Harm and Forgiveness in Restorative Justice
- [Speaker] Yeah.
- [Speaker] So true.
- [Speaker] Yeah.
- [Speaker] Yeah.
- [Speaker] Exactly.
- [Julian] Hey, guys.
- [Speaker] Hi.
- [Julian] How are you?
- [Speaker] Good, good,
- [Julian] Nice to see you.
- [Speaker] You too.
- [Julian] How’s your weekend? Yeah. So it sounds like and then question and
- [Speaker] Yeah, it’s on the second. It’s the second slide on the page. You just want to compress it and see the results. Yeah.
- [Speaker] Yeah.
- [Speaker] Okay.
- [Speaker] Yes.
- [Speaker] Yep, that’s a good yep, and it was the ones that you guys suggested so that is in poor slide.
- [Julian] Are we good now?
- [Speaker] Yeah, yeah, so you get up there. You say this
- [Speaker] You say the slides
- [Julian] Okay.
- [Speaker] Am I
- [Speaker] Okay, all right, aperture that’s what she told you
- [Julian] Okay. you wanna?
- [Julian] I don’t have time
- [Speaker] Yeah.
- [Speaker] Yeah. Okay. Yeah, okay.
- [Speaker] It just causes you to
- [Julian] Right, right.
- [Speaker] Going super meta off the whole thing.
- All right. Hello, hello, hello. Welcome one, welcome all. My name is Julian Portilla, and I am one of the instructors in this very exciting, thrilling course on conflict transformation with the new center for conflict transformation. And boy, it’s a lot of fun. One of the great things, I’m sorry, is that better? Yeah, okay, great. So I’m Julian, I won’t repeat all that, but one of the great things about teaching this course on conflict transformation is that we get to invite all these wonderful people from all over the world who do fascinating work. And one of those people today is Sujatha Baliga. I’m super excited to have her here today. You can Google her and find out all kinds of details, but here’s a few highlights. Her work is characterized by an equal dedication to crime survivors and people who have caused harm, that should give you pause. She helps communities to change their justice systems, looking for ways to implement RJ practices, restorative justice practices rather than maybe more classic approaches to justice and order. She’s been a third party in a large number of conversations involving restorative justice. Now in just about every category of terrible crime that you can imagine and has some really powerful stories about the outcomes of those conversations. She’s a lawyer. It’s okay. She went to to Harvard and then to Penn. She’s been a Soros Justice Fellows. She was a Just Beginnings Collaborative fellow. She was a MacArthur fellow, maybe you heard her name on NPR when they interviewed her about her. It was pretty neat. And she’s got personal and professional connections to Vermont, which is fantastic. And I can also tell you that her husband is a great mountain biker and he is a lot of fun to hang out with as well. So I’m delighted to have her here. She has so much wisdom and thoughtful experience to talk about and share with you. Welcome Sujatha.
- Thank you, Julian. And thank you everyone for having me here. It’s just been a joy to be back in Vermont. Before I get started, we are gonna start with a question that we would like you to discuss with your neighbor and you’ll see it up there. So take a moment now to find a person to chat with. Maybe there’s somebody behind you if you’re sitting solo. And I’d ask you to briefly introduce yourself, and then discuss this question. Imagine a community or society in which there’s no such thing as punishment and yet everyone agrees that their society is moral, fair, safe, and just. Serious harm does occur in this society from time to time. How do you imagine such harm is addressed without punishment yet results in the shared belief that theirs is a moral, safe, fair, just society? So let’s take a few minutes to discuss amongst yourselves, introduce yourself. Maybe pick somebody that you haven’t been married to for decades if you happen to be sitting next to someone to whom you’ve been married for decades, and say, hi, introduce yourself and have a little chat about these ideas. Thanks folks. I’m sensing the lull that is coming. Did y’all notice that it all kind of got quiet at once, so maybe that’s a good sign. So there’s no right answer, but it’s a real, I’d like to encourage you to go home and journal about it, think about it, draw about it, pain about it, meditate about it. Not just sort of technical terms and things, but like literally what does it look like? Like what does it look like? What does it smell like? What does it feel like? These kinds of processes in this kind of world in which these folks are living in. And then sort of you go to bed, maybe dream that we’re all headed there. That would be really wonderful, ‘cause dreaming is the way to start. So before I get sort of into the meat of the talk, I’d love for you all to share a moment with me in silence. It really helps me center myself and I hope that it will help others sort of welcoming us to enter this space and to become present to ourselves and one another and the space and the ideas we’re gonna be engaging with. And so let’s start with a moment of silence, maybe it’ll be about a minute. I’m just enjoying the silence if that’s something you enjoy or if you so choose to pay attention to your breath as it comes and goes at its own natural pace. And so maybe you might notice your belly rising and falling. If you feel like sharing this time with me doing this, just notice your belly rising and falling. Or maybe you notice some sensations in your nostrils or above the upper lip. Just take a moment to acknowledge our true friend, the breath, as we’re noticing the breath, we can think about how our breath is our first and most constant friend who’s literally been here since our very first breath and will be with us until our last breath. And it’s a really wonderful tool in conflict transformation and in restorative justice, and in any kinds of relationships that we’re in, including parenting. Our breath can say to us in this beautiful non-judgmental way, Hey, I’m here, and I’m sensing that you seem agitated and we take a moment to notice our breath. We can see there’s all kinds of information that’s giving us without any sense of judgment. You had a friend telling you, you seem agitated, you probably wanna punch him. We don’t punch the breath, right? So let’s take some time to really be grateful for the breath and how it lets us know how we’re doing without any sense of judgment. Thank you, everybody. So the title of this talk is Harm and Forgiveness in Restorative Justice. And I’m gonna take those in sort of a completely mixed up order. We’ll start with a little bit about what is restorative justice and within that we’ll talk about harm and maybe in some ways in which it might differentiate, be differentiated from, or maybe sit up under the larger umbrella of conflict transformation. There’s a lot of debate about whether or not that’s the case. And so happy to sort of add questions to that without any concrete answers. And then we’ll get a little bit to the topic of forgiveness. And I know that a lot of places I go, and I really appreciate the sentiment behind this that we spend time thinking about the folks who came before us here on this land and doing a land acknowledgement. But something that I have learned from many Indigenous folks that I have the incredible blessing of learning from and spending time with is that that’s not how they do things, right? They don’t start with thinking about how, they’ve been wronged and all the things that they’ve lost, but rather that they start with something what the Maori people call Whakapapa, which is to talk about your own lineage and genealogy. And the reason that you do this, they literally talk about like the canoe that left, everyone knows the canoe that their lineage comes from that left Hawaii and came to New Zealand, Aotearoa as they say. And what was the canoe? What is the mountain that they originate from and who their lineage is. And it’s a beautiful thing to remember who we are when we are so privileged to be able to do so. But it also really builds a sense of relationship and understanding from the beginning of the conversation, to whom do we belong? And to whom are we, who are we in reciprocity with and in an obligatory reciprocal relationship with? That tells us a lot about one another. And so there’s a similar question that I see all the time in Oakland, California where I do most of my work. When I’m sitting in circle with kids who are at risk of being criminalized, an opening question is often, who shoulders am I standing on? And so when I first heard this question, who shoulders am I standing on? I was really uncomfortable with it because when I think about my elders, like that’s the last thing we do. We actually touch their feet. We don’t stand up on their, but our feet do not go on their bodies anywhere. This was an interesting thing to notice in myself. And so I think of it as whose feet do I touch? From whom do I get my blessings? And so I’ve learned from so many Bodhisattvas masquerading around as public defenders and peacemakers and things of that nature. And so in particular, it’s great to be back in Vermont where I learned so much right out of law school from Judge William Sessions, who I’m so pleased to see here today. I was a federal clerk, a law clerk for him in the federal court and I chose working for the judge because, and I was so lucky he chose me to be able to do so, because he was one of the very small number of federal judges who was previously a public defender. There were like literally a number you could count on two hands at that time, I think. So that’s why he was very much on the short list of judges I wanted to work with. And so I’m so deeply grateful for that year I spent in chambers and for the relationship that continues to this day. I’m also deeply indebted in my work to the Tibetans who kept an Ancient Indian Buddhist set of teachings alive, the Nalanda tradition and it’s a Sanskrit school of Tibetan. Now Tibetan Buddhism lost to India. But in those teachings, there was a whole lot about justice, about how we treat one another, literally including like you should never have solitary confinement like this stuff was written down thousands of years ago. And so really grateful to his holiness Dalai Lama, and all the Tibetans who kept these kind of fundamental teachings of our interdependence and how we might have justice that flows out of our knowledge and wisdom about the interdependent relationship, nature of human relationships, sin of all of existence. I’m also deeply, deeply indebted to Howard Zehr, and many other Mennonite people who actually coined the phrase restorative justice by reading their Bibles and trying to find their way to a thing that they used to call a covenant justice. And one of my principal teachers as well is Justice Robert Yazzie. He is the former chief justice of the Navajo Nation, who teaches me that when Indigenous people say all my relations, they are talking again about this notion of universal reciprocity and collective responsibility to one another. So there are countless other people whose shoulders I’m standing on, people in the restorative justice movements who have worked really hard to center racial and ethnic disparities in the way in which restorative justice has rolled out. I’ve been incredibly blessed to work with people like Fania Davis and Cheryl Graves and so many others. I also wanna name, today, that I’m gonna be talking a little bit about my own personal history and how I came to this work and it involves my survivor journey. And so just there’s a general sort of content warning that I wanna put out there. And I won’t be speaking about details specifically, but I just wanna let you know that if you need to return to your breath or leave the room when I’m talking about this stuff, I do not take that sort of thing personally. I encourage you to take care of yourself. So in that, you know, it’s interesting to think about, again, when I think about the Maori folks who’ve taught me about Whakapapa, they pushed me to talk about my own personal lineage about which I was quite uncomfortable doing in part because I am both the product of, but also deeply disconnected from the Gaud Saraswat Brahmins Konkani people who gave me my first language. And I feel in my bones though, this is why I had to really sit with what they were asking of me, both the casteism that I grew up in and the racism that I grew up in rural South Central Pennsylvania. And so I feel in my bones that their survival of the cultural and religious genocide by the Portuguese implanted in me a capacity to survive the racial violence at school, on the school buses, and the playgrounds and the sexual violence that I was enduring in my home in rural Pennsylvania in the 1970s and 1980s. And so for that capacity to survive, I am deeply grateful and I’ve learned so much. So I’ve been on a long and winding journey from victim advocacy to being a public defender, ultimately to the field of restorative justice. And all of it has really been driven by this motto that was given to me a few years ago by a fellow child sexual abuse survivor. And it is, “Be who you needed when you were younger.” “Be who you needed when you were younger.” And so my work has been leaning more and more towards explicitly naming the necessity of engaging with abolitionist concepts around the criminal legal system. Because what I know is that what I didn’t need when I was a child was for my father to be locked up or for child protective services to take me away from my amma and my akka, for there to be potential immigration consequences for my family. And so that I knew as a wise child and because I knew all of that, I never told anyone what was happening. I like most survivors of these types of harms, remain silent about the things that I was living through. And the data bears that out on a number of fronts. So we know that in a hundred incidents of child sexual abuse, depending on the state, maybe 10 to 18, we think, because it’s so under-reported that it’s hard to come up with this data are reported to some version of the authorities, six people out of a 100 are prosecuted, less than three are convicted. And when you think about what those convictions are for, it’s usually for something that’s pled way down, not what it is that had actually happened often. And so another thing to think about is that in terms of intimate partner violence, that 50 percent of survivors don’t contact the system at all. And of those who do only 20 percent say it made them safer. And so the system I knew, and then as I started to learn more about the data around these particular crimes and many others as well, that we needed to find another way. So I started looking and I heard about an amazing community, an Ojibwe community in upper Manitoba called Hollow Water. And I would strongly suggest folks who are interested in learning more about it to check it out. It’s a film that is available freely from the Canadian Film Review Board. And it is about how a community that was dealing with transgenerational trauma around sexual harm started with the boarding school crisis where children were taken away and experienced severe harm in the boarding schools, came back to their communities and perpetrated those same harms against the children in those communities. And then the state wanted to step back in and take those kids away again. And they said, hold up, that’s what you did the last time, and now we’re in this mess, so is there some other way we can do this? And they had forgotten what they called their medicine and they learned it from the neighboring Cree tribes and started doing circle process in order to heal. And they had basically an ending of child sexual abuse in their community through open dialogue, direct dialogue with all the family members who were involved in the harm, the people who experienced it, the kids who experienced it, the parents were perpetrating it, other adults who are perpetrating the harms. And so I thought, oh my goodness, how do we start that here? And I tried for a few years and realized that was not a place to start, but I did think that there were other places that we could get these things started in California, found some district attorneys and judges who are really willing to think about doing it in the youth diversion context, not around sexual harm in the beginning. Eventually we got there, but that’s sort of the trajectory of my work. So I like to also, when I go to places, tell people where they stand in terms of the stats. So how does Vermont’s incarceration rate compare? So doing really well compared to the rest of the country. But since Vermonters we know very much more think of themselves as Europeans, I think in a number of regards, I would ask you to look at the other nations here beneath the Vermont numbers and just sort of gives a sense of where it is that you sit. And in thinking about racial and ethnic disparity is a really important thing to consider. We don’t actually have this many people incarcerated in Vermont. These are per a hundred thousand people. You can see the disparities here in racial and ethnic disparities with regard to incarceration rates, important things to consider. So with that, these and so many other problems with the criminal legal system as it currently operates why I wanted to get involved in restorative justice. So what is it? Everybody uses the words restorative justice for everything these days. And my former boss used to joke, he says, this is Sujatha, she runs our, that’s not restorative justice project. I spent all my time telling people I love what you do. Your gang tattoo removal program is wonderful. That is not restorative justice. I love that you’ve started a youth court in which you’re teaching young people what the actual system currently is, but just having kids run a thing that is exactly like the thing we do or some version of it is not restorative justice, right? So what is it? So one of my teachers, Robert Yazzie, thinks it’s hubris to define it, and he believes that it is deeply tied to Indigenous peacemaking at its roots. And he says life comes from it. That is how he talks about it. He talks about moving forward in a good way. And he says things like, start from the east and walk clockwise. And I have to spend lots of time with him to begin to understand what he might be meaning by that. But in general, I just need to start by saying Justice Yazzie says, he can’t define it, but Howard Zehr says you can. So Howard Zehr is known as the grandfather of restorative justice, and is a dear friend and mentor, and he says “It’s an approach to justice that involves to the extent possible all those who have a stake in a specific harm or offense to collectively identify and address harms, needs, and obligations, in order to put things as right as possible.” So that’s a lot of words, and I could spend a lot of time breaking down those words, but I would just encourage people to just, you know, go back and look at this, it’s everywhere on the internet. And really think about each clause and what it means and why each word might be there. Because Howard spent a lot of time thinking about it and I think it’s very powerful definition of what restorative justice actually is. And so he also really frames it as a paradigm shift. And so when Howard first coined the term, there’s a seminal text in the field written over 25 years ago called Changing Lenses. And in that text, he talks a lot about Thomas Kuhn’s structures of scientific revolution and about the nature of paradigm shift and how we ought to be thinking about restorative justice as a paradigm shift, not as a way of making our current systems as in the paradigm that they’re in, a punishment based system, slightly less punishing let’s say. But really to think about it as a complete shift in the way in which we’re thinking. So what questions do we ask about wrongdoing today? Whether we think about school discipline or the criminal legal system, if someone’s done something that crosses some boundary that we believe shouldn’t be crossed, we often ask questions like what law was broken? Who broke it? And how should they be punished? And restorative justice by contrast asks a completely different question, set of questions. It asks, who is harmed and what do they need and whose obligation is it to meet those needs? So if we were only asking those first two questions like who is harmed and what do they need? That’s just what we should do anytime. Anyone we love or care about is suffering something terrible, right? Like what happened? Like what do you need to have happen now? But when we add that question of whose obligation is it to meet those needs, that’s where it becomes a justice paradigm. And to leave that question out really, to my mind, you can do restorative practices with the who’s harmed and what do they need or what happened and what needs to happen? But that without explicitly asking about whose obligation it is to meet those needs, and we’re not gonna have a real feeling that justice has been done at the end. So when we look at these two side by side, it’s really interesting to think about to whom and what do we attend and who do we attend to first in a sense, right? And so when I meet with crime survivors, when I’m getting them ready to participate in a restored justice process, sitting down and asking them how they were harmed and what they need is a real, it’s really overwhelming for them sometimes, right? Because nobody’s ever asked them that before. They think that it’s like, well, there was a rule that was broken, I have to get my testimony together to do what the system has already decided is the right outcome. We’re moving in this direction. And so it can be a little bit destabilizing and that’s why it takes time. Although I will say on the whole restorative processes don’t need to take more time than court processes need to take, especially when there’s delay after delay after delay. And so just sitting with the distinction between these two, and particularly, the starting point as a survivor myself, feels really liberating, and yeah, centers me. And so what is interesting about this is that people often say restorative justice is like being soft on folks or whatever. And that it’s not for survivors, it’s for the folks who caused harm. But if we’re operating within this framework, it literally starts with a crime survivor and what they need. And having my self-identified needs met through a process. I can’t think of anything that might be more empowering than that. So the big picture in restorative justice is that crime is a violation of people and interpersonal relationships and those violations create obligations. And the central obligation is to as much as possible do right by the folks that you’ve harmed. I put crime in quotations here, because I’m not really necessarily wedded to these Western definitions or notions of transgressions of law because I think there are all kinds of harms that we can be addressing through restorative processes that can feel and be quite severe without it being a transgression of some rule or law. Yeah, and I’m more interested in harm in how it’s defined by families and communities and the people who’ve experienced it. And so in thinking about the paradigm shift view, I’ve been thinking a lot about, “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” was one of my favorite books in college. And I think about the worldview in which the view and that centered, when we think about a big paradigm shift phrase, we used to think that the earth was in the center of the solar system and then we figured out that the sun was in the center of the solar system, right? And so this is my terrible drawing of, I don’t even know what continents or whatever are there, so forgive my artwork, but this notion that the Earth was in the center and the sun was revolving around it, and that what was actually going on was, the sun was in the middle, right? And for 200 years, there was a raging debate and there were trials and inquisitions and all kinds of things in which scientists who said that they believed that the sun was in the middle were punished and severely so. And what was happening was along the way, the current system, there were anomalies that were starting to show up, right? Like planets were going retrograde, and maybe gravity didn’t work sometimes or I don’t know, I’m making it up now, but that’s the science part I shouldn’t try to talk about. But what was really fascinating about it, right, was that there was such deep weddedness to the present system that they kept trying to resolve the anomalies in some way that kept the current system going, right? And so when I think about this, with regard to, and then eventually that resolving didn’t work and ultimately, all the answers got solved by just putting the sun in the middle. And then 200 years later, everybody believed, most everybody believed that the sun was in the middle. So when I think about this from the perspective where we are today, when I think about punitiveness in the carceral state, I think of the heliocentric paradigm, the one in which we put the sun in the middle as one in which, one of my friends, Cheryl Fairbanks and a Tlingit woman talks about the three cousins she says of Indigenous peacemakers and restorative justice practitioners and transformative justice practitioners that we’re over here saying, we think the sun is in the middle y’all. And that we’re gonna be in this place of 200 years of figuring it out together. So as a former victim advocate and a former public defender, it’s important to me to not start to criticize all of the trying to resolve the anomalies as sellout work, as letting the steam out of the pressure cooker, as incrementalism, that people get accused of as we’re trying to reform systems. Because when I think about the human beings that require our attention and our love and our care, we have to be doing what the current system is doing as well as we possibly can. And we have to be pointing out the anomalies, right? Pregnant women giving birth in shackles. So it’s great when legislation gets passed to stop that, right? Or people serving 25 years for a crime they didn’t commit like a friend of mine, who got a big settlement from the state because he was locked up for so long. So saying that it’s incrementalism or some sort of sellout thing to be, trying to make reforms in the current way, we’re doing things I don’t think is very wise. And I don’t think it’s a position folks take when they are sufficiently proximate with the people who are suffering in the current system. So it’s an important thing to consider. So what does it look like and feel like? I mean I could tell a hundred thousand stories and I don’t wanna do that ‘cause I wanna leave lots of time for Q&A in discussion, but I really like this picture, President Obama sitting in a circle in Chicago with some folks and it can look and feel anyway, it can look like a lot of different Indigenous practices and it can also look and feel like this in a classroom. And one of the things that I see the most is the way President Obama’s got his elbows on his knees and he is listening, listening, listening, deeply listening as if everything else in the world has disappeared, and whoever it is that is sharing is getting his undivided attention. And that is the majority of what it looks like. It looks like really listening to understand one another. And when we’re taking turns going around the circle and each person is speaking in turn to suspend the notion that we have to be coming up with an answer to what that person said. And if the circle is big enough and strong enough what you were gonna say gets said before it comes back around and some deeper knowledge and understanding comes about. So in particular in circle process, what I really love is in the first round, people get their stuff out there and in the second round, people sometimes spend a lot of time debating, which we weren’t supposed to do ‘cause we’re just supposed to be listening and thinking from our own place but it happens, and in the third round, there’s some more resolution, and then in the fourth round, in the fifth round, in the sixth round, we start to spiral from downwards to upwards. And it is a really beautiful moment to feel that shift into really hearing and understanding one another. And then there’s a certain point at which folks start to talk about what needs to happen next. And at that point, we stop and we eat, because hungry people are angry people and they can’t come up with good solutions. And often if it’s a serious situation in which somebody has caused harm and it’s not something we’re just trying to understand better together, that person will leave the room with their supporters and family and come up with a draft plan to repair the harm. And then it gets brought back and gets brought back to the group. And the first person we ask about, how’s this plan look, or did what you say get heard? And are your needs getting addressed in this thing? Is the person who experienced the harm and everybody keeps weighing in, and then we start thinking about who’s gonna help this person complete this plan? Because going solo, and without the support of the people in this room is how we got in this mess in the first place. So let’s buttress this person, let’s support this person to make things right. And so that is a gross oversimplification of what it is that we do. But there’s lots of stories in writing and things out there that I can get to your professors and have you get some good examples of what it looks like in practice. I think the most important thing to say about in practice about the work that I did for quite some time with an organization called Impact Justice, I’m very proud of them. The restorative justice project which I started there, is that we really centered ending racial and ethnic disparities and to not net widen and to center crime survivors voices in need. So those things may feel like they’re all at odds with each other. But the truth is, is that one of the reasons I sometimes shy away from calling restorative justice conflict transformation is because there’s an understanding in a lot of conflict situations that people feel like they’re operating at odds with one another’s needs, that I have this need and you have that need and we’re bumping up against one another, right? Sometimes is the way it’s understood. And with restorative justice I often find that everyone’s needs are actually perfectly aligned. There’s a person who actually needs to apologize and knows that often. There’s a person who needs to hear an apology. There’s a person who feels the need to be unburdened by the weight and the guilt that they carry and they want help in turning their life around. And there’s a person who wants things being made right, they want maybe that fence rebuilt or they want something. And I know some of you are in classes where you’re getting to watch that Tinkerbell video. If you watch it, you know it’s really funny, we could have never imagined that this crime survivor would say, what I want is a six foot tall painting of Tinkerbell. Like you don’t know what people are gonna ask for, what’s gonna make them feel whole. And so it’s a very powerful thing to see how individualized it is and how different people have different needs. And so you can learn more about that whole thing from something called the RJDToolkit.org. Every single thing that a community-based organization might need to try to start a restorative justice diversion program, pre-charge felony crimes, working closely with your district attorney to make sure that there are no racial and ethnic disparities in the way in which it rolls out. All the things you could possibly need to do that are in this thing RJDToolkit.org. It’s also a great thing for research for your college papers or whatever. There’s tons of definitions and glossaries and videos and documents and all kinds of things in there. And so the other thing I’ve been working with is called CHAT, which is the Collective Healing and Transformation Project. And that has been sort of new frontier of our work around sort of coming home to what it is that I most wanted and needed and when I was a child, which is working an intimate partner in sexual violence. And so we are doing this work completely off the grid, which is that people come in the front door to a family justice center and say, I’m not leaving my husband or boyfriend or I’m not leaving my partner and I want the violence to stop. And so we actually work with both parties and their families and communities in order to come up with sort of safety plans for moving forward and shared custody and living arrangements and all the things and we build it together. And that has been an amazing process. It’s nascent, we are learning a lot and going slowly, but that’s been really amazing. Facilitators, I think about restorative justice facilitators, who do you need to be in order to do this work? When you think about some mediation programs teach you to be neutral, I like to say think we need to be equally partial. We have to fall in love with everybody. And what that means is you hold with equal compassion and care the people who caused the harm, the people who’ve experienced the harm and the family and communities that undergird the whole process. And it’s really built on this notion which was a part of the truth and reconciliation commission’s work and it’s a Ubuntu, this word Ubuntu, it’s Nguni Bantu word that means a person is a person through other people or I am because we are. And when I think about my father, it’s a very literal truth, right? I literally am because he was. And so that is a hard truth to sit with and also a truth. And so there’s sort of no outdoor way we can throw people too. We have to figure out how to work it all out together. Another way to think about it is what Dr. King said, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality, and it’s also what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “Interbeing” that we all inter-are, I love those notions. And so family and community I put in the center actually here is because it’s how it actually works. Not just as support and witnesses, but these are the people that are most poised to help, make things right and make sure that it never happens again. From a Buddhist perspective, I like this idea of Indra’s net and it’s this idea that there’s an infinite web that permeates all of space and time, and it has an infinite number of junctions where these pieces of the net come together and at each juncture there is a gemstone. And that gemstone has an infinite number of facets and in each facet is reflected all the other facets, right? And so that is how the universe operates, that is our belief. So this is the fabric of all existence, and so that is something to think about. So a little bit about the roots, again, I mentioned Mennonite people in the U.S. and Canada in the 1970s sort of coined this term restorative justice. Millennia and millennia ago, some Indigenous people, and I say not all cause we can’t call ‘em all peacemakers and everybody does the same thing, came up with notions that are very much akin to what I’m talking about today, different processes like family group conferencing comes out of Aotearoa, the Maori people, Navajo Diné peacemaking, and so many other tribes. And in most cultures, if we went far enough back, like I’m studying with the Tibetan and Indian systems of justice, particularly Tibet prior to Chinese occupation, really amazing Buddhist roots of restorative justice are there. And every one of us, including what we cannot remember about white indigeneity, my son is half white. And sometimes when we are doing a lot of stuff around say Black Lives Matters protests, et cetera, he can start to speak very negatively about white people. And I always need to correct him and remind him that not only is he half white, but also it’s not all any kind of one people. And I took him to Stonehenge and showed him the circle that is there, right? That white people knew how to do this too. How to build a beautiful contraption that shows us when the solstice comes and to know to bury the folks with disabilities in that space and to pray for those folks that that’s white folks stuff too. So let’s not forget that we have forgotten, but we can always re-remember lots of things. So briefly about measuring success about the work that I was doing in Oakland with the youth diversion programs. We found a 44 percent reduction in recidivism, crimes, oh, even if it’s measured by re-arrest, which I really hate arrest as a measure of recidivism because kids of color get arrested for being kids of color. So I don’t really think that’s a good, but even, even with re-arrest as a marker, 33 percent reduction in re-offense. And crime survivors have a 91 percent satisfaction rate, couldn’t do a comparative analysis, because interestingly the criminal legal system does not keep track of victim satisfaction data. They conflate conviction with victim satisfaction. But it doesn’t start with a question, is that what you wanted? ‘Cause it wasn’t what I wanted so. Also significant cost savings. I mean depending on what jurisdiction and where these numbers vary, but when you think about what the cost of incarceration, let alone just probation, all kinds of things of that nature, cost is obviously much, much, much less expensive to hire community-based organizations to facilitate these dialogues. I’m coming up on closer to, I’m not sure where I am, what time? How much time do I have left there, Julian? You can tell me.
- [Julian] 30 minutes.
- There’s 30 minutes left, okay. I’m gonna move kind of quickly through the next couple of slides. So I would make a plug for thinking about language and particularly what kind of language we should be using and what we should be abandoning. So Justice Yazzie taught me that there’s no word in Diné for, so most Indigenous languages have verb based languages. And so this is really powerful. There are very few nouns at all or things that would even qualify as nouns. So instead of saying offender, the phrase is acting as if he has no family, are acting as if she has no relatives, no relations. That is what no relations, I should be careful, acting as if they have no relations. And Eduardo Duran told me that there’s no word like for woman in his language. He said, instead of saying there’s a woman sitting over there, you’d say womanning is happening over there. So there’s this beautiful book called “Braiding Sweetgrass” that everybody should read by Robin Wall Kimmerer, she’s a botanist and an Anishinaabe woman. And in one of the chapters of that book called Learning the Grammar of Animacy. She writes, “A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans trapped between its shores and contained by the word, but the verb wiikwegamaa, to be a bay, releases the water from bondage, and lets it live. To be a bay holds the wonder that for this moment the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers because it could do otherwise become a stream or an ocean or a waterfall, and there are verbs for that too. To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive”. So this moves me deeply because it really speaks to the heart of what we’re doing in restorative justice. Please don’t leave me fixed in time, don’t leave me stuck in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania when all those terrible things were happening to me and I was a victim. I adopt the word from time to time, especially when people are saying the victim’s lobby wants this and the victim’s lobby wants that. And I’m like, did you ask this victim, right? But mostly I a shoo all these terms. We tend to call the young people we work with responsible young people, and all the meetings that are held in that, right? You are responsible for the thing that you did. And when they complete the plan to repair the harm, I’ve been a responsible young person. It’s so beautiful. I joked about this earlier with folks that I recently was a speaker at a statewide association for the treatment of sexual abusers. And I said, why are you still calling people the thing that you want them to stop doing? Like don’t leave us there. Don’t leave me there. Don’t leave my father there. Don’t leave any of us there. Let’s keep it moving. So I think I covered these folks. So I talk a little bit about forgiveness. What I wanna just say extremely, I’m writing a book about forgiveness right now and what I would say is people really conflated I think, with restorative justice or see it as an expected outcome. So it’s neither a prerequisite for participation nor an expected outcome of processes. It’s lovely when it happens, but we shouldn’t be making victims survivors, folks who’ve experienced harm feel that they need to forgive in any sort of particular way or time if it’s for them at all. And it really is an intra individual personal journey that may or may not come. And I think we need to be really, really gentle with folks. I had the incredible privilege when I was 24 years old of this wonderful and long and crazy course of events, which I will not talk about too much today. Had a private audience with the Dalai Lama when I was 24 years old, and I was begging him for advice about, I was a hot mess, I was yelling at him for most of the audience actually. And I was begging him for advice about how to forgive my father, how, how you’re, how, and tell him about my work. And it was raging and he wouldn’t give me advice. He kept speaking in these beautiful, lofty ideals that I felt completely incapable of ever understanding and I really kept interrupting. I was like, how? And he stopped at one point, he shushed me, and he sort of reached out and he took my hand and he asked me, with all the compassion in the world, he said, “Do you feel you’ve been angry long enough?” And it was an incredible gift. And so I would encourage us to, when we’re working with folks who’ve experienced harm, please give them that wide birth in their own healing journey. I myself decided that I had been angry long enough, and so that’s kind of how I define forgiveness. Angry long enough. There are all kinds of other definitions out there. I really like one that Oprah throws around, which is giving up all hope that the past could have been any different. And there are other definitions I’m working with over time, but it really is about a personal relinquishment of anger that we have every right to feel on our own timeline. In the end, I would just say when I close out a little bit with these notions that I’ve received from my dear friend and mentor Father Greg Boyle, who talks about loving me with no matter what-ness. It’s not a free pass to be my worst self, but it’s a weight off my shoulders. I think like sort of like the universal basic income of love, right? Like that we’re all standing on this ground together and it frees me up to be my very best self. And so I’m gonna skip this slide, unfortunately, it’s an important one, but I have gone over, I think. There’s some big questions that we need to answer. I will just say about appropriation of Indigenous people’s practices and what we ought to do. And that probably should just be a whole other talk and we’ll move past that. So when I think about today, there’s this incredible urgency, and I think about the children that I have met who have been in cages for far too long. The adults are in cages for far too long. The survivors who the criminal legal system has failed on countless levels. The parents have had their children taken away for reasons that have more to do with their race than anything else. And when I think about this, I remember that this debate between the two worldviews was going on for 200 years. And sometimes there can be this incredible urgency like we have to do it now and to burn it all down now. And I really, really understand that and relate to it. And that’s definitely how I was when I met his holiness. I was definitely in a burn it all down mode. And I do think that the way we are currently doing things needs to not just tinker and shift and change, but ultimately, we need to go through this paradigm shift. But there is both and that we are being called to right now, an urgency to move into new ways of being with the patience of how long it’s gonna take us to get there in a good way. Yes, children are being locked in cages, and Indigenous wisdom and language is being lost and the climate is moving quickly towards irreparable damage to Bhumi Devi, Mother Earth, and that urgency, and that there’s this urgency for us to all see that we inter-are, with all these things for the sake of the very planet. And paradigm shift is messy and it takes a long time. So it’s not something that can be well seen with the eyes of urgency, right? That is limbic brain thinking. And we need our prefrontal cortex and our whole hearts and souls to be involved. We have to stop and breathe and be present to one another and what’s happening even as the world is burning. So will we get to see this in our lifetimes? I think maybe it’s hubris to think so, but maybe not. Who knows? That would be thrilling. If not, I like this quote, which is “The seed never sees the flower.” I think I am making cave paintings. I think of the RJDToolkit as a cave painting. And I hope the books that I write will be cave paintings, leaving behind a trail of information of things that can be done in a good way so that we can get to a good place in a good way. And it’s really important to remember what Arundhati Roy says, that “Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.” And so with that, I’m gonna ask you to turn back to a neighbor and have a little bit of discussion time about what stood out, what resonated for you, what’s something you have a question about. So spend a few minutes in that and then we’ll come back together. Thanks folks.
- [Sujatha] Should we move to Q&A?
- [Julian] You tell me.
- [Sujatha] Yeah, sounds good.
- [Julian] Yeah.
- [Speaker] Let’s do it.
- [Julian] Okay. Okay. So I imagine some of you have some questions for Sujatha. This is some fundamental stuff, some stuff that I imagine touches some nerves and both in good ways and provocative ways. So what are you curious about? What are you wondering about?
- I’m so glad you’re here. Thank you. I appreciate that we’re in a 200 year process. I work in restorative justice in Chilton County and one of the things I struggle with is that we, the paradigm we’re trying to move away from is very punishment focused. And so when I’m working with someone who’s been impacted by crime, often when I say, what do you want? Their response is, I want the beep, beep, beep to go to jail. And that’s not what we do. And we’re also fundamentally against sending to be people to jail. So as someone who’s been a victim advocate and works in this work, I’m wondering, I know that sometimes the anger lowers and it moves to other things for people. My work has deadlines. How do you support a process through that when that is the wish of the affected party and you’re trying to center the affected party in the work?
- Yeah, this is a really, really important question, so thank you. And it’s something we really struggled with for a long time. So you are right that often time. So there’s two pieces. One is that there’s an analogy that I use all the time from my friend Danielle Sarad, who says, she talks about how, we think all crime survivors are super punitive and sometimes they tell us they are, but it’s only because like, so you think about it like a bunch of people are walking through a desert and there’s a hamburger truck and it’s been four days since there’s been food, and it’s been a day and a half since there’ve been water. And there’s like a hamburger truck with free water and free hamburgers or whatever. You can’t say that the hamburger truck is the best hamburger truck in the desert because the data is that everybody’s lined up at that hamburger truck, right? You can’t say who’s a vegetarian and who’s not because as a vegetarian, I myself would be lined up at that hamburger truck, right? So we’ve only offered people one thing for decades and decades and decades. And so people have come to believe that justice is the harm that is done to someone else, right? And they haven’t had space to imagine otherwise, right? Or to even consider centering their own needs. So do you really have a need for another person to be punished? And what else do you need and what else do you need, and what else do you need and what else do you need? Not to dismiss that I don’t, I say there’s nothing that can be promised on any fronts and that’s not what we do. I would like to know what else you need and I’d like to know more. Tell me what happened and tell me what your needs are in relationship to what happened and what did you need then and what do you need now, right? Just spending more and more time in the preparatory work around truly helping folks identify their spiritual needs, their physical needs, their financial needs, their, you know, their need for safety, all of the needs, right? And there’s a conflating most, I’m assuming knowing a little bit about the Vermont system that the kinds of stuff that people would like to see folks locked up for, they weren’t gonna get locked up anyway, so was, yeah, a lot of the diversion that we do across this nation is I worry that we do net widening actually. But that being said, restorative justice is a wonderful thing to offer in any situation where people really want it, but it wasn’t gonna happen anyway, right? Unfortunately, a lot of DAs send cases and this is why I focus entirely on pre-charge felonies because then we’re doing real diversion of actual things that would’ve resulted in a criminal conviction and time usually. So most of the time we’re not, people aren’t gonna get what they wanted anyway, and even if it was a case where they could have gotten it, right? Our conviction rates are abysmal for a lot of the stuff that people are most in need of the, they think they’re in need of, and I’m being careful with my language ‘cause I don’t wanna be patronizing, but they’ve only been told that justice looks like the person who has hurt them, being hurt, and that they actually haven’t even taken a moment to imagine what all their other needs might be, right? And so when I think now back on my own childhood and what I needed, I didn’t need my father in a cage. I needed him to stop doing what he was doing. I needed therapy, I needed my family to know what was happening. I needed assurances that would never happen again. I needed us to be apart from each other for a while, but not for me to be in some family that they didn’t speak my language, eat our food, et cetera. So pray to our gods, right? Really I needed something different. And so in asking those questions about what do you need and what else do you need and what’s the need under that need is really a way to help people step away from that. Especially when yeah, I’m real straight with folks too. I’m like unfortunately or fortunately, I don’t even say I don’t, I never put my politics on, I’m like a full on abolitionist, and most of the people I’ve worked with would have no clue, right? So that is a really interesting thing, because the program is such that that’s not what we do. So if you need that then there’s other places for you. But unfortunately, those other places are probably not gonna deliver that either. And I tell people that I say, the chances of you getting that over there are pretty slim. You could try, but I’m still here. And the time limits on when, so statue of limitations are really long actually, and cases are usually not going stale that fast. And so I push really hard for the DAs who divert to us to give us a lot of time to finish, is respectful of crime survivors to let them go through their whole process, right? So that is hard to get them to do, but I’ve been very lucky to work with wonderful DAs who are super, super progressive, and will give me most of what I ask for. So that’s really good. Yeah. There’s one, there’s one over here behind you and the other, yeah.
- Hi.
- Hi.
- My name is Judy.
- Hi, Judy.
- And I just wanna say thank you very much to share your story in today’s talk, and I have two question, I think. The first is that just like leading into the future, are we thinking about like using restoric circle this kind of practice to like reduce like jail time and maybe one day, like instead doing jail, maybe like all we do is restoric circle and the other question we kind of have in our group is that like, how do we prevent like criminals to like manipulative use the restoric circle to get away from what they do and then go out in the society to like make more harm?
- Thank you so much both of those questions. So it is my dream someday that we would be having, I mean I don’t know if we’re gonna call it restorative justice in 50, a 100 years, whatever, but that there would be other ways that don’t center sort of punishment as the way in which we address things, right? And that we are really centering, meeting crime survivors needs and putting the onus on folks, supporting folks who have caused harm to be directly accountable to their crime survivor’s needs as the way we do business, right? And in Aotearoa, New Zealand, prosecutors have to file something to take cases out of restorative justice, right? It’s an automatic that the cases go to restorative justice, and it’s understood nationally that that’s what’s gonna happen. And so that is very powerful to my mind. But it has to be properly resourced to happen that way. So what frustrates me is that there’s all of these demands put on restorative justice to solve everything without the sufficient resources in which we can really even put up proper demonstration projects. And each time I get one up and running, it’s like this funding stream gets cut and that funding stream gets cut, and so that’s been really hard. And so, again, that’s why I kind of rely on the cave painting thing to hope that we’re at least leaving something for other people to pick up when the conditions are better for so doing in the future. So that’s one thing. And then how do we stop folks from manipulating the process? So people are manipulating things all day, every day. They’re manipulating all kinds of processes, right? And so when you think about the current system and the current process, people are manipulating those processes in all directions at all times, right? And so I think that the most important way to stop people from behaving in the ways that we would like them, to helping people behave as their best selves is to bring the right people into the circle. So early on we ask questions like, who helps you be your best self? And who holds you to be your best self, right? Who is, right? And so making sure that those folks are in the circle is absolutely critical to the success of a process. Making sure that the person who caused the harm is supported to complete a plan to repair the harm, right? So there are processes where if you just like, if you’re not really attending to the self-identified needs of the person you harmed, then if there’s no like concrete outcome in a sense, then it maybe you could just like have some fake sorry, but everybody feels it when it’s a fake sorry, right? So what does it look like to bring the kind of people into the process that help that person complete that plan to repair the harm? And honestly, restorative processes aren’t, they’re not easier than court. They actually are often way more involved. The stuff that you have to do that you yourself have agreed to, that the process ends in a consensus-based outcome that everyone has agreed to. And the last question I always, the last two questions I ask is I ask the person who’s experienced the harm, are you truly satisfied with this? If all of this got done, would you really feel like today sitting today, I know you can’t ever know, but today, do you feel like you would feel like, ah, that’s good, like things turned out okay for me, right? And then I turned to the young person who’s caused the harm and the person who’s caused harm. And I say, do you feel like this agreement is a setup for your failure? Have you said you do things that you’re never gonna do? Do you have all the help you need? Have we filled out this plan sufficiently that the people, that you can count on those people to help you get or done right? ‘Cause it’s a pretty intense plan most of the time. And if it’s done well, it really does turn that person’s life around. So yeah, I think that it’s also about having facilitators who are really not conflict averse and bringing in no bullshit people, pardon my language into the circle, right? Having people who can really just smell like if there’s some funky going on and having them be the brave people who say it, be like, nobody believes that. Somebody’s gotta say that sometimes, you’re never gonna be able to do that. Or grandpa, you’ll never get those kids to school. Or like, people just have to keep it real. And that’s a really important part of the process.
- All right, we got time for one more. Who wants to take the last one? Yeah.
- Hello, I’m Jackson, and I had a question about the urgency and patients, and I’m just thinking about the whole situation in general with just certain groups being persecuted at just like extremely high rates and just wondering how it’s been that way for a lot of years already. And so at what point do we not, do we place the emphasis on the urgency versus the patients, and say that I should have be able to have that expectation that in my lifetime, I’ll be able to see a significant paradigm shift versus say that I can do things to set people up in the future. But I think that’s kind of, in my own opinion, it feels like that’s already what has been done. And so I think now it feels more like the time for us to push that urgency versus to try and start an actual paradigm shift versus like, I guess think about these things and then continue to chip away slightly versus actually makes real noise, I guess.
- Yes.
- In the space. And so, I mean, obviously, I understand that it’s not that easy and you have to go about it in meticulous ways because the whole system is built, so that it’s not easy to take it all down. But I’m just wondering at what point do we really try and push the envelope to a point where it’s like, all right, we’ve been thinking about this for a couple hundred years at this point and it’s just been change, like the things that we’ve been seeing have just been changing forms. So how do we get a ahead of the curve and stop it before it changes again to another way in which we can’t touch it?
- Ooh, Jackson, thank you so much for a beautiful, beautiful question. I misspoke earlier if I was not clear, there’s something that is really, really important for folks to look up, and it’s this thing called vent diagrams, V-E-N-T, and they’re on Instagram, and you just draw a regular Venn diagram and on the one side, the two sides, the things on the two sides, do you know about it, Jackson? No, so it’s like the two sides are things that seem diametrically opposed that they can’t coexist and so you draw a Venn diagram and one of them is the urgency of now, and the other side is the patients of a thousand years, right? And where we need to live is in the middle of that Vent diagram, right? So if you say now I’m like, yeah, now, like I was yeah, now, yes, right now, right now, we have to start now. We needed to start 200 years ago, but yes now, right? I’m not saying not now, absolutely now. I just know that when we run on the now energy without any of the patients of a thousand year energy, we burn out, and we are the soldiers that have to stay strong, right, in the battle for collective liberation. And I’m not crazy about battle language ‘cause I’m like a 100 percent about nonviolent. It’s a journey. It’s a long, long walk, right? And I think Dr. King was right, the arc is bending slowly towards justice, but sometimes I think like some of us might just jump on that thing and grab a hold of it and bend it a little faster, right? And so it is no way to dismiss the absolute necessity to do it now and yesterday. And I think that a part of our work, it’s like sacred work. It’s sitting in circles. It’s being in deep relationship because particularly when we come with the now energy, we also tend to come, punitiveness starts to rise up in us and we find the enemy. And I like how Adrienne Maree Brown talks about how that, in her book, “We Will Not Cancel Us” that all of this like now and move now, and these are the things that we’re gonna do, is that we’ve turned some of that, we’ve lost our, who’s a comrade versus like who’s our combatant. And I kind of feel like, I would like for us to also start to expand our hearts and minds to understand that even the people that are actually oppressing us are being harmed by the oppression that they’re causing, right? And Dr. King’s style and Gandhi’s style, like I wanna free the oppressors of oppression that they’re living with perpetrating on us because they’ll be happier too. And that kind of stuff takes like deep contemplative, prayerful, spiritual, or scientific, right? Like I love the scientists who feel just almost like theologians to me and their love of like what they’re seeing in the web telescope now. And like we gotta be looking all the way out there for the answers. And that is not stuff that comes from this limbic brain, lizard brain kind of desperation to save ourselves and our people, such a legitimate feeling. But if we can’t slow down and breathe and have a barbecue and dance and love one another, we’re not gonna get there. So I think that that’s a little bit about what I’d say about that, but thank you for that point of clarification. It is urgent that you brought that to our attention. Thank you.
- All right, well, we are at time, and I wanna thank you Sujatha for sharing your wisdom, for coming up and sharing your story. And I want to thank all of you for coming out today, and let’s get one final round of applause for Sujatha. Thanks to you for coming.
- Thank you. Thank you everyone.
- Thank you.
- [Julian] Yeah. No, yeah