Hey guys, so we're getting it ready for our next speaker, who is Mark Metakely-Skott. He holds a PhD in information theory and has worked at IBM for more than 30 years, understanding and transporting new technology to customers. He's currently the IBM Q Ambassador Leader, which kind of means that part of his job is this awesome task of spreading excitement about computer computing around, and some might remember him from the previous talk he gave last year about quantum computing in the real world. So let's have a look, sorry, that's the title this year, yeah, I messed up, anyway. Let's head it off to Mark, he's a better speaker than I am. I don't know about that. Thank you that you applauded at the start of my talk, it would be interesting to see if you applauded at the end of it as well. Everything you should never ever do when you talk is apologize, but I'm going to apologize because you should never do it. If I fall asleep in the middle of my talk, it's because I'm incredibly jet lagged. I was falling asleep earlier, but I'm pretty awake now, the adrenaline is doing all the rest. So, let's see, not quite as many people as last year, I have to say, but probably more focused, that's good. So, indeed my name is Mark Metakely-Skott. I'm British, I live in Germany. I would like to take this opportunity to observe one minute's silence for the death of the United Kingdom. Are there any other Brits here, okay? Are there any other, are there any, this is very political, are there any pro Brexit Brits here? Are there any pro Brexit Brits, full stop? Sorry, I have to get that out of my system. I'm so, I'm so unhappy about it. Okay, now let's get back to the topic at hand, which is not political self-destruction, but quantum computing. And, yep, so that's a picture of IBM, one of IBM's quantum computers. We currently have, I think it's 11 or 12 other things online available for you and our customers to use, you in the sense of everybody, if you're not in the IBM Q network, you just want to play with it, there's, I think, six, five or six which you can use. If you, whenever you go to talks about quantum computing, you will, depending on who's doing the talking, you will hear claims about exponential speed up and quantum supremacy, but if you look closely at the technology, you'll realize that there's actually quite a lot of hard work necessary to leverage that to achieve that. We know, for example, we know that there are certain algorithms which really do or really would provide significant speed up, Schor's algorithm, for example, but if you look at the technology, the technology is not there yet. So the question then becomes, what's doable today? What can we actually usefully do today? And the question there becomes, when might we be able to do something commercially meaningful? I mean, that's the question that everybody is thinking about. So I'm not going to give an answer to that. So no, I'm not going to stand here and say quantum advantages in three years or five years or next month, but I hope to throw a little bit of light on how a more differentiated way to think about that. So where have we identified that quantum computing is likely to provide some kind of advantage in the sense of speed up? We know that a quantum computer or qubits as a kind of Hamiltonian solver is, very, very careful choice of words here, is amenable to solving problems of physics from chemistry worse about Hamiltonians anyway. And there's a lot of research, a lot of papers being published, a lot of experiments being completed, among others, IBM with our, with our IBM Q network members on exactly that kind of problem. It's fairly clear that quantum computers are almost certainly going to make a difference in chemistry, material science, that kind of thing, protein folding, exploration, color chemistry. We've already joined the dots there. We've got a fairly good idea that's going to work. The next area where we all think about using quantum computers is in the area of optimization. And that's where it gets a little bit more difficult. It's not like you can say, okay, I have my KSAT general purpose problem and here's an algorithm for solving KSAT on a quantum computer. We're not that far yet. We do have a number of promising approaches to break that problem down and a number of challenges still. But we expect in the area of optimization also that quantum computers will make a difference. Third area is optimal, is third area is in machine learning, actually the fourth area here. For some reason I've got them labeled two and three. In machine learning it's a lot more, I would say today it's a lot more speculative. There are algorithms such as the HHL algorithm. Is anybody not heard of HHL? This is a lecture theater, we're at a university, I expect you to be prepared when you come here. Okay, the HHL, sorry. My sarcastic, formally part of the European Union British humor and combined with jet lag, excuse me if I've offended anybody, it wasn't intentional, so HHL is basically a very interesting algorithm because it provides, in theory at least, exponential speed up to invert a matrix. In practice it doesn't provide you any speed up because it assumes that you've initialized your quantum state with your data and that process currently takes away all the advantage you might get. But it's a building block and we expect that that kind of building block will be integrated in other building blocks to build larger quantum systems. If you look at the application areas, in other words where, when we talk to customers or universities, where are people looking at using quantum computing? This is kind of a non-complete, but non-exhaustive but nevertheless extensive list of application areas and no prizes for noticing that healthcare, life sciences, chemicals and financial services is where most of the action is happening. These tend to be commercial organizations with a significant interest in improving those things. Let's be clear for a bank who are doing risk analysis, a performance improvement of 1% in the accuracy or time that they need to do, particular risk analysis is the difference between being in business and being out of business, so it's a big motivation. So let's have a look at, that's the background, let's have a look at what a quantum computer actually is and to be clear without losing any generality and because we've got some of these things, I'm going to talk about the IBM quantum computer. We heard there are other ways of implementing qubits with some advantages and disadvantages. I'm sure in the next four or five years that's going to really accelerate, we're going to see massive leaps in the capabilities of technologies. We're also going to see one or two technologies basically full by the wayside, but let's take this as an example. So what do we have here?  You got it, last time I asked a question, hands went up, you all know what a signal generator is. So signal generators basically they generate microwave signals. We have things called arbitrary waveform generators which with those microwaves they make pulses. Those pulses are fed down the plumbing in the chandelier, at the top it's room temperature more or less and at the bottom it's 15 millikelvin. That's an amazing challenge by the way to make that all work. So microwaves pulses are sent down to the chip, stuff happens and then we send other microwave pulses down to the chip to read stuff out, that's how we implement qubits. Like I say there are other ways to do it but actually you're always talking about some kind of control signal and manipulation signal and readout signal. We're using microwaves if you're using embedded ions that might be lasers, whatever, so this is, the next foil is an attempt at an animation, is it working, ooh, is it cheese grommet? Yeah, so here we go, microwave pulses, go down the wires, okay, you get it. Now we need to talk about something we call quantum volume but those microwave pulses and the 15 millikelvin device at the end of the wire, these are all real things, they have real constraints, no signal is perfect, no pulse is perfect, there's lots of anecdotes about how you build a refrigeration unit and how precise and sensitive those copper waveguides are to the extent that you, even the torque you use to tighten a bolt is extremely critical, lots of things that can go wrong, lots of things that can influence performance, so we have a real world device with real errors and it turns out that more or less, I'm simplifying a little bit, but more or less the most critical thing to getting a performant quantum computer, in other words having lots of qubits, having an insanely long coherence time of probably 150 microseconds, the most important thing is the error rate of the individual qubits, if you reduce that means you can play with the other factors, not strictly speaking 100% true but it's more or less how it works, so we measure quantum volume basically by creating a set of random qubit, two gate, two gate operations and measuring the cumulative error rate and that gives us this graph, now, no this isn't graph, this is Moore's law, sorry my apologies, so this is Moore's law and the idea of measuring quantum volume is to find something comparable to Moore's law, so Moore's law was published by Gordon Moore, I think in Popular Electronics 1963, he observed the development of silicon chips, he saw that the die size was increasing every year and that the feature size of the transistors was decreasing, he put the two factors together and said number of transistors is going to double every 18 months, you all know this, so we're always searching for some kind of analogy in quantum computing and the reason we're searching for an analogy in quantum computing is that if you've got a comparable growth rate in some meaningful measure of the power of your quantum computer with the things that are influencing that y-axis where you know what's influencing them, you know what the challenges are, you know what the engineering and physical challenges are, you know what the physics limitations are, so you've got the graph, you can then start to think about oh well, if I get up to so many qubits or this particular quantum volume, then I can solve a particular real world problem, so it gives you more of a handle on how long it's going to take to be able to solve a class of problems, if you look at the idea of quantum volume, then there's a whole bunch of other things which flow into how well you can use quantum computing, one of which is of course the algorithms, so we're all, who's actually working on algorithm development here, can we have more hands, clearly shown please, sir can you hold your hand up, be brave, don't be ashamed, anybody else, he's, he's developing the biggest algorithms, humongous algorithms, so what are you, what are you working on? VQ, okay, yeah, so a lot of work going on developing algorithms, but if we look at the, the IBMQ's systems then there's a whole bunch of other stuff in there which also plays a major role, one that always surprises me is calibration errors, measurement fidelity, gate parallelism, but also things like how good is your compiler, so we, the quiz kit aqua transpiler is open sourced, it is a, a, an active area of both within IBM and in the community of development to improve that transpiler, because just by being clever about how you do gate elimination, how you optimize can make a huge difference, and so if we look at the, the latest machine that we have, which is a 53 qubit machine, that's the topology, then one of the things we discovered was that if you try and entangle too many qubits using Josephson junctions, basically the error rates increase so much that it, it's counterproductive, so you need to, you do that software optimization, and if we look at where IBM is right now on our quantum volume, if you want to definition of what quantum volume is, then there is somewhere there's a link to a paper explaining how it works, we now have four data points, about three months ago we only had three, now we have four, and we've committed to doubling that, so it's a logarithmic scale up here, we've committed to doubling that every year without saying how long we're going to double it, I'll leave that to the senior executives, but it's feasible, it's feasible to double this quantum volume, and then it becomes a, do we have a pointer here, is this a pointer, it's either a pointer or some medical device for doing unspeakable things, just small animals probably, you think I should, like, it's a microphone, I've got all this stuff buried in here somewhere, good thinking Mark, so I guess this, yeah okay, so one of the things you can do, is you can say, well right now with this quantum volume here, here, we can, we can calculate energy behavior of, of battery catalysts, of battery electrodes, or battery electrolytes, when that's a real use case, and there was a paper published a few weeks ago, by Daimler, and ourselves doing exactly that, but then the question becomes, okay what can I do if my quantum volume is here, well, 2024, it's a quantum volume of 1,000 realistic in 2024, I don't know, I won't guarantee it, but it's not infeasible, with a quantum volume of 1,000, or you can do all sorts of, you might be able to do all sorts of interesting things, so what I'm saying is, think about it this way, how long is it going to take to get to where I need to be, if you look at the devices we currently have online, now some of these are publicly available, some of them you can use, some of them you can't, in particular the Rochester devices only for, for organizations in the IBM Q network, we have different topologies, so you can use that to play with different topologies, what you can also do, and I thoroughly recommend people take a look at this, there is a textbook on our API, QuizKit API textbook, where it uses the API, but it's a textbook on quantum computing, it's on GitHub, it's open sourced, and if you want to use it, I think it's, I forget the, I forget the type of license, open commons, no, what's the word, creative commons, so have fun, but we do see, we also see a lot of external committers, or we've enabled a lot of external committers, looking at the API, and the reason I want to do this is because I just want to spend a couple of minutes delving into one part of it, so we, our API, we have these four areas, aqua, which is very much applications, air, which is a special purpose simulator, which simulates the real hardware, it's not an ideal quantum computer, Ignis, which I'm going to take a look at in a second, for doing area mitigation and Tera, which is basically the gate, the gates, gate and circuit level models, so try the IBM quantum experience, it's everywhere you'd expect it to be, so QuizKit Ignis, and this is probably what's going to be of interest to some of you, so Ignis is basically we expose through the Ignis API the open pulse standard, so at this level you are not interacting with the quantum computer anymore with gates or with API calls, you're actually defining and sending microwave pulses to the device, and the publicly available machines, one of those exposes this API, the publicly available one is the only one, and it's a single qubit, don't laugh, it's actually very, still very useful, because it allows you to really look at area mitigation, be my guest, so let's have a quick look at Ignis, yeah, so Ignis allows you to do things like the area mitigation, area calibration, and I've just temporarily forgotten the name of the, it begins with R, the error calibration algorithm, it comes to me in a second, so you can play with the one qubit quantum computer which exposes the open pulse API, and what we often, not always, but what we often see is that developing, what I would say is not ideal algorithms, but things where you think, okay this, this, this is getting towards something that will work in, perhaps in the real world, is yes it's important to know about things like H, the HHL algorithm, or the quantum Fourier transform, or phase estimation, these things are important, you have to understand that, but then you have to really understand the circuit level, you have to understand the, the details of what's going on, and then if you want to take it further and get even more performance, you have to look at this level as well, so all those levels are important, for those of you who are electronics engineers or have some familiarity with electronics, it's a bit like the very early days of transistor based computers, going from architect to literally down to what kind of, what kind of basis semiconductor technology do I use for my chips, how do I interconnect, how do I manage clocks, all that sort of thing, so that's all exposed, this is the mobile machine, which is the largest publicly available machine, it's a 16 qubit machine, and this is Armunk, which is the single qubit, which exposes the open pulse API, and I don't know, has anybody used Armunk, nobody's used it, it's the most, for me the most fascinating part of quantum computing is at this level, because you literally, you're playing with microwave pulses, and the question I often get is, yeah, can you use this API to break the qubits, no, we're not that stupid, we have, we've put, you know, controls and things in there to prevent that happening, either inadvertently or potentially, so it's safe to use, so we are, if you look at what's, where's the road to getting to quantum advantage, in other words, the point where these things actually become commercially useful, and for those of you sitting here, commercially useful, I guess is one aspect, the fun aspect, the intellectual challenge aspect, and of course, is this going to help me some point down the road, is it, somebody going to be sufficiently interested in this, we're at the stage of quantum readiness, or we consider ourselves to be sort of quantum readiness right now, and we anticipate that in the near future, and the near future, so I was born in 1961, which makes me 58 years old, turning 59 in November, IBM will compulsorily retire me in about six years, so the foreseeable future means I expect to see quantum advantage in some applications, areas before I retire, if you belong to, or are associated with, or in charge of, or studying at, any of these organizations, good luck, congratulations, well not all of them, this is where Thomas, look at his face, look at his face, isn't it sad, so not everybody gets full access, for Thomas we had to restrict it, but basically if you're one of these organizations here, so obviously commercial companies, but here, this might be very interesting, or these here, a lot of universities, or these here, so there's currently 102, we broke the 100 at the end of last year, and we've set our aggressive goals to expand that this year, so these are all members of the IBM Q network, and they have more or less access to all the other quantum computers, and if you don't, you aren't a member of one of these, or associated with one, and you don't have access to the IBM Q network, you still have access to all the free machines, and play on those, you may have heard, we announced last October, a collaboration with Fraunhofer in Germany to put together a joint program, there was also an announcement in December that we're doing something similar, but not exactly the same in Japan, and I think that underlines the fact that this is, the whole thing about quantum computing is very strategic, strategic in the sense of strategic importance to economies. I don't know the exact figure, or even though it's about 10 to 12 billion currently being invested in quantum computing, but the projections, all the projections I see is that that's going to increase massively in the next two to three years. Something for you guys and girls here, the quiz kit, quiz kit camps, so there's one due to happen here, taking place in New York, where I've just flown in from, a traverse to Vermont, so March, traverse in New York to Vermont, I guess that's something like those who survive it win, and those who don't freeze in the snow, I don't know, we hold these things regularly, keep an eye out for those, anybody's welcome to apply, we do help and support as well, and that's a good way and an interesting way to contribute and to meet like-minded souls who are obsessed with and in love with quantum computing, like me and you, I hope. Okay, I've, in my jet lagged waffling, I've said enough now, and I think I'm, yeah, I guess questions. One point, one point, okay, here's some some advertisement, does anybody know what this is? Yes, okay, now if I was, if I had the courage to open this, this thing up, which I packed last night, and it's one of the, you know this, when you open the bag up and it goes, that's the state, there's a pi zero in there, so if you go on, if you go on github and search for IBM Q, system one 3D model, you'll find it, so there is a 3D model, if there's anybody with a 3D printer here, please go and print the thing, there's some design files in there, there's also a instruction set on how to compile Qiskit, the Qiskit Terra API onto the pi, and as of two days ago, it now runs on a pi zero, so the idea is we put the pi zero in the model, it will have LEDs, or it has LEDs, and you can actually interact with it, and maybe somebody wants to write the code to actually reflect the, so if you're using the simulator, if you're using the air simulator, you can actually see the internal state of the computer, because you're simulating it, we'll actually reflect that on the model, so an interesting way to interact, and for sure a conversation starter, okay, now. Okay, we have time for two questions, and may I ask to not, like, everyone to leave the room right now, because otherwise it's very hard to understand what people are saying, so are there any questions? One of the key things about quantum computers is the interconnect between the qubits. Yes. Is this factored into the quantum volume as well? Yes. Okay, because if there's not enough connectivity, you're going to basically not be able to use the qubits well. So the thing is, there are qubit technologies where, for example, you have three dimensions, so you have a, try drawing that when you're jet-lagged, so you have maybe a qubit here, and a qubit here, and a qubit here, so you can do, you know, three-dimensional ideal connectivity. With transmon Josephson junctions, you have a 2D lattice. Theoretically, you can do this as well, so the edges, you have connectivity three, and then you have a connectivity of eight.  So that's why in the topologies, the scaled topologies, you see, you know, these large rings of qubits like this.  The key question is, what's the penalty when your, when your, your mesh connectivity is less than ideal? The ideal one would be, and this is a, this is a vague attempt at physics irony, the ideal one would be an n-dimensional, n-dimensional space where every qubit was intangible with every other qubit. Here it's not the case. How can you get around that? Well, if your gate fidelity, if your error rates are sufficient, you've got sufficient coherence time, you can swap, you know, you can entangle, for example, these two, but if your circuit wants this one to be entangled with this one, you can actually do that. If you've got sufficient fidelity and sufficient error rates, you can, there are ways to, there were ways to, I wouldn't say fake it, but there are ways to not physically, physically move the qubits, but computationally move them. Then the question becomes, how good does the compiler have to be? And what effect does that have on circuit depth? And the heuristics we see are, the compiler is, a compiler is a compiler is a compiler. The effect on circuit depth is, for most of the algorithms you see out there, like VQE and the stuff people are using, it's, it appears to be polynomial. So I don't know, was that a very long winded answer to your question? Okay, so we're out of time, so let's thank Mark for the talk.


He told the players, when they're in the tunnel, to give them a bunch of flowers but wrapped in barbed wire. I go back into the dressing room after the game, all the players are there singing sad guru, sad guru, sad guru. I was in… You know I went and spoke to the Everton Football Club. Anybody following English Premier League? Huh? So that's the best leagues in the world, English Premier League, highest quality. The best players play there. Now the Spanish league is getting much better but still English league is in terms of talent, it's great. So last time when I was in Birmingham, a young man attended the program, not the program, just a talk, a evening talk. So I didn't know anything about sad guru, I'd never heard of him until the day before. And then just before it's about to speak, this energy just came into the room, it just hit me like a ton of bricks and he's standing there, this guy, this incredible guy and he starts speaking.  And so the next day I'm thinking right, I'd love to get him in to speak to the players.  So he agreed to come in and speak to the players and I was so excited. So the next morning it was a Saturday, he was coming in to kind of meet the players and watch training. And all of a sudden I started to get very nervous, normally I don't feel stressed but I was very stressed and nervous and the moment that I saw him, the feeling of panic that I had completely dissolved and I felt completely at ease and at peace. And that's part of the impact that sad guru has on people. So they took me to the Everton Football Club and they wanted me to speak to the boys, their stars in their own right. The moment you enter a professional football league you are a star in your own right because there's a certain talent there. Then with a couple of boys I kicked the ball around a bit and then I was to talk to them.  So that night it was at the team hotel in Formby and we were about to play Liverpool in the Derby the next day and we had not beaten Liverpool for years. So I went and they were training, see when the football clubs train they are under the manager's whip and it's very rigid and things are going through paces because the next day they are playing a big game, a very big game with Liverpool. Liverpool has really fabulous stars, tourists, good art. These are kind of people who can change a game individually, single handed. The manager is putting them through the paces and you know the usual things and running up and down they don't want to put them through too much stress the previous day, they are just enough to keep them limbered up. So I went there, I said I just want to be there and observe and I was just there. So he comes into the room in his robes and the players are sat there and I noticed immediately that the players all of a sudden they just got this, like they calmed, normally a lot of them can't sit still but they completely sat still and were completely present and calm and peace kind of came into the room. It was an incredible experience. And from being okay to slowly they became like this because what they thought some religious preaching is going to come, I just asked them a simple question and made them look at life in a certain way, look at the game in a certain way. I'm not trying to teach them soccer. They know how to play soccer but how to keep yourself. Just this an hour and a half talk. Next day I had special pass to go and sit in the box for the game and I went inside for the game. And one thing I remember is he told the players when they're in the tunnel and regarding the opposition is to give them a bunch of flowers but wrapped in barbed wire and I won't go into what he meant by that but it always stuck with me and I know it stuck with the players as well. This one of their stars is Tim Carey. Tim Carey is from Australia and I saw this boy was just sitting there like this. I said today when you enter the field say nice things to the Liverpool players. He looked shocked and said nice things to them. I said particularly he's a forward. So I said particularly go to the goalkeeper and say nice things to him. He looked like this. I said yes you do this and see. And I said find out something about the goalkeeper's life. They said he had a daughter three months ago. I said go and ask how his little daughter is doing. Just do it. And he thinks it's a friendly. In his mind for a moment if he becomes friendly with you and slackens down for a moment a moment of slackness is what you need. That's all the game is. And the first goal he scored and I saw him actually patting. You know when they were introducing he not only shook the hand he went to the goalkeeper and he tapped him on his chest and said something nice. And within twenty minutes he scored the first goal. They scored one more and they dominated the whole game right through which was a huge surprise headlines in all the newspapers next day they won 2-0. I go back into the dressing room after the game all the players are there singing Sad Guru, Sad Guru, Sad Guru. And it was one of the best days of my life. And that evening on match of the day, match of the day was just starting and it was just panning around and it comes on to Sad Guru because he had the Everton shirt on that Jags had given him. And the commentator goes here's an interesting gentleman. It is just that constantly Liverpool means you're overpowered, overwhelmed by the repetition of the big players there. Nobody's reputation is going to win any game or any situation anywhere. How you conduct this situation is how it's going to work. I have a great reputation but tomorrow you can make a fool of yourself, isn't it? If you don't conduct it properly. So, reputations are to be respected when you walk on the street. Never to be respected or even considered when you're actually in the situation or the game. So the impact that Sad Guru had on the players was huge and he gave them meditation techniques like Isha Kriya and I know that several of them still do it today and several of them still follow Sad Guru, his talks and he's a huge inspiration. And hopefully when this pandemic ends that we'll be able to get him back in here and he can help a new generation of footballers succeed.


Item number SCP-1044 Object Class Safe Special Containment Procedures SCP-1044 is to be surrounded at all possible access points by signs in English and French, warning of falling rocks, avalanches, landmines, and dangerous animals. The area should be kept under periodic aerial surveillance, and at least one member of personnel will be available in short notice to further discourage any non-personnel who choose to ignore the warnings. Description SCP-1044 is located in a small, uninhabited valley in the Alpine region of France, located at ██████ Degrees north ████ Degrees east, and measuring approximately 1.2 kilometers across and 0.6 kilometers wide at its broadest point. The properties of SCP-1044 were first encountered in 1968, after rumors of unusual sounding echoes began to spread through the local area. These reports range from the valley producing echoes that talked back to ████, while the reported phenomena were widely dismissed as urban legend by local authorities. Researchers were dispatched on March 6, 2000 ████ to determine their veracity. The following are partial transcripts of the three investigations carried out over the course of the following two years. Experiment 1044-1 How should we begin? Perhaps hello? Hello? I didn't get that. Try harder. Hello? Goodbye? Did you hear that? That was good. I got it. Let me try something else. Is anybody down there? Is anybody up here? Yes. No. Hold on. Try that again. As loud as possible. Yes. No. Yes. If the first echo is contradicting you, is the second echo contradicting the first echo? Or the second echo was just my own echo coming through late. Let's continue. Experiment 1044-2 Note, henceforth it can be assumed that the responses of SCP-1044 are heard in the form of an echo, in the same voice as the person who made the initial statement. Dog! Dog! I suppose there is no opposite statement to Dog. Cat? Not a true opposite. The phenomenon appears to follow a consistent logic. Observe. I am a man! I am not a man! And so, rather than echoing, I am a woman, it attempts to relay the logical opposite. It is not yet clear that it has the awareness required to attempt anything. What about the hello from the previous experiment? The echo said goodbye. It would make sense, possibly, that a statement of parting ways is logically opposite to a statement of greeting. Maybe. Or it is not as logically infallible as we think. Suggesting what precisely? Experiment 1044-3 Analysis of the audio transcripts of the experiments all conclude that SCP-1044 is an echo. It is localized to a single valley that directly contradicts the speaker wherever logical contradiction of a statement or question is possible. Where multiple echos are heard, each subsequent echo will contradict the previous. In the later experiment, attempts were made to test SCP-1044 by calling out self-contradictory statements such as, this sentence is false, this invariably resulted in, future experiments are to avoid such attempts.


Welcome. I'm James Mulan. This is an episode of Justice in the Balance, our series that looks at criminal justice from all different kinds of perspectives. A regular guest of ours on this series in over the years is Sheriff Peter Kutujan from Nittlesex County, of course. And we are very pleased to be able to welcome the sheriff virtually to join us today. Thank you so much for joining us, Sheriff. Always great to see you, James, and always great to join you as well. You are always, always a busy man, and so we never don't appreciate the time that you take with us, but I suspect that that's even more the case right now. We want to cover quite a bit of ground. There's lots to talk about today. But of course, because we're talking right at the beginning of June, it is impossible not to start off by asking you about the George Floyd situation. And by that, I mean, of course, as much the reaction and what seems to me and to many of us to be a kind of fury that is underlying a lot of the public reaction across the country and, in fact, globally at this point. So just to begin with, just what is your take on, again, the precipitating factor? We can talk about what some of what has transpired with the demonstrations turned other things. But just the underlying issue here. Sure. Well, I mean, the Floyd family may not be watching Arlington Cable, but I think it's important to express my condolences to the family. We get caught up in a political and social phenomenon, so to speak, a tragedy that we forget that they're really family members. And that couldn't have been more evident than Terrence Floyd visiting the site where his brother died and actually spoke with great passion and love and respect for the crowd and encouraged them to address the matter peacefully and to protest peacefully. My heart goes out to that family. I cannot imagine what it feels like to them. But I can tell you this, that when I saw that video the very first time and every time thereafter, it is a visceral, horrific reaction that I have. It flies. Firstly, it is inhumane, right? Let's just just set that aside from policing and everything else. It was inhumane and it was terrible to watch a man begging for his life under the knee of not just one, but really three officers just begging for his life and then passing right before your eyes. That's horrific. And yes, I feel outraged as well. My outrage might be a little bit different because I'm white, but the fact is I'm outraged by the way that law enforcement handled themselves on that day. There was no reason for that conduct. Crime itself was a fairly nonviolent crime. I didn't see much resistance and quite honestly, no matter what those cases were, what happened was inexcusable. Officers were not trained for that and what's even more concerning with that there are other officers around that were participating that really should have tapped that officer on the shoulder and said, step off, let's give him a breather. And so it failed in so many ways and I think quite honestly, and by the way, this isn't in isolation. You know, we're speaking about Christian Cooper in Central Park in the harassment he received. We're talking about Armand Arbery in Alabama being shot running in the neighborhood. We're talking about Eric Garner suffering the same things, the same words, I can't breathe, I can't breathe were said by Eric Garner as well as George Floyd, horrific, tragic and it's understandable that people would be outraged quite honestly right now because it's not like this is something new. It's happened over generations and decades and months and days now, right up to this point. Well, truer words, I appreciate the candor with which you have responded. Let me ask you, if you have any opinion, any ideas about why so I'm asking this in the context of the fact that here in Arlington, we will soon be going into our third or fourth consecutive evening of a lot of people coming out to protest that has been true across the country and cities and towns all over the country. What I'm wondering is because you have correctly identified this is not new. This is not new in the last three years. It's not new in the last decades, generations, centuries, et cetera. Yet it does feel different than what was the situation with Eric Garner, for instance. Just in terms of how widespread, how consistent the protest has been now. And of course, some of the uglier aspects of what has happened, yes. But I'm just wondering if you have any ideas about why it is that this moment is eliciting such a tremendously powerful reaction. Yeah. I mean, James, that's quite an interesting question because when Eric Garner passed, it was equally as horrifying. And yet society didn't rise up in the same way it is now. Maybe it's because it's the accumulation of events that have sort of breached this feeling of we'll get along. Perhaps it's the COVID crisis that has raised tensions. Perhaps it's the divide that's going on in this country. I think it's really all of those things. And I would not put it much past the idea that there is that divide in our country where we are seeing that separation of our society into two completely separate sides that seem not to be able to even speak to each other anymore. Never mind understanding each other, but can't even speak to each other. That's the horrifying part because I do know that I've got people that I know or people that I meet. I have to be cognizant of where they stand on issues so that I don't offend them initially. We always get to the point where we discuss these things. And I did that even just during this weekend where I had a strong discussion, if you will, about people that were dismissing and then speaking about the looting. I think it's important we speak about that. And yet you get to that point, but you have to know how to get to that point. And right now our society is very divided. And I think quite honestly, the president is not helping in any way. He continues to divide it in a way that suits him and does not suit this nation. Well we do want to move on to the other topics that we were going to talk about, but you said that just now that you didn't want to talk about the looting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So thank you. Listen, people should be peacefully protesting. It is important. I encourage it, right? Martin Luther King did this with civil disobedience. He did it peacefully. He did it thoughtfully. And there were changes. Not enough obviously, but there were that. The others that loot and pillage and burn and steal and destroy, not for the purposes of building anything up, but to tear something down, that does no good for anyone. And in fact, it does a complete disservice to the memory of George Floyd. As his brother said yesterday, please don't burn things down. Please don't destroy things. My brother would not have wanted that. You would want peaceful demonstrations. And then what I find is that that looting and pillaging and theft and all that's going on causes an excuse for many in society to say, well, you know, that's what's going on. This is who they are. And so it really does a complete disservice to the very issue we should all be discussing, which are like equity and justice issues. And instead we're talking about thieves and robbers and malicious individuals that sometimes are coming in from the outside to cause trouble specifically for that purpose. And we're not talking about the real issue, which is what we need to do, because these people are undercutting the legacy of George Floyd and Eric Garner and others. I just think it's such a tragic situation that we can't actually speak about it in a meaningful way. And again, as I said, others use that as an excuse to speak about that community. And it's very frustrating. That was the argument I had this weekend with people, as a matter of fact. Yeah. I mean, you echo frustration that it's hard not to imagine that so many people at the center of the legitimate movement here must feel about what's happening. It's heartbreaking. They go peacefully protest. They have hundreds of people. And then, you know, whether it's curfew starting or whatever it is, the sun sets and everything changes. And it's heartbreaking. I think all the good that they did for those number of hours during that day is completely undone and then some during those hours in the evenings. Heartbreaking. Yeah. Just as a last thing. And then we're going to move on. The footage from here in Boston the other night, when, just like you said, a peaceful demonstration as dark descended became something else. I just want to make note that I did see the police acting with restraint all the way through, at least in the images that I saw. And so fair, you know, fair, fair enough. We really do need to try and isolate these individuals who are doing harm and destruction, as you said, and separate that out from the from any, you know, the mass bodies involved in the really in the in the crux of the issue. So anyway, thank you for spending a little bit of time with that. So let's move on to, you know, of course, everybody's major concern for the day. And that is COVID-19 and its effect on so many different sectors of society. We have had a number of conversations in this series in recent weeks with folks who are looking at the situation in jails and prisons in our state and around the country. And everybody recognizes what makes such places, particular potential hotbeds and hot spots for the for the pandemic. I have to say, frankly, that middle sex has looked pretty good compared to other counties in in Massachusetts and other places in the country. But tell us, you know, give us a sense of going back to January, February, etc. But how what your guys experience has been and what steps you took from the beginning and through to deal with us. And I will say, I believe that middle sex has looked pretty good because we've done a really good job, I think, in our sheriff's office and in our facility. But our district attorney, Marion Ryan, we worked together. I don't know that you saw another sheriff and and district attorney working together on the decarceration efforts before the Supreme Judicial Court decision. We can speak about that in a moment. But let me just tell you, my journey on this began, you know, 15 years ago, really, in 2005, I was the chairman of the Committee on Healthcare. And at the time, we had just gone through Katrina and we now had the bird flu, which never really came to the continent, but it was a concern. And I drafted a pandemic preparation piece of legislation, which would set in place certain things that would trigger, you know, authorization for certain powers and then a regionalization of certain entities and powers and it would just make it a lot smoother transition. We didn't get much attention, right? You know, Katrina already passed, bird flu never came here. As is often the case with legislation, it really never got much attention until after I just left the health care committee and became financial services chairman. And let's just clarify for folks, just in case anybody doesn't know, you're talking about your time as a legislator. I'm sorry, yes, that's right. I was a state representative for 14 years. That's right. I was chairman of the Committee on Healthcare for a number of those years. And then in 2010, I became chairman of financial services. And that was right when the swine flu hit. The swine flu, I think we had 60,000 hospitalizations, a quarter of a million infections and 10,000 deaths that year, which was considered horrific. And so suddenly they became more attention. Sadly, when the House and the Senate passed individual versions, I wasn't involved in this because I moved on to my committee. They couldn't come to an agreement, didn't it fail? So I had been on this. So I saw this coming long before many of my colleagues did, quite honestly, because of my public health background. So actually in February, we began putting in place the medical questionnaire that you would see in medical facilities.  What are your symptoms? You know, back then, have you been in touch with anyone from Italy, right? Because that was where the breakout was. Those are the first questions. We don't ask that anymore. It's all around the world. So we started that in February. And indeed, we were the first facility to actually have positive cases, at least they admitted they had positive cases inside. But our commitment was to transparency. So we had our first case. He had a cellmate. We immediately put the individual that was symptomatic. We tested, put him into medical isolation immediately when he was symptomatic. His cellmate, we put him into medical quarantine, different status. And then he became symptomatic and tested positive. He was then into medical isolation in our health services unit. All the individuals that have been treated have been treated in our health services unit. But we started very quickly on a lot of cleaning. We brought an outside company that does cleaning that come in. I always say that almost like those busters, they've got a big suit on with the pack on the back. And they do a really good job. We started doing temperature checks for our staff. We started limiting movement in and out. And we stopped visitation, which is something, by the way, I want to be clear about this. That's not something you do lightly. I was probably one of the last two Sheriff's Office to say we should stop visitation. It was only a day or two by the time we realized we had to. Because the visitation is sometimes the only anchor for the individual inside to maintain normalcy and to prepare them for reentry and just to keep them healthy, mentally healthy, and strong and grounded, right? So you don't do that lightly. Right, and from what I understand, let me interject that after making that decision, you then made some gestures as you've said, and more than that, to the inmates to allow them for free phone calls, I think a certain number per week to try and make up for a little bit of that deficit. Well, we offered four free phone calls, 20 minute phone calls for each incarcerated individual. We've upped our video conferencing capacities. We've done a lot. And in fact, one of the other things we did is we stepped up our video conferencing, which we do with the courts, but now we're doing it a lot more. And I really stepped this up because our pretrial individuals that are incarcerated, they shouldn't have to just sit around while their case languishes, right? Just more months and weeks and months of dead time for them. We want to maintain the progress of their cases. So we've done well over a thousand video conferences and audio conferences with courts in order to keep those cases on track and to allow people to get out quite honestly. And this is again, all before the Supreme Judicial Court decision, our decarceration attempts have brought us incredible benefit, and I'll just tell you briefly about this, we can go through a little bit of the numbers if you wish, but we brought our numbers down significantly and I know we've got a graph that I'd offered that we can show, but what did that allow me to do? So for me, in a place of incarceration, this idea of decarceration is not just a social justice issue, although it is, it allowed me to do certain things in my facility. What did it allow me to do? In a facility it's hard to sometimes do social distancing. And we can do that in certain places with tears or pods where you have individual cells, but in the dorm units, you don't have the same ability, that you could sleep them separately far enough, you know, generally, but all day they're kind of mixing around one common area, can't limit their movement in that way. So we actually were able to enter out, we have five dormitory units, we emptied out four of them, and the only dormitory unit that we kept going was those with generally more mental health concerns, self-harm issues, suicide concerns, because in corrections, if you have people that are thinking about self-harm, you put them in dormitory style units so that the officers can see them more easily and they can watch out for each other as well. Now what we've done is those numbers started creeping up, and so we've actually taken some of the people out of the tears, and we've now opened two dormitory style units, but with half capacity so we can spread them out. And by the way, every decision we've made, James, this is, I should have said this right up, every single decision we've made is based upon the direction and recommendation of Dr. Elise Orsell who is our infectious disease specialist in Department of Public Health. Every single decision we've made, we run by her and then she will make a medical recommendation, infectious disease specialist recommendation, and then we will operationalize that. So many of the things that I wanted to do or I thought would make sense, she suggests that we're not the right things to do, and oftentimes things that we thought made sense that she didn't think make sense, she actually said, you know, that makes sense, we should do that. So it's been an incredible partnership. Again, it's all been medically driven and then operationalized, brought to us and then operationalized from that point. Right, so let me ask you about that because it does seem like that has been a crucial part of how effective your response has been. And I'm wondering, is that, is she or somebody like her available to all the other sheriffs as well in the various counties and are they making use of that partnership in the same way as you have them? Yeah, so what I did is she had worked with us on Hep C and HIV and AIDS, infectious disease issues before. We'd always thought very highly of her, but our use of her was not significant really, it was just for those issues and she'd come up, she'd actually come inside the facility as well. So she was familiar with the inside of the facility. We started using her more and more when Essex had an outbreak, she started, I think they might've been using her before but they started working with her more. In Cornell City, then I brought her to the Mass Sheriff's Association, so everyone had access, we brought her on retainer, so every sheriff would have access to her advice and they all do that now, they all have access to Dr. Worsell. Some don't have outbreaks, so they don't really utilize her as much and some have outbreaks and then they utilize her when that has happened, especially of course. So you have started to talk about this but I'd like to start to dig in a little bit more into the weeds of just exactly how you are doing the things that you're doing within the jail. My threshold question is there's gotta be a whole list of things that you, that are part of your operations on a daily or regular basis. Some of those things you could change, you've already mentioned some of the changes that you've made. What, so people have an idea of the real, of the whole context. What are some of the things that you just can't do anything about regardless of your desire to create a safe and environment as possible? So for one, it's not within our authority to just release mass swaths of people based upon age or chronic condition. So what we've had to do is to focus on those that are elderly or those that have chronic illness and try to see if we can identify them and get them out of our facility for their own protection, right? So that many people can become ill and recover. We've had, again, we've had I think 75 illnesses so far, everyone has recovered. Right now actually we stand at having two people that are still positive in our health services unit. There's been not a negative in about two weeks. And so I don't know if you can hear me knocking on you. Yeah, you did. Yeah, you know, hopefully I think as of tomorrow and Thursday, both of those should come off. If we don't have a number negative, it'll be the first time since early March that we've had no positives in our facility. Our greatest threat is those coming from outside. So some of my greatest frustrations, I've identified, I mean more, but two individuals that I could not get out of our facility, that perfectly fit chronically ill and elderly and should have been out, but I couldn't get them out. And I worked really hard. One was on a minimum mandatory multiple OUI offense, but it wasn't from Middlesex County. So it's hard to step that down anyway and be able to free them because it's a minimum mandatory statutory, but the other county from which this gentleman came for our veterans program, by the way, specialty program, they were not into it. They just weren't cooperating. Yeah, and you know, unfortunately it's like, so I am a chronically ill, elderly person that I have to worry about dying on my watch because you won't release him. And I don't want to send him back to you because I believe he's probably better off here too, right? Secondly, we had another gentleman, a pretty notorious case, chronically ill elderly and I worked with his family to try to find a placement for him for weeks, and you know, people think that, you know, I mean, even where someone has a family that is not impoverished, you know, and has some access, they just couldn't either see, either they couldn't put it together or they weren't really willing to put it together. Right. So these are just two cases that I could think of prominently, and actually the elderly individual, the first one that I mentioned on the OUI, he just got out. We would have been able to try to get these people out. Now, they have not gotten sick. They're still healthy because we've managed ourselves well, but that has been some of my greatest fears. Some of the rules on the outside just allow us for being able to take some of these individuals that we were willing to take a risk on and put them outside, even at the risk of upsetting victims of crime because it was important to keep them alive. Those are a couple of things that were greatly frustrating to me. And what about, I mean, you know, just things either the balance between security and safety, et cetera, and also just the fact that you've got people coming in, you know, it's a jail. Right. It's not like other incarceration situations. It's, you've got people coming and going. I guess you really can't do much about that. Right. Well, so you said one thing. As the disease would pop, you know, as we would have some people who were positive in certain units, we would have to begin to restrict movement in that unit. That's not a lockdown, right? We don't keep people in their cells for 24 hours a day or 23 or 22 hours a day. What it means is that they have access to phone calls and recreation, but we get them out in smaller groups. And so what we started, and again, this was working with Dr. Wursel. So our limited movement began with groups of five. And then when things got better, we moved it up to eight, then we moved it up to 12. Right now it's 20. And it actually is getting to the point where we might be able to open it up to just the regular work. So the idea of limited movement is important. It's never a lockdown. Access to programs, as much as we can provide access to mental health and medical health are really important because what people have to understand is, inside this public health issue on the outside becomes a public safety issue on the inside because these individuals are cooped up, they're incarcerated, they're frustrated, they're powerless really, right? And so as this crunches down on them, they become more agitated. And then that becomes a public safety issue.  And that's really that balance that every day you find that balance between public safety and public health and allowing that growth and that hope. So if people see, you got limited movement and they're frustrated, then they can see it's at eight, the next, you know, about again a few days or a week. And then it's at 12, they can see that hope. And they say, and basically they're willing to say, I understand it's difficult for all of us. We understand you're trying to do what you can do. We believe it. And you're communicating with us a lot. We've been doing that. I can get by another week or two under these conditions and I can still see hope coming. I think that's really important of managing a facility like ours. Yeah.  We had an excellent visit in which we, you know, learned a lot. But a lot of that also establishes a sense that we all have that communication and a potential trust, trusting relationship as much as possible between you and the inmates, long precedes this whole episode.  If you treat them with respect, they will respect you back. If you treat them and diminish them and treat them like animals, they will behave as such. And that's just not what we should be. I mean, again, it doesn't make sense on the correction side, but it doesn't make sense on the safety side inside. It doesn't make sense at all. So this is what we should be doing. And I believe we try as much as we can in middle sex to accomplish this every day. And by the way, it's great work of corrections officers. No one gives credit to the corrections officers and professionals that when COVID was breaking around the country, everyone was nervous and panicked. Officers kept coming into work because they knew that that was what their job was. And they had to worry about their own families as well. So kudos to corrections professionals and officers as well. Those of us out here are following certain rules and as to different levels of scrupulousness, of course, this is always gonna be the case. But here in Arlington, for instance, there's a really high level of compliance with this idea that you do your best to maintain social distance, but you also wear a mask at all times whenever that may not be possible. My sense is that for all of your efforts and you've described with the dormitories, et cetera, that there are just some things, meal times, bathing, things like that, where you're gonna have a hard time maintaining social distance within your facility. How widespread is, like, are you adopting the same alternative, which is wear masks because we can't guarantee social distance? Great question. So yeah, so I will say this, the limited movement allows us to spread people out so they can shower, they can call, they can recreate without getting too close. So we do that in order to create that distance. The difference between outside and inside is, you know, on the outside, they can make it a law, but you're reticent to enforce the law. Inside, you know, we have greater ability, greater capacity to enforce the rules. And so our rules are officers wear their masks inside the facility every moment that they're on the job, right? Inside the facility, they're always wearing their mask. Our other rule is, we started by when, just each remember that at the beginning of this, masks were hard to come by, right? Tests were hard to come by. So we've evolved through this whole thing and it's a different world now than it was just even a few weeks ago. So we had officers had to wear their masks because also part of our concern was, officers were coming going into the institution, right? So that was one of the primary weak points of our protection of the population inside, right? So by the way, we've put out probably two to 300 officers on precautionary quarantine over periods of time. Just if they came in contact and someone was positive, we put them out. We put them on paid leave, basically, but they had to stay outside in quarantine until they were at a test and they were positive when they finished their 14 days. Right now, I think we've got zero positives in our staff but it started, we were very high on our staff at one point. So that was one issue. And I think the other issue was, oh, the mask. So when we started, we didn't have many masks around. So we offered masks to all the, we actually had enough. We offered all masks to any incarcerated individual if they wanted to wear one. And then as the disease progressed or the concerns progressed and heightened, we actually then mandated that all incarcerated individuals wear their mask when they're outside of their cell area. So now you have the officers wearing their mask, you have the incarcerated individuals wearing their mask. It's the way that it should be on the outside, we can make it happen on the inside. Right, that's good to hear. I actually had no idea whether that was the case. Let's talk a little bit about testing. What are the criteria? I know that not everybody, not every inmate or even every staff member has been tested, I assume. What are the criteria that are being used in order to get that testing and is it the same for security personnel and for inmates? So with regard to testing, this is an interesting example of our Dr. Wursel in her medical and research mode and then working with us mode. At one point, some weeks ago, I actually went to her to say, hey, you know what? They're doing some universal testing. This is right after Pine Street and did theirs. I was a little worried about it because quite honestly, if you do that, you can heighten tensions inside and I was worried about that, right? So I thought it might be a good thing to do medically and it might be a good thing to do for the public to know, but I was concerned about the climate and the safety issues inside because if there were a number more cases than you think at the time, that can cause violence. A lot of people are asymptomatic. They never have it and they never know. So I went to her and asked her and she recommended do not universally test as well as Department of Public Health. And part of the reason by the way is because I know we've got a graph on this, the churning of the population. We are discharging people every day. But we can pull out that graph for a second so you can really show people what it is you're talking about. So if you guys can bring up any one of those graphs, I'll go through it, but so yes, so we have been testing aggressively in our place. If someone presents with symptoms, we immediately go to testing now that we have the testing and or if they said that they are positive. And again, as some people, as I've told you, we've had a number of cases come in from the street positive. Here you can see the number of tests that we've conducted. I think it's about 80 tests as I recall, but you can see at the very beginning of the pandemic, the blue line is the positive test, those that are COVID positive and the orange line is those that are COVID negative having tested. You can see actually in about, this is cumulative by week. So this is not daily, this is by week. So we ending April 20th, you can see we had 15 positives and two negatives. And then you can see because quite honestly, I think we did a good job in managing this in our limited movement and the way we addressed it. You can see that number coming down on the positives and those last few are really, I mean, we might have one or two that came from inside, but the others came from the outside. And you can see the inversion of the negative test going up and the positive test going down. And now I think we haven't had a positive test in about two weeks. So you can see this is kind of goes to show the peak of what we're doing. And I like this because to me it shows what we were doing was working and we were able to manage this pandemic. Yeah. It's a very dramatic upside down triangle there, going up, spiking up to the 15 and then really coming down immediately, it seems like, and then obviously on the continual downhill downward. Yeah, do you want to show any of the other graphs, James? Cause I can go through them quickly. Sure, we can pull the next one up, which is total number of releases. So this goes, actually, why don't we go up if we can to the first one showing that the clock. Yeah, that may be down on the way. Yeah, I think it's the other direction. There we go. That's it. So here you can see our population. Now, by the way, it should be noted that Mary and Ryan and I worked together to decarcerate initially. We picked, I helped identify individuals. She and the court would make a lot of the decisions on reduction of bail, so that was kind of it because they could only deal with bail issues. So we were able to identify for the DA's Office of the Mass Bail Fund to be able to release people. Now, by the way, this number, 788, historically low, James, people should understand that in Massachusetts we had the lowest decarceration rate in the entire country. When I first became sheriff, we had 13 to 1400 individuals. That was only 10 years ago. Then it was like, oh my God, we're going to break 1200. Oh my God, we're going to break 11. We're going to break 1000. We're going to break 900. We'll never break, you know, 900. We'll never break 800. And here we are below 800. So we started at a historically low level and you can see it's 788 beginning on March 7th. I think that might have been about our first case. You can see that number coming down to the number 567. That's a reduction of almost 30% of our population. And again, for many others, that's a social justice issue. For me, it allows me to practice better pandemic management and social distancing inside. And quite honestly, I think it'll be interesting to see what happens on the outside with the individuals we're putting out. I do have concerns, you know? When you're putting someone to the outside, first you have to be thinking about public safety. We have a lot of mental health and substance use folks up there, but we have a lot of dangerous people up there too. So public safety first. And then what I really worry about is when we put people outside, that we have to make sure that we have a plan for them. For many of the advocates, they just want to put people out in the street and that's sort of the victory for them, I guess, getting them out of jail. For me, that's not the victory. The victory is making sure they have a place to go. They have a program in place. They have medical health support. They have mental health support. And they have medication assisted treatment support.  And that's something that concerns me. Because that's a public safety issue. But really my concern is about those individuals and their families and the heartbreak that they will continue to have because they're not being set up properly. I have to say that is a theme that you have often hit on and you have innovated programs within the jail, et cetera.  So therefore I am wondering how is it working? A certain tension I would imagine which is pressure towards decarceration but your concerns about how you're letting these individuals get back into the world. I would imagine with those numbers coming down as rapidly as they have been that you're just not able to monitor and provide the kinds of services and support you generally do with the folks who are coming out of your jail. Well, for those, a lot of the reason our numbers are coming down are just naturally. They're end of sentence. Sometimes they're provocal releases, right? And so with those we can plan because we know what day they're getting out. Our re-entry planning begins on day one of their incarceration. It doesn't begin 30 days or 60 days out. It begins on day one. We set up the programs around the criminogenic needs of that individual. Where are they lacking? How can we build support in there? And so for the time that they're with us we put out an individualized plan for them and then we have a plan for their release as well. Under this, you have courts that suddenly will be putting people out. We can also put people out. We've doubled up the number of individuals we put on our electronic monitoring program so that we can also have plans for them. But those are sentenced individuals. So that's something we can do on our own and we've doubled those numbers. Again, we can have a plan in place. Our challenges are when someone, a court case gets heard or the Supreme Judicial Court just oversees matters and starts releasing people. You know, and I don't mean that they're doing it wrong but it's just hard for us. Right, but you're not, right. You can't plan. You brought out guard and we don't have, it's really no one else except for us planning for their reentry. There's no one else out there doing this stuff. They don't have social service agencies that are working with the courts. It's just us and our office is doing a great job. And honestly, we've heard stories. I mean, I've not heard stories. They've been here sometimes on a Friday night till six, seven, eight o'clock at night trying to find a bed, trying to find a housing place, trying to do a housing check for someone. So this is something that is, something we're passionate about. And I think we'll see the success of this decarceration because there will be failures. There already are failures. The greatest failures are going to be those that victimize another individual and those that overdose and die. Right, that's my greatest concern about the failures. And so we've already had that happen to a degree but it's more qualitative information. It's not quantitative. And I think that anyone's trying to make certain predictions is a little ahead right now. I think that we need to monitor what's going on and then at some point in the future kind of go back and take a look at all the data and see how it's worked. And the pendulum might have swung, I don't know if I'm going left or right here or the end screen, everyone's left and my right. This way it might be that the pendulum comes back a little bit or maybe it comes back to where it was. I don't know where it's going to be but I think that's going to be an important thing for society in our communities to take a look at what's going on and say, okay, we're comfortable with it being here or we like where it is right here. So that's going to be the interesting part of it. You know, we've spent a good amount of time talking about the Middlesex House of Corrections which of course is your main facility but we've often asked you as well about the situation for women and other conversations that we've had with the women's facility in Framingham. What can you tell us about what's going on there you know, during this entire time? So Middlesex is, as far as I know, never housed women because we don't have the facilities for it. They have to be in a separate site and sound, you know, building so to speak. We haven't had that ability. So our women, along with many of the other sheriff's offices have all been going to the Framingham Department of Corrections. When I first became sheriff, I realized that some of our men were getting out on bracelets but our women were not because we were not involved in their lives down at Framingham. So I actually put out the first woman and you know, a number since then on bracelets to be able to be reunited with their family. People have to understand, by the way, women are very different from men. The drivers of their crime are different. Their experience in jail are different. Their mental health levels are very different. The needs of their families are, I mean, they're five times more likely to be primary caregivers of children than men. So the impact on their family is very different. And so we need to attend to that. They're also a smaller population. They don't take part in the more vicious and conspicuous and notable crime. So you don't think about them as much as we should, especially in the impact on the family. So we began to get involved in that. Right now, the numbers of women have diminished significantly but we have continued to address their needs up there. We're the only sheriff's office that was going up for a couple of years now, at least, visiting with our women to see how they were doing and prepare them for a re-entry. And in fact, we've doubled our numbers. Again, there's small numbers, but we've doubled our numbers for the women that we've placed on electronic monitoring programs as well. So we have been really stepping into that in trying to find, no, we are, there's a question about whether or not at some point we can take women back into our facility. And that is something that if we can't, the thing is this, if we can provide a better experience and a better preparation for them inside with us, I want to take them back. If they're doing, if it's going okay over there, I'm okay. So right now we're taking a look at whether we have space, whether we have the capacity and then what will that look like for us as well. Again, our numbers are small. So also creating an entire program around a very small number of women is also something that you have to be careful about. You've mentioned a couple of times now that the numbers are really small. What are we talking about really? So when I started, probably had about 100 women, slightly more, I think we've got probably 30 to 40 women up there now and there's a much smaller number of sentenced women. So the pretrial women that could have been released have been released. And so that number is kind of stabilized right now. And the sentenced women is a very small number right now. And if we're going to house them because of the, you know, where we can house them for pretrial, we have to put them in a certain level of security because they're pretrials, what's mandated on law. For sentence we can find based upon the crimes, we can find a lesser security setting. And that's going to be the issue is how many people can we have that we can put into a lesser security setting because we don't have the security setting for all the pretrials necessarily at this time and to be in compliance with law. You know, I'd like to keep going. We're going to have to close the conversation soon just to let you get back to your work. But before we do, I want to ask you just to give us a sense of what lessons you will be taking forward from this whole experience. So we're all love to imagine ourselves on the other side whatever that means of this, of the intense, the most intense part of the pandemic at least and whatever that new normal is in all our different ways. So what are either, you've mentioned technology probably that you're going to be using more video conferencing, et cetera as you can, but what are some of the other things that you're going to be bringing with you as practices or policies on the other side of this? So because we were one of the first and I think we've handled it as one of the best in the entire country, quite honestly. I mean, I don't say that lightly of the President of Major County Sheriff's of America. I have a national perspective. I don't see another shop handling it as well as us. And so what I want to do is take the lessons we've learned you know, in law enforcement use after action reports. Something terrible happens like George Floyd and you do an after action, you break it down. What was the training, how could it stop? Should someone have tapped? What was the point of this, right? And so you can do that. I want to create an after action report with regard to our COVID experience. And one of the things I've learned most was transparency and communication, James. When we were the first ones to acknowledge, let's just say, having positive cases it was a painful thing to admit and then we made the commitment, not just to acknowledge it and put it out there but we made the commitment to post it every day, every day publicly to the press and to our staff and on our website, every day what our numbers were so people could see what our numbers were. And that was actually really good because it was painful at first because when you had an uptick, you don't want to. Like everything inside just says, you don't have to do it. You got the devil on one side and the angel on the other side the devil say, you don't have to do this. You know, no one really cares. No one's paying attention. No one's gonna notice. You got the angel saying, you should do this is the right thing to do. And so we went on the side of the angels and quite honestly, I think it's worked out really well because it allowed a trust factor. We would every day, we would tell our staff exactly what the numbers were. We would then go right to the press immediately afterwards and then we would put it on our website so the families do too. And I think that really helped us in managing it and setting the expectations in a way that there was not constant pain, there was not doubting. So that was one thing that is difficult that's one thing that it was difficult that I'm going to be recommending to others communication and transparency, accountability issues. And any practices in your own department that you just know you're gonna keep going keep moving forward with that might have been born of these particular circumstances but you're seeing are gonna be, you know useful going forward. But Jim, you asked the most probing questions, James. So let me say that yeah, one of the things is our use of technology, video conferencing and other things. I mean, we're all using Zoom, we're all using, you know, Microsoft Teams but inside we've used it to communicate with our courts. We're looking to see if we can help out the police departments and the courts through their arraignment sessions. So I'm hoping that we can do more video conferencing of court matters in a way that will be beneficial to the individual and to the court into our shop. Because quite honestly, that's one of the the transportation of people around is bereft is just, is tremendous issues and concerns, expense, contraband, overdose issues, things like that when we're transporting people around and the individuals oftentimes don't really want to be in the back of a van all day in a court lockup. They'd rather have their rec, their phone calls and their programming as well. So we can find that balance. I think we can actually take that to a new level. And the most important thing, keep the cases moving. Move them, move them, move them. These pre-trial, we've got people in there for months and years sitting there on bail or no bail. We've got people on mental health issues that are only in there because they have mental health, only because they have mental health.  But the only reason they're committing crimes is because they're mentally ill. If we can speed these cases along and get resolution that's appropriate, then I think that will benefit everyone in the future too. All right, well, we're going to wrap up. I do want to finish by noting, you mentioned a few minutes ago that you are the president or the head of a national sheriff's organization so that you have a national perspective. And you said within that, you really feel like you're doing as good a job as anybody or, you know, that, I got to say, I love to hear that, not because I think you blow your horn a lot, but because that does accord with our general sense here in Middlesex County that we've got a pretty good. In this way, you know, folks that we can trust, folks who will be transparent at sheriff's office as well as the DA's office, that seems to be straight shooters. And so we do appreciate that. I'm the sheriff, but I've got an incredible team around me that drive this. So it's not me alone. I've got an incredible staff up here. And again, I will say this, I think we're one of the finest sheriff's offices, if not among the very top finest office in the entire country. And I say this every time I go out there and I see what other people are doing. And I find out what we're doing. And we're way ahead of the curve, which I think is one of the reasons I was chosen to be the president of major county sheriff's of America because that reputation that we had preceded that election, so to speak, to a point where my colleagues actually elected me to become the president. And by the way, this is among a profession where most of the rest of the country is predominantly patrol with some corrections on the side, right? And the corrections always that stepchild. They don't really want to address too much. As long as it's not a problem, they're worried about the patrol, which is understandable. I always say I have the freedom to focus on the correction side, which I just honestly, I just love that fact. You know, I love that fact. Well, and we love, again, being able to get access to you. You have just given us so much to chew on today. And we really appreciate it. We always do. We will look forward to talking to you again sometime soon. But for now, we will close it out. With our thanks to our Middlesex Sheriff, Peter Katujan. I'm James Milan. This is Justice in the Balance. Thanks for joining us.


SEGA DRUNK My favorite thing about X-Men 2, The Clone Wars, is right when you start the game, there's no title screen, no menu, no text, no nothing. You turn on your Genesis and you're dropped as a random X-Men character into a snowy 2D platforming landscape fighting bad guys to the death. That is awesome, why can't more games do this? You advance through the stage and then you get to the title screen. Yeah, that's right, you have to earn that screen, damn it. I reviewed the first X-Men game a long while back, and it really took me a while to come up with ways to phrase how that game can still be pretty good even though objectively the gameplay isn't all that great, so there was a lot of hand-wringing and stuff that had to be apologetically phrased. Thankfully, I don't have to do that with X-Men 2, The Clone Wars, this game is just flat out good. Everything that made the first X-Men game good is all here, the number of mutants, the fun use of mutant powers, the villains, the perfect use of that early 90s X-Men color palette, and it's corrected most of the mistakes that game made, like the iffy platforming and the annoying sound design. Even better, this time around there's no limit to how often you use your mutant power, which is really smart, because I mean, that's why people play X-Men games, right? Not to punch and kick like any other game. People want to blast stuff with Cyclops and blow stuff up with Gambit and teleport with Nightcrawler. Some mutant powers can even be charged to a certain extent if you have enough health. But yeah, the same four X-Men are back from the original game, Wolverine Gambit Cyclops and Nightcrawler, in addition to Psylocke and Beast being playable characters. Oh, and there's one more guy you can get after the third level, but I don't want to spoil it. I'll just say it's a long time coming, being able to finally play as him. What makes this game really great, though, is that each of these characters aren't just alterations of the same basic sprite. Yeah, they have unique powers, but they also all have unique speeds, sizes, and ranges of motion that are accurate reflections of that particular mutant. So after you play X-Men 2, for a while, you start to get a feel for each character. So by proxy, you get a feel for which character works for each level, whether it's the brute strength of Beast, Nightcrawler's dexterity and agility, Wolverine's resilience or Gambit's speed. This really adds a lot of replay value to the game. There's hidden areas you can discover. It's the smaller, more detailed stuff like that that sets this game apart. I have to mention, of course, that this game is multiplayer as well. However, that brings about the game's biggest flaw, and that it's pretty frustrating to play with a second player because the screen doesn't always know where it wants to scroll, or if it wants to scroll at all, so that can get kinda tiresome. The game's story mirrors the story that was going on in the comics at the time, which was the Phalanx story arc. No, not this guy. It's this kind of techno-organic virus that indiscriminately spreads very easily through all sorts of living matter, sort of like the Borg, but in virus form. The Phalanx is trying to assimilate Earth, and the X-Men travel through all sorts of familiar settings you might recognize, like Magneto's Mutant Haven Avalon, or the Savage Land, and of course you run into a potpourri of villains, everyone from Exodus to Deathbird to Apocalypse. I mentioned earlier that the sound design is much improved from the first game, but the soundtrack especially steps it up big time, with all sorts of memorable tracks that fit the game flawlessly, and a good soundtrack, like this really goes a long way toward adding that much more energy to the action, and it works awesome here. The soundtrack here is so good that it got released on CD as part of the Sega Tunes series. So yeah, while the first X-Men Genesis game appealed strictly to X-Men fans, X-Men 2 The Clone Wars appeals to everyone, and if you're into X-Men, you're gonna like it that much more. In all likelihood, this is the best X-Men video game I've ever played on console, sorry, nothing on top of the four-player arcade game, but yeah, this goes beyond just the regular licensed gaming stuff. Sure, it's awesome to play as your favorite mutants and fight the familiar villains, but they really got everything right from giving every mutant a wide variety of strengths and weaknesses, creating huge levels that allow you to utilize all sorts of mutant powers, and allowing the player to play however they want.  Play as Gambit.  Play as Wolverine. Want to sneak around? Play as Nightcrawler. It's frickin' great, and it's one of the best games on the Genesis.


Rebels infiltrated Russia to overthrow Putin. A part of the fighters of the Russian Volunteer Corps and the Free Russia Legion remained on the territory of the Federation to continue the fight against the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin. This was said by Andrey Yusov, representative of the General Intelligence Department of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine. We can definitely say that the resistance against Russia is getting stronger. If we talk about the recent events in Belgorod region, yes, a certain part of the Russian Volunteer Corps and the Free Russia Legion remain on the territory of Russia to continue the struggle and attract new supporters, said Yusov. He noted that in connection with this, the geography of struggle of the Russian Volunteer Corps and the Free Russia Legion is expanding and the scope of activities is increasing. According to him, the recent events in the Belgorod region have become the most massive armed resistance against the Putin regime in the center of Russia in recent times. On May 21, the Russian Volunteers of the Corps and the Legion announced that they had started an operation in the Belgorod region. According to them, two soldiers were wounded as a result of the operation. In addition, they seized armoured personnel carriers, small arms and other equipment. Ukrainian military intelligence said it was a special operation by the Russians themselves. It is said that the fighters of the Russian Volunteer Corps are currently in the village of Glotov. It has been the potential to be embarrassing for President Vladimir Putin, who has, for 15 months, been leading an invasion he baselessly claimed was needed to keep Russia safe. With limited returns on the battlefield, Putin may now face discontent that the war is disrupting life at home.