Hello learners, I welcome you all to this video session where I will be discussing the theories of development and behavior So in the human growth and development course, which is basically a foundation course of psychology We have seen that how psychological concepts are important for social workers therefore in this session, we will discuss What is the process of socialization of a child of a human being and then how the personality of an individual develops through various stages. We will discuss Freud's Psychosexual theory and Erikson's psychosocial theory and also we will look into the three constructs of the personality development from the psychoanalytic perspective of Sigmund Freud. We will discuss the different coping mechanisms that are important in the human human behavior and then how due to different conflicts in our conflicts If the conflicts are not resolved, they can give rise to certain antisocial or dysfunctional behavior within the individual personality So, let us see what is actually meant by the process of socialization Socialization is a continuous process where individuals interact within the members of the society They interact with others and it enhances the sharing of experiences, communication and these communication develop meanings The meanings found in particular experiences may be expanded through the process of socialization When a person moves out of that environment or into another social environment So here social environment means the surrounding that we live in And the socialization process continues. There are various adaptive behaviors that is Adjustmental techniques that are used and one learns through these experiences of interacting with the other members of the society They learn about other person's culture whether it is similar or different from them and it helps in building up their personality. The Psychosexual and psychosocial theories imply that there is a struggle within an individual and as the stages develop So in the different stages of development from his or her birth in the stages certain inner conflicts develop and accepting the realities of life dealing with each abstract and particular conflicts that develop in our psyche during the course of development it is important to actually form a Healthy personality in the individual. The sources of socialization Are firstly the family because that is when the baby directly comes into comes into contact first with the family members the mother the father and Then the extended family the siblings. So all are important in the socialization process of the child PRs and friends and That is the Fred the group outside the family that they are living in Community here also includes the neighborhood the relatives Okay, who maybe live in and around and who are in contact in constant social visits So it give it it advances the process of socialization and then through media different types of media electronic media print media and Then also the regional and national Culture where a child is growing up a enhances the socialization process for example if the child who is of Indian origin but born and brought up in Another foreign country then that particular culture will have a lot of influence in the socialization process of the child and now moving on to Freud psychoanalytic perspective that gives us an understanding of Actually, how individuals personality develops in order to survive and co-op in society Individuals have implicitly developed ego defense mechanisms. So here ego defense mechanism Now we'll see firstly the concept of it ego and super ego in the psychoanalytic theory Freud has talked about the different constructs of a personality It is said that it is the core of a personality as it is believed to be present and fully functional at birth It basically Signifies or symbolizes the basic instincts or the basic needs that the that require that Demands it demands immediate gratification of that particular need it remains in the unconscious mind and plays a role in the development of Unacceptable urges and desires and memories because these are not rationalized at that particular point of time when the child is born They may not be possible to implement in real life as the person grows that it is always present in the person But then we'll see we're going to ego and super ego But let us discuss this concept of it the expression of these basic urges and desires is based on hedonistic and pleasurable principles which may not be rationalized or accept socially acceptable then Comes the role of ego in super ego first. Let us see. What is super ego in contradiction to the concept of it? Super ego is conceptualized as the center of moral standards or it holds it It closely holds to the moral conscience Conscience of an individual suppose the eat demands and immediate gratification of a need Super ego is the moral conscience that says that wait you have to first look into these things It checks whether the various ways of satisfying it impulses are right or wrong Therefore the super ego sees that whether the eat demand is Socially acceptable or not ego plays a very important role ego acts as a reality checker for the eat Ego helps to meet the needs and wishes of it But by creating a connection between eat and reality so basically ego is guided by the principle of reality and Mostly resides in the conscious level that brings a balance the ego aspect brings the balance between the eat and the super ego now Moving on to this defense mechanism as we have seen in the previous part Then ego plays an important role in defending the certain actions But that is demanded by the eat and then superseded by the super ego and ego brings out a balance between the immediate Demand and the moral conscience. So now let us see how this coping mechanisms or defense mechanism of a human being function. These are the types Depression this technique is used unconsciously to keep away disturbing or threatening thoughts occurring in the mind suppose a person has committed a Particular action, which is not socially acceptable that person will try to not think about it and then try to Divert the attention so that the person is not disturbed or does not create any anxiety within himself So that individual knows what he or she has done and in order to deal with anxiety The person will divert the attention or will not think about what he or she has done This technique is used unconsciously to keep away disturbing or threatening thoughts occurring in the mind So that is the first way how a person deals or they defend his particular actions Then we go to projection. It is a technique through which individuals make Others responsible for their own thoughts feelings and motives So what this person does who has Suppose who thinks that he or she has committed an Socially unacceptable action he or she will try to make others responsible for their particular action that they have done and That is how they try to defend what they have done and that is how they try to Actually not have the guilt feeling or the anxiety which they would be living with now the displacement this is a Technique which most of us we must have seen maybe in our own family members or friends that when a person Is angry or is aggressive over someone else and that is directed to another victim so Basically displacement is the redirection of an impulse onto a powerless person or a target Which serves as a symbolic substitute for the person object causing the actual aggression for example you have a very Dominating supervisor or a boss at your workplace and when you go home You went out that particular frustration or the aggression that you have you have been victimized with on another member Maybe your sibling or maybe your spouse you tell let out your anger and frustration on that person and that That person on whom you let out your anger or frustration is actually will be The victim of your anger on someone else So that is why it is known as that it is a redirection of your impulse or aggression onto a powerless Substitute. Okay, so sublimation another technique It is similar to displacement But the emotional outburst that is caused to you because of any kind of disturbance or anxiety caused by another Individual it is let out through the form of maybe art music Okay, or in other In other constructive way not a destructive way when you let out your anger on another person Who is innocent and who is actually not the cause of your real anxiety or anger then you form a Destructive activity, but when you let out your frustration or went out your anger on In another way maybe through some creativity maybe through art or maybe through music Then it is known as sublimation. It is a concept. It is a constructive way of letting out your or it is a positive defense mechanism Denial suppose that person knows that he has done something wrong Denial involves blocking external events facts or knowledge from awareness by refusing to experience them for example and alcoholic and Alcoholic might always be in the denial stage that he has become completely addicted to alcoholism alcohol So here the person Uses the technique of denial the person completely denies that he or she is an alcoholic and will give various kinds of excuses that This much amount will is not alcoholism or this is not go leading towards alcoholism and things like that So denial is a technique not to accept the reality So that is also a defense mechanism Regression individuals respond to a threatening situation in the way, which is appropriate to their Earlier age and level of development for example a student Who has failed in an examination maybe due to? Not not studying or not submitting all the assignments in time And then what the student does is by to defend himself or herself goes to the teacher and tries to plead the teacher to the teacher to make him pass or Plead to the teacher that he should be promoted and starts crying So these that method is known as regression it is appropriate to the role and is appropriate to the age that the Individual is going through and rationalization It is the cognitive distortion of facts to make an event or an ample or an event less Impulse impulse and threatening. So here a rationalization means fire showing reasons to validate what you have done So basically if you have done something unacceptable, you will show various reasons or try to Create a scenario in your mind that what you have done was actually right. So that is known as rationalization and Reaction formation lastly. This is where the person behaves or reacts in a way Where the opposite? Actually the person wants to react in another way So socially he has to show that he has not done anything wrong and Therefore his reaction will be like he will give explanation and try to Show a different picture that is known as instead of reacting in a particular way in an apologetic way the person will be More you know defensive about what he has done that is known as reaction The reaction will be opposite to actually what the person is thinking So these are the types of defense mechanism that we see in human personality Now going to Erikson's psychosocial theory In Erikson's psychosocial theory, he has talked about different stages of development In which he has said that there are various conflicts that take place within an individual personality If these conflicts are not dealt with in a proper way then it leads to certain Behavioral issues in the next development phase. So in the next slide, we will see the different that eight distinct stages of development. So he developed this theory in 1959 and it assumes that a psychosocial psychological conflict occurs within the inner and inner conflict occurs at different stages of development and there are different needs of an individual and These needs will create conflict inner conflict in the mind of the individual and these conflicts need to be settled Or did these needs to be dealt with at that particular stage of development so that the individual can move on to the next development stage According to this theory successful completion of each stage of development is important to develop a healthy personality And if these conflicts are not resolved it will lead to disturbance It will lead to an anti-social behavior maybe and it will also lead to certain frustration and This may result in the development of more unhealthy personality sense of self The impact of different social roles like parents, schools, friends, teachers, office colleagues Then spouses play a distinct role in the life stages which shapes the personality of an individual From childhood to adulthood. These are the different stages Infancy, early childhood, preschool, school age, adolescence, young adulthood, middle adulthood and then maturity. So You can have a look at this particular table, which is also there in your electronic ESLM Which is uploaded in our website, but here in the chart you can see that The basic conflicts that are stated here are in the infancy stage trust versus mistrust That is the child develop a sense of trust from the caregiver That is the mother and if the if the care is lacking at this stage It will lead to mistrust that means the child will develop a personality where he or she will not be able to trust anyone Therefore feeding is an important activity by the mother which creates the trust factor Early childhood here Autonomy versus shame and doubt the child has to be empowered to make his own decisions Sometimes too much controlling by the parent at this stage will lead to shame and doubt in his own abilities Therefore, it is important to give some kind some amount of independence and autonomy to the child preschool Initiative versus guilt the child needs to begin Asserting control and power over the environment that is the social environment in which he is living Success in this stage leads to sense of purpose and child who try to exert too much power Experience disapproval result in the sense of guilt and in the school age There is the child is working hard in the new social environment There are academic demands and success leads to They with a sense of competence while failure results in feeling of infinity inferiority Therefore the child is in competition with his peers and it boosts up his personality if the Child is working hard in achieving his goals. Otherwise, it will lead to some kind of inferiority complex Then we come to the adolescent stage, which is also a very confusing state a child Or the adolescent is always confused whether he is to be treated as an adult or a child So the teens needs to develop a sense of self Then personal identity and then success leads to ability to stay Prove to himself while failure leads to confusion and a weak sense of self So it will give it needs to Build confidence in the teenager the adolescent so that he or she can move successfully move to the next stage That is young adult So young adults need to form intimate and loving relationships Which is automatically formed in most cases and success leads to strong relationships in future While failure leads to idleness and isolation So the person will also develop inferiority complex and isolation if he or she is not able to have any intimacy with the maybe the person of another gender or Maybe the same gender so therefore they need to develop relationships of different kinds So coming to the stage of middle delab group We will see the generativity versus stagnation the person needs to develop from by creating Things and individuals which will outlast them So here may basically means procreation of children looking after them and being busy with the Children and then or the work or the career that they are involved in it leads to a sense of satisfaction if these needs are met and then Work and parenthood found form the main focus of this particular age That ranges from 40 to 65 years of age Failure or conflict in this stage leads to a sense of shallowness and less involvement in the worldly activities And then moving on to the maturity stage Here ego integrity versus despair at this age the person looks back into his or her life and Should have a feeling of fulfillment and success at this stage leads to feeling of wisdom and Maturity to accept the reality of that while failure results in regret until That is confronted therefore at this stage one has to actually Look back into the things that he or she has done and maybe feel proud about it and satisfied about it Or might have certain regrets about the life activities that he had been involved in So these are the eight stages of development as put forth by Ericsson And he has talked about how the basic conflict to between these two three elements It is important to resolve these These conflicts because only then it will lead to a successful Proceeding to the next stage of development and now let us move into another important theory which is Sigmund Freud's Psycho-Sexual theory according to this The famous psychology Sigmund Freud talked about the personality of an individual starts developing from his birth And it Develops it keeps changing until the later stages of one's life Freud identified five childhood stages in which there is development of personality through a theory which is known as Psycho-Sexual theory it says that The psychosexual energy of a child is the driving force behind his or her personality development so Freud relates the different developmental stages of personality to the sexual desires which are in the subconscious or Conscious level in the person psyche a child encounters particular Conflicts in each of the stages and these conflicts must be resolved before the child can successfully advance to the next stage Now, let us see the different stages put forth by Freud He has talked about the oral stage and it is the first stage of personality development Where the baby's pleasure she is seeking activity is directed through the mouth so since Freud relates this development of personality and development of actually the person's life through the different unconscious and conscious sexual activities and urges in the in the in the infant stage the it is seen that the oral state or The gratification of the sexual need is basically through the baby's mouth Freud said that too much of oral stimulation can lead to oral fixation and develops a person can develop the Problems like smoking nail biting finger chewing and thumb sucking more so such habits become more prominent at times of stress so if this Stage if the sexual needs are not met in the form of maybe breastfeeding or you know any other form of oral Sexual urge then it is seen that it can lead to certain bad habits or addiction in the particular person In the anal stage that is one three years a child develops to control his or her bodily functions through toilet training the anal Stage asserts that In this particular stage the child learns to control the bodily urges and toilet training is an important aspect Yes, but if the parent is too controlling or you know At this particular stage it may lead to certain Negative personality in the particular child for example a child may develop less confidence or The child may have problem and decision making so at this stage though or toilet training and other Controlling activities are important on the part of the parent Didn't this needs to be restricted also to some extent the fell phallic stage during this stage a child Unknowingly struggles with his or her sexual desires towards the opposite sex or opposite pair a sex parent for example Boys are unconsciously Physically attracted to the mothers and girls are Attracted to the father's it is not one only physical attraction. It is also physical plus the personality Attraction towards the opposite gender in the parents too. So this was a very contradictory State of statement made by Freud during that age of time where he first developed this Psycho-section theory because it talked about Odi bus complex Electra complex in Odi bus complex It is said that the mother the boy is attracted to the mother and the girls are attracted to the father So that is how I it is said that unknowingly or unconsciously the child may be Attracted to the parent of the opposite gender a Boy child is attracted towards his mother and sees his father as a competitor for the mother's attention This is known as Odi bus complex a girl's desire for her father's attention Wish to take her mom's place and is known is known as Electra complex a term coined by Carl He is another Psychologist latency during this stage implicit sexual feelings subside and the superego or consigns Begins to develop in a child So here the child is conscious about the sexual urges But the superego or the moral consigns try to control the basic or instinct of the Particular child the child begins to develop moral values by adopting Adopting some of their parents and other important adults behavior. So here the child superego Actually comes in way of immediate gratification of the needs by the demanded by the Eid and here ego also balances the rationality of the in and the superego In the genital stage where you see that it starts from age of 12 that is the onset of teenage During the stage explicit sexual urges re-emerge Where it is no more an unconscious or something to be hidden about and there are explicit sexual urges that re-emerge in other stages If these are successfully met adolescence engage in appropriate sexual behavior and that is said to be a healthy one So instead of repressing all these various sexual desires It is seen that starting from the oral age and then age fairly Latency and genital The sexual urge is always there and it is in the form of either unconscious or the conscious state of mind Therefore Freud has termed this theory as the psychosocial theory The word psycho means of the mind and the sexual urges that are always there It is either in the inactive or the active form of our conscious mind So that is all and so here today we have seen that How in the development of personality these stages are important and where these inner conflict and urges needs to be fulfilled for Positive personality form formation and socialization process is also important here So today we have discussed the different types of coping mechanisms and then development of personality and the theories of personality and How these conflicts are important to be resolved for the for a good personality formation So, thank you so much And hope you have understood the different concepts in relation to theories of behavior


I'm your host Pedro Ducosta. This is the State of Working America podcast, where we seek to elevate workers' voices to make sure they're heard in the economic policy debate in Washington and beyond. I'm here at the sidelines of the EARN Conference in Pittsburgh, and I'm joined by Jamie and Shade, who's the criminal justice policy analyst for the Oklahoma Policy Institute. And I really want to talk to you about the issue of incarceration and how it relates to the labor market, because as somebody who pays attention to the job of labor market very closely and who pays attention to federal reserve policy very closely, these are issues that barely ever even enter the radar of the discussion. So please tell me a little bit about the work that you guys do, and tell me about how you see the criminal justice system interacting with the labor market. Well, thank you for giving me an opportunity to talk about criminal justice issues, especially through an economic lens. I think at Oklahoma Policy, one of the biggest value ads we've been able to give to the conversation is to show the way in which low income, especially marginalized communities of color, have found their economic earning potential, their ability to build wealth, their ability to have the equity to buy a home, to leverage themselves out of one economic condition actually experience economic mobility has been constrained by the American court system, by the punitive system of fines and fees, and by the mass incarceration system writ large. So I'd say it is very difficult to think of the racial wealth gap in the United States and truly contextualize what it means as a policy idea, as a notion that policy makers could come together and actually resolve the racial wealth gap and do that hard work of reconciliation that we seem to find so difficult and pernicious in America. To me, there is no way to get there if you aren't actually looking at what the criminal justice system does to black and brown communities. Can you talk a little bit about the kinds of everyday hurdles and challenges that black Americans predominantly face because of these fines and fees, the system that kind of gets people into this sort of debt into perpetuity and doesn't allow them even to get a foothold in the economy, much less develop a base of wealth from which to do anything. Absolutely, we've actually produced data that can demonstrate in my home state of Oklahoma, there is actually no better geographic proxy for race than court debt. In my hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, you can actually see in the historically black portion of my community, which was known as Black Wall Street or Greenwood before the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 when it was burned to the ground by an armed mob. That portion of the town, you can actually see the zip codes having a concentration of court debt that's somewhere in the neighborhood of $800 to $1,000 a person for a tiny zip code of a tiny community and in a subset of a relatively low population state. We're talking a state with about 3 million people total and this tiny community in 2017, we found more than 20,000 failure to pay warrants. That is arrest warrants, bench warrants from district judges for mostly black and brown people who had not paid, in many cases, municipal fines. And in the state of Oklahoma, so we're talking about anything from a speeding ticket to simple municipal fines for the way you did your garbage, things having to do with utilities. We're talking about things for low level misdemeanors.  When you can't pay it, the fees pile up and suddenly you're in more debt than you can pay and then you can actually be put in jail for that debt. So it's a debtor's prison. Absolutely, debtor's prisons are alive and well, not just in the state of Oklahoma, throughout the United States. There are actually websites, websites like free-to-drive.org is a great one. You can click on that website, go to any state in the United States and you can see the thousands of people who have failure to pay warrants, in some cases failure to appear, which like a trade secret, just a little secret of the industry that people don't like to talk about, you will almost never see a failure to appear warrant from the court system for someone who's already paid their fines and fees. So there are people who never have to have those extra appearances because they've paid. There are people who bond out of prison because they are bond out of county jails because they've paid and there are people who don't show up for their appearances but they have representation and they've paid and judges never issue a warrant for them. Even though they don't show up to court, they don't follow the instruction of the court. As long as you pay the fees, you are given a presumption that you deserve to be treated without incarceration. The worst remedies are reserved for the poorest people in the system and just a basic baseline data fact about this population of people, not just in Oklahoma, but across the United States. As of 2018, 80% of all criminal defendants in the United States were declared indigent, meaning they didn't have enough money for an attorney and actually in most statutes, the way that's critically defined, these are people who we consider relatively few steps away from homelessness, from experiencing homelessness. So we're talking about some of the poorest people in the United States, many of them experiencing the cyclical traumas of intergenerational oppression, often involved with racial discrimination. As I had mentioned the racial history of violence that my own hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma is steeped in. And so when you look at a heat map of my state. Can you talk a little bit about the massacre for those who don't know the history? For those who don't know, on May 31st of 1921, there was an organized attack. There's really no other way to describe it, involving people who were deputized by the police, the white members of the southern half of Tulsa County, many of them who were resentful of the fact that the most prosperous black community in the United States began in 1906 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It was called Black Wall Street, founded by a man named O.W. Gurley, who was himself a child of slaves. He moved from the American South and during the Oklahoma Land Rush of the 1860s, he actually worked for Grover Cleveland. He was so good at land speculation. He was such a remarkable educator that this person truly in the way, as the old conservative axum likes to go, truly pulled himself up by his bootstraps from slavery to founding this, what was going to be a black township in what is now Tulsa, Oklahoma, the area north, the northernmost zip codes of Tulsa County, which are now called North Tulsa or Greenwood. This was the most prosperous black community in the United States. There were millionaires, dozens and dozens of black millionaires. I'm talking in the 19, in the early part of the 1900s.  And that community was destroyed, more than 1,000 homes and businesses burned to the ground. It was firebombed from the sky by the Air Force. So it was a state-sanctioned, white nationalist terrorist attack. This was a state-sanctioned act of terrorism against the black community that had formed in the northern parts of Tulsa County in 1921. And so the impacts of that and redlining efforts that happened in the 1950s, terrible policies around education funding and parity, and the criminal justice issues that we see in mass incarceration, particularly in the 1970s, ramping up in the 1970s and 80s, as it did throughout the United States as the mental health infrastructure and the community health infrastructure was collapsed. In that same vacuum entered the criminal justice system as the means of perpetuating the hierarchy of economic undervaluation of opportunity that you see for so many communities, black and brown, but also rural communities, indigenous communities, Latinx communities, throughout the United States, you see this system places where the poorest are put in the position of having to fund the court system, the way that we fund Netflix, right? This fee-for-service model. And to such an extent that prosecutors will have openly said to me, there are innocent people who I know are innocent, but I am pushing for a plea agreement because that's what keeps the lights on. That's amazing. So what's fascinating about your work is that it actually, when we talk about the racial wealth gap, we often think about it. Some people talk about it as historical grievances, redlining and so on, but actually the way the criminal justice system operates is very much a clear and present ongoing danger and an ongoing drag on black wealth. Absolutely. If we talk about structural racism, obviously I know there are people who don't believe that structural racism could exist now that a president named Barack Obama was in office for eight years, but I have the unfortunate duty to tell America there is at least one truly structurally racist system in the United States and that is the American criminal justice system. In Oklahoma, there's no way to even view the data without the context of race. So just to give you a simple example of it, the incarceration rate for the United States was an outlier amongst Western industrialized countries. We're the worst of the NATO nations, even if you put us on a chart with China and Saudi Arabia and subtracted political prisoners, we still have the highest mass incarceration population of any industrialized nation, more than two million people in our system. The ratio that exists in most of the U.S. is every 698 per 100,000 Americans are incarcerated. In the state of Oklahoma, 1,079 of every 100,000 Oklahomans is incarcerated. So we see this profound statistical difference, but when you dig into the data, you see that for white Americans, it's roughly, or white Oklahomans, it's roughly analogous to the national average. So it's about 767 of every 100,000. But for indigenous Oklahomans, it's more than 1.3% higher. For them, for Hispanic or Latinx, it's more than twice. That number, it's over 1,000. It's something like 1,800 per every 100,000 for black Oklahomans. The number is more than 3,000 per every 100,000. So you are talking about a per capita incarceration rate that is more than four and a half times that of white Oklahomans. So our entire incarceration disparity, the reason Oklahoma is the prison capital of the world is the incarceration disparity that exists between communities of color and white Oklahomans. It's so clear and stark in the data that it's actually impossible to think about ways and strategies to truly reform Oklahoma's system that don't focus themselves keenly on communities of color throughout the state. I wanted to ask you about, as far as storytelling and narrative, the role of the 1619 project in opening the broader American consciousness, at least those who are willing to read it to some issues that people haven't thought about before. I'm wondering if you've read it. And in particular, I was struck by the criminal justice piece in that series, right? Because, I mean, and I did a whole Twitter thread on it because I'm like, you can't really make this up, right? I'm from Brazil originally. I get sort of Portuguese, the Portuguese history of the Portuguese role in slavery. Excuse me, so to have a prison named Angola, to have a prison named Angola, where the detainees, the prisoners are forced to pick cotton for free. And if not, they're put in the hole. So my question to you is what do you make of that whole project? And was there any history there that you didn't already know if there wasn't? What is it that came out of that particular story and that you hope can kind of open people's minds to the way that the seamlessness with which this country transitioned from a system of slavery to a system of quasi-slavery with the kind of cyclical detainment of blacks? I think to me, most of what I read in the series, I'm not quite done yet. So there may be information that I hadn't seen before. Most of it was stuff that I already had some historical context for. To me, the big line is the trend line in America, right? Going from a slave state, essentially 400 years. And then having another time period at post-reconstruction that we don't talk enough about, right? What we call the gilded age. In that time period, we see heights of political corruption. We see heights of economic inequality. What we never discuss is how that economic inequality became itself a type of system that created the Jim Crow South and that eventually became the American court system, the prison industrial complex. So when we talk about police, we are literally talking about a group of people that was designed to ensure that workers were not able to organize and agitate against their owners. That's their employers. So the first police officers, we literally see them putting down labor uprisings. We literally see them amongst groups of young low income white communities breaking up those abilities. Why is that important?  Keeping those groups segregated has been the popular project of American politics. As long as it was. And it's so alive and well today in this presidency. How has your work changed under this president? I'd say the biggest thing. So-called occupant, rather. I like Ayanna Presley's characterization. I'd say the biggest thing that this administration has done for a large number of Americans is to make them less comfortable with the amount of unaccountable power we've been pouring into the executive branch of the United States. So for more than 50 years, we have watched a massive expansion. I'm talking about the prison industrial complex, but we could add to that the surveillance state, the massive militarization of police, all of these intense powers and depreciations of our Fourth Amendment rights, right? And our sense of due process, how that all works. It's all been going in a particular direction for decades, increasing incarceration, increasing the punitive nature of the system, increasing the disproportionate power of prosecutors, all of those things.  And I think one of the things that one of the sad truths of the Obama administration for all of the good the Obama administration did, the fact that criminal justice reform was never a top tier agenda for the Obama administration and for liberals during that time period is something that we have to reckon with now. Now that we can see what abuses of a presidential administration can do to our immigration enforcement and detention system, which is all a piece of that, right?  Now that we see what can happen when an attorney general doesn't believe in reviewing civil rights misconduct cases against police departments all across the United States, including my home state, when Oklahoma city police are doing things that should be investigated by the Justice Department, when missing and murdered indigenous women in my state are dying at a rate that's disproportionate to any other part of the United States where we see indigenous populations analogous to ours. When we're seeing these outcomes, we understand we've allowed too much power to go into the hands of an unaccountable regulatory structure. We've given too much power to the presidency and I think Democrats are waking up to that and I know in the criminal justice space that's a huge piece of what we are thinking about. How do we pull some power back? How do we end some of the state-based preemption of being able to change municipal laws, laws about detention, police practices, probation practices, all of those things. They have to be on the table, which means our localities, our state governments. They have to start reasserting themselves and saying, hold up, Oklahoma cannot follow this path. My state cannot just abdicate its responsibility to investigate racial disparities if the Justice Department isn't gonna do it. If the Civil Rights Act, if the Voting Rights Act don't matter to huge portions of the executive branch, it is the duty of our state governments, our local governments and our county governments to fill that gap and they're not gonna do it unless those of us who care about justice reform and care about putting the economic power that's being stolen from these communities by these punitive processes back, it's only going to happen if we force it. It's one of my favorite Frederick Douglass quotes, power concedes nothing, nothing without a demand. That's the nature of the system so I think if there's any positive that's come from this nonsense in the past three years, it is our ability to be honest and say that we were asleep at the gate on the issue of criminal justice reform as a political coalition and we've got to start fighting. Last question to two-parter. So is there anything in the backlash to Trumpism that lends momentum to your cause and if so, what are the most kind of pressing issues that you're working on that you see positive momentum maybe on or at least the reforms that you think would have the biggest impact, have lowest hanging fruit? I, as a black kid who grew up in Jackson, Mississippi during the height of the crack epidemic, I genuinely never thought I would live in a time where I would see large numbers of white Americans saying black lives matter and saying that it is important that we name what is happening in our country right now because it's not okay. And the fact that the criminal justice system that the court system is a branch of the oppression of hundreds of years of subjugation that we've just let flourish. All of our state governments, our federal system, we've just let it grow into this exponential leviathan that is sucking people down a drain. The fact that we've let that happen is one of those things that I think the backlash to Trump will help us organize and fight against because a lot of Americans who were sitting on the fence who were comfortable with the dog whistle racism of the 1980s and the 1990s see what is happening now and it is a different creature. It is a fundamentally different thing to say, I hear some of this welfare queen stuff, I hear some of this stuff about super predators and criminals and all of the things that were being sold by both parties for 20 years, right? In the backlash to Trump, I think there are a lot of people who might have considered themselves centrist or moderates who are going to be willing to throw a lot of those old tough on crime, war on drugs, notions which were often centered in deliberate racial prejudice and animus. Get rid of those notions, throw those metaphors out and actually build anew. To your second question, to me, there are three big pieces. If we wanna fix the America's mass industrial prison complex, there's three things we need to do. We need to reform the system of cash bail. The notion that any American should be incarcerated for no other reason than they cannot pay by their freedom from a bondsman is the human rights catastrophe of our time. Right now, there are literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, depending on how you do the estimate of Americans who are in pre-trial detention who are presumed innocent. They're legally innocent, I ask prosecutors all the time. What does the presumption of innocence mean if you can incarcerate me for months? This is a distinctly American problem, I assume. I mean, other than in authoritarian countries where people just get thrown in jail for nothing. I mean, for a developed country with a proper criminal justice system, that doesn't usually happen. There is no Western industrialized nation where this is happening other than the United States. We are a, as I said before, we are an outlier if you look at us on a list with other NATO nations. I believe the next closest nation to us has 131 per 100,000 citizens incarcerated, whereas we are in order of magnitude above that with millions of incarcerated people in our state and the amount of, in our nation, the amount of those people who are there because we have criminalized poverty is what bail reform is about. You shouldn't have to pay money to not go to jail when you're innocent, right? You shouldn't, and there are counties in my home state of Oklahoma where people literally stay in jail for six months because they can't pay bail for nonviolent offenses. That's what I mean. So if we could reform the system of cash bail, we could literally do for American human rights what was done for human rights in other parts of the world that we've seen in Western Europe, in parts of Africa, where we will have a class of human beings who have been put into a permanent underclass position by what our county jails are doing. The next big component that we've got to talk about is mental health. I don't know why it takes massive shootings for us to start having that conversation when we know let's not stigmatize people who are experiencing mental health issues, people who experience mental health struggles, those individuals we see the data, they are not more violent than most individuals. The things that create and produce violence are crisis, right? So you have untreated illness that goes into crisis and other factors, sometimes bad interactions with police mitigating circumstances that continue to spiral a situation that should be resolved with a doctor and a hospital and a treatment regimen, but those things aren't even present in huge portions. I'm thinking specifically of rural America in Oklahoma, one in 10 people in rural Oklahoma do not have access to any form of mental health care, any form of hospital care. And in my state of Oklahoma, we have the highest rate of adverse childhood experiences of people reporting two or more of those before the age of 17 in the nation. So there is no, for anyone to try and make the argument that there's no connection between the fact that Oklahoma leads the nation in trauma and we are the prison capital of the world is absurd. Those two facts are hand in hand. I will talk to police officers and prosecutors all day who will say the same thing. So we've got to begin dealing with the mental health crisis in this country, the crisis of suicide, the crisis of opioid addiction, the crisis of methamphetamine addiction. Those are all mental health issues that nations like Portugal, nations like Norway, other nations all around the world have strategies that we should be deploying evidence-based best practices to deal with these things that are less expensive than prisons and jails. In my state, we can literally spend $5,000 a year on state-based mental health substance abuse treatment or $15,000 to $80,000 to incarcerate people. Is that even a math problem that I need to make an argument to defend? Like we could spend that $5,000 several times and still save the taxpayer money on what they are getting right now. Some of my conservative friends like to say we are spending money that we don't have for outcomes that we don't want. So this is the reason why there's a bipartisan coalition on this. There are hundreds of millions of dollars in potential cost savings across the United States to be given to the lawmakers and policymakers who have the good sense to close some jails and open some hospitals. The third component of that is we have to create a probation and parole system in the United States that works. There are millions, more than 10 million Americans on paper, they like to call it, on probation or parole at any time in the United States. In my state of Oklahoma, we're talking about a class of people whose voting rights are often in jeopardy, who do not, they are, in my state of Oklahoma, they are, their unemployment rate is five times the unemployment rate of people without justice involvement, which means you have a permanent underclass of individuals who cannot have access to jobs because of occupational licensing bans who often do not have access to educational training because of the inability to get grants and to get the same types of FAFSA supports that most students would be able to get who often cannot get a driver's license because of the court debt that we've already described, so you can't get utilities, you can't rent a place, and you have the vast and completely counterproductive and not evidence-based system of probation restrictions. So you have to go to get drug tests every week. You have to go back and forth to therapy. You have to pay if you have a GPS monitor, you pay for that. You pay fines and fees to the district attorneys for the pleasure of them collecting your check every month, that these are the systems that make it impossible for literally millions of Americans to escape poverty. They take the, it takes the racial wealth gap, it makes it worse. It takes the disparities that we see in rural America in education and outcomes makes them worse. I said this to you earlier, but if you think of public policy problems as a fire throughout the United States, the criminal justice system is the accelerant and the probation and parole system that we have that is not based on evidence in many parts of the United States, it is simply based on what we can do with the under-resourced court system that we have and how we can extract fees so we can pay for more court system, whether we need that court system to fix these problems or not. It's an economic model that's both unsustainable, it's not actually funding the government agencies that it's supposed to be funding and it's producing harm to our communities and the economic power of millions of Americans and we can fix it. I like this problem because the solutions are right there. If we can look at what's happening at Texas, if we can look at in states like, even states like South Carolina and Georgia and Louisiana which has a bad incarceration rate like Oklahoma but they're doing things that are reducing incarceration by thousands and they are seeing public safety, their crime rates continue to fall and they are seeing vast millions of dollars in reduction of incarceration costs for their citizens. We can fix this problem, we just need the political will to do it. Wow, thank you so much Damien Shade from the Oklahoma Policy Institute. I feel truly enlightened by this discussion and I know our listeners well as well. This is the State of Working America podcast. You can sign up at epi.org slash podcast. Please subscribe to our YouTube channel or download us wherever you get your podcasts, iTunes, Spotify, et cetera. Thank you so much.


Good evening and welcome to the 2011 Sheboygan County Ferris of the Fair Gala. My name is Heather Leipam and I am so happy to be here. While many of you know me as the person who is usually next to the person at the microphone, I was honored to be asked by the committee to MC and share this exciting evening with all of you. Many of you also know that I am from Sheboygan County, born and raised, but what you may not know is that when I was very young, my parents were fortunate to discover a farmhouse for rent that was owned by the Ernst family just west of Plymouth. And while the Ernst family operated the farm on site, my parents and I lived there several years and that was my introduction to agriculture. Now in the last few years, I've had the privilege of working on committees that planned components of farm technology days and the Alice and Dairyland finals. Those events were amazing successes due to many of you in this room and they come around from time to time. But what could be more important than the culmination of all that is best about Sheboygan County agriculture than the county fair's events every year? This is truly a special place that I know I couldn't be more proud to be from or happier to call home and with my husband Joe, the person usually at the microphone, raise our three children in and we are looking forward to making more family memories of our own at the fair again this year. We have a great night ahead. Thank you all for being here, supporting our candidates and the Ferris program. Tonight, we'll not only learn more about the talents of these young people but of their passion and dedication to their community and the significance of agriculture and the county fair to them. The county fair indeed holds unique memories for many and who would know better than our 2010 Sheboygan County Ferris of the Fair, Brianna Wimler. Let's welcome Brianna. Thank you and welcome everyone to the 2011 Sheboygan County Ferris of the Fair Gala. My name is Brianna Wimler and I had the privilege to serve as the 2010 Ferris. Tonight, we will be choosing the person who will replace me and today I got to know the nine great girls that are competing for this position. We started early this morning and have been running at 100 miles an hour all day in order to get ready for the events tonight. We practiced our speeches, we perfected their introductions and worked on interview questions and talking about what it takes to be a great Ferris and I know that all of them would become great Ferris and so I'm really glad to be here tonight and I'd like you to join me in a round of applause and wish them all great luck tonight. Thank you. We'd like to take this moment to recognize our men and women that are serving for our freedom, those that have given their lives and those that have served our veterans who are here tonight. We salute you and ask you to stand so we may thank you for your service. We'd like to ask you to please stand and we'll welcome Elise Black and Cole Booth of Sheboygan County 4-H to lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance. Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Time to meet our candidates for the 2011 Sheboygan County Ferris of the Fair in alphabetical order. Rachel Bonhoff. What do you get when you cross a bookworm with a can of caffeine? You get Rachel K. Bonhoff. That's me. I'm 18 and I live and work on a family farm in Pullman with my two loving parents, Mark and Sherry Bonhoff and my three extremely tall siblings. I also work at Camp Evelyn for Girl Scouts. I'm also a member and president of the Limelight's 4-H club. I love showing the three C's, Cat's, Cary's and Cow's and my dreams are to be a writer and to be a Lutheran egg teacher. I especially love to make people smile. So are you smiling yet? Please welcome Lauren Bovot. I'm from in Plymouth, Wisconsin and I'm currently attending Concordia University for occupational therapy with a business minor. After graduating Concordia, I hope to start my own therapy program specializing in pediatrics. I have been a member of the Sheboygan County 4-H for the past 12 years and I've had an incredible and amazing experience by ahead of me and I hope to be the next Sheboygan County Ferris wheel fair. Thank you. Please welcome Brittany Faber. I grew up on my family's hobby farm with chickens, pigs and beef kettle as I exhibited them at the fair as well. Assistant Hertzman, managing, working with 1,000 cow dairy.  Thank you. I'm Brittany Sponson, November Falls, studying biology to become a doctor of veterinary medicine. Over the years, I volunteered in a variety of activities such as hurricane relief in New Orleans and using my leadership in student council throughout high school and college to better those around me. I'm a born leader and would use my skills to build the important role of Ferris wheel fair. Thank you. I'm from the Sheboygan County Fair and show rabbit. I also was the Sheboygan County Rabbit Ambassador. Thank you. So milk house on the dairy farm, which is my job, my full-time job. And I also feed the calves and of course, the pet to see this fall to get my CNI license and hopefully be hired in a nursing home or in a hospital. Thank you for coming. And again, my name is Jolie. Mikayla Pockner, studying communications, emphasizing in journalism and photography. After college, I would love to trail to impoverished parts of the world and share my experiences with others. My career goal is to write for a magazine. Thank you. And now please welcome, Katie Reineking. I'm part of Steve and Patty Reineking. This past May, I graduated from the University of River Falls with a bachelor degree in dairy science. Currently, I work on our family farm, Kingsley Holsteins, where I'm the herd manager. One day, I hope to co-own our farm with my brother and be able to expand. Thank you. Now, please welcome, Ashley Ryan. I'm proud to say I've grown up living between my parents' farm and living in downtown to work with my family. I'm going to be attending UW-Chaball even in the fall and I've just graduated from Hart's Girls High School. Thank you for attending tonight and I'm honored to be here. Thank you. Thank you to all of our candidates. It is my honor to introduce to you a very special guest joining us this evening. Alexis Nicolotti is the 2011 Wisconsin Ferris of the Fairs. Alexis grew up in a small dairy farm just outside of Genoa with her large family, parents Steve and Gina, and four younger siblings. They have all been active in 4-H since a very young age, showing swine at the Vernon County Fair. Let's give her a great Sheboygan County welcome. Alexis Nicolotti, your 2011 Wisconsin Ferris to the Ferris. I have been spending this entire day with all of these fine candidates and good luck to all of you guys who've been doing a great job. It's been an honor to get to meet all of you. So my passion is in the fairs and it means so much to me to have so many people here supporting the fair and the Ferris program. I just finished my junior year at Platteville where I am studying business marketing and I have already received my minor in biology. I'm involved in cheerleading. I'm also involved in track and I'm an RA at the housing department down there. I'm so excited for this upcoming summer to visit all of the fairs and do all these different Ferris galas and all of that. So thank you so much for that opportunity. I can't wait to travel to the many, many different counties. So I grew up in Vernon County on a small dairy farm and I was showing at the Vernon County Fair, I showed swine and one of my most favorite experiences with doing so is I painted the swine's toenails before every show and I was sharing that with the candidates earlier today. So it was a lot of fun to do that. I would love to encourage everyone here today to make it to one of those 76 fairs around the state, especially the Shabuigan one, but as well I'd like to invite you to the 160th Wisconsin State Fair. It's presented by U.S. cellular August 4th through the 14th and it's got, that's 11 days, 11 days of entertainment for all ages and there's so much going on. We have one of the fun new things this year is they're having doggy weddings and they're gonna dress the dogs up, have bridesmaids, groomsmen, all of that along with a adolescent personator that will be marrying them. So that's great entertainment that'll be going on every day. They also have a grizzly bear show that will be going on and you'll get to also, there'll be a show that's going on to show you all the different things that these grizzly bears can do. However, they also have them in their natural habitat so that children in anyone of all ages can come and see how it is that they live. So it's a fun experience. So with all of that that's going on at the Fair, there's also the Pottawatomie main stage and there's such large entertainment coming this year that there's surely something for all ages. My favorite and the one that I'm the most excited for is MC Hammer. So I cannot wait, cannot wait for that performance. There's also Blake Shelton, ZZ Top, and tons of other performers that are coming. All I'd like to say is encourage all of you to go to WI State Fair and there's the complete listing of events in different entertainment that's going on. So come on visit the Wisconsin State Fair August 4th through the 14th. It's 11 days of entertainment for all ages. So thank you once again for having me tonight. If I did, I had such a blast getting to know everyone today. So enjoy the rest of the evening and I hope I get to see some of you later. Thank you, Alexis. Now we'd like to introduce our selection panel. The selection team started at 12 o'clock noon today with individual interviews, group interviews, and then a light dinner with the candidates so far. Their jobs aren't over yet as the candidates are still being evaluated on their professionalism, speaking ability, and fair knowledge. I will ask that they please stand as we recognize them and thank them for their commitment to the program. Stephanie Benversi. Stephanie was our 42nd Alice in Dairyland. She holds a master's degree in home economics education from UW-Stout. Stephanie and her husband, Randy, reside in Manitowoc with their three active children. Stephanie is a stay-at-home mom and enjoys visiting her older children that reside at colleges out of state. Thank you, Stephanie. John Rasmussen. John is from Fond du Lac and a dairy specialist for Vita Plus Corporation, an agricultural company that manufactures livestock feed for dairy cows, beef cattle, and swine and includes nutrition consulting and on-farm troubleshooting. John holds a bachelor's science degree in dairy science from UW-Madison and enjoys supporting the Badger teams. Go Red. Thank you, John. Sarah Bradison. Sarah is from Latoma. She is a Northeast Regional Editor for Country Today newspaper. She graduated from UW Eau Claire with a degree in journalism and is a co-author of Stories Guide to Raising Dairy Goats. Sarah is a licensed cheese maker and specializes in promoting Wisconsin dairy goat products. Please join me in thanking the selection panel for their time and dedication to these women in our Ferris program. Thank you. At this time, we'd also like to recognize our special guests who are with us this evening. We've met, there are 2010 Ferris of the Fair Breanna Wimler, Breanna. Also, again, our Wisconsin Ferris of the Fair is Alexis Nicolatti. Our 2004 Sheboygan County Ferris of the Fair and featured guest, Nicole Noll. We have former Ferris also Aaron Jens in attendance. We'd also like to welcome Dr. Roger and Barbara Siegert, Foundation Sponsors. Jean and Kathy Kessner, Foundation Sponsors. The Manitouac Ferris of the Fair, do you understand is with us tonight? Okay, thank you. We have State Representative Steve Kistel, our official photographer, Leslie Blatt of Photos by Leslie Faye, and Sheboygan County Fair members, Fair Board members in attendance. Dan Huberix, Dave Moves, Ron Rail and Lois Rail, Gary Vanderkin and William Rush. Thank you for being here and supporting our program. Okay, are we ready? Here we go. At this time, we're ready to move into the applicant's radio advertisements and impromptu questions on stage. The women drew an order this afternoon for this component of the contest. The first candidate tonight is Makayla Popner, all and a graduate of Random Lake High School. She is currently attending the University of Wisconsin Green Bay majoring in communications. She is currently employed by SHOPCO as an Apparel Sales Floor Associate. Her future goals include studying abroad and to become a writer or editor for a music or fashion magazine, Makayla. For us with friends and family, enjoying great Wisconsin weather, maybe it's screaming at the top of your lungs on a wild amusement ride, or maybe it's just snacking on hot, buttery corn on the cob. Where can you enjoy all this excitement at the Sheboygan County Fair? Join us September 1st through 5th at Plymouth Fair Park for all this excitement and more. Thank you. Thank you, Makayla. And now we will ask her the impromptu question. How has your fair experience shaped your decision to run for the position of Ferris of the Fair? In the Scott Pioneers Club for nine years, and I absolutely enjoyed it. It was my number one activity throughout high school and middle school in the addition. I enjoyed it so much that when I couldn't be in 4-H, I looked for another opportunity to participate in the fair. And I found the Ferris of the Fair program. And I found this was the best fit for me to try and contribute to the Sheboygan County Fair even after I left 4-H. Thank you. Thank you, Makayla. Next we'll welcome Lauren Bobot. Lauren is from Plymouth and a graduate of Plymouth High School. She is currently attending Concordia University, Wisconsin. She is employed as a special needs caregiver for an adult with disabilities and also employed at the Mequon Chancery as a hostess and serves as liaison between the Chancery and Concordia University. Her future goals are to become an occupational therapist and found her own therapy program for kids with special needs. Welcome, Lauren. Good day. Gates open at noon. See you there. Two questions. How has your fair experience shaped your decision to run for the position of Ferris of the Fair? Has definitely shaped my abilities as far as becoming Ferris of the Fair and filling that role because of all the wonderful experiences there. I've been there for so many years. The animal products are incredible. The great food, the concerts, everything is just incredible and it would be awesome to be as involved in the Sheboygan County Fair as I possibly can. As I continue through my life. Thank you. Brittany Faber. Brittany is 20 and a graduate of Plymouth High School and Lakeshore Technical College where she received a technical diploma in Dairy Heard Management. She is currently employed at Soaring Eagle Dairy as Assistant Heard's Person and owner operator of D&B Cattle Company. Her future goals are to continue advancing in her business by selling affordable and profitable club calves for the show circuit. Brittany. I'm at the Sheboygan County Fair September 1st who will fit at the Sheboygan County Fair Park and present out your thing. There's plenty of music and entertainment to go around. Not to mention the various livestock shows to attend. I hope to see you at the fair. Thank you. How has your fair experience shaped your decision to run for the position of Ferris of the Fair? Do you need the question please? Sure, of course. How has your fair experience shaped your decision to run for the position of Ferris of the Fair? When I was 10 years old, I exhibited livestock at the fair including swine and beef cattle and I always looked up to them and the Ferris as a role model as an excellent position. And I feel I've developed leadership qualities such as fulfill the leadership as a Ferris of the Fair. I've also exhibited woodwork and took part in four rejectives at the fair as well that has led me to a part of the film, the Ferris position. So thank you. Thank you. Jolene Menting. I'm Waldo and a graduate of Sheboygan Falls High School. She is attending Concordia University of Wisconsin. She is currently employed by her family farm Split Rail Acres where she is responsible for a multitude of tasks including milking and general care of all farm animals. Her future goals include exploring her options within the field of agriculture while continuing to be involved in her family's dairy farm. Jolene. In our Sheboygan County Fair, September 1st of the Fin. There's a family affair this year including Grand Cratchit, the longer debt shows, and of course the animal sales. But don't forget we have nightly change-ups including a monster truck show, race cars, and of course the demolition derby. So come join me, Sheboygan County Fair of the Fair, Jolene Menting, September 1st of the Fin at Plymouth Fair Park. Thank you. Jolene, here's the impromptu question. How has your fair experience shaped your decision to run for the position of fairest of the fair? Come first, Sheboygan County Fair. There's so many things that if you go to the fair just one day, you'll completely forget about something on the other side. So knowing from the 4-H building through up to the horse barn is really fantastic to know for a fairest because you'd wanna explore other reasons to tell everyone else to come to the fair, not only meet you, but to see everything. Thank you. Heather is from Usberg and a graduate of Usberg High School and Lakeshore Technical College where she received a technical diploma in Dairy Heard Management. She is attending Moraine Park Technical College where she was on the waiting list for the veterinary technician program. Her future goals are to become a veterinary technician and work as a Heard's person, calf razor. Heather. I'm listening from Ryte's notification. Thank you. A prompt to question for Heather. How has your fair experience shaped your decision to run for the position of fairest of the fair? Okay, my fair experience has shaped my career by seeing all the wonderful kids and animals is a big part of my career with being a vet technician and I just wanna show the kids how much there is to animals and how much responsibility and a great learning experience it is for them. Thank you. Stephanie Kemp. Stephanie is from Plymouth and a graduate of Sheboygan Lutheran High School. She is currently attending UW River Falls where she is working toward her bachelor degree in biology. She is currently employed by the UW River Falls Art Department in the Art Gallery and is also employed by the Plymouth Aquatic Center as a lifeguard and lessons instructor. Her future goals are to apply to the Peace Corps to volunteer for services and then attend veterinary school. The Sheboygan County Fair was more fun than you can bear once to give you chills and for more. So come learn, explore and enjoy for every man, woman, girl and boy. Just take a short quick ride to see our Sheboygan County pride. This September 1st through 5th is something you won't want to miss. How has your fair experience shaped your decision to run for the position of fairest of the fair? Well, since I've been involved, the fair will live and implement for so long. The fair has been a big part of my life being involved in 4-H. It has influenced me to run for fairest of the fair because it's such an enjoyable time in my life and I look forward to the fair every single year and I want to promote the fair so other people can experience the fun and enjoyment that it all offers. Thank you. Ashley Ryan. Ashley is from Sheboygan. She's a graduate of Howard Grove High School and will be attending UW-Sheboygan majoring in agribusiness. She is currently employed by Lino Ristorante Italiano as a server assistant. Her future goals include working in the marketing field to help promote agribusiness and complete her rating of a horse management fee in the United States Pony Club. Ashley. Here's a fair inviting you to come out to the fair September 1st through the 5th. Bring the family out for some fun family entertainment including tractor poles, grandpa cratchet and the lumberjack show. We're featuring some great fans this year including the UW marching band, Red Star Express, Copper Box and Vic Ferrari. It's five days of affordable family entertainment at the Sheboygan County Fair. See you there. How has your fair experience shaped your decision to run for the position of fairest of the fair? My fair experience, I've always had a lot of fun at the Sheboygan County Fair. It's a really outgoing experience and I've had so many great memories at the fair and I want to be able to share those memories with people and help make so many families and kids have great memories that they want to be able to come back to the fair with their family and with their friends and share those great experiences with all the people around them. I want to be able to just promote the fair as a whole for families and kids and I want to just share all those memories with everyone because I've had so many great memories over all the years I've been there. Thank you. Katie Reina King. Katie is from Plymouth and a graduate of Howard's Grove High School and the University of Wisconsin River Falls with a Bachelor of Science degree in Dairy Science. She is currently employed by Kingsview Holsteens, her family farm, where she is a full-time milker and is involved in the breeding and nutrition of the animals. Her future goals include owning and expanding her own family farm. Katie. Music, lumberjacks, tractor farm, indulged in hot Wisconsin cheese, funnel cakes, and cream puffs while kids scream on rides and beg for a pound candy and snow cones. Blue ribbon animals and buildings full of 4-H projects. Fun is guaranteed for the whole family at the Sheboygan County Fair. Labor Day weekend, September 1st through the 5th. Katie, how has your fair experience shaped your decision to run for the position of Ferris of the Fair? Well, the fair has helped me decide to run for Ferris because it is something that has always been important to me and I think being able to teach kids and show kids and families different parts of the fair is very important and also very educational. Thank you. And Rachel Bonoff. Rachel is from Plymouth and a graduate of Sheboygan Lutheran High School. She will be attending Concordia University this fall to major in secondary education, English and biology. She is currently employed at Fantasy Farms where she is a small animal caretaker and groundskeeper. She is also employed at Camp Evelyn where she is a camp counselor. Her future goals are to write and to become a published author. Rachel. Words like Raj Fry, yup, random leg art and do you know that the Packers are the best footballs that's in Plymouth, Lumberjack and Band Rocky, four wheel smashing, car smashing, Ferris wheeling, produce judging and of course, cream puff snarking time. Prompt to question, how has your fair experience shaped your decision to run for the position of fairest of the fair? I've gone to the fair every year of my life that I can remember and I've gradually done more and more things at the fair. I started showing and stuff, you know, cats and cows and you know, I started spending longer time at the fair and there's also a second part of me as you know and that's the love princesses and happy endings and I just, every time I'm showing I see this, they're always very beautiful. I'm just gonna say it's the fairest of the fair and she's her sparkly crown and she always just seems so amazing and happy and just inspired me and so I'm like, I want to be like that and I also have an older sister who I look up to and she was gonna run with me for fairest of the fair and we're gonna do it together even though only one could win it probably wouldn't have been either of us but unfortunately she had finals and she wasn't able to but I'm here because fairest of the fair inspired me and the fair inspired me to run just because I'm so in love with the fair and just being able to express it and of course all those amazing romance around me so thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Well done candidates. Let's show them our appreciation for their onstage presence. At this time, we'll please excuse our judges. Thank you judges. So good evening friends. Thanks for coming out to celebrate the candidates that have brought so much talent to our county and our evening. If you get the opportunity you should get their autograph like I did. They've worked hard to be here and to present their talents. Congratulations to you all. I'd like to also congratulate Brianna for her term and serving and helping our county grow with the fair and the people that you meet. She's a passionate woman that I got to talk with. I'd also like to thank the fairest of the fair committee for welcoming me back, inviting me back. I think I was your favorite. I like what is it like to be fairest of the fair a little bit and tell you what getting involved could mean and where it could take you in life. So I had to do a little bit of digging into the history. Yes, I dusted off my journals, my binders, my videos, my photographs, like the scrapbook that Brianna made. A couple of interesting things. The first one that stands out is my first parade in Elkhart Lake. There was a young man that came up to me just like you had mentioned in the tiara and the sash. He was all in awe. Can I take a picture with you? Well, of course I would oblige. And his mother came up to snap the picture. Little did I know she was gonna run home during the parade, print it off and bring me a copy. At the end, that was an inspiration for me my entire term hanging on the bathroom mirror. So that's a priceless memory that you get. I also found out that I tried three times for fairest of the fair because people like Jessica Ford had inspired me while she was fairest. And then I earned the title. During my term, I learned a couple of things. Like things about myself that made me seek the Dale Carnegie public speaking course. And that made me get a sales job, fall in love and get married. Some things in my history book are amazing and some things we'll just call history. But my point is that past experiences can fuel your future. It can either propel you to achievements or it can push you to learn things and to grow. For instance, tonight, I'm asking each of you to be your best and maybe participate a little bit.  Hopefully that's everyone in the room. Yes, they're all there. Okay, keep the hands in the air.  If like the candidates talked about you have a favorite memory from the Sheboygan County Fair. Hands can go a little higher in there. That's great.  Thanks. Good job being put those down. Welcome to the edge of your comfort zone. It's an amazing place to be and things that you find. Running for Ferris is the first place to stretch that comfort zone, which our candidates have done. And you can do every day, finding your talents and your skills by encouraging other people. Did I know that the encouragement of a friend in 2004 was gonna land me the serving as Ferris of the Fair? Did I know that was gonna take me to the Dale Carnegie program in 2006? And that I'd meet a wonderful man who would become my husband in 2008? No, couldn't protect that stuff. But it was wonderful to get there. And a few things have changed a long way. It's okay to make adjustments. Like, I had a dream of being Alice in Dairyland. I traded that for family life in a career in Green Bay. But I stayed true to my passion of agriculture. In fact, yesterday I took my in-laws to the Audigamy County breakfast on the farm to show them a modern milking parlor. 12 on each side, machines going. And in July, I'm taking my husband on a vacation to the Marathon County Farm Technology Days near Marshfield. I'm sure he married me for adventures like that. Our future endeavors include starting a Brown County Ferris of the Fair program because lessons like this, I can apply other places. Hosting an Alice in Dairyland finals, hopefully before moving back to Sheboygan County. What does your future look like? Are you willing to impact somebody in the next day, week, month, year, like these girls are committing to? Encouraging them to touch agriculture or the Sheboygan County Fair? Please do it and open the opportunities. Like last year, we came up with a photo scavenger hunt for a friend of ours that was engaged. Yes, we used the Sheboygan County Fair. We had to play in the sandbox, we had to go to the horse barn, those kind of things. And now every fair season, that's gonna make us remember the time that Katie got on the stage with Mount Madison County. As I close, there's a few nuggets of wisdom that I'd like to pass on. It's not only the candidates, but everyone in the room that you can count your blessings and achievements often. Those are the moments that define you. Being here tonight defines you, it's a moment. Even though only one person gets the title tonight, everyone in this room is a fair promoter and you can continue to do it. In fact, you can take action tomorrow. Offer a word of encouragement because history is made and legacies are built by the people in this room. Then make this the year that you chase your dreams. Fast or slow, you'll get there, like I did. And you'll inspire or assist others along the way. Thank you for being part of my adventure, whether it was six plus years ago or tonight. And thank you, I hope you have a wonderful treatment. Thank you, Nicole. Now we'd like to ask Gary Vanderkin, the president of the Sheboygan County Fair Association to provide us with an update of the 2011 Sheboygan County Fair. And Nicole talks of a comfort level. It's not me up here, believe me, I hate this. Not good at it. Courtney Drags-Milpia, we're here to occupy a little time. And I'm here. Okay, yeah, okay. You take care of that. Hats off to Courtney and her committee for doing a great job. Nine candidates, probably a record, I'm guessing. You did a great job. I get up here and I'll forget things I wanted to say. Vernon County, where are you from in Vernon County? 20 years of my best times ever, third weekend in November, deer hunting, never forget it. There's more deer, I can get a deer in Vernon County. Anybody can get a deer in Vernon County. You can get a deer in Vernon County? I just had to ask you that, I'm sorry. Okay, update on the fair. First of all, everybody says you gotta change the fair. How do you change the fair? It's kind of the way it is, you know? We have tractors, we have animals and stuff like that. There's not much you can change up, you know? We've been very successful. Last year we had a little glitch. We took a bath, literally, financially. We had a little tough year last year. We're gonna come back, we'll come back strongly this year. Thursday night we're gonna start out with our animal sale again and our local tractor pull. Friday evening, we're gonna go with the big tractor pull and Saturday, we're gonna mix it up a little bit and Saturday night, I think we're gonna go racing, correct, Saturday night we're gonna do a little race program. We're kind of successful at racing. It's not a big, it's not a big, we're not gonna lose money on it, let's say that, okay? Sunday night we're gonna go and try a little monster truck. Sunday night we're gonna try a monster truck pull and then the afternoon we have the UW band, we have the Ferturity Show and they tell me I'm not a real big animal person, you know? But they say our Ferturity Show is the envy of all the state. And hands off to them people who have put this together and years ago we spent some money to fared it and we got them going and they took over and it's all them now. They do a great job and I'm not kidding, we are the envy of the whole state on that. So, like Sunday night we're gonna try this monster truck thing. I don't know if it's gonna work or not, we hope it is. And then Monday, Monday is Teradon Day but we're gonna do that Demo Derby which is just fantastically successful. Now that's probably 10 albums and she's calling them and I can't help it, that's just the way it is. I'm not a good doctor. I just wanna defend ourselves a little bit too. People will be looking for the big axe and I just wanna tell you right now we're not gonna do the big axe for a while. We're not gonna do them this year and probably next year either. I know we are contracting for next year we're getting together with a motocross deal which I think is gonna be very good but we need a lot of dirt and we're getting a lot of dirt in for that next year. But I just wanted to say that nobody really knows what these axe costs. Last year we had sticks and they cost us and I'm not kidding, it was $55,000 just for one axe. We had a country axe and I stand here and I forgot the guy's name but it was $35,000 to $45,000 for a country axe and we didn't do good. Now that's just the axe themselves that doesn't include the stage, the lighting, the sound. To produce them two shows last year cost us $163,000. We have to hire 20 stage hands to set up and to tear down. I just wanna defend us because people ask me all the time what about the big axe? Well, we're not gonna do the big axe this year and I don't know if we can for a long time to come with the casinos, with summer fest, with country fest, with rock fest this year. We just can't compete. But we're looking forward to a great fair and in fact, if we wanted the fair tomorrow, we could. We're ready to go. Everything's set in place. We have a few things to do. We have to walk a few different pans maybe but I thought I'm a hard of tap. Okay. So we're ready to go and thank you this evening for coming and I really appreciate it. Thank you, Courtney and you for many for what you do for us. Thank you. As we prepare for our entertainment portion of the evening, we will take the chance to formally chat with the candidates. We spoke earlier and talked about what we might do this about while we set up. And we thought we could ask each of us if we all want to share a fair experience that's special to you or perhaps something, if you covered that maybe in something else that you talked about today or something about this experience that stands out and special to you. Thank you. We're going to leave on Rebecca if you know what I'm going to do. I'm just going to guide you by if you're going to get to your specific, especially if you're going to be left. So let me take that and start making work with you. I'm going to show you how much that you spoke up and she's a good date. I'm going to do that now. I'm just going to let you know that it's a little bit of a strange thing. Any company needs to hear you. She was like, what? And it was very, very strange. I'm going to stand out to you. One of my first years at the fair, I was showing a duck. And I was so excited about this duck. I got him for my birthday, a little before I left and he came from my uncle's. Took him to the fair and he got judged and the ducks get judged in their cage where the other chickens, we take up to the judge come up for showmanship and the judge goes, do you know what you have a problem with your duck? Somebody told me, but he's handicapped. My duck was the best ever. Probably should have worked a little harder with them. Not going to lie. And showmanship, I was trying to pen them and when it's hot and they're not well tamed, they tend not to listen. Well, frustration and impatience built up and thankfully the judge understood what the weather conditions I might pick did not want to cooperate, but I'll take a reserve champion showman which was pretty exciting, but that was probably the most memorable man. I can't think of just one memory. So I'd have to say my favorite part of the fair is seeing all the animals. It's sad that they aren't all mine, but it is nice to see all the people who are dedicated to showing their animals and seeing how nice and soft and fuzzy the rabbits are. When I first started showing, I showed dairy. I got through the first round and I was gonna go clean my halt there and little did I know that I adjusted the thing and when I did showmanship, she got loose and ran wild. Luckily my dad was there to catch her and bring her back to me. I started showing my horse. I walked in, I was so ready. I had the naughtiest horse ever. None of you know who my horse is. He was young and I was young and I walked up to the judge and he was staying still. She laughs at me and turns my hat around. I walked into the room with my hat on backwards. Five years myself, along with other members of the Shibuya County Sewing Project, were proud to bring high fashion to Shibuya County Fair. Especially being in dairy, but one that sticks out was one year I'm always told you sign that your animal's up, you've got to take them off. And this was the first year and only that I was told to keep one home because no one else liked her, but I did. And I did all the work with her and I walked out of the ring with first place in the troll. I had my pony at fair and I thought it'd be really fun to do a costume class with my cousin.  Yeah, my company's laughing. And it took like two hours to paint the pony and we got these costumes.  We thought we were gonna get first place and we got like a third. Our entertainment, as you can see, is brought to us by the hardworking 4-H Club members and parents of the Johnsonville Hustlers 4-H Club. They will be presenting Thanksgiving dinner, a lesson in cooperation. I wanted to say this, may I have the envelopes please? The first mention, sorry, a little more suspense. The second runner-up will receive a $100 cash award from the Ferris program. The first runner-up will be active, filling the shoes of the Ferris in areas where she is not able to attend. First runner-up will receive a $200 cash award from Jean and Kathy Kessner. Thank you, Kessners. Our 2011 Ferris of the Fair will be responsible for serving as a Sheboygan County Fair official host Labor Day Weekend, as well as participate and represent Sheboygan County in the state competition in January. The winner this evening will be receiving the Dr. Roger M. Barbara Seegard Family Foundation Scholarship of $500. Thank you, Seegards. Additionally this year, the winner will be receiving a $250 scholarship award from a grant provided by the 2006 Farm Technology Days in Sheboygan County Committee. Please step forward as your name is called. We have a drum roll. Our 2011 second runner-up is Jolene Mending. Sheboygan County Ferris of the Fair supporting you wherever your paths lead in the future. And thank you all for supporting these outstanding candidates. The Ferris of the Fair program and the Sheboygan County Fair, please stay enjoy each other's company. Have a safe ride home. Good night. Thank you. Thank you.