The next item of business is a statement by Angela Constance on Scotland's prison population. The cabinet secretary will take questions at the end of her statement and so there should be no interventions or interruptions. I call on the cabinet secretary up to 10 minutes. Over the course of this year, the prison population has risen from around 600 from 7,303 to yesterday 7,937. That is an increase of around 9 per cent. That represents a significant challenge and further increases will seriously impact on those that work in our prisons and on the prison population itself. Scotland is not unique in this challenge. There are increases in England and Wales of similar proportions. As I made clear in my letter to the criminal justice committee two weeks ago, this acute pressure is a great cause of concern and is one that I am taking action on. As I also made clear, the Scottish Government is not changing its position on the use of prisons. They are necessary in society to punish, to protect and to rehabilitate and reduce re-offending. Therefore, our independent courts must continue to have the ability to remove an individual's liberty when appropriate. Protecting victims and the public from harm is my absolute priority. Whether custody or a community-based alternative is used, ultimately the goal is the same. Less crime, fewer victims and safer communities. Crime has reduced and a number of people entering prison each year has fallen substantially. So why does the prison population level not match those changes? We must consider the reasons behind this and also what the evidence shows us in the effectiveness of prison and alternative sentencing. We know that community sentencing leads to safer communities as they are more effective at reducing re-offending than short-term custodial sentencing. That is why we have protected investment in community-based interventions and are providing a total of £134 million to support community justice services this year. Yet, although the number of individuals on community sentences has increased, so has the number of people in prison. Yesterday, we had 312 people serving sentences of six months or less. Recognising the independence of our courts, we must consider the reasons for this and work on increasing confidence and alternative sentencing, particularly in community justice. Since January of this year, there has been a 19 per cent rise in sentences of under four years. This is one of the reasons for the rising prison population. The other is remand. Although the post-pandemic court recovery programme is doing its job in clearing the backlog, there has been an unanticipated increase in the remand population, which has now reached a historic high, particularly with women. Another reason for the increase in prison population is the substantial change in the individuals who are in prison.  The average length of prison sentences has increased by 14 per cent over that period. That also shows the success of other areas of our justice system in improvements in the clear-up rates and increased reporting and investigation of crimes such as sexual offending. The age profile of the prison population has also changed. The longer term reduction in individuals spending time in custody each year has been driven almost entirely by a reduction in young people and those aged under 30. The prison population is mirroring our own society in terms of demographics. Over the last 10 years, the average daily population of male prisoners aged over 50 has nearly doubled from 647 to 1,201. That brings its own challenges to the Scottish Prison Service. As SPS sees the welcome reduction in young people, they are also seen an increase in the need to contract for social care for an ageing prison population. There is an issue that I have spoken to SPS officers about on my many visits to the majority of Scotland's prisons in the six months since I became Justice Cabinet Secretary. These are the reasons for a changing and increasing prison population. I want to address the actions that we have already taken and the further action that we will need to take. We took action when it became clear that the GOAME contract was not working as it should be and was causing disruption for court efficiency and for the Scottish Prison Service. We did that by providing SPS with additional flexibility to work with GOAME to support improved staff, recruitment and retention to improve the issue. I am grateful to justice partners for working with SPS to find solutions and for implementing practical changes that reduce the demands on GOAME. To decrease the use of custody in appropriate cases in favour of more effective community-based alternatives, we have extended the presumption against short sentences from three to twelve months. That supports people to have a stable life, including staying and employment. To address the remand population, we have introduced electronic monitoring on bail and have invested £3.2 million this year to support bail assessment and bail supervision services as a direct alternative to remand. That has now supported the establishment of bail supervision services in 30 local authorities with the final two to be established by the end of the year. Since we introduced electronically monitored bail in May 2022, over 1,200 electronic monitoring bail orders have been granted and around 375 individuals are currently being monitored. The 25 per cent increase in the use of electronic monitoring since last year is driven by bail and other court orders. Future development of the service will include exploring the use of GPS technology, which could change how people are monitored and support decision making with individuals, for example on home detention curfew. The bail and release from custody act seeks to refocus remand so it is reserved for those who pose a risk of public safety or the delivery of justice. It enables courts when passing sentence to take into account the time and accused spend on electronically monitored bail in a comparable way as they can do with time spent on remand. We are aiming to commence those provisions by the end of this year as a further tool for the independent judiciary to have when sentencing. In addition, investment in community justice is a key strand to a longer term solution to this issue. We need to improve confidence in appropriate alternatives to imprisonment because we know they are effective and support people from reoffending. We are therefore urgently planning increased support for people on alternatives to remand with a particular focus on mentoring and one-to-one support. We are also supporting the Scottish Prison Service and the actions that it is taking to respond to the increase in the number of people in their care, which include considering what can be done within the existing prison estate to safely accommodate additional prisoners and making further improvements to progression to the open estate and our two new community custody units to help prisoners to better prepare for their eventual release and return to our community. We also remain committed to modernising and improving the prison estate to ensure that it is fit for purpose and supports the rehabilitation of offenders. We have provided an extra £29 million this year to support SPS to deliver a stable and secure prison system on top of the £97 million in capital funding to continue the modernisation of the prison estate to better meet the needs of staff and prisoners. Although we are taking action to deal with the immediate issue in front of us, I am determined to also develop longer-lasting solutions that are robust and continue to put public safety and victims first. We have therefore established the Prison Population Leadership Group, comprising of senior representatives from the justice sector and beyond to identify both long and short-term options to address the challenges and ensure a collective response. I want a justice system that will take a whole systems approach using multi-agency partnership and have a clear focus on early and effective intervention, diversion and rehabilitative support. Prisons contain some of society's most vulnerable individuals around a quarter of the prison population have been in care and just half are from our most deprived communities. To bring about a reduction in the prison population as a society, we must work together to address the underlying causes for much of that offending, including tackling poverty inequality and substance misuse, as well as wider work to grow the economy and improve educational standards and reduce health inequalities. We must always ensure that we put victims at the heart of our decision making. Let me finish by paying tribute to all those who work in our prisons, SPS staff, NHS staff, social workers, educators, chaplins and many others. I have seen firsthand the extraordinary work that they do. I know that those working in our prisons, particularly SPS staff, are working diligently to respond to the pressures caused by the rising prison population. I very much want to hear from this chamber on their views today and also from justice spokespeople who I will meet tomorrow. I believe that this situation requires cross-public sector and cross-party collaboration to address the situation. Scotland has demonstrated in the past the ability to achieve significant justice reforms and we now need to rise to the challenge of a rising prison population to deliver on our ambitions for a just, safe and resilient Scotland. The cabinet secretary will now take questions on the issues raised in her statement. I intend to allow around 20 minutes for questions after which we will move on to the next item of business and I would be grateful if members who wish to put a question were to press their request to speak buttons now. I call Russell Finlay. I thank the cabinet secretary for advance sight of today's statement and I however find it astonishing that it contains not a single mention of the impact of drugs on the prison population. Prison officers deal with violent and volatile prisoners who are under the influence of highly dangerous psychoactive substances yet the SNP government diddard while jails were flooded with drug-soaked mail causing mass overdoses, some fatal. The BBC has today reported that drones are increasingly being used to smuggle contraband including weapons. Staff are being terrorised by organised crime gangs with at least 10 firebombings of vehicles. A senior prison officer association official who is also an SNP councillor says that threats and intimidation are at the worst he's seen in 30 years. This is all relevant to the prison population. The SNP have allowed drugs to spiral out of control. Those who leave prison in the grip of addiction will almost certainly find their way back inside. We know that the SNP cannot seek to undermine judicial independence by freeing dangerous criminals who are behind bars for good reason. So if they are really intent on reducing prisoner numbers, do they accept that tackling this drugs epidemic is of critical importance? Mr Finlay is correct to raise the impact of drugs and the harsh reality of a rising prison population is that it makes many issues that the prison service heroically tries to tackle. It makes their job day in, day out all the more harder. What we know about drugs and prisons is that the scale of the challenge often reflects what is in the community. When the prison service closed down one route, they need to be very swift and alert, because invariably another route opens up. That is an on-going challenge. They work very closely with Police Scotland. I am not going to go into an awful lot of detail in and around the more covert intelligence or security measures, but I am happy to have a further discussion with Mr Finlay about that. I also emphasise that the Scottish Prison Service and the Government take the welfare and safety of prison officers and staff with the utmost seriousness, because we know that as a result of the criminal justice system doing what it should be doing, there are more people from a serious organised crime background. Again, there are measures that the Scottish Prison Service takes day in, day out to ensure the welfare and safety of their staff. It is important to remember that over and above disrupting the supply of drugs into our prisons that we need to be focused on treatment and we need to be focused on recovery. I was very pleased to see that very recently that His Majesty's Inspectorate for Prisons in her annual report paid tribute to the recovery work that is now on-going in our prisons. I thank the cabinet secretary for the update on the increasing prison population. I know what she says regarding the extension of the presumption against short sentences and indeed the ageing prison population. Does she believe that the prison population will continue to rise due to court backlogs and the increasing number of convictions for sexual offences? Will she share with us the projections that she has for future prison numbers and will she confirm that there will be no further delay to the modernisation of the prison estate, including at HMP Glasgow, Highlands and the commencement of work at Greenock? The cabinet secretary is again quite correct to point to the issues in and around short sentences and the ageing population within our prison estate. In terms of the projections that were published over the summer months, there will be further projections published in November. I felt that it was imperative, given the seriousness of the issue, that requires serious scrutiny and a serious, sober debate about the future and the way forward to share as much information with the committee and Parliament as possible. Yes, the success that we have had with the court backlog is indeed adding to the prison population, but what was not anticipated is that the Raman population would fall as the sentence population increased and that has not happened. Yes, we are utterly committed to the replacement of HMP Barlinnie with the new HMP Glasgow and, indeed, over the summer I visited HMP Inverness to discuss their plans in and around HMP Highland. For brevity, the member and I have corresponded a lot around HMP Greenock, which I also had the pleasure of visiting over the summer. I have no doubt that we will continue to do that. What more can the Scottish Government do to harness technology to increase the use of electronic monitoring, particularly as an alternative to Raman and short jail sentences? Electronic monitoring is a tried and tested feature of Scotland's justice system and a key tool to support moving on from prison or as an alternative to a custodial sentence. It supports reintegration and also allows for swift responses from Police Scotland and other justice partners where any conditions are breached. The member will know that we introduced electronic monitoring of bail last May and that this option has become more widely used. We are, of course, exploring GPS with partners and we are looking at whether this may offer options around other forms of release that are currently available. However, some of the work in and around electronic monitoring because it requires the development of further technology or, indeed, the support mechanisms underpinning it is not necessarily a short term measure, but it is certainly one for the short to medium term. The recent rise in Scotland's prison population is due to more criminals being sentenced for more serious crimes. That is despite the SNP Government and others doing their best to empty Scotland's prisons through the presumption against short prison sentences that under 25 sentencing guidelines and diverting criminals from prosecution. Does this not confirm that the SNP's policies have removed the deterrent to commit crime and allowed serious offending to spiral out of control? The member is half right when she says that there are more serious offenders spending longer in prison and that, indeed, indicates the effectiveness of our justice system. However, there is nothing soft about heaven, one of the highest prison populations in Europe, and nor is that smart justice. As I have indicated in great detail both in my letter to the Justice Committee and I hope that the member had an opportunity to read that, and in my statement today is that we are not just seeing a rise in the long term serious organised crime or sexual offending prisoners. We are seeing an increase in remand, which is at historic high. That, of course, is untried prisoners. As I have intimated in my statement, we have over 300 people as of today in our system spending less than six months in prison. In some cases, that might be entirely appropriate. Our judiciary are, of course, independent, but we must rise to the challenge of providing more, and I am determined to do that, to ensuring that we have more effective, more visible community disposals that make our communities safer and increase the confidence in and around that work. The cabinet secretary will be aware that Barlinny prison in Scotland's largest lies in my Glasgow province constituency. In my conversations with those who engage regularly with the prison population express concern that, in their words, many prisoners probably shouldn't be there and that treatment for addiction, health or other root causes would be a more effective use of the significant public funds currently spent on incarceration. Can I ask the cabinet secretary what re-offending rate data she has and whether the data shows that more successful outcomes in terms of lower re-offending rates are achieved by non-custodial as opposed to custodial sentences? I will always stress that prison is necessary for those who pose a risk of serious harm. However, it is important to recognise that the reconviction rate for individuals who are given a community payback order is consistently lower than those given short sentences. With the latest statistics showing a reconviction rate of 25 per cent for those on a community payback order, that nearly doubles for those given a custodial sentence of one year or less to 47 per cent. It is clear that people in custody often present with higher levels of risk and vulnerability than the general population as a whole, often given very complex health needs, including mental health issues and a history of being looked after. We are working with our key partners to improve the health and wellbeing of those in our care in prisons. I am determined that we will indeed have safe, effective and person-centred care. Of course, there is our national mission on drugs to improve the lives of those impacted by drugs, and that is for those in the community but also for those who are in prison. Thank you, Presiding Officer. When we are seeing a welcome investment into the estate in Stirland and also the opening of Bella Centre and Dundee in other centres, we are seeing a worrying increase in the number of women who have been held on remand. Could the Cabinet Secretary expand on what she thinks the reasons for this are and how we are going to address it? The reasons for women being held on remand are complex. Part of the bail and release bill that was passed before recess will gather more data in and around this. If I look at the statistics this week on the prison population, 28-29 per cent of the male population are on remand, whereas women this week are 34 per cent. Some weeks are as high as 37 per cent. We have achieved much in terms of improving the women's estate and also in terms of moving forward with those trauma-informed approaches. I am determined that we will do more for all groups of prisoners, particularly women, in terms of community alternatives. The reasons are complex. They are ultimately matters for the court, but we are committed to robust alternatives to manage those higher levels of risk and vulnerability and to furnish more data-driven evidence on that. Fulton MacGregor, to be followed by Liam McArthur. As the cabinet secretary, if she has considered any measures introduced in England, there would be appropriate options for Scotland. For example, I understand that, since March, sentences and guidance on the relevance of prison overcrowding should be taken into account for shorter sentences. Can I also ask her what impact she believes the strategy for community justice is having in reducing the prison population and re-offending? What we know is that the strategy for community justice and underpinning delivery plan is having an impact. We are seeing more people taking part in community justice disposals, but we are also seeing more people in prison, in terms of our daily prison population. In terms of other measures elsewhere in the UK, it is important to stress to chamber that there is a four nations UK-wide dialogue on this. We do want to share information about our shared challenges and look at the different solutions, the different jurisdictions, whether that is in the UK or elsewhere in Europe that are being deployed. I can confirm that we have no plans to use police cells, for example, as additional capacity for prisons. Before taking any such step, I would have to carefully consider the practical and feasible impact of that. Part of the purpose of bringing together the prison population leadership group is to really focus, because we have been here before, as a Government and a Parliament and a country, with very significant rises in our prison population. We need to not consider any measure in isolation, but we really need to expand on that whole systems approach and get the right solutions for now but also for the future. I call Liam McArthur to be followed by Ruth McGuire. The cabinet secretary is right that the shockingly high numbers in Scotland's prisons, the reasons for that are complex but they are not new and the inspectorate has been a warning of the implications for some decades now. Recent data suggested that in the adult male prison estate every prison is at or over capacity, with the exception of Castle Huntley, SPS's low security open estate prison, which is operating at half capacity. The prison inspectorate has highlighted the institution as inspiring and a flagship establishment but one that is severely underutilised. What can the cabinet secretary do to ensure that that institution is better utilised to improve rehabilitation and ease some of the strain across the prison estate? Mr McArthur is quite correct to point to the recent report and indeed previous reports by the prison inspectorate, because while she praises the good work that has been done, she also sets a clarion call around our collective response and that we need to have a strategy of tackling numbers beyond capacity. To use the successes that we have had in tackling the previously high numbers of women in custody and young people in custody to learn from that and to apply some of that learning into the male estate. In terms of the over capacity of prisons, 10 out of those 17 establishments are facing that and that is a matter of public record that I think I put on public record in response to a question from Mr McArthur. The issue here is we need to tackle remand so we need to address the historic high levels of remand and that will in course help us to address some of the issues in and around progression. There are other actions we will need to take to ensure better progression because you are absolutely correct. Those world leading excellent facilities, whether it is the community custodial units for women or indeed Castle Huntley, we need to be maximising the use of those facilities. I am keen to get in all members who have pressed to put a question, so I would be grateful if we could pick up the pace. I call Ruth Maguire to be followed by Maggie Chapman. Jail is absolutely the place where many offenders should be. However, when it comes to short prison sentences, we know that family relationships, housing and work are all affected and that this can increase the risk of re-offending. What is the Scottish Government doing to encourage more community justice sentencing to help people to sustain their family relationships and employment? We know that community-based interventions and sentences, rather than short-term custodial sentences, can help to ensure that justice is served and be more effective in reducing re-offending and assisting with rehabilitation, leading to fewer victims and safer communities. That is why we extended the presumption against short-term sentences and why we continue to invest and have protected the community justice services budget. I am determined to do more to bolster capacity in community justice and strengthen alternatives to remand. I can also look at other potential actions in and around wider use of structured defer sentences, the investment and services that underpins that. As I have said to other members, I am actively exploring ways to invest more and do more with regard to community justice. I thank the cabinet secretary for her statement, which highlights just how important it is to ensure that community justice strategy works and does actually reduce the prison population and re-offending. Can she outline what more we can do to implement the actions in that strategy, specifically how we can ensure vulnerable people such as those who are themselves victims and survivors, those with poor mental health or with addiction issues, are not unnecessarily incarcerated and criminalised but supported through community and or restorative justice options? There are a range of community sentences and other interventions available to decision makers in our justice system, whether that is an alternative to custody. I am also open to further improvements that could encourage that more widespread use of community sentences and other interventions. The national strategy for community justice, along with the delivery plan, sets out a range of actions to improve the delivery and effectiveness of community justice. Our current work includes ensuring the availability of bail supervision services and increasing the knowledge and awareness of other interventions such as restorative justice. We also remain committed to developing restorative justice services that are safe, consistent and of a high standard nationally, while delivering a service that is person-centred, reflecting local needs and circumstances. The cabinet secretary said in her statement that around a quarter of the prison population has been in care and just under half are from our most deprived communities. In other words, some very vulnerable individuals. Is this inevitable or does she think that this can be changed? I think that it should be changed. I do not think that we should ever throw in the towel and think that anything is inevitable. This is about first and foremost the safety of our communities. If we have the courage to engage in that debate to improve community safety, we have to improve reintegration and rehabilitation. I would point the member to the success that we have had in drastically decreasing the numbers of young people in, for example, HMP Pullment. That is a good example of where we had the courage and the consistency to take a whole systems approach and it has achieved better outcomes for young people and for communities. We now need to scale that up and do it with a much larger, more complex population. I call Annie Wells to be followed by Stephen Kerr. Thank you, Presiding Officer. If judges decide more criminals need to go to prison, then that is where they should be. Yet this SNP Government has failed to build replacement prisons to facilitate this rise in violent and sexual offenders. Barlinnie's replacement has reportedly quadrupled in cost and is likely to be a year late. Can the cabinet secretary confirm that Barlinnie's replacement will be built on time and can she also confirm whether the proposed capacity of the prison could fit Barlinnie's current population? Let me just be crystal clear. You do not have to be an economist or a master builder to know the impact and the severe constraints that the construction industry is under in terms of labour costs, the supply of labour as a result of Brexit or indeed that the price of concrete has went up by 87 per cent. Never mind that the cost of steel. What I am on record is saying, and I am absolutely committed to a replacement for HMP Barlinnie for that new HMP Glasgow, which will of course be developed with the best of practice in mind, that once the design plans are finalised we will have a much better accurate estimate both of costs and timescales, but it is a journey that we are determined to pursue. It was the cabinet secretary that mentioned the phrase throwing in the towel, so let's talk about community payback orders because it's typical of the SNP's soft touch approach to justice that ministers have a track record of discounting the hours, the backlogged hours of unpaid work. At the end of 2022 there were 700,000 hours of backlog unpaid work, so what is the backlog now and what will the cabinet secretary do about it? It is important to recognise the dedication and the importance of the work of community justice service staff, including justice social work services. The work that they do is incredibly important in the same way as the work of those working within our prisons. It is also important to recognise that community payback orders have a 74 per cent completion rate. I have already said on a number of occasions that the reconviction rate of community disposals in comparison to short-term sentences is much lower. So let's dump the rhetoric on soft justice, let's focus on substance and let's focus collectively, I hope, on smart justice and I will of course write to the member.


Ya jaibu kukupi, wat dancers do? Lemitari ah, asa ni baki tukupu host. I am delighted to welcome a very dope crew. I'll say I have talent because of the dancers. I think that across as well. We'll introduce ourselves. We'll find a step. I think we'll introduce themselves to get called. They tell us what's on about Kari. I will say, what was that? Hadam hemi. Kuzuea, kuzuea. Let's do a quick introduction. We'll introduce everybody else. What crew? Okay. Zak, dancer. Crew leader, orangai, dancer. Akademi 125. Nevi ja na wakali. Vi ja na wakali. Titu mambasa. Nio namazi. Dania ta awo. Sindio. So, anecho wa ino. Anecho wa ino. Anecho wa viki. Danza K-boy. Anecho wa KB. The dancer. Right. So basically, nye mi patanaji kwanza? When do we, patanaji kwanza? Patanaji kwanza? Bring together amambili patanaji patanaji. Patati wiki kwanza tnato ka transe ya kawenti. Kawi. Namba 26. Zero two six. Kita ale. Alafu walu internet nye. Alafu wiki ja na wakali apana doka vihiga. Megga kawenti. Kaka mega. Kijana wa Ingo. Kijana wa Jim Jim. Pataneg plene Jim. Inu jere kila kipleksan. So, ya na talka kangemi. So titu korongai si soatati na fiako kangemi. So, my name is Kua Dukubwa, but actually I represent the whole team and that is why I am here at our academy. So, it is not just any of your actual dance academy? Yes, we are a school of dance. Actually the only school of dance which is a registered company under the County Government of Kagaya. So it is an official group, you can come and train with us every Sunday. Yeni keshwa...oh, keshwa kutua. Tuna pati kana runga, tuna fanya dance and acrobatics. Daka acrobatics? Ya ama tune zaita, creativity. Tuna fanya tukor around ya, tuna fanya everything, video shoot nini. So, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube na tupata na runga hi dance akademi, kila maali. Mi runga hi dance akademi, one, two, five. TikTok, IG, YouTube, Twitter, kila maali.


Hi everyone, Joe for jaspyscasebreaks.com, coming at you with 2020 Panini Score Football. Pick your team number two, four box, pick your team two. So here's a little twist here. Only inserts, numbered cards and autos of your teams, will ship. So if you get an insert, you get a numbered card, you get an autograph, it'll go to you. But anything that's non-insert, non-numbered rookie cards will be randomized in one lot at the end of the break. Except for Joe Burrell, Justin Herbert, and Tua, right? So Joe will still go to the Bengals, Justin will still go to the Chargers, and Tua, right? Non-insert, non-numbered Tua's will still go to the Dolphins. Makes sense, right? I think everybody read the item description. Big thanks to all of these folks for getting into the action. Four box, pick your team two. Jason popped open the four boxes, I think last night, and I just grabbed another four from that same group in the back. There you go. If you got a rooftop next to your name, that means you won that spot in the team random. That's in a separate video. Scott got last spot Mojo Rams, and there's everybody else. Thanks. Got another four box in the store. We are booked for the night. So thanks everybody, but we can do another four of these tomorrow. Nick's not here right now, so let's shrink the Nick Cam a little bit. Oh, my knife's right up on top of this box right here. All right, good luck everybody. Mark, your golf shop opened up. Food and beverage starting outdoor dining. There you go. Nice, I'm glad. Glad things are slowly getting back to normal. We got Gladiator on in the background. Maximus was just betrayed, and now he has been captured and sold into gladiating slavery, I guess. He's somewhere now. So yeah, what are your marks saying is, eight people per thousand square feet for the golf shop, including employees, masks required. We're actually doing a little remodeling here, ladies and gentlemen. So if you visit the shop before, it'll be a tiny bit smaller because we're growing. So we gotta add, so we're adding, we're shrinking the retail floor, and then adding a couple new offices, possibly a new break studio for later on down the line. The floor's still gonna be pretty big, but I think with the new rules and regulations, there'll be less of an emphasis on browsing and whatnot, so we'll see. All right, good luck everybody. So these are the non-number that'll go to one person at the end, right, including the rookies? No, no, not vet comments. It's just rookies. So these are comments, just vet comments that will not ship. So I don't think vet comments ship. We're not shipping vet comments in the score. So this is a, one of those I'll go into the rookie pile. And there's our first autograph of the Michael P. Ryan, Samaj's brother, brother, cousin, cousin or brother, they're related. And I should have a, I haven't memorized all these guys yet. So we're gonna go by groupbreakchecklist.com, which I will, if you're watching live, I'll drop the checklist into the chat for you too. So that'll be for the jets. So that first group is vets, and then this next group is rookies. And you know what, I should kind of keep an eye out for those guys, right? I'm sure how I'm gonna, I think I get this now. That's Josh Jacobs to 100. Joe Burrow in his Ohio State gear. He was there for a little bit, remember? We'll go to the bangles. That'll be for Natalino and the bangles. I wish I could insert here. I'm gonna try to make this easy for the shipping team. Inserts here, rookies. Rookie group over there, vet comments up there. Justin Herbert, of course, will go to the chargers. This is not part of the non-numbered rookie group. That'll be for JC. I have a bit of a pattern here now. And there's Robbie Anderson. And Allen Hearns. There's four autographs to box, by the way. So Allen Hearns to 50. Allen Hearns is on the dolphins, but I forgot about that. That'll be for Gary. There's Brian Edwards, Raiders. And we've got Kendrick Rogers. Autograph. Kendrick Rogers is a cowboy.  Yeah, I think scores traditionally, I don't know how much these score boxes cost these days, but score is not traditionally like a high-end set, if that's what you were looking for. This plate's nice, though. Baker Mayfield. Nice, Cleveland Browns, Glenn Campbell. There you go. All aboard the Big Head Express. Woo-hoo! But yeah, like Ryan Herald's thing, it is a classic look, though. So I think for those reasons, people are still into it. There's Jonathan Taylor. Inserts. Rookies. And the two, of course, goes to the dolphins. That'll be for Gary. See ya. All right, nice two there. We've got Chris Herndon, the fourth to 100. Right there for the Jets, the rookie group.  There's AJ Brown, Titans, Gray Border. And we've got Devin DuVernay, a longhorn. And the DuVernay goes to the Ravens. I'll have all these tagged, too. And that'll be for Aaron Billingsley. What happens when I was a Rosen here? I've said this before, and I'll say it again. I feel like Rosen can make a Tannehill-esque return if some team just kind of gives him a chance to maybe stay in one system for a minute or two. And there's James Winston. All right, next box. Where could Josh Rosen go? He went to UCLA, so if you're like thinking, who cares about Josh Rosen, Joe? People in LA are still kind of casually curious about the fate of Josh Rosen, maybe. Where does he go? Where does he go? I mean, not in Miami. The Tua is waiting. Maybe he does get a chance in Miami. I don't know, but I think Tua's healthy, they're bringing him on. ASAP, who's he willing to stay in Miami as an insurance policy in case Tua gets all reckless, runs around, gets banged up. I don't know. I heard someone say, someone say Patriots could be an interesting spot for him. Jared Pinkney. Jared goes to the Falcons. Going from Vanderbilt to Atlanta. That'll be for Jared Morley. We've got the Falcons in a team random. My rookie pile, of course. That common pile, all right. We got Colby Parkinson, 20 out of 50. Joe Burrow, Deshaun Hamilton. Man, we've got Denzel Mims. Denzel Mims. Mims. We'll go to the Jets, so that'll be for Joseph Kay. Joe Burrow, of course, will go to Natalino and the Bengals.  How are Joe Burrow's score base going for on a secondary market? Maybe if you get it graded and grind those out. Pan's team, Cooper Cup. Some rookies here. More Tua. Tua, of course, will go to Gary and the Dolphins. Got Gladiator on the background. Chris Levin saying Joe Burrow score 10 bucks. That's not bad. Clavon Chasen. Van Jefferson. Eight out of 20 autograph. That's a ram. Van Jefferson will go to Scott V. Got the Rams last. I wish I was, Jesse, I wish I was watching baseball. I'm gonna watch Gladiator instead. It's Gabriel Davis, red zone of 20. Wait, did someone mention, was it Andy? Maybe someone was talking earlier that they may have like, that players and owners are restarting negotiations or something like that. Another bangle, Natalino with this. So I don't know. Hopefully we'll go back to the table and figure some ish out. Justin Herbert, of course, will go to the Chargers, JC. Nice, Al Canone saying, Sports Bank just got legalized in Colorado. There are no sports to bet on. You could bet on, I've been betting on Draft King's stock, Al Canone. How about that? I'm betting on that Draft King's stock. It's been doing all right. It's Corey Davis for the Titans. So the proposal is what, a 76 game season? 76 games. Starting when? Yeah, at least it is something. I agree. We've got Michael Warren II. Michael Warren goes to the Eagles. Fly Eagles, fly for Chet. Nick Chubb to 100. All right, next box. July 10th is what they're thinking. So maybe there will be an all-star game. Can we start the season with the all-star game? At Dodger Stadium? That's where it's supposed to be. I'm definitely on the players side, Calvin. I mean, at the end of the day, I gotta be with the players. Although, frankly, neither side is looking too good in this situation, though. But yeah, definitely gotta be with the players in this. The owner's made a proposal in March, I think. Back when all this was starting, they kind of figured out, hey, here's how we're gonna split up the money. And then they're going back on it, saying the players have to concede more money, blah, blah, blah, blah, yeah. These are billionaire owners, you know? Guess what? A player's career, 10, 15, 20 years at best, you know? They're getting, every player is getting older right now. Their chance to earn as a baseball player is being reduced just to, what, help billionaire owners save money. And they're gonna be owning teams for decades, you know? So, I mean, they should be Johnson. And there is Rico Dottel. And that'll go to the Cowboys, Dallas with that one, Leonard. The rookies, all right, these are back to the bet comments now. There's Marvin Jones Jr., but the struggles that baseball has had, you know, kind of goes to show you and I that the player's union and the owners and the league not getting along. And their collective bargaining agreement ends at the end of the 2021 season. And we're getting a taste of how bad it could be. So I'm worried about that too. Ryan Lewerke, 21 out of 50. I think he ended up with the Patriots, yeah, Patriots. And it's kind of a frustrating thing because baseball has a lot of young, exciting players coming up the ranks, a lot of interest in prospecting and baseball prospects and whatnot. And so you're kind of getting really close to screwing up a lot of things this year and possibly even next year. So they gotta be careful. You know, meanwhile, basketball players and owners seem to have figured things out. I mean, they're not best friends, those two organizations, but those two groups, but they've been able to take care of it. I think it also helps that they just, I think basketball players just completed their collective bargaining agreement like a year or two ago, pretty recently. Jordan, J Hart, that's what he's going with with his autograph, J Hart. And that would be Steve who got randomized the Packers. Justin Herbert, of course, will go to the Chargers. Yeah, all kind of things. The owners played this wrong. Baseball owners, maybe a strike on their hands. Yeah, I mean, next year, there could be a work stoppage because of all the stuff happening this year. I mean, it's like we're seeing the negotiations. There's a Fletcher Cox to 10. We're seeing the negotiations for the collective bargaining agreement like happen now when they should just be, let's just get baseball back just for the, just as a sign of goodwill. Something for people to watch. There's Thaddeus Moss. There's Joe Burrow right here. And that Alino with the Bengals, Cat Team Mojo. There is Brandon Carr. Rookies. There's Taylor Luan for the Titans. Steve got randomized the Titans in this. You sure do. Those are considered inserts. But you'll get all of those. Without luck, you'll soon forget the Titans sermonizing of a few dry old men. There's Will Fuller. Where's the number on there? There you go, 13 out of 50. That's for the Dolphins. That's gonna go to Gary. And the final box, fourth and final. Good luck, everybody. What's the weakest player you've seen in football, maybe? Baseball might be the strongest. Then basketball and football and hockey perhaps, but I think football definitely has one of the weakest unions. It looks like they're just gonna power through. Maybe no fans for a little while, understand? Just kind of crazy for two teams opening new stadiums. My Raiders in Vegas and the Chargers and the Rams here in LA. I've got Vic Beasley Jr. to 50. The patterns, these are all the vet commons leading up to that gray border right there. Some inserts for an auto and then some rookies. And then back to the commons again. There, there's Zay Jones for my Raiders to 100. People seem to really like the Zay Jones amongst Raider Nation, maybe a sleeper pig. It's T. Higgins, 16 out of 50, gold auto. T. Higgins is a bangle. Why are you not entertained? Jalen Ramsey to 20. Rams, Scott. Kyle Allen. And we've got a Drew Brees autograph, one of one. That's pretty nice. That's Joe Kubasek and the Saints. It looks like some surprises in score football right here. Nice. Joe, Saints all aboard the Big Head Express. Woo-hoo! I saw that breeze card flipped upside down and I was like, I can't be, can't be an autograph, could it? There it was. Darnell Savage Jr. to 100. AJ Green. And we've got a Bryce Perkins. Got a green foil, green border. Bryce Perkins is a ram. That's gonna go to Scott. My green always makes me think it's an out of five, but it's not trickery. We got Rayquan McMillan for the Dolphins. TJ Hawkins for the Lions. And what else do we got to close things out? We got, is that our second Rico Dottole? I think so. That'll be for the boys. Cowboys, that's gonna go to Leonard. And a final Joe Burrow. Bangles and a Lino. And these are non-numbered inserts. That'll be part of that one big non-numbered insert group. Or will it, actually? No, it's just non-insert, non-numbered rookie cards will be one lot, so I do have to do that randomizer. So let's flip back to the list here. Go to this blank list, New Dice. So this will be top, middle, bottom. And everyone from David Baker down to Ryan and everybody in between has a shot at, once again, this group right here, all non-insert, non-numbered rookie cards. We'll go to one group, except for those guys, of course, which I've been pulling as we're going along. All right, so good luck to everybody here. One dice roll for both lists. Let's roll it, randomize it. Five and five, 10 the hard way. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and 10th and final time. After 10, top, top cards. We'll get those fantasy stars right there. All right, once again, five into five, 10 times. Name on top, after 10, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and 10th and final time. After 10, congrats to three, two, and chat. Chat, I don't know if I called your name too often in this break, but there you go.  We'll all go to you, except for those players, of course. All right, thanks everybody. Joe for jaspyscasebreaks.com. Try to do a quick little recap, I guess, just kind of a longer break. So some pretty nice stuff, and that breeze was definitely a surprise. And one-of-one drew breeze. Was definitely a surprise. That was really nice. And there you go. There you have it. Thanks for watching. Thanks for breaking with us. I'm Joe for jaspyscasebreaks.com. I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.


All right. Hello, everybody. If you're listening to this lecture, you're either in CIS 419 or 519 or in CIS 522. And if you're in the 519 class, then you know who I am. But if you're in 522, you will have recognized that this is neither Lyle nor Conrad teaching this class. Instead, I will be handling reinforcement learning. And my name is Dinesh Jayaraman. I'm an instructor. I'm an assistant professor in the CIS department. And I work in computer vision, machine learning and robotics, including applications of reinforcement learning for robotics. All right. So by now you're familiar with these different types of learning settings. In particular, we've seen supervised learning, which involves typically the setting where you're given some training data and some desired outputs for that training data as labels. And you try and fit a function that's able to produce those same desired outputs, hopefully in such a way that you can generalize. We've also seen what you can do with unsupervised learning where you're given just the training data without any labels. And we briefly discussed what it means to do semi-supervised learning, where you have some training data that has labels and some other training data that doesn't have labels. And so reinforcement learning is quite special. In reinforcement learning, you no longer just have sort of a data set that's given to you in advance. Instead, you receive your data as the agent performs some sequential actions in an environment. And that process of performing sequential actions generates some observations and is accompanied by reward. So there is no label per se, but the reward essentially tells you whether the actions that you performed were good or not. Now, I don't expect that at this point things are very clear yet, but we will digest this over the next few slides so that hopefully you'll have a clearer understanding of what the reinforcement learning setting is. So broadly, the aim of reinforcement learning is to make sequential decisions in an environment. So for example, if you're driving a car, you're making sequential decisions at every instant about how to steer your car, whether to put your foot on the gas or on the brake, and so on and so forth. So those are examples of decisions you're making sequentially in the environment. Each decision is affecting something in the environment. It's affecting the position of your car at the next instant. It's affecting the people around you, the other vehicles on the road. And it's going to, through that effect that your action has, it's also going to influence your future actions. So that's one example of how you make sequential decisions in an environment. But of course, we do this all the time. So you might be cooking, or you might be playing a video game, or you might be controlling a power plant, maybe changing some settings in a power plant, coming up with a medical treatment plan for a patient, or just trying to display online ads to a user. And all of this typically involves some kind of sequential decision making. And the question then becomes how do we learn to make those sequential decisions? And the RL answer is to assume that you have occasional feedback. So for example, if you're learning to cook, then your feedback comes from whether your meal is tasty or not. If you're learning to drive, your feedback comes from whether you've crashed your car or gotten home safely. Or maybe from an occasional honk from your nearby drivers on the road.  And so RL assumes that you have this occasional feedback. And then the learning paradigm in RL is to use that feedback to learn through trial and error. So obviously you try out a bunch of things and you see what gives you the best feedback through this occasional feedback mechanism that we haven't quite covered in detail. But once you have that, then you have to kind of make use of that experience as cleverly as possible so that even though you're learning through trial and error, you have to do this as cleverly as possible to minimize the number of trials you need in order to be able to learn something. So having seen in English the sequential decision making setting that reinforcement learning operates in, let's start kind of formalizing this a little bit. And in particular, we will assume this abstraction of an agent and an environment. The agent is the thing that's going to learn to perform some actions. And it's operating in a setting that we'll call the environment. So for example, a robot agent could be operating on a tabletop where it must grasp some objects or it might be operating in a kitchen where it should perform cooking. Or you could have a self-driving car agent that is operating on a highway. So remember, this is a sequential decision making problem.  And at every time instant in the sequential decision making problem, the agent starts by looking at the state of the environment. And that state of the environment is going to inform the actions that it will execute. So at every instant, the agent observes the state of the environment and it might also get feedback from the environment on how well it's been doing. So that feedback is going to be called the reward RT. So we're going to denote the state of the environment as ST and the reward as RT. Now it might not always be the case that it's easy to observe everything in the environment that is important for making the decision. So for example, it might be that a pedestrian on the street is hidden behind a car right now and you're not able to observe them very well. And so it might therefore be that you don't get to observe everything in the environment that is important, you don't get to observe the full state of the environment and you might instead just observe some features of that state, some function of that state. And this might include some aspects of the state actually being omitted. Like in that case with the pedestrian being excluded. So once you've done that, once you've gotten a reward RT from the environment, you've observed the state ST and remember the reward is only occasional. So we don't always get a reward from the environment. There might be time instance T where there is no reward. But once we've done this, then the next step is the agent at time T emits an action into the environment or executes an action at in the environment. So you can think of this as kind of a turn by turn kind of abstraction of acting in the world where the agent first executes in one turn a particular action and then it gets to get some feedback and it gets to see how the environment changed in response and then in its next turn it executes another action. And so at the next instant again it's going to receive an updated state ST plus one and a new reward RT plus one. And remember we said at the beginning that the agent's goal in doing all of this was going to be that it wanted to make a tasty meal or it wanted to drive a self-driving car safely. Now the agent's goal is to, so we've said that in English but the way that goal is actually expressed to the agent is through this reward, the feedback. And so the agent's goal in reinforcement learning is always just to maximize the expected rewards. So the reward is really important because it's really the reward that specifies what constitutes a good execution of a task and what does not. So the agent's goal is going to be to maximize the expected rewards. And in particular typically we will abstract out this process of learning a particular skill in the environment like cooking or driving into a policy function. A policy function which is a mapping from a state S, remember the states are the configurations of the environment. So it's going to be a policy function that's a mapping from the state S which belongs to a set of states capital S that the environment can be in. So it's going to be a mapping from a state S to an action. And an action A is going to be in the set of actions that the agent can take. And so this function that's going to learn, that's going to represent the mapping from states to actions, the optimal mapping from states to actions is the output of reinforcement learning if you will. So at the end of reinforcement learning, the agent should have learned a good function Pi of S, which we'll call the policy function. All right, so how is reinforcement learning different from what we've seen before? Let's recap kind of what we've seen on the previous couple of slides. We've seen that in reinforcement learning there is no notion of supervision and instead supervision is replaced by occasional rewards as feedback. The second thing that we've learned about our problems is that it operates in the sequential decision-making setting. And because it operates in the sequential decision-making setting, it means that data is going to be generated as sequences, because we saw ST and then ST plus 1 are all generated in sequence. So it's not really IID sampling from a distribution like we were assuming earlier. It's not independent and identically distributed like we've been assuming so far when we've been doing things like supervised learning, but instead the data is going to be generated sequentially. And thirdly, the training data is actually generated by the learner's own behavior. So when you're learning to drive, you are going to observe, you don't have a repository of training data that is waiting for you to optimize, to learn an optimum policy from. Instead reinforcement learning typically assumes that the data is being generated by the learner's own behavior. So as you learn to drive the car, you will encounter various scenarios and in that process you will learn from your own experience. So that's kind of three main characteristics of RL problems that make it quite different from what we've seen before. And this in turn leads to two key problems that a lot of RL literature is devoted to solving, which are the credit assignment problem, which is the problem of deciding which decisions that you made were the good or bad ones or which actions that you executed were good or bad ones. Remember you've executed a whole sequence of actions by the time you've completed a task. And so if for example you've cooked a meal and your meal was not tasty, then it's important to figure out which of those decisions that you made when you cooked that meal were the good ones and which ones were the bad ones. And so that leads to this credit assignment problem because you only ever get feedback occasionally and that feedback might not correspond to something that you've done very recently. Instead it might be the cascading effect of something that you did a few time steps back in the past. The second thing that's also a key problem which is related to this third point above is that because you're generating your own training data, it becomes important for you to decide what to pick to try. So we mentioned that reinforcement learning involves learning through a trial and error paradigm, but then it becomes important to decide what to try out. And that is often captured as this notion of exploration versus exploitation. And we'll return to that and make that clearer as we get more into this. So in the spirit of differentiating RL from the other settings we've seen before, let's also try and identify what settings are not sequential decision-making settings and therefore would not be appropriate to apply RL to. So as an example, if you're just making a classification or a regression decision, which is just a single isolated decision, it doesn't really affect any future decisions you might have to make, then you typically aren't operating in a sequential decision-making setting. So for example, if you're trying to look at images on the web and identify them as images of mites or container ships and so on and so forth, then you're probably not in a sequential decision-making setting. If you're doing something like this where you're holding up your phone to identify what a particular sign is and there's an ML algorithm running on the phone to identify and translate this text, then likely, again, you aren't operating in a sequential decision-making setting because at this point, your only output, your only desired outcome is to be able to translate this well. And if instead of operating in that kind of single isolated decision setting, your setting looks a little bit more like this where you don't have supervision and you're operating in settings where your actions are going to have consequences that go into the future, that produce new observations that require new actions and so on and so forth, then you are operating in a sequential decision-making setting. We've already seen some examples of applications like robotics, like autonomous driving. Interestingly, you can also use reinforcement learning for language and dialogue. So for example, if you are trying to hold a conversation with a human, then the chatbot is the agent and the human is the environment. And so the chatbot has to execute actions which consist of seeing the right things in order to accomplish some task. Or you could do business operations like we discussed, you know, operating a power plant or trying to make financial decisions about which stocks to invest in and which stocks to divest from, for example, could be your actions and the stock market could be your environment. Let's see some more concrete and fun examples of reinforcement learning. So here is an example of reinforcement learning in the context of video games. So this is of course the Mario video game and you can see that this reinforcement learning agent has learned a pretty good policy for solving this video game. Here's an example of an application with a more real world style flavor where a bunch of robot arms are trying to learn to grasp objects from a cluttered table top. And so this result from a few years ago now, about five years ago now, was very exciting for reinforcement learning for robotics. And here's another example again in a robotic setting, but this time in simulation of agents learning how to navigate various obstacle courses. I like to call this robot parkour and you can see here that agents are these kind of humanoid style agents are learning to navigate some pretty impressively difficult obstacle courses. And in these cases, the agents are controlling the positions and velocities of all their joints at every instant. So that's the action. The action must control the angular velocities of these joints. Here's another example of a more complex robot, this time a spider. It's also learning to do the same thing. And then this funny looking humanoid robot that's operating on this obstacle course and it's learned a kind of really weird gate, but it works for it. It's able to actually even be robust to random forces that are applied. That's what those red bars are. It's able to learn even to be robust to those random forces.


Hello Columbia and welcome to This Week in the City, bringing you highlights from the public relations, media and marketing department with the City of Columbia. I'm your host, Alicia Utsi. While This Week in the City, it is National Telecommunicators Week for our public safety telecommunicators who work in our 9-1-1 Center. We appreciate and thank all of them for the jobs they do on a daily basis. On Tuesday, join us for Lunch with the Planner with staff from our Planning and Development Services Department. Lunch with the Planner will be hosted at Riverfront Park at the Amphitheater. So join our planners for an outdoor lunch and discussion about planning and development in our city. On Wednesday, the Office of Business Opportunities will host a Government Readiness Contract Workshop. The workshop will begin at 6 p.m. at the Earlwood Community Center. For information, visit our website at columbiasc.net or call the Office of Business Opportunities at 545-3950. Friday, please remember that all city offices will be closed in observance of Good Friday. All emergency services can be reached by calling 9-1-1. And for the weekend on Saturday, the City of Columbia will be busy at Silver City. Our Columbia water staff will host an Earth Day booth and table at the Soda City Market, starting 9 a.m. on Saturday morning. And also, open streets will be held this year at Soda City, which also begins at 9 a.m. So please come out and join us in Downtown Columbia for Columbia Water Earth Day and Open Streets at Soda City. Well, that wraps up this week and we hope you have a great week in the city.