one quick question for staff, just as part of operationalizing this, and that is for commission members, who should they email? We would like an email confirmation that members have watched the training video um and training video is just basically corporation council's presentation of the training to the full county board at its organizational meeting um so uh my question is um and we want a public record that members have viewed uh that training so my question is who among staff should be the point person that members should email that confirmation to

Chair Miles, I will send the ethics video by Corp Council out to all CJC members with a red receipt. And I will also ask that they email me back a confirmation. I can also then provide that log at the July CJC meeting, which is on July 23, if that suffices.

Yeah, excellent. Thank you. And just a reminder that the ordinance requires that it be completed by July 1st. So for members to view it. So thanks.

Judge Moyer. I had a question on whether or not this mandatory training applies to non-voting members of the commission.

I don't think it does.

Chair Miles, any insight?

I don't know, but since even if somebody is a non-voting member, I guess my intuitively I would say that their participation and discussion and debate can influence decisions. So I would caution on the safe side and required of non-voting members as well.

Anything further with regard to that matter?

Judge Harlan?

Chair Miles, do you know how long the video is? About 20 minutes.

Okay.

Thank you for that information. Good. Thank you very much. Then that motion has passed. Staff will distribute that.

Excuse me, Judge Harlan, can you hear me?

Yes, I can.

I did raise my hand. I don't know if it's preferable to put a request to be recognized in the chat or raise hand function. I'm not sure what's better, but I was just going to clarify that because the supervisors attended the training at the organizational meeting that this that would suffice and staff would make a note of that for the purpose of this.

That makes sense. And perhaps if it's sent to someone who has already done it, they can just respond. So there's an official response through this organization that it's been accomplished. Thank you. Very good.

Chair, one more quick note on that. Because we have members of the CJC that are on other CJC subcommittees, the district attorney, the county exec, the public defender, I would assume that process would be the same once they see it once.

One time, yes. Thank you. Thank you. We're gonna move into the presentations and if there's no objection, I'd like to move public comments to after the presentation. It makes sense from the standpoint of hearing out the presentation and then those that have registered to comment on it may even have further thoughts or there may be clarification for them. So without objection, I'll move public comments to after the presentation that is item D on our agenda. And would you please introduce that, Colleen?

Sure. Brett Taylor, please come on up. Brett Taylor, JD, has been the implementation coach for Dane County for the community court, but I'll hearken back. 12 years. Actually, I was able to bring a team of city, including at that point, Joe Bayless and some other folks, county folks, including our district attorney, Ishmael Ozan, myself. And Ron Chance and Ron Johnson from the Department of Human Services all to New York to then visit with what was called Center for Court Innovation is now called the Center for Justice Innovation. That site visit and Dr. Alex Gee, I should mention, that site visit really led to a lot of innovations in justice reform in Dane County that we all should be and are really proud of. And at this point, now we are moving into putting that past chapter to bed and moving into the next chapter. And so Brett is going to talk about what we've done over the last year working with him. Go ahead, Brett.

Thank you, Colleen, and thank you all for having me. Before I start, there's two quick announcements I'd like to make. The first one, which is a great announcement, which is on Tuesday, there was actually the first community court case acceptance, and so we started that process. That's a big tip of the hat to the district attorney's office, the public defender's office, the court, and the Office of Justice Reform that we finally got that started. So I think that's a nice... kind of segue into this. As to the body of the report, and it's also in the PowerPoint, there are two corrections I just want to note. One is I misspelled Jonathan Scher's name incorrectly. I missed the C on a couple of pages on the previous copy that went out. The official copy has it corrected. And on page nine, I misstated something about the district attorney's office where I said that they only wanted to have retail theft for the first year of the program. And it was only to start the community court. And I apologize to the office for that misstatement. So I just want to make sure those corrections are out there and they are in the official. They've been corrected in the official posting of the report. Can we get the PowerPoint up? We start the video. Yeah. So before we start the video, I just want to kind of it's a four minute video. I just want to put some context to this. You've heard us talk about Red Hook. Colleen just referenced it. I referenced it in this report. And I just thought this little four minute video kind of gives a little bit of a viewpoint into the judge who made that project so successful into his mindset as to why he did the things he did. and the outcomes that they would achieve. And then after that's over, what I'm going to do is just jump right to the recommendations of the report so we can talk about all the going forward, the steps going forward. So will you start the video?

Do the video. I'll get out of the way.

has three children, working for 10 years, everything's fine, loses his job, has to feed the kids every day. He and his wife use their savings, they borrow from friends, but eventually the money runs out, he's got to feed the children, so he goes to Home Depot, steals a set of screwdrivers or drill bits that he can sell for $15 on the street. I don't know about Madison, but I know in New York you can find people selling these on street corners and at traffic lights. Or maybe the person, maybe it's a different underlying issue, maybe that person's feeding, has a heroin addiction that he or she has to feed. Unless you address this underlying issue, when the defendant finishes the sentence, he still has to feed the children, he still has that heroin addiction. He's not going to go back to Home Depot because they know him. He's going to go to Lowe's to support his family. To stop recidivism, you have to find and address that issue, whether it's job training, substance abuse treatment, mental health issues, trauma counseling. So the community court problem-solving approach is to identify those problems and address them and monitor someone's compliance with services to make sure they're getting the necessary treatment they need to stop recidivating back to the court system. So now we're going to talk about trying to build trust in justice. We're going to start in the courtroom first. And it's also referred to as procedural justice. Decades worth of research has isolated a handful of factors, these four factors, as to what produces perceptions of fairness in people, when people think they were treated fairly. When they believe they were treated with dignity and respect when they understand the process when they had a chance to be heard and listened to. And when they believe the decision making process was neutral and on bias, first and foremost. We think it's simply the right thing to do, right? Treat people with respect. We see everyone as part of our community. They're not a docking number to us. They're not just a defendant or just the charge. We see the whole person taking a holistic approach to that person. Yes, that person may have a case your cases in front of you, but maybe a father, maybe a mother, a brother, a sister. There's a whole part of that person which we have to consider if we're going to look to help that person and stop them from coming to the court system. But most importantly, taking this approach, concentrating on these four principles while procedural justice, it gets better outcomes. And research tells us that people are more likely to comply with mandates, obey the law, trust the system if they feel they were treated fairly and with respect and had a voice and understood the process. A challenge for us when we opened was we were on second and third generation high school dropouts, and Brett was working out in the community before I was on the issue of education. The red houses, they are public projects, they're poor areas, so we had to raise the value of education in our community. To do this, we opened a GED. It's a high school equivalency classroom. I could also use participation in GED or taking the GE test as part of a sanction or a sentence on a case. But like all of our services, as it says, we're available on a walking basis. We also operated a youth court. It's a court run by teenagers, very inclusive kind of process. And so between the GED classes and youth court, they were graduating over 30 students a year. And these students are going to community college and four-year colleges. And they were back in our community. So we were sending role models back to our community for other students to see that college was a real option for them.

So before I get into recommendations, I just want to say, because I know some folks get nervous when they hear talk about community court. They don't want certain types of folks going in. Everyone is not suited for community court. I just want to put that out there. In fact, with the grant that the Office of Justice Reform has, it prohibits anyone with violent offenses. And this particular grant is focused on 17 to 35-year-olds, although there are ways where you could get other people into that community court. They just couldn't be using the federal resources that are assigned to that. And so unless anyone has any questions about that video, I could just start into the recommendations. Okay. So I come in as an outsider. I do not and will never know any jurisdiction I work with, their nuances and what the worth of a case is, as well as the practitioners here. My job is to try and identify gaps that I'm perceiving might be ways we could make some headways into creating better opportunities for people to access a community court and be successful in it. I try and push and prod on people. They'll push back. And that's just the nature of this work. And I just want to kind of acknowledge that sometimes everything doesn't click up right during that process. But here's where we're at. And I'm going to run through some of these. Some of them I'll get into a little more in detail. Some of them are pretty self-obvious. So I'm going to start with the recommendations that are listed on page 12. And I'll just run through them in order. I want the slides to move. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sorry. Forgot to motion to my man, Sharon. You do next slide. Sorry. One more. There we go. So the first are the court operations recommendations. As I've already mentioned about, you know, retail theft is the initial charge it's going to be in. And my urging would be to allow more charges into the community court. In my work, myself and another colleague, we actually developed a little mantra we refer to as people, not charges. And what that really means is we want to focus, the community court should be focusing on an identified type of person that fits what the community court is trying to address. Some community courts I've worked with solely only wanted to work with people who were either homeless or housing insecure. Others wanted to work with people that had mental health issues. Others wanted to work with just people with drug issues. I would urge that you should try and include all of those into any kind of a model you're working because none of those issues are independent of each other. A lot of times folks might have touches of needs for all of those. And as I give an example about the people, not charges, is that when a police officer makes an arrest, there might be all kind of behavior you guys are looking at, and you have to decide what charge to write, right? And maybe you could write two or three different charges, but one kind of comes to top of mind to you, so that's the charge you write. That's what the district attorney's office then sees, and that's what they work off of. You haven't had a chance to do an assessment on that person when you make an arrest. The district attorney's office doesn't even get to talk to that person. And we're making decisions for them based on what types of charges are initially written up on them. What we have found in the community court context is when someone outside of that court staff and i will say when i was a practitioner doing this and the clinic would call me and say hey did you know your client is doing this or said this and i'd i'd get a little attitude like damn i talked to this guy for a half hour he didn't tell me any of this he goes and talks to the equivalent of jl curry who's the court manager and the clinic uh person and they tell them all kind of things and they'll say hey did your client tell you he needs this no he didn't tell me that When you have this kind of a process in place where you're engaging with a person at a human level and at a person-to-person level instead of a defendant or a court level, you learn more about them and what their needs are and what their motivation may be. And so that is what that recommendation really focuses on, is that you should not just solely go with what a charge is, but also look at the person themselves. And so another way of sometimes putting this is eligibility as well as suitability, because sometimes people will be eligible for community court, but they might not be suitable for it at that time. We do, okay, I got the second one up there. What this means where I say that charges should be, any restrictions should be presumptive and not automatic. So, you know, most programs you have to start with charges as some sort of entry point into eligibility. When you make those restrictions automatic, you might be missing some opportunities to, again, engage with people that might be suitable for community court. and might actually thrive in community court. A quick example of that little mantra is a project I was working on, which was a pre-filing program in a different state. They had their normal list of charges of, okay, if you had sex offenses and violent charges, you're not eligible. A prosecutor called me up and said, hey, I'm putting this person in, even though it's written as a sex offense. She said, if you look at the underlying issue, this was a homeless person that was urinating in a park. And the way the officer wrote it up, it was written up as a sex offense, which means he was ineligible for any services. She overrode that presumption and said, this is actually a case that could work. That person went into that program. successfully completed it and graduated that program. If those restrictions had been automatic, that person would have never had that opportunity to get into that program and receive the resources to help him get back on track of where his life should be going. We go next slide, please. Okay. This is a big one. Identify ways to minimize time between arrests and connection to services. What research has shown, there's a lot of research out there that shows clearly the quicker you connect someone to services from the point of arrest, the more likely they are to be successful in that treatment. And what happens a lot in court is we tend to get caught up in the processes of all the paperwork and the processes that happen that are part of every court system across this country. And what I try to do when I come in as an outside consultant is to identify, are there any processes that we could either bypass or speed up? A couple examples of this are places where they had citations and you get a citation and in those jurisdictions it was sometimes six to eight weeks before they're even coming to court. What do you guys think someone that is out there using drugs and doing things to support their drug habit are doing for those six to eight weeks between the citation and coming to court. And so in those instances, we worked with those folks to identify their ways to shorten that process. And one jurisdiction actually got it to the point where they were able to turn those summonses around in two days. which means you have a much quicker opportunity to get that person into treatment than if they waited six to eight weeks, because what sometimes happens in those situations is people are going to get more and more charges, and then, rightfully so, prosecutors are going to look and say, this person's got six charges. I don't know if they should be in this program because they seem to be a menace, although it's the same person with the same needs and the same behavior. So I do talk later in this report, but this is a situation where I think all parties need to sit down, look at their processes, challenge themselves to see are there things we're doing now that we don't need to do to get someone into this process? And are there ways to quicken the ability to get a screening done or an assessment done so that we know the needs of this individual before the court process starts? The review in custody, I think, let me see what number I'm on here. That's number four, if you're following through the report. Review, leave it back for one second. Back one, yeah. Review the in custody people awaiting their initial appearance for community court eligibility. Now, I know this is a tougher situation because district attorney's office just gets this report. This person's in jail. They have a time clock going to when they need their initial appearance. There might be cases where a district attorney has to do a deeper investigation and can't make a decision on an individual in time to make it for that initial appearance. What could occur here is a process where maybe it's the Social worker in the jail, maybe it's the police officer who notes it on his report, or maybe it's the public defender's office that say, hey, I think this person might be a good candidate for community court. That's when the community court coordinator can actually go speak to someone in the jail, say, hey, there's this type of program. I'm not your lawyer. I'm not going to talk about your case. I'm just saying if you are going to be eligible for this program and the charges get filed against you, we could actually start talking right now about what is bringing you into jail and making you do these behaviors and if you're interested in it. Back when I was working as a practitioner, when I showed up in the morning, our community court clinic coordinator was always there ahead of me, and he'd just come up and hand me a list. He'd say, here's four people I noticed from the list of charges might be interested in community court. He hadn't talked to them. We have a different process than what you guys have here. But again, that helped me when I got my paperwork to be ready to go talk to that individual because someone had flagged that for me. And so these, again, are instances where as the team keeps meeting and talking about these processes, they might figure out a way to make that happen. And I will say, even in the case, I know District Attorney Ozan, you mentioned like, hey, you really want me to put someone in community court that I wasn't even going to file a charge on? What I would say in that instance, it's a case where you didn't want to file a charge, but someone like Ms. Curry had already spoken to them. What all of these projects do that make them successful is they also allow people to come and access these services on a voluntary basis. And that gives these types of programs a lot of credibility because what early iterations of these types of programs were accused of doing was what they call net widening, where officers would make an arrest on someone because they knew that person could get help. And so by... IDing that person and offering them that help, even if a case doesn't have a charge filed to them, that individual may have created a bond with that initial conversation who might actually go and seek out to get some help through the services they need. We can go to the next slide, please. This is number five on the list. So different community courts, again, have different models. Some want to be all post-plea. Some allow people to go in on a pre-plea basis. I would urge, I have found through all the work I've done through the years that a hybrid model works best. The reason that this works better for some folks is sometimes you get people that feel like the arrest was a wrong arrest. I'm sure you guys have heard that before, right? Or they might want to fight the charges. But at the same time, they will acknowledge, hey, I need help. I have a drug addiction problem or I'm off my mental health meds, but I don't want to plead guilty. And so what we discovered in Red Hook, and we did this from day one, is we put a focus on if people want help, we're going to get them into the services they need, and we will figure out how to deal with the case down the road. Now, the number one objection prosecutors always make, and I very much understand this, is what if someone goes into treatment fails out, it's six, eight, 10 months later, and I have to prosecute this case. What about my witnesses? I might lose witnesses. Evidence might go stale. What we have found, Judge Calabrese presided in that court for 23 years. We did what we call conditions of release for people that did not want to take a plea that he would accept and allow into services. I asked him at the time of his retirement, Judge, how many of those cases on conditions of release who failed treatment ended up going to trial. And he put up a big zero sign. And the reason that happens is because people that fell out of treatment end up seeing our friends with the police again. They get rearrested. They rack up another case or two. And then what happens is those cases get a package deal. Those people plead out. There might be an instance here where a case actually does go to trial. I am just saying from my experience and my years of doing this, it's very unlikely that's going to happen. Now, the flip of that is someone's successful in treatment. What do we do with that case? That case tends to work itself out because if someone has gone through six, 12, 18 months of treatment, is now working, engaged in school, Defender's going to go to the prosecutor and say, what can we do with this case? And generally, I have not seen any prosecutor say, well, this person now needs to go to jail after they've got themselves turned around. You figure out how to get rid of that case to the satisfaction of all parties. Moving to number six, developing additional referral options and entry points for the community court. As I kind of referenced already, sometimes when you start to engage law enforcement and other folks into what the community court is, you'll get officers that'll... I remember once I was standing in Red Hook in the court, And I had an officer actually walk a client in. And I told him, I thought it was a warrant. I said, officer, you have to take the warrants around back. That's where they process them. He said, no, no, no. This guy's in a warrant. I'm just tired of arresting him. He wasn't really doing anything, but he was just passed out on the street. And I heard you guys can help people. And so we walked him in. We took him up to our clinic. We got that guy into a program. That's what happens when your community court starts to get developed is officers welcome this because you guys see folks that you might not want to arrest, but you don't want to leave them on the street. You can't leave them there. So you have to do something with them. You put them into the jail and hope something good happens to them. Sometimes someone might get missed at your initial appearance, and maybe the defender says, hey, I've got these three cases that we don't know what to do with. I don't want to take them to trial. I think this guy would be perfect for community court. And then the judges, you guys all have cases in your courtroom that if you look through them, you might say, this would be a perfect community court case because this really shouldn't be on my docket. I want to deal with the serious cases. That's what most trial judges want are the really serious cases. So again, as this project starts to develop, I would urge that you allow multiple referral points to allow as many people as possible who are able to benefit from community court to be able to enter community court. We go to the next slide. We want to ask any questions at this point since we're moving to a different topic or keep going, keep going. Okay, so now we're talking more about, this is one I labeled as personnel decisions. The first one, I know at this point, Peter and Mr. Ozan are staffing the community court, but at some point as this community court starts to get more people in it, it's gonna be tough for the two of them who are leadership positions to handle that caseload. I have worked with community courts that have the kind of catch of the day. Hey, you know, it's your turn to go today to community court. It's her turn to go today to community court. That is not a really good model because those folks don't really, they might know what community court is. They might know what the goals are, but they also won't know the distinctions of that individual, what successes they've had, what missteps they've had. And if you have the same team working together, they develop a trust and there becomes an understanding of, hey, this I think this is what this person should be doing. And what's kind of interesting as this type of a project develops. is you'll sometimes see a defender thinking, hey, maybe this person needs this type of thing, and sometimes it's the prosecutor suggesting types of outcomes. But we always rely on the clinicians and those people with expertise to put them in the right modality. The other thing, by working as a team, and I'm including the judge on this, is you can seek out training opportunities where they go as a team to learn about best practices, emerging practices. And now instead of me coming back and explaining to someone, hey, I was at this great conference and this dude said this or this presenter said this, We all heard that same presentation. We all met that same person. And we come back and say, how can we do something similar in our jurisdiction? We might have to make some changes or tweaks to meet what our jurisdiction would require. But again, having them working as a team will make this community court a lot stronger. Identifying a backup for the community court coordinator is amazing, as wonderful as JL Curry is. He needs vacation every so often. As this project starts getting bigger and bigger, you're going to probably have some situations where you might need two people in the same place at the same time. And so that's just a pretty self-explanatory one. And then the continuing the court team meetings. A lot of folks think once community court gets started, hey, we're good. We hit our finish line. I would flip that to say you just hit your starting line because I have yet to work with any community court project where when I go back six, 12 months and two years later, that project's completely changed. And it's because they adapt and they change and they see different needs that they can feel with or they see things they were doing that weren't effective and they quit doing those things. And so early on, I know everyone loves having extra meetings on their schedule. I would just say yes. They're very valuable to have because you can course correct as quickly as possible and you don't have to wait for things to spiral out of control before it's a crisis and you have to address it. So I'm just going to encourage you guys to keep meeting, especially in the early stages, to make sure everything that we think we have right is actually working right and to course correct as needed. Thank you. You already got one more. There we go. Document creation is item number 10. So participant handbook and the procedures and policies guide, those are two documents. A participant handbook is something that's more for the individual so they understand what's happening, what community court is, explains it to them and what they need. You heard Judge Calabrese talk about procedural justice. One of the things that happened in the early iterations of drug courts, mental health courts, and even community courts is the people that were in those roles and participants in there as people that had been arrested they weren't always sure what was happening during the process. They weren't always sure, hey, if I mess up, am I getting rearrested again or am I going to jail? And if so, for how long? And so what the procedural justice best practices say is before anyone should accept community court, they should have a deeper understanding of what the community court is, what's expected of them, what's expected of the people that are running the community court, and know with a certainty of what's going on. And then also it's the policies and procedures guide. I think that's pretty self-explanatory that the people who are running the court will be able to use that kind of as a rule book of like, hey, this is what we all agreed we're supposed to be doing at this point. This is who should be eligible. This is the process to get them entered in the community court, et cetera, et cetera. But the part that I really want to focus on is making sure that the individuals that are entering community court as someone who's been arrested and processed through the system truly understands what it is that their obligations are and what they could be facing if they're not doing the things they're supposed to be doing, but also the benefits they could be getting if they do successfully do the things they're supposed to do. And then this one's pretty clear, creating a data collection protocol, because any project like this, you ultimately want to have to have some sort of outside independent evaluator to show, hey, You know, I could tell you stories all day long about Red Hook. I could tell you I think it's the greatest program that ever got invented. But until someone could come in as an outsider that didn't have the energy and the blood, sweat, and tears I put into helping get that project started, saying this project's doing well, You guys, you know, you'd say great stories, but is it really working? When I get an outside person saying, hey, we spent a year and a half evaluating this program. Here's what we're showing as results. Here's where you can actually do better. In fact, one of the things we got early on in our first evaluation was we weren't doing what I just described to you about the participant handbook. We were not clearly telling people this is what's expected of you and what could happen if you don't do it. And we did that adjustment based on that independent evaluation. But putting a data collection protocol in place now will help any evaluator understand what is it your goals were that you were trying to achieve? Did you put in the right processes to achieve those goals? And were the outcomes what you expected? Okay, we're moving to number 12, the training opportunities. I already mentioned this, finding training opportunities for your community court team. There's a lot of different organizations out there, All Rise, which runs all the drug court operations. Center for Justice Innovation has the federal grant for community courts. They all put on conferences. They all identify training opportunities. The field changes. When I first started in community court, no one ever talked about trauma-informed therapy. I'm not saying it didn't exist. It wasn't part of the lexicon of the court process. Once we understood, hey, this is why certain people are failing out of treatment, because they were using drugs to mask their trauma of whatever was going on in their lives from when they were young people. Once you start adapting and learning, what is trauma therapy? How do we use it in a court? Where should we use it? How do we identify it? How do we measure it? Those are the kind of things that identifying training opportunities could give you. And again, going back to saying create a team, you want to send your team there as a team, not just as individuals if it's possible. The next one is to the Office of Justice Reform itself. And I know I've talked to them all about this, and they've talked to me back about it, but it's a constant education process because – Let's just say OJR goes out and just tells every police group, every prosecutor what's going on with this program. Everyone agrees this is great. Guess what's going to happen in a year? You might retire. You might win the lottery. Someone else might get a promotion. Someone might get married and move. There's new people that are going to come in. They don't know anything about this thing called community court. So that's why you have to keep doing this on some sort of regular basis and create opportunities to make sure your community is educated about this. And you also have to go into the community to let them know what's going on about this so that they can be supportive. And the third group you have to work with are your social service providers because they need to understand, if I'm working with court-involved individuals, what am I expected to be doing? What are my obligations? What's this judge going to want from me as an outside agency if there's a report due? Things like that. And number 14, this is just kind of a reminder that prior to the Office of Justice Reform and since the Office of Justice Reform has been up, there's been a lot of amazing work done to get this process in place. As Colleen pointed out in the very beginning, the two of us started talking in 2013 about this. And she's been amazing at finding resources to get opportunities to get the community court up and running. There was an amazing community needs assessment done here in 2021. Jonathan Sher did another follow-up on the community court in 2024. And if you look at those documents, it really gives a lot of guidance as to what the community and the community stakeholders are hoping a community court can achieve for dane county and then the last one is creating an advisory board and an advisory board that is not just system stakeholders but you also need to have victim witnesses in there because they're going to give a viewpoint from someone who's been victimized by crime you want a former community court participant in there who can explain This is why I turned it down the first time, because I didn't understand this, this or the other, or I wasn't ready. And this is this is what helped me get ready. And so making sure you have community members, community advocates, even those community advocates that are a pain in the butt to you and always rabble rousing. You want to hear their viewpoints on this. You want to know what it is they are seeing that you might be doing missteps. and let their voices be heard. And so the other problem with a community advisory board is keeping them interested in this kind of a project. And so figuring out ways to engage them and keep them active as leaders and guidance for your project is really critical. So that is it for the recommendations. I did already mention those corrections. That's just in the PowerPoint, and that'll be part of this public record, correct, Colleen?

Okay. If anyone has questions, I'm... Did we want to take questions at this point for Attorney Taylor and then bring in jail?

But we have public comments, sure, but that's your purview.

We'll take up the public comments first. I note that we have just under a half hour, and there's normally five minutes for any public comment. I'd respectfully ask people to keep it shorter than that if they could, just so that we have plenty of time for further presentation and questions. But let's move into those public comments at this time. I think there are two individuals. appearing online? Two that registered.

So let's take the in-person registrants first.

We can do the in-person first.

And then we'll take the online.

I can take the PowerPoint, Don.

Yeah, you'll need to... The public commenter will come up where you are, Brad.

Oh, okay, I'm sorry. And these are, are these Melvin and Rebecca? Yes.

Okay. We also have .

Oh, I didn't know that she was in person. That's great, because that looked like an online person, and then Carmela Glenn was the other individual.

Good afternoon, everyone. A couple of things I just want to make comments regarding. I think that's what's missing in this process is the activities that the DA have actually implemented as a result of this process. I think if you talk about criminal justice reform and what's happening, one of the things he has initiated is the diversion review. So basically, we're looking at the age of 17 to 35. He has assigned a team where we have individual cases. myself, Rebecca, and Jessica are all looking at cases when they come into the office. So we're reviewing cases to determine program eligibility for CRC, for prosecution, as well as the community court. Since we have started, and we started probably the beginning to mid-January, we have reviewed over 2,500 cases. And in those cases, we look at them simultaneously as the ADA is looking at the case. And I think what's happening here, you're looking at a merger between the ADA's reviewing cases and saying, okay, can I prove this beyond reasonable doubt? And two, they're also looking at it and say, should I, and what impact is this going to have? And we also are looking at it at the same time and saying, how do we look at this case and say, what's the needs this person have? How do we address and figure out what we need to do to hold them accountable, change behavior, and making them responsible for repairing the harm done. And so at that time, we're having a discussion with the ADA and saying, hey, what is your thoughts here? What are you looking at? This person is eligible for deferred prosecution, either as a pre-charge, a post-charge, or a pre-screen. This person is also eligible for a community court. and then be putting notes in our system to say, this person is eligible. The process he also is implementing is, we are looking at cases live time, and when those cases are coming up, we are able to hand them a letter saying, you're eligible for the program. It's community court and giving the information, you are eligible to go to this program, you're eligible to go. So now you're seeing, At live time, the system is being reformed because now you're having these conversations a lot earlier to say that this person is eligible, let's pull them out of the system, and they're not going deeper into the system. And then we look at what we have to do to... figured out how to coordinate and collaborate with treatment providers to ensure the continuity and continuation of care. Because now when you get them into treatment, you're making sure that we're addressing the behavior. So I think that has been kind of missed. When I looked at this document, I was kind of disappointed in it because it was characterizing as if the DA's office has been obstructionist and not trying to get things to move forward. But one thing, we've been doing the work in the office. We're not necessarily out there telling everybody about saying that, hey, we're looking at cases a lot quicker than before. Before they get to IA, people are coming in with the goal of saying they're going to know which program unequivocally that they are eligible for. And we're looking at how to pull them. how to get the information and how to make sure they get on the right track to either CRC, deferred prosecution, or community court. So when you're looking at the collaborative system, we are working collaborative. For the first time, I have worked in a DA's office for 28 years, have worked under five different DAs. This is the first DA have said, we're going to prioritize diversion and have gave us the latitude to go talk to the ADAs and say, hey, this person could be eligible. What are your goals here? What do you want to see happen? So I think that's something we just have to be really mindful when you think about collaboration. We are working collectively to be able to say, let's get people out of the system as quickly as possible. I always say that it's a lot of talk about criminal justice reform, but nobody really know what you're trying to reform this system into. And so until we figure this out, let's divert people out of the system. Let's divert them and get them into the programs that we have because we do have an infrastructure here to really make some positive changes. And I think we are doing that, but just be mindful that it's a lot of things that's happening that a lot of people is not aware of. And we're still talking every day about how to make things better. You know, we always say that when I'm talking to people about program means I'm the director of the second largest diversion program in the state of Wisconsin. I also tell people I am the face of the racial disparity within the criminal justice system because at times we make decisions that adversely affect people who look like me. And so when you start thinking about what we can do better, and we can do a lot of things better, and I think what we are doing that. And so just when you start looking at these different programs and looking at the things, make sure to be mindful is that The people look at when you think about needing more prosecuting attorney, needing more staff for a different program, is that if you give them more prosecuting attorney, more people go to prison. And that's not the case because a lot of time before we can get people in any program, we need prosecuting attorney. I can review a case and say it's appropriate. That would be still talking to the ADA and sort of figuring out what do you want to do with the case. And you think about with the priority, if you have like different higher end homicide case, those type of case, They are focusing on that when we're looking at some of the other cases that could potentially get to us. We're really making sure that we're doing the right things. And I'm excited about when you think about the diversion review because it's unlike anything that is happening in Dane County. And now this is all new. And we start thinking about the next step of that is talking about eligibility, educating law enforcement as far as when they had on contact, if they have us talking to the individual, talking to the victim, when we get those reports, we're doing a background check, we're reviewing criminal history, doing everything and saying, is this person appropriate? Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Jewett. Next, we hope to reach someone by telephone who can't zoom in. No, I think there's... I thought you said Carmela Glenn next.

She's not online. Okay. Unless she's online, we'll... Okay.

Alderman Figueroa-Cole? Thank you for registering.

Thank you. I'm going to make this very short. First of all, thank you for allowing me to speak today and for the work that you guys do. I am not... I wish I was more versed on the topic of community course. I think I'm sure you have done some outreach already. But obviously, we need more outreach from the community to understand what this process is like. But based on the information that I have that we heard today and that has been released, I just want to ask the committee to look at this as another tool for the things that you already have in place in the justice system, not a replacement, not something that is going to take away from something else, but just enhance the tools that we currently have. I just heard the word infrastructure when the person was speaking before me, so just another pillar of that infrastructure to support our community. We invested resources and expertise on this particular topic. And I think when we do that, it shows that we're committed to have people from the outside to look at our beautiful county. I didn't say the city, the beautiful county and how complex our community is and actually be able to work outside of that community. mindset to point out the needs that the community have. So I'm really here to ask you to please take that into consideration when you make your decision. So I think a tool like this will benefit the entire justice system from not just the person committing the offense and the victims, but everyone in between, the police officers, the attorneys, the judge, the family members, and any other community member in general. So please, this is a program that has some track record already across the nation, so it's not something that we're inventing here. Let's give it a chance, and I'm just asking you to please recommend that we expand the service beyond the retail theft cases, and include things such as disorderly conduct, persistent arrest, obstructing justice, to also connect people, to work real hard to connect people to services at an earlier step in the process. The sooner we can deal with the root causes, the better for that individual and for the rest of the community. And to reduce the red tape and To avoid creating more red tape that will only increase more barriers through the processes that we all know how the city and county processes are. They're already pretty complicated to try to minimize those barriers for the people that are going to participate. to focus on addressing, again, the order line costs of criminal behavior rather than continue to send people through the regular justice system pipeline. And it's so important that we don't lose focus of the age group that we're talking about here. Wisconsin is pretty tough on juveniles, and 17-year-olds are still kids. So really, please keep that at the center of your discussions. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Alder.

Do we have any other public comments?

Did Ms. Jones wish to comment separately? Rebecca Jones, also with the DA's office. You register. Deferred prosecution. And essential to this process. Yes.

Thank you, Judge Hyland. Good afternoon, everyone. So, as I was reading through Your review. I did have one question. You do say on page seven, in my understanding of how DPP operates, the processes DPP followed are not needed for the community court as these are two separate and distinct programs that have different goals and target population. All well and good. What is your understanding of the Deferred Prosecution Program goals?

Excuse me, Chair? May I? I don't know.

Your comment is welcome, but we have to question Mr. Taylor, and that's not part of the public comment. I understand your point.

No problem. The only reason I was asking the question was because I felt that seeming was a little vague but within that the deferred prosecution program our whole goals and purpose for our program are to hold our participants accountable change behavior and ensure that they repair the harm done to the victim in the case also one thing we do hold true to is assisting the assistant district attorney or the ADA in resolving their cases. With that, DPP engages, educates, enhance intrinsic motivation, activates and empower all of our participants. While we're doing that, we are engaging our participants on a level that is relevant to them, resilient about relationships and how they see themselves in the community in all aspects of their own life. We coordinate, collaborate with our treatment providers to ensure continuity and continuation of care for mental health, substance use disorders, domestic violence, you name it, we touch on it and we make sure that all of our clients that are within Dane County and outside of Dane County have those wraparound services available to them. By collaborating across agencies, we aim to enhance treatment effectiveness, optimize the use of community resources, and improve outcomes and reduce recidivism. In addition to that, within our process that the DA has implemented with our diversion review, I am intricate in generating and completing all of the referral offer letters for the community court. So when we're going through that, we are going through each and every case that we are referring to them and we are doing the background checks. We are making sure that they are appropriate. We are making sure that there are no outlying cases in other counties, states, whatever. So we are ensuring that we collaborate across their program as well. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Jones. May we move on to questions for Mr. Taylor at this point? Come on back up, sir. And questions within the room first for Mr. Taylor, Executive Agar.

Thanks for being here. It is exciting to be on the front end of such an innovative program for our community. New things are hard. Certainly, we can always do better, even when they aren't new. And continuing to build trust in a system, the justice system, that inherently has the a lack of trust in it for many people in our community is something that I think we need to root ourselves into and continuing to build that trust. But having the group of people that continue to move forward, the core team, I think is vitally important. And you identified that. And Dane County having 60 municipalities in it. Not everyone is in a city, but we do have many big cities. Can you talk to me, and maybe this is too big of a conversation for what it is that we have available for us today, today, and maybe there's a resource you can send me to, but how it is that a county community court could potentially plant the seeds for municipal community courts. How is it, because we don't, my understanding is our municipalities don't have these either here in Dane County, but a girl can dream. I think there's a real opportunity once we get this off and running, as you pointed out, people will walk into the room and say, well, they don't have a referral, but You do good things here. Could you talk to me a little bit about how that intersectionality of municipalities within Dane County could potentially work forward to providing more opportunities like this?

There are a few ways of doing that. I think from my understanding when we were discussing of having the community court outside the court, I would rely on the district attorney and people that know this more detail than me that that's not possible as to state law that you cannot have a court hearing outside of the actual courtroom.

Municipal courts across Dane County that aren't Dane counties, right? We have a municipal court within the city of Madison. There's a municipal court in the village of Maple Bluff. There's a municipal court in the village of Shorewood Hill, right? So would those be opportunities to also provide community court services if those municipalities chose to invest time, resources, etc. ?

Sure. So I'll give two options that come to top of mind. The concept of the circuit court, just give you a little history. The concept of circuit court was from the old, old days where the courts literally rode from town to town and did their circuit. And that's why the term circuit court came up. When I was working out in Portland, Oregon, they decided to do something kind of interesting with their community court approach where they realized they wanted it in Florida. I think at the time, four different communities. And they didn't have resources for four different district attorneys, judges, et cetera. So what they did is set a day for each of those courts. And they set a court team. The court team literally rode the circuit, went to those different communities, had hearings, et cetera, in person there. So that's one possibility of doing it. That was way before this thing called Zoom and Teams kind of became part of all of our lives. So now you have all these other options of having remote abilities to have someone engage with someone where if I'm in, it's difficult for me to come downtown, right? So what you could do, and this is something Philadelphia did, is they set up little offices in different communities across the city. And for those that don't know, Philadelphia is both a city and a county. So they had these, I forget what they called them, these AMP offices, Accelerated Misdemeanor Program. And people could go there for resources. And this is where it really takes a lot of coordination of figuring out, hey, what resources do we have? And from my understanding, Dane County's fairly lucky that they're pretty resource rich. You can figure out ways of going compared to other places. I know every community says they don't have enough resources. You compare yourself to others, you guys are resource rich. In that model of having community centers, You could, again, this could be anything you guys want to invent or come up with, but it could be like, hey, someone needs to do a check-in on their program because they're required to do a weekly check-in. Instead of having to come downtown, pay for parking, et cetera, et cetera, they could go to that... community office. That could also be a place where people go and ask for resources. They can ask, hey, my kid just dropped out of school. Where's a GED program he could go to? So you could set up something where that community office not only provides resources to the community but it can be used as a check-in place for a court similar to day reporting centers that have been all around for a while it could also be a place where a person actually might have to meet with their lawyer there like if the lawyers are able to go out into the community that way so there's a lot of different options

I feel like maybe I did not ask my question.

Okay, I'm sorry.

Are there examples of counties that have community courts? And within the counties, there are municipalities that have their own community courts as well? Or are you saying that it's because I feel like you say some municipalities do have community courts, we are a county that has many municipalities in it? Is there? As we move forward? Would there be? Has there been an example of like municipalities that have their own community courts within a county that also has a community court to be able to support someone, you don't know our community as well, but maybe like in Mount Horeb, which is not near the city of Madison, there are different needs, different jurisdictions, different law enforcement.

I recall when we were working on the community restorative court, this was a similar issue. Colleen, you're nodding your head.

I can talk to you about this. I think the quick answer is there aren't any clear examples in the country where you have a county community court Like Orange County, California has a community court. Irvine, a municipality within it, does not have a community court.

There's nothing that preempts that.

I'm glad you mentioned that because now you just, there is a community court in Anaheim, which is part of Orange County. And it serves a separate subsection that they felt that those leaders thought Hey, this community court's great. It's not serving this particular subsection of people we're trying to reach. So they figured out how to amass the resources and figure out who it was. So I will just say your imagination is the limit of what this kind of model could be and also resources, obviously. So if a municipality says, hey, this community court thing is really cool, we would like that. I would urge them to go to the Office of Justice Reform and use their resources and their knowledge because, you know, a lot of communities don't have something like the Office of Justice Reform to come to, and they could create some sort of a process where, you know, Maybe it's community leaders that oversee that court, similar to CRC, right? Those cases are resolved by community members. So there's all kind of ways that you could work with your elected prosecutor here, your police chiefs, and see what they have appetite for. But I don't see any reason why that could not happen. And in fact, I'd love to be part of that discussion, quite frankly.

Thank you. Excuse me, do you mind also putting me in the queue for questions? Thank you.

Municipal Judge Moyer.

I love the question because I've been making notes all through your presentation about the different points and the different ways that municipal courts in Dane County could integrate and become a mesh and become part of the broader community court. And that I'd love to be part of that discussion. I'm hoping that discussion occurs as this is implemented. But you're absolutely right. We can't forget about the communities in Dane County. And ignore the resources that exist within a municipal court. In any event, put my name on the list when you're starting to talk about... Your name is on the list.

Alder Madison. Thank you. I think I have mostly clarifications and maybe a question, and this may be for an earlier speaker, but of the 2,500 cases, how many were referred to community court?

What cases have we merged with community court? Four.

Four. And then, I guess, for the metrics that you're using, how are you determining who goes where?

Well, if we're looking at the eligibility right now for community court, we are looking at strictly just retail theft. We tell the ultimate no additional charges.

Can you approach the mic, please?

Actually, while we were getting into mechanics about the screening process, which is something that people can reach out to Melvin.

I'll send it further. I just want to make sure I clarify for myself. And then just one more question. The district attorney submitted a letter. I'm not sure because it's dated today, so I don't know if everybody had a chance to read it. I really just have a clarification or make sure I understand what the restitution portion of it. Is it saying that a person has not completed the community court program until full restitution is done or full restitution has to be completed before they can enter? I'm just trying to help me understand that part.

Full restitution, if we're talking about successful completion, would need to be done prior to completion.

But they can be in the program? Yes. Okay. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. I know I see a hand on screen from Clerk Okazaki. Go right ahead, please.

Thanks so much. And thanks, Brett. I think we all certainly appreciated your level of knowledge here. I just had a question and I apologize if any of this have been addressed before I was able to jump on. But, you know, we've spoken about this process. There's an understanding that it's somewhat fluid and responsive and tailored to the community that it's implemented in. And that said, it's also my understanding that the model we're now using is fairly different from what was originally envisioned in terms of what you mentioned for how and where court is held, the pre and post-charge, the target population. Can you speak a little bit to that drift and how it compares to other implementations and how that might impact our overall outcome?

I'll answer that last part first. I don't think it's going to impact your outcome because it really depends on the individual and how they respond to the stimuli around them and what they're being offered and the support they're being given. As to the drift, I think that's just natural with any of these types of planning processes. Like I said, everyone... comes into this with their own positions. You know, this is an adversarial system to start with. So people might think, hey, we could do this. But then if they think it through a little more, they want to shift it a little bit or nudge it a different direction. And I think that is why my recommendation of the team continuing to meet and continuing to develop a trust with each other to create this type of program is what's really important. and not whatever's happened in the past, because I think we should start with celebrating the success that the first case has been heard. They are continuing to refer cases to the community court. And so that kind of drift is just normal, Jeff. And there's nothing to be noted about it or no fingers to be pointed anywhere.

Thanks. Sure. Yes, sir.

As I read through this, and I apologize, I'll sound like a broken record because I always seem to bring up victims and victim centeredness as we talk about various programs. There's one paragraph that's about six lines that talks about victims, victim witness process in this. And that concerns me as we talk about adding additional crimes to this. and ensuring that victim voices are heard too. I heard the county exec talk about mistrust of the criminal justice system. We have certainly seen plenty of victims that mistrust the criminal justice system because they aren't treated fairly in that process. And seeing just a short little blurb in here about a meeting with a victim witness unit concerns me that victims won't have a voice in this process. So how is that going to be appropriately addressed moving forward, what are ideas, what are other jurisdictions doing to make sure that the victim voice is also heard in this process?

Well, I think in this instance with the district attorney's position, their voice will definitely be part of this. And as you heard, I advised that on your community advisory board that you definitely have a victim voice there. But I also will state that A lot of reports I've read of people who are identified as victims of nonviolent crimes, which tends to be what community court is looking for, their big thing is they want to make sure this behavior gets stopped and that further people, more people don't get victimized the way they did. So that's, I know, different than getting restitution and making that person whole. Some places deal with this is they have victim restitution units. There's no perfect answer for this because, you know, you can argue, should we focus on helping victims more than anyone else? Should we focus on stopping the behavior that creates victims? And that's why it comes to each unique individual community to make those decisions. But I definitely think a victim voice should be part of it. That's part of why I was a big believer and helped get the CRC started here is because that kind of a process is vital. perfect to have a victim's voice in place. And I just want to state that a lot of cases are going to come through community court as this gets more robust, won't have an identifiable victim and will benefit from those kind of resources. And then the ones that do have those identifiable victims, That's where I think just passing that off to the CRC. A community court should not compete with any program that's existing. It should have its own little slot, its own little, this is who we're trying to serve. In the very beginning, drug courts thought community courts were competing with it. Now drug courts realize we should embrace community courts because they're for lower level people. Drug courts are for those high risk, high need people. So all of these different programs should slot in and provide the resources for the people that are part of that. And I don't know if that fully answers your question.

It does. And you talked about... Reducing victimization overall, and I think that should hopefully be the goal of the entire criminal justice system. But I'm curious if there are opportunities for data or metrics that could come out of this to say, listen, as a county, we should be focusing more here in this particular area or this area.

so we can stop people from offending in the first place reduce victimization and you know divert people from the criminal justice system because they aren't committing crimes in the first place there are evaluations of other community court programs that show a reduced frequency of arrests for people that maybe in a prior year they'd been arrested eight to ten times now they've been arrested three or four times we prefer zero but would also prefer three to four to eight to 10. And that three to four means there's five or six less victims than they had been doing because of that intervention. And so back to the data collection process, that's again, this team should come together and say, if this is a data point we wanna track, let's track this. Let's figure out what the correct metrics are to track. And then let's figure it out and do an assessment on your program, because if you're not meeting those goals of addressing the need for the victims, then that's where the reboot of something has to happen.

As we talk about retail theft too, I think the victimization which you bring up and which you've mentioned as well is the repeat. It's that the conduct doesn't stop. Restitution, which is required for completion of this program successfully, is a little different than in a criminal case because we revert to civil judgments if it's not paid, and you know what that results in is zero money. But I think the victim here for retail theft is probably much more interested in not having this person continuing to victimize businesses, and they'd like to get their money back, which is required under this program more than a criminal case. So I appreciate that aspect of it.

Thank you so much for the second question. I think it's more of a also clarifying. Now, help me understand on page 12. You know, right now, only retail charges are eligible for community court. So in the city, Chief Patterson just presented his annual and quarterly report again. And I think we all know that black men are overrepresented disproportionately for disorderly conducts, arrests, jails, all of you name it at the top. So I guess I'm curious on how how did retail theft How did how do we end up with retail theft as the single option with disorderly conduct? Like, I don't I don't see retail theft when I'm looking at this report. And I don't think retail theft is the highest. You know what I mean? Like it's happening. But disorderly conduct seems to be the driver.

That was not my decision.

I guess I'm trying to, because help me understand, because I just, I'm trying to understand how do we get, how do we not include disorderly conduct? That is, year after year, that is my single hugest frustration for both adult men and juveniles. So I'm just trying to understand that one.

Yes. We are starting with retail theft so we can get some cases through with fewer victim issues because there was a concern regarding how center, victim-centered the program was. So we've had some delays. We've had some concerns. That is part of what's covered in my response to the report, which I'm assuming you received.

Yes, I did.

And I'm assuming it had some impact on the final report. Yes, it did. And I thank you for the clarifications you gave at the very beginning. But that is why we started retail theft. We wanted us to move cases through that we would not have victim issues with, hopefully. Those cases are relatively simple when it comes to the victim issue because most of the big box stores have signed off on their victim rights other than restitution. So once we get a few cases through, We should have a better idea of how they're moving, and then we can actually expand to different crimes within the area, which would be potentially disorderly conduct, obstructing criminal damage of property. But that's where we're starting. Okay.

Any other questions?

Just a note of clarification. The grant allows for... So where we're starting, the grant allows for us to give services, 17 to 35-year-old nonviolent offenses, misdemeanants, and nonviolent felonies. So while we're starting here, as long as the communication and the collaborative work continues, we have a... larger. Yeah. What's the length of the grant? Well, the length of the grant isn't terribly long right now, but it's likely that I'll be asking for an extension. Gotcha.

Chair, can I just make one last comment? Yes, sir. I think some people are reading from a previous draft of the report of which I did amend based on some of District Attorney Ozan's comments. Some of my frustrations were not with any particular program. It was with what I perceived as too much time being focused on nuanced processes when I thought we should just get started and adjust as things went along. So I just want to make sure that is clear, that it is not any particular program. I think the district attorney has been very embracing of different approaches to resolve things without using a carceral setting. My comments were purely based on I didn't think we were getting things moving quickly enough and we're focusing too much on a detail. It's kind of like saying we can't sell this house until we have this chair in the right spot. And it's like just sell the house and let them put the chair where they want it. So I just want to make sure that is clear. I think Dane County is well positioned to have an amazing community court. I look forward to coming back and telling people, you need to go to Dane County to see how they're doing this. The way I now point out other places, you have a lot of good folks here doing a lot of good work. And I just challenge them to push their own boundaries and their own comfort level of what they're doing.

Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Wagner.

Thanks. Really appreciate the presentation. I had kind of two questions and maybe I know we're late into the meeting. So if there's just a direction to point me in or if people can follow up via email after the meeting, that works too. But I'm wondering about like kind of the policies and procedures, like the handbook, the procedural justice aspect that you referenced in your report. A quick search around the CJC site didn't lead me to find those. I don't know if those are, it sounds like it's an ongoing work that's happening, but I'm wondering if there's some sort of guidelines right now, given that there has been one case in process. And then my second question has to do with the support for services, the mechanism for access. Is there dedicated funding as part of this grant? It sounds like. And is that the case management piece? And then is there a connection to other services? And do they get priority in terms of access to providers or programs within the broader human services network?

So I will address your first question, if you'll allow me, Chair. J.L. Curry, our coordinator, was going to speak to this, but we're running low on time. The Office of Justice Reform actually has our own website. So if you look at county departments, you can look at us and then see what the office does. You also see an icon that's labeled community court. Within that gives you the community court brochure, gives you some general guidance around what a community court is. So I would look to that as far as the social services and that network. I'm awaiting finalization from some of the Bureau of Justice Assistance as far as the purchase of service contracts, but that is currently in the works, and that BJA grant would be the resources that we would be able to use only for 17 to 35 year olds, nonviolent folks who have misdemeanors or felonies within the community court. So those resources in our data system is all dedicated to looking just at those community court respondents, tracking it for the federal government, but also tracking it for our local government and our local residents.

Thank you. And I did see the brochure. I just didn't see, is it going to be like the consequences of what happens? Is that going to be just determined sort of on a case-by-case individual basis at this point in terms of what that person's participation looks like and what

What agreement they come up with the handbooks in the last stages? Judge Tramiel is who we've ignored mentioning is the community court judge. Obviously, she sits and will. weigh the options, but JL's been working on that with our whole team, so those are in final stages.

Great, thank you. And the best practices for that are not to have automatic responses, you know, if X, do Y. It's a fluid situation. You have to look at the individual, see what efforts they've made, what success they've had. And I will tell people to look at the report, Go to the last two pages and look at the amazing courtroom Judge Tramiel has created, and it's going to make all of you want to go there and check it out.

I would just say, Supervisor Wegleitner, the specifics as to what participants are going to be required to do for their agreements is likely going to come out of an assessment that the case manager and or Ms. Curry will be going through with the participants. So we don't have a specific X, Y, and Z yet. I think they are also waiting. for some of that assessment to figure out what specific training and or counseling they may want these people to participate in. So that is not there. The handbook is in progress, and I'm assuming that will come out in due course, but I don't think that will be talking about the specific conditions of each participant's agreement.

I also think, if I'm not mistaken, that what occurs if someone enters the program but fails to graduate or finish successfully, I think the case goes back to the assigned trial court because the case has started with an assignment to one of the eight branches, and then the case is resolved in that branch with the district attorney and the attorney for the defendant and defendant. That would be correct.

Judge, before that gets sent back to the branch, you do want to do a reassessment sometimes of that individual to make sure, hey, did we put this person in the right treatment setting, the right modality? Make sure we did everything as a system to support this person before saying, hey, you know what, this person's just not working this time. As Judge Calabrese always said, we're finishing this case in a negative way, but you're always welcome through the front door.

Good point. Any other questions? I see no hands online, none in the room. Thank you so much, Attorney Taylor. Thank you for your efforts for our court, our new court, our brand new baby. And thank you for your continuing availability as a resource. It's very much appreciated. And thanks to everybody who spoke. Here today, we have a joint meeting with the pretrial subcommittee, July 23rd, important meeting with presentations about the pretrial assessment study. And I hope you will be there. I will not, but let's not go there. And any other business before we were to adjourn? Hearing none, is there a motion to adjourn? Move. Is there a second? Second. Any opposition? It is passed. Thank you everyone for going late today. Thank you again.