Restorative Justice

At the core of our community engagement for peace and equality is our deep commitment to restorative justice. On this page of our website, we explain what movement organizing, community education, and community healing for restorative justice means to us. 

Root Definition

Succinctly, restorative justice refers to healing practices that bring people within communities into conversation, amends, reconciliation, and agreement in the wake of mistakes to foster healthy, safe, ongoing accountability instead of punishing people and making people suffer. 

Centering Victims and Survivors

Have you ever noticed that victims and survivors have the least input in the management of offenses in our criminal justice system? Police, prosecutors, and attorneys ask victims and survivors to make statements and give testimony. But, these contributions rarely come from a place of power in deciding the course of the accountability. The framing of victims' and survivors' contributions is often overtly or covertly about what kind of retribution they seek even as they may be called to share facts.

Restorative justice is different in that it centers and empowers victims and survivors. They are empowered to co-manage the accountability process. If safety permits, they—and members of affected communities—are called to work together with so-called offenders to manage, transform, and/or resolve conflicts, and work towards reparation and/or reconciliation. Moreover, restorative justice goes further: it is about preventing, understanding, and intervening into experiences of conflict, harm, hurt, offense, and suffering.

Realizing Peacemaking

Restorative justice is an outcome of peacemaking. For us, restorative justice is synonymous with transformative justice. We aim to transform, manage, repair, and/or restore relations within communities and families without perpetuating pain and anguish. We aim to prevent harm and offense and intervene when these mistakes occur.

Broadly Beneficial

Restorative justice benefits everyone. Since the 1970s, careful social scientific evidence proves restorative justice's effectiveness. Along with reading short explanations from Baltimore City's own Annie E. Casey Foundation, major statements from African American civil rights organizations such as the NAACP's Resolution on restoratve justice, empirical studies on restorative justice's effectiveness, and Paul McCold's formative 1997 investigation entitled Restorative Justice: An Annotated Bibliography, we recommend clicking here, here, here, here, here, and here to examine recent introductory readings that present some of the evidence for restorative justice's benefits.

Recently, key state legislatures passed laws that forbid the use of statements made during restorative justice practices against people by police, prosecutors, and courts. These advancements are laudable, and we believe strongly that the United States must move resolutely towards widespread, immersive restorative justice practices within communities.

Abolishing Punishment, Pain, and Suffering

Punishment harms people by making them suffer and/or feel mental and physical pain for actual or perceived mistakes.

We are fundamentally against the perpetuation of pain and suffering. 

Our vision for restorative justice elevates humane engagement, humanitarian guidance, and reasonable protection at all times.

Protection and self-defense from harm (especially when imminent danger is close at hand) is critically important. But even here, defensive force and warranted extraction (whether physical or institutional) must be limited, reasonable, and humane. It is possible for self-defense to achieve these hallmarks even in the presence of crisis, grave danger, harm, and offense. De-escalation techniques integrated with self-defense and extraction training bear this out. 

Elevating Accountability

Rather than punishment, we foster accountability.

Accountability is when someone who makes or causes mistakes, offense, or harm works within communities to do the following: 

• Take full and consistent responsibility for their errors;
• Becomes open to working through the consequences of actions;
• Becomes humble and listening, resisting pride, selfishness, and arrogance;
• Acts to restore and repair relations within the community that experienced the offense or harm;
• Makes amends by centering the needs of victims and survivors; 
• Adheres to well-thought-out, carefully written agreements that delineate and certify the amends;
• Ensures that recidivism never occurs, or that the offense never happens again; 
• Becomes open to mental and physical health interventions and rehabilitative treatment; 
• Separates, if applicable, from the affected community to uphold safety in the event that the individual who has harmed may pose a danger to themself or others; and
• Depending on the height of the danger, is willing to undergo intensive, longterm, in-patient rehabilitation at secure, maximally humane medical treatment facilities (not jails and prisons as they are currently operated and designed in the United States and most of the English-speaking world).

Changing Systems

There is no such thing as the "perfect" victim, survivor, or "offender." Offenses are rarely only two-sided. Violence often occurs in relationships where parties may have a rapport or care for one another. 

We practice sophisticated holistic approaches to peacemaking and justice that rethink civic, court-centered, and policing-centered models for justice.

Our abolitionist vision is not focused on individual people who hold great power and privilege like, for example, police officers and politicians, and we fully acknowledge that some of these individuals do good. 

Rather, our abolitionist vision to end pain and suffering is about radical systemic change. 

We work towards the wholesale reimagining and redesign of structures, systems, organizations, institutions, and approaches for offense, conflict, and rehabilitation within human societies. 

In this reimagining and redesigning, we aim for societal systems that govern peacemaking to be grassroots public health and community health systems.

"Grassroots" means centering, coming from, created for, and led by non-elite, non-aristocratic, everyday people within communities. 

We prioritize grassroots leadership from victims and survivors of violence, harm, and offense who are trained in peacemaking and restorative justice practices.

Policing intervenes after the fact of alleged harm and it often chiefly serves the interests of elites, aristocrats, corporations, and politicians. 

Instead of policing and incarceration in their currently conceived forms, we advocate for these systems to be replaced with grassroots public health and community health systems led by deeply trained community members. 

Again, we speak of systems, not individuals. When they re-orient their vocations, become public health practitioners, make reparations, and conceive of themselves as non-elites, then individuals who previously upheld problematic systems can work with others to implement just, equitable, humane, healing-centered restorative justice systems.

De-Escalation

Changing systems means de-escalating.

Escalating is the following: 

• Making toxic assumptions rather than studying, observing, listening, and reflecting.
• Catastrophizing (speaking and acting in an overwhelmed, aggressive or apocalyptic state).
• Agitating (letting anxiety, trauma, or other mental health challenges create abusive engagement).
• Being prone to or on the verge of verbal and/or physical aggression and violence.
• Enacting bigotry, discrimination, hate, and wrath through verbal and/or physical aggression and violence.

De-escalating mitigates these problems. 

In addition to our own approaches for de-escalation, we highly value Brendan King's approach found here and here. 

Supportive 

Restorative Justice is supportive, maintaining an unfailingly kind, compassionate, yet vigilant and watchful demeanor in our engagement with communities. 

We try not to allow anything that someone does to provoke us towards toxic engagement.

Consequences

We encourage accountability by thinking-through and investigating the root causes of a conflict in a community and in the lives of individuals, and then creating responses that solve, resolve, manage, transform, or address the problems that prompted problematic behavior. 

This requires rethinking how we conceive of natural consequences, logical consequences, and imposed consequences. 

• Natural Consequences: These are the direct results of our actions.
• Imposed Consequences: These are healthy interventions that make amends in the wake of offense after discussion with different people involved in a conflict. Imposed consequences become unhealthy when they involve punishment.
• Logical Consequences: Expectations predetermined by a group and explained to group members thereby making the un-fulfillment of the expectations a choice by a person.

We try to create learning environments where harmful actions are not tacitly enabled by refusing to identify them and speak openly about harm. 

We "circle up" and guide harmful actors, victims, survivors--the whole community--towards apology,  repair, restoration, making amends, and even (when it feels just for victims and survivors) forgiveness. 

Understanding and valuing the natural consequences of harmful actions and working not to make the same adverse mistakes repeatedly is part of fostering accountability. 

So too is seriously devising procedures and agreements to make amends and uphold safety and harmlessness. 

Being non-punishing also means that we maintain compassion as we encourage accountability by regulating our emotional responses and de-escalating when harm, crises, conflicts, and problems occur.

Our current systems for incarceration are deeply anti-restorative and inhumane. We advocate for these systems full replacement. 

The best response to persistently violent, oppositional, defiant, and dangerous people is intensive in-patient medical treatment in extremely humane facilities that are truly rehabilitative. 

Managing, Transforming, and Resolving Conflicts

We differentiate between managing conflicts (de-escalating feelings about differences and regulating our responses and behavior), transforming conflicts (the hard work of making amends and reintegrating into communities); and resolving conflicts (hoped-for endpoints when problem-solving, making amends.)

We value holistic, integrated approaches that implement a variety of ways to mediate and negotiate, a range of conflicts, disputes and offenses. 

Our approaches are rooted in Indigenous Native American methods (especially those taught by Ruth Locklear Revels (1936-2016) of the Lumbee Tribe and those valued in the mid-20th century African American civil rights movement). 

Here are a few preventative and interventional elements of our approaches:

• Ascertaining facts from multiple vantage points; 
• Considering how feelings frame and influence the understanding of facts;
• Bringing different or opposing groups together within a community to work through conflicts face-to-face; 
• Uplifting the views, needs, and wants of victims and survivors in a community; 
• Bringing those who offend into conversation with victims and survivors; 
• Finding community-centered ways to hold those who offend accountable without punishment (meaning, without pain and suffering);
• Uplifting amnesty in which authentic apologizing, making amends, finding forgiveness, and forging genuine kindness are regularized;
• Making, keeping, and re-making agreements that articulate accountability and the making of amends.

A Lab for Conflict Studies

Our work is an ongoing laboratory in conflict studies.

Conflict can be constructive and generative, teaching us how to value differences and work through challenges. Not all conflict is negative. We guide community members to differentiate between forms of pain, suffering, conflict, and offense so that community members understand the distinctiveness of experiences like disagreement, hurt, abuse, discrimination, and violence. 

Many conflicts arise from disagreements in which the parties can work out arrangements to "agree to disagree" while "circling up" to face each other, and work out agreements that give all parties redress; admit misunderstanding, confusion, and error; and repair relationships.

Other conflicts require intensive mediation, amnesty, and rehabilitation.

We encourage community members to enter into and respect the need for factual investigations with thorough research and detection that pinpoint the roots and branches of conflicts.

No Judging, Blaming or Shaming

We engage in a nonjudgmental manner that strictly avoids blaming and shaming in overt or covert ways.

Clear and Non-Confusing

We value open, clear, plainspoken, straightforward, and forthright communication that avoids creating confusion. If questions are asked, we answer them directly and clearly and we encourage this kind of straightforward, transparent engagement as a cornerstone of our community counseling.

Non-Directive

When engaging with adults, we offer advice, encouragement, and service in non-directive ways. In other words, unless they are receiving stipends and working as bona fide employees (which does involve following directions), rather than only telling people what to do, we offer best practices, wise options, and beneficial alternatives, and then encourage and empower community members to select the path that is best for them.

When engaging with children, we acknowledge that learning to follow directions is part of children's necessary developmental processes that are central to elevating safety and care in their lives. At the same time, we try to create learning spaces that uplift youth voice by encouraging best practices, wise options, and beneficial alternatives that empower youth to select the path that is best for them.

Do No Harm

We do not shrink from our responsibility to speak up when we feel community members may be harming themselves or others.  

Credibility

We maintain our credibility by not joining in or encouraging harmful activities of any kind, including through subtle endorsement, with community members so that we do not send mixed messages and work at cross purposes.

Personal versus Private

We talk-through the complexity of personal versus private notions in our work with community members. Everything is personal because we feel and sense things deeply within ourselves, and we recognize that we must demonstrate care and friendliness in our engagement. At the same time, we talk with community members about the matters that are private in their lives and in our lives, and the need to keep many matters private, uphold consent, and maintain boundaries. We do not try to force community members to reveal information that they deem private unless they wish to share. Talking through this complexity is one of the cornerstones of how we build trust in our engagement.

Assessing Needs

We perform ongoing assessment to learn the systemic barriers in housing, healthcare, food, and transportation that may be influencing community members' wellness.

No Passive-Aggressive Behavior

Oftentimes, when we work with people who are undergoing challenges, we may become subconsciously annoyed with them and this negativity may show up covertly in our engagement. We are careful to become conscious of our subconscious feeling and to avoid passive-aggressive behavior in our engagement. Click here and click here for overviews of passive-aggressive behavior.

No Gaslighting

We strictly avoid gaslighting (whether subtle or pronounced) and all forms of emotional manipulation. We never implicitly or explicitly make someone question their sanity or emotional stability. We encourage admitting error clearly and we do not create situations where blaming makes someone a guilty party. We engage based on factual and actual problems, not imagined and manipulated matters. Click here and click here for overviews of gaslighting behavior.

Monitoring and Managing Mood

We monitor the tone of our voices, the positioning of our bodies, and the attitude and expression of our faces so that we always counsel in supportive, encouraging ways.

No Bias

We never, ever discriminate and move from bias, be it explicit or implicit. Click here for our nondiscrimination policy.

Welcoming, Timely, and Responsive

We make community members feel welcome in a session. We end on time (if there is a set time for engagement), and we schedule and perform timely follow-ups and check-ins.

Disarmament

In learning situations, we never give adults or children anything that is or could be perceived as weapons. For adults, we encourage the proper safe storage, regulation, and maintenance of arms and weapons within people's constitutional rights in the United States. If someone is ill or prone to violence, and the topic of weapons arises, we encourage them to disarm for their own and others' protection and safety. 

Self-Defense

We encourage protecting oneself with martial physical response only in situations of imminent violence.

Fighting and Play-Fighting

We encourage a zero-tolerance on verbal and physical fighting, including play-fighting (in the case of children) because play-fighting (instead of playing safely and lovingly) gets confusing and dangerous.

Four Principles of Universal Respect & Care

We live in societies in which there is often little understanding or valuing of the ways that mistakes, trials, and errors can be essential to growing and learning for children and adults. We often do not have restorative, non-judging, and non-blaming values and practices to guide us when mistakes occur. 

That is why, in 1990, Miss tree turtle, our Co-Director at Wisdom Projects, developed a mantra, which is a four-point corollary that aims to ground our sense of humanity as we respect and care for each other:

1. We can all be good people. 
2. We all make mistakes. 
3. We all can change.
4. Change requires work.