Locked Down, Locked Out (19 page)

The return wasn’t a simple prospect. The young man had long since dropped out, and the high school didn’t want him back. The circle crept toward a stalemate. Then one of the community members, a retired principal, spoke up: “I can help you get back
into school.” She initiated the process, creating the circumstances through which the young man could keep himself accountable for what he’d done—and, in the process, transform his life.

The connection-building process spun forward, gaining momentum. The victim was a basketball coach, and through ongoing circle conversation he discovered that the young man who’d burglarized his house loved basketball and played often. He’d always wanted to be on a team, but had figured that he’d lost his chance when he left school. Father Kelly recounts how, after a few more conversations, the victim said, “Look. You play basketball, I coach basketball. Would you be willing to come play basketball for my team—and I’ll be your mentor?”

The boy agreed. He returned to high school and became an avid basketball player. Years later, his bond with his coach and mentor remains tight.

“Now,
that
!” exclaims Father Kelly.
“That
is justice!”

Reknitting Stories

Still, justice doesn’t always look the same, and it may not involve reconciliation. Sometimes, coming face-to-face with a perpetrator (even to receive an apology) may not be something the victim or survivor wants; in fact, regardless of preparation, it may be re-traumatizing. As Philly Stands Up!—an organization that works specifically with perpetrators of sexual assault—notes, “It is not the work of a survivor to hold a perpetrator accountable.”
¹²

Pointing to the necessity of offering support to victims without urging the goal of reconciliation, Father Kelly speaks of a woman whose two sons were killed within two months of each other. When she first engaged with the circle process, she couldn’t speak at all. It took many months of counseling, as well as circles with other mothers who had lost their children, for her to piece
together the stories that described her pain: “who she was” beforehand, her personal story, how the series of unspeakable traumas she had borne had ripped her to the core. What she needed was the support of those with shared experiences. “This is about storytelling,” Kelly says, describing how trauma is processed in ways that break up our narratives so they often don’t seem to make sense. “Narrative helps us to reknit our lives.”

These words apply to people who have done harm, as well: Kelly works to guide people who have hurt others toward addressing the ways that
they
have been hurt—the root causes of their harm-doing—so they can be fully accountable for what they’ve done. In a letter to me, Lacino notes that those who do harm aren’t only dealing with the trauma that led up to the act—they’re also likely dealing with the trauma of having
done
harm, which may prevent them from confronting what they’ve done head-on.

This is especially true if they’ve already been subject to state-inflicted violence like incarceration. “There is no way you can feel good about yourself and do crime,” Lacino says. “Something inside of us has to be comatose or dead to harm people and sleep good at night.” In order to fuel transformation, he argues, people who have done harm must come to a point where they are revived from that “comatose” state—where they can talk about what has hurt them in the past and what they have done to hurt others.

However, Father Kelly emphasizes, community justice should not be about excusing injustice or letting perpetrators “off the hook.” An
effective
community-based process is often a more challenging undertaking than the punitive, isolative one. And it may last a long, long while. “This process is an investment of time and energy,” Mariame Kaba says, noting that receiving punishment doesn’t take much emotional excavation. “It’s not just about The
People Vs. the Perpetrator. It’s about forcing you to engage in ways that the current system doesn’t.” When it comes to reaching inside, yanking out your deepest self and linking it with other people’s deepest selves, you can’t just go through the motions. Mariame also notes, regarding restorative justice, that sitting in a circle by itself won’t lead to long-term shifts in consciousness. It depends on what specific actions are taken, what happens afterward, whether self-conceptions and worldviews are shifted to the point that lasting change can emerge.

Restoring to What?

Mariame points out that, absent the buy-in of all parties involved—and an extremely supportive community and culture—the concept of “restorative justice” can sometimes fall flat. The word “restore” may assume that there’s already a “store,” a safe and healthy place to return to that can be repaired and peacefully rein-habited. Depending on the practice, it may operate on the premise that relationships can be “repaired,” that they were “good” before they were “broken,” that a supportive community once existed and can now be fixed. And, by itself, the concept doesn’t encompass the huge structural factors (race-, class-, gender-and sexuality-based oppression, to name a few) that drive the system and inhibit “repairs.”

Especially when it comes to sexual and domestic violence, the prospect of community “restoration” may well ring discordantly. For survivors of gender violence, the key factor in whether a restorative justice process can be effective is whether a community unites with the victim in holding the perpetrator accountable. Often, communities end up siding with the perpetrator, according to Andrea Smith, a feminist scholar, antiviolence activist, and co-founder of INCITE!: Women of Color Against Violence. Victims
and survivors may be coerced into participating in a “restoration” in order to maintain some façade of community equilibrium.

“Restorative justice tends to promote a romanticized notion of community,” Andrea tells me. “What if the community is sexist, and racist, and homophobic? Or what if there isn’t any community to begin with?” And since practices classified as restorative justice often work with or within the criminal punishment system nowadays, they’re controlled by that system’s power structures and are subject to its rules.

Being Jazzy

Transformative justice, as distinguished from restorative justice, was first conceived as a response to the ineffectiveness and brutality of the criminal punishment system’s methods of dealing with sexual and domestic violence, as well as the way in which restorative justice strategies can betray and further traumatize survivors if the community involved doesn’t stand with them. Transformative justice centralizes the “safety, healing, and agency” of survivors; the role of the community is to support them in those goals. Coming back to Generation FIVE’s definition of transformative justice—“transforming the social conditions that perpetuate violence,” including domination, exploitation, and oppression by the state—the question becomes this: How can we imagine ourselves beyond any sort of prescribed system?

Since it’s impossible for
any
readymade model for dealing with violence to work effectively in every single community, Andrea Smith suggests, “We need to be jazzy—to think, in every specific context, what is the perpetrator motivated by?” Like jazz music, transformative justice requires both improvisation and structure. It requires intuition, creativity, collaboration, and an understanding that no process is ever
finished
.

However, just because every situation is different doesn’t mean strategies can’t be shared. Circles aren’t the only places that storytelling can happen, and communities engaged in transformative justice come together through meetings, conferences, online networks, workshops, social media, and spur-of-the-moment conversations to speak about what has worked, what hasn’t, and all the stuff in between. The Oakland-based group Creative Interventions runs a Storytelling and Organizing Project (STOP), which collects narratives like these—instances in which violence was addressed or prevented without state intervention. These stories illustrate how people work every day, in their own ways, to change the circumstances and social structures that make it possible for violence to occur.

One STOP story recounts a situation in which a woman in Orange County, California, responded to domestic violence by seeking refuge at a friend’s house. The friends then helped her reach out to other people to bring into her support network. The group listened closely to what the survivor wanted. Her mom assisted with getting her husband to leave her house (remaining calm despite his “raging”) and convinced him to stay away, so the survivor could live there with her kids. Her network of family and friends then set up a schedule in which someone would come over every day and bring food and sit with her, and talk, if she was up for it. She explained, “It felt so good to have this full house, you know, this busy house of people coming by, and, you know, people were playing with the kids, and we were making art in the kitchen, and someone was always making tea, and it felt not alone.” In the end, the survivor stressed that the community’s response worked because she was able to say what she needed, and she was actively heard. She told STOP, “We need to trust people to be the experts on their own lives.”
¹³

In early January 2014, INCITE!, along with CURB and several other organizations, compiled a long list of transformative justice strategies for dealing with “police/vigilante/hate/white supremacist violence.”
¹⁴
They emphasize that since approaches
need
to be community specific, they do not endorse any particular strategy. Instead, they’re opening up a conversation about possibilities that will hopefully multiply, change, grow, and spread. Ideas include developing community centers that use transformative justice; gathering and circulating information about transformative practices used in other countries; starting up “neighborhood check-in” systems to keep connected with neighbors and ensure their safety (as opposed to vigilante-ish neighborhood watch groups); talking to people from hate groups directly (since they are, indeed, made up of individual people); using transformative justice strategies in workplaces; and many, many, many more.

“We Can’t Do A Plus B Equals C”

INCITE!’s shared ideas demonstrate that “strategies” aren’t always neatly sewn up, beginning-to-end stories that tidily close with the perpetrator held accountable and the survivor “sufficiently” healed. In fact, when I speak with Jenna Peters-Golden, a member of the Philly Stands Up! (PSU) collective that uses transformative practices to work with perpetrators of sexual assault, she tells me that she’s not a huge fan of either numbers or anecdotes as metrics to measure success. “We can’t do A plus B equals C here,” Jenna tells me. “So we use small, specific tools.” For example, she says, people who’ve caused sexual harm may tend toward narcissism; they’re often better at focusing on themselves than noticing cues from others or engaging with others’ feelings. So, Philly Stands Up! members stress considerate practices like showing up on time and asking, “How are you?” They’re looking for shifts in behavior,
changes in how people who’ve caused harm interact with those around them.

Jenna says, “When I’m meeting someone for a session, if they don’t show up after twenty minutes, I’m not waiting—and if they call me later, I say, ‘No, I’m not coming back; I’ll see you next time. Showing up on time is a way of showing you respect me.’” Processes for working with perpetrators are lengthy, and Jenna tells me it may take a year before a person starts coming to meetings punctually and inquiring after other people’s thoughts and emotions. “In the first twelve months, it’s common for people to not remember to ask how my day has been, so I have to be pushy and say, ‘I really want to tell you how I’m feeling,’” Jenna says. “Eventually, people start saying, ‘How was your day?’ They start listening.”

In talking with people about transformative practices, Philly Stands Up! members emphasize that “eventually”; nurturing the possibility of lasting, evolving justice takes time. I ask scholar and activist Beth Richie, who’s also a cofounder of INCITE!, how we then might begin to conceptualize a universe in which the widespread response to immediate violence—for example, the instant of an attack—is something other than
Call the cops
! “I think it is still an experiment, a way of thinking, and a call to develop something new,” she says. “We need to take a long view.” And that view isn’t confined to the realm of harm response. New “ways of thinking” interweave with daily life, transforming our perceptions, our definitions, our experiences of justice, and our understandings of how to live together in the world.

Chapter 9
The Peace Room

When we think about the prison abolitionist movement ... it’s not “Tear down all prison walls tomorrow,” it’s “crowd out prisons” with other things that work effectively and bring communities together rather than destroying them.

—Andrea Smith, INCITE!: Women of Color Against Violence
¹

As spring exhales its way into summer, I pay a visit to Manley High School in Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood. In 2007, Manley logged the most “violent incidents” of any high school in the city—though of course such rankings will always be subjective, depending on which incidents are reported, which are dubbed violent, and who’s counting.
²
Largely attended by black and Latino students, it’s prime ground for the school-to-prison pipeline, in which school-based arrests pave a quick path to early incarceration. Research by Project NIA found that about one out of five juvenile arrests in Chicago in 2010 took place at a school. Seventy-five percent of those arrested were black youth, even though black kids make up only 42 percent of the Chicago school system.
³