 Good afternoon. Thank you for being here. It's a nice large group. We feel certain that this will be a time Well worth spent here, and we hope you leave inspired those of us who have been Hearing Danielle all day long It's gonna be hard to get even more inspired, but I bet we will be I'm Ruth Schantz. I'm the current convener of Friends of Restorative Justice of Washtenaw County which is one of the Organizers of this day-long event We're a group of citizens local citizens who are deeply persuaded by the research on the efficacy of restorative justice practices and These are practices used in various legal systems in places across this country, but also internationally Friends of restorative justice of Washtenaw County was born in 2012 out of the experiences of Janet and Stan Reedy after their house was broken into by a local teenager and Although the Reedy's felt that they were well Taken care of by our local court system They left with a profound sense that something was missing from this whole Experience and specifically They wanted to have the opportunity to talk with the young man and also to work with him on restitution work together So they and others of us from their church who are aware of the restorative practice of victim offender Conferencing began conversations with our local juvenile justice Office as well as the dispute resolution center, which I'm sure many of you are aware of Following Fred van Luz first visit to Ann Arbor a number of other community members joined us and we formed friends of restorative justice and Since then we have been joined by the healing communities, which is a local group working on prisoner reentry issues Today we are associated with the dispute resolution center and many as of us have been trained to be volunteer mediators and circle keepers our mission is to pursue a balanced and restorative approach to crime and to violence one that promotes justice reparation Resolution to victims and to the community So we welcome you to join us in our monthly meetings and The brochure that you may have seen coming in on restorative justice. I think has our website on it. So we're very Happy to always welcome new members. Hi everyone. Thank you so much for coming. My name is Mary Lynn Stevens. I'm 17 years worth of Work at the U of M and retired from there from here a year ago wonderful awesome years But today I'm here to represent CAPS the other group that was one of the the major leaders in getting Danielle here today and making this quite a spectacular moment for all of you as well I hope so we're thank you for coming There is an enormous list when when the when the biggest text block in a program is all the sponsors It's a great problem to have so we're not going to read them all and but we will be referring to them Please do take a time and and get a sense of that It's a wonderful mix of sort of town and gown if you will as well real non-profit organizations and the University and some others so But anyway CAPS very briefly if you don't know what some of you do We are a non-partisan non-profit policy and advocacy shop unfortunately located in Lansing but not East Lansing and CAPS actually stands for the Citizens Alliance on prisons and public spending It's a it's a mouthful now. You know why we go by the acronym CAPS But it is our work is very straightforward and it's important I want you just very briefly to know about it in the arena of criminal justice reform in Michigan all about state law and State practice we conduct extensive research We then use that research to come up with policy recommendations. What's really strong and solid and not to happen We then do advocacy to Advance those policies and if you want to know more there is some literature in the back And I'll be around as will our director Laura Sager at the at the Reception afterwards so you can do that so we do those three things and we also do lots of education and outreach Statewide so that everybody can learn about all this and that's what brought us here today And we do all this work really in pursuit of really only two Policy goals they connect explicitly to Danielle and they really are our mission. They're what we're about We're about two things one is ending Michigan's overuse of incarceration and Promoting community safety and healing That's it and with that dual Mission in mind more commitment to safety and Less reliance on incarceration who could be better than Danielle to be here somebody who's whose work sort of Screams and validates and celebrates the fact that those two things belong in the same breath So really really so glad to have her here already this morning She headlined a forum in Lansing so that state officials could learn about all of this and really Engage with the idea and I'm very happy. It's our turn now. So really Thanks to all of you for coming. It's really sort of on behalf of all the sponsors that again that big list that I hope you Look at I want to welcome you. Thank you for coming. Thank you. I know a lot of you do this work I'm gonna thank you for that and I'm gonna turn this over to Carolyn who's gonna actually introduce it and we're gonna get to Danielle My name is Carolyn Madden. I'm also from Friends of Restorative Justice of Washington County It's wonderful to be here and as you've heard We are among the many community organizations and University Departments that have brought brought Danielle here to Ann Arbor But before we hear her speak I want to make just a few announcements and make sure that you understand the process We will have Danielle will speak and then we will have time for questions and you should have cards on your table And so please write some questions that you have and we will have people come around sort of after the talk It's halfway through collect the questions and then we have two wonderful representatives from the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy Who will be asking questions of Danielle? We also have a reception in the lobby which maybe some of you have partaken already But please feel free to have more as you leave and stay around in the Lobby out there for discussion and in case you want a bit more of a formal discussion about next steps Please come back in and we have a few people who are willing to sort of run a little bit of a discussion about next steps to take In Washington County Also, we have sign-up sheets as Ruth said if you're interested in working with restorative justice please sign the sheet and We will be in touch with you So, okay Again, thanks to all who made this possible. I just want to mention our other organizing Sponsors where these besides the two of us American Friends Service Committee Michigan Criminal Justice Program University of Michigan Gerald Ford School How could we not thank them for this wonderful venue and Michigan Council on Crime and Delinquency who besides all the wonderful work they did have supplied the food for us outside So we're very grateful to them and all of the sponsors truly it's been a community effort to get this to happen. I Also wanted to give a slight mention to Judy Levy. I don't know if she's here yet She is a the United States District Court judge from the Eastern District of Michigan And she's a faculty member of the University of Michigan Law School She inspired us to bring Daniel Sered here to speak on behalf of restorative justice and Second I wanted to thank Kate McCracken who's there taking pictures. She's the communications director of CAPS and Who not only coordinated all of us and making all of these events run smoothly But did it with thoughtfulness and respect every step of the way and then third I want to thank Ivy whereas Ivy Ivy is back there. She's a graduate student in public policy at Gerald Ford and Applied economics in the economics department. She has waived her magic Organizing wand to get this venue and the Ford school support for this vent. So we're very grateful to everyone Okay, now to our speaker speaker Daniel Sered has spent much of her life By her own words as a student of violence She's worked within the justice system as an innovative seeking alternatives to incarceration and to end violence and mass incarceration incarceration She worked with youth in adolescent reentry initiative for returning young men on Rikers Island and with the Center for Court Innovations Harlem Community Justice Center a little mouthful there She was a Rhodes Scholar And in 2012 she received an award for innovation in victim services from Attorney General Holder remember him and The federal office for victims of crime Most recently she was interviewed by the Atlantic a wonderful interview You could see it online and has published an article by the same title as her talk today She currently teaches restorative justice at City University of New York and is the executive director of common justice It's an organization dedicated to helping victims of violent crime Rehabilitating violent felons and developing alternatives to incarceration Wow So with further ado, please join me and applaud for Daniel Sered Thank you all so much for having me here and welcoming me in the space and thanks to all that many Long list of people who made it possible today I Wanted to talk with you about violence and so I would like to talk about Why we have to take on the question of violence and how I think we should do that I Will start in the middle which is to say that we cannot end mass incarceration Unless we take on the question of violence And there are two main reasons for that the first is the the deeper of the two which is that our Tolerance for incarceration in this country is built on a story about violence It's a story about who commits it about who survives it about what each of them are and what they want It's a story as old as our country and as wrong as the worst parts of our history It's a story about an imagined monstrous other Someone who is somehow fundamentally different from us and the people we know and love Someone from whom we have to be protected from whom we cannot protect ourselves and Who's in humanity makes just about any action? Justifiable and reasonable to keep us protected from that harm That story in this country is also a story of structural racism It's the story we've told about people of color and have told in a particular way about black men in America It's the story that makes it seem reasonable to build a prison instead of a school To build jail beds instead of hospital beds To invest in corrections officers instead of teachers or counselors or roads or any of the other things You wish were a little better in your day-to-day lives And it's a story that we on the side of people who typically advocate for criminal justice reform almost invariably avoid We our opponents say they're all monsters We say well Statistically speaking about 40% of them aren't monsters and another 15% with evidence-based practices could become 10% less monstrous with the right unit like we So we fight an ancient narrative with technocratic nonsense That reveals our unwillingness to say like no actually every single one of them is Human and some of them are humans who have done things That are horrific that none of us have any right to do but they're fully human and we know them and they are ours And so until we take on that story We will continue to build prisons and we'll continue to do it instead of everything else We could do with those resources Because that story is at the centerpiece of mass incarceration No matter what number of people are incarcerated for other kinds of offenses and we have to understand the fight to end mass incarceration at its centerpiece as a fight against that story The second reason we have to take on the question of violence is a little more basic And it's just that we won't reduce incarceration by more than half without doing so Because more than half of people locked up are in for kinds of violence now Like I wouldn't stand a chance in a semester of an applied economics PhD course, but I know that to be true So 53% of people in state prisons are incarcerated for violence We are not getting to a transformative reduction in the system unless we take on those crimes And I said this this morning too, but even when I say 50% and some people are like wow, that's really ambitious Let's be clear the day. I was born there were 443,850 people locked up in the United States I'll ask you not to calculate my age if you're really good at the sort of criminal justice math history 443,850 there more than 2.3 million today Which means even when I say 50% that means conceding a three-fold increase in just my lifetime So a world where we incarcerate only 20% of the people who are currently locked up is not some wild Imagine strange future it's a place many of us were born into and Lived through and lived through often in a greater degree of safety and well-being than we may feel now and so it's important that we Not accept the stories that talk about us as though we are some pie in the sky Fools when we talk about making possible something that has been possible and is possible Everywhere else in this world and all other times in human history Right nowhere else in human history ever has incarcerated such a large portion of his people compared to what we do in this country And so when we say that we can be different what we are saying is that we can be like everyone else everywhere ever That's not a radical notion But the other thing is that we not only can we not end mass incarceration if we don't end violence but we can't end violence if we don't end mass incarceration and We'll talk about this in a little more detail a little later when I talk some about safety But we have to understand mass incarceration Not just as something that fails to deliver on the promise of safety which it does every day over and over But as something that makes us less safe So when we know that inequity drives violence and that incarceration drives inequity it means incarceration puts us in danger When we know that ripping funds from the social service infrastructure makes violence more likely and healing less available It means incarceration drives violence When prisons are demonstrated to be criminogenic meaning people who go can be more likely to commit crimes than people who didn't get caught Incarceration drives violence and so even if we don't care about Incarceration if we care about ending violence we have to lose it We have to stop and we won't be safe until we do a Common justice we believe there are four main principles that should guide our approaches to violence The first of those is that approaches to violence should be survivor centered Seems straightforward that the people whose lives are changed by what has been done Should be at the center of our conversations and questions about what should be done about that pain That their feelings should matter their insights should matter their needs should matter their desires should matter That doesn't mean we're solely driven by them. We live in community with each other We've got a government. We have all sorts of other constraints on what happens But it means we shouldn't get to summarily disregard what they want in the decisions about their cases and about policy generally We live in a country that pretends to regard that highly we enact laws and victims names We do that quite literally we have Marcy's law and Sarah's law and a lot of other white women's names laws and We say that we're doing it on behalf of victims We do that without asking most victims what they want when we do ask We often disregard what they tell us they want because it runs contrary to what we expected to hear or what is useful to the policy We are trying to advance We set a policy goal and then find victims who like it Instead of talking to the full range of survivors and letting their experience guide us in what policy goals We select and identify and we lie about who victims are about what they want About what heals them and what brings them peace and perhaps worst of all we lie to victims about that So we have a national picture of crime victims that they look like me I am a survivor of serious violence. So to some degree that's right But a young man of color is ten and a half times more likely than me to be robbed or assaulted and is virtually Nowhere in our national story about who is hurt That's because in part telling that story would make that original story a little confusing Right, it would be complicated if the imagined monstrous other and the person at greatest risk of victimization were the same person And it would maybe implicate us in that perceived Monstracity because it would ask us where were we when he was hurt So we don't like for those stories They don't coexist comfortably and it's part of why telling that second story is so important about being honest about who is hurt But then the next thing we have to do is be honest about what people want when they're hurt and across ages across Demographics across race people who are hurt tend to want a few things. They want answers They want to know why you chose them. Was it a real gun? Were you going to shoot? How dare you think you have the right? They want in it. They want Closure right so they want a story they can live with in the world of trauma healing We talk about it as a coherent narrative, but it's a story about what happened that describes a world you can choose to continue to live in They want some sense of control relative to the event the fundamental trauma basically distills down into powerlessness Right the basic element of trauma is powerlessness, which means its opposite is power And so victims want some power They want to have a say and what will happen about what happened to them and Most of all at the end of the day They want to know that they and others will not go through that again that that person won't hurt them again That others won't hurt them in the same way and that that person won't hurt others in the way that they were hurt Most of that for victims doesn't mean incarceration So what we know at common justice I The centerpiece of our work is an alternative incarceration for serious and violent felonies Where if and only if the victims of crime consent people who've committed crimes like assaults and robberies so shootings gunpoint robberies stabbings with serious injuries enter into a restorative justice process we're after extensive preparation They enter into dialogue with the people they hurt reach agreements about how to make things as right as possible And if they fulfill those agreements have the felony charges against them dismissed and don't go to prison In the meantime we provide wraparound services to the victims of their crimes to help them come through what happened to them And in their lives generally When I say that we only do this with victims consent it's important to talk about what that means So first of all fewer than half of victims of violence in America called the police in the first place That's a stunning number It means half of people who are rendered unconscious who have to be hospitalized who suffer serious injury Who have lasting physical and psychological impacts prefer nothing to everything we have on offer in our criminal justice system So if the system were as victim-centered as it purports to be and as a lot of people's bumper stickers and other Hostile remarks suggests it is we would understand that as a central moral crisis of our culture And we would be obsessed with correcting that wrong We couldn't be farther from it of those half who call the police fewer than half of those make it to grand jury Sometimes that's because there's not an arrest Sometimes there's not an arrest because the police don't try particularly hard if you're a particular kind of victim Sometimes there is an arrest but the victim decides not to come they called in a moment of crisis And then they divest from the process that follows because they don't believe it will give them what they need So of that small portion of people who make it to grand jury We reach out to the smaller portion of those who've survived violence And we ask them do you want the person who hurt you to be incarcerated or do you want them in common justice When we give them that choice 90 percent choose common justice 90 percent it's a crazy number Right if I was like one thing I want everyone to know about common justice. It's that number and I at first I thought that was because we are genuinely good people like we're Compassionate and we care and we believe in transformation and we know we've made mistakes and so do others and we believe people Change and we say but for the grace of god go I and I think that is sometimes true But the thing that we are more than I gave us credit for is that we are practical And I should have known that about crime survivors as a survivor myself Crime survivors have a reputation for being very emotional and we have very strong feelings Those feelings it turns out do not override or exclude our ability to exercise reason Um, I said this morning. I think it's largely probably sexism that makes us think those two qualities are incompatible with each other Like feeling a feeling and making a choice at the same time. It turns out we can do both Um All of us it means men can start feeling feelings women can be trusted make choices Wherever we are like there's a lot. There's good news in it for everyone. Um and And when I say we're practical, I mean like we of course We feel the things that we feel when we're hurt we feel rage That like shakes us to our core like makes us almost unrecognizable to ourselves Like we feel loss That makes us want to like wring out the marrow of our bones to be rid of it Right, we feel terror In the safest places with the people we know and trust most Like abject terror shaking terror Like unresolvable terror Like we feel confused. We feel furious. We feel angry. We feel betrayed We feel all sorts of things that we are entitled to feel And yet when we are asked what we want Almost every time we will choose the thing that will make us and others safer That the one thing that outranks all of that emotion Is our pragmatism And that pragmatism is rooted in our self-interest and in our care for the people around us And so our emotions sometimes get co-opted And get put to the surface of draconian Sentencing that does not make us safe that does not heal us that does not meet our needs that does not answer our questions That does not give us all the things we deserve But when we are asked and given options We will choose the option that will keep us and others safe almost every time And if we are among the vast majority of crime survivors who live in neighborhoods where violence is prevalent And which are the same neighborhoods where incarceration is present You will have a very hard time persuading us that incarceration will keep us safe That's not because we're liberal. It's not because we're abolitionists. It's not because we're radical It's because we observe what we see In our own homes and our buildings on our blocks in our neighborhoods every day And we see that for the most part prison makes people worse And there are people with the strength of spirit to withstand the onslaught of what happens in prison And so not to be made worse by it. There are people who even become better in prison But they do that not because of prison but despite it But most people who live in neighborhoods where incarceration has promised safety Live day to day with the degree to which that promise is unfulfilled And so when given an option for something that might do better people choose that option Not for innovation and not even usually for compassion, but for pragmatism and safety The second thing that we believe should guide our responses to violence is that we think they should be accountability based It's important to distinguish accountability from punishment Punishment is passive. You don't have to do anything to be punished. Someone else has to do something, but you don't You have to just not escape it Accountability is different accountability requires that you Acknowledge what you've done Acknowledge the impact of those actions express genuine remorse Make things as right as you possibly can And do the extraordinarily hard labor of becoming someone who won't do those things ever again Accountability is some of the hardest work we as people will ever do When we do it, it is transformative to the people to whom we are accountable But maybe even more importantly it is transformative to us And so I'd ask you to take a moment and think about A time that you did something that you know is wrong And you can decide whether you want to think of a little thing or a big thing like check in on how you're doing today Don't go too big just because I asked you to I know I'm at the very official lecture So I can tell you what to do but don't do something that's not good for you um A time that you did something you knew was wrong that you made as right as you could And so think about what the thing was and how you made it as right as possible And take a moment to just pay attention to how it feels to think about that And now take a moment to think about a thing you did that you know was wrong That you didn't make right Because you didn't know how because it was too late because you didn't have access to the person Because by the time you figured it out you couldn't figure your way through because you still don't quite see the way And sit for a moment with how that feels I would venture that the latter is harder Um the first I think probably most of us can think of and still Feel a good amount of self-love A good amount of pride in who we are We can recognize ourselves in it. We could tell someone Just about anyone about it and still feel like we'd be able to be deserving and worthy of their respect That second one a little harder The best word I know for that feeling it's not a perfect word, but it's the best I know and that's shame And shame is probably my least favorite emotion like if we're gonna rank them. Um There's a bunch of crappy ones. It's my least favorite. Um Shame is known to be core driver of violence Which means feeling ashamed of what we have done put us at risk puts us at risk of hurting people ourselves and others And it's hard to know the pathway out of shame and so when we talk about grief and loss We know we talk about a pathway. We talk about stages of grief We talk about the things you go through In a process that we all sort of know and recognize understand and can talk about That return us to our self-love to our hope to our connection with each other to our dignity I believe accountability Is the corollary to grief for when we do something wrong And that in answering for what we have done we return To our self-love To our hope to our connection to our dignity It's part of why that first example feels different It's part of why like the ancient Hebrew word to shuva, which is sometimes talked about as repentance is also means return Right, it's that it's a return to a place of a particular kind of wholeness And so I believe that holding people accountable is an act of love I am certain people in common justice wish we loved them less Because it's undoubtedly incredibly hard And so when we deny the accountability of people who have committed harm We aren't helping them when we excuse their actions when we talk about The idea that like the horrific thing they did was inevitable because of their terrible childhoods or terrible neighborhoods or terrible families or terrible lives That doesn't mean that we should not acknowledge the way pain generates more pain The way unhealed trauma is one of the surest drivers of future violence The way our indifference to certain people's pain sets us up for a society of violence But it does mean we shouldn't make excuses We shouldn't do it because it's wrong for the people who were hurt They did not hurt less Because of any feature in the person who hurt them their pain is just as real It's unstrategic politically excuse making goes over really poorly in a political context when we're seen as apologizing for the worst things people do But it's also wrong for the people who commit that harm Because it excuses them from an accountability process that is precisely the road out of shame and back to dignity It creates a barrier between them and that transformation and that transformation is one of the most important things Any of us can ever have the gift of undergoing in our lives And so we believe responses to violence should be accountability based And the good news is that when people are accountable when we face what we have done We are very likely to be transformed by it partly because of how hard that is and how much we don't want to do it again And partly because in it we are reconnected to the people with whom we share community The third principle we think should drive our responses to violence is that they should be safety driven That also sounds obvious And yet at the same time nothing of what we do has basically anything to do with generating safety and so That's awesome And so our current approach to violence There's no relationship to everything we know about what causes and what ends violence That seems weird like our approaches to disease Are always rooted in what we know about what causes and what ends disease That seems like a reasonable thing to do And yet in the criminal justice arena our approaches to violence are driven by rhetoric They're driven driven by sort of outdated philosophical notions They're driven by myth And they're driven by vengeance It's my belief they should be driven by safety that when the government intervenes in a situation Where someone is unsafe their intervention should make us all safer But that's what they're there for it's part of why we so joyfully pay our taxes and What we know is that the core drivers of violence For individuals so the biggest drivers of violence are structural their poverty their inequity They are racial inequity. They are unhealed trauma. They're all these things these structural factors They're things like redlining drives of violence on the individual level The core drivers of violence are shame isolation exposure to violence and an inability to meet one's economic needs I would argue the four core features of prison are shame isolation exposure to violence and an inability to meet one's economic needs So it means our core response to violence has as a very central dimensions Precisely the things that generate violence That is not what people who want to end violence do To expect the criminal justice system as we know it to produce safety is totally irrational It's like putting out a fire by throwing a molotov cocktail through the front door of a building It doesn't make sense that it would quell the flames What we know about what ends violence are things like relationship accountability healing Access to supports right all these other things. We know what ends violence Because a ton of those cases that don't make it to the criminal justice system a lot of those actually result Some of them end terribly some of them go on to result in more harm And some of them end in some measure of healing and some measure of reconciliation and some measure of peace Because when we go when we take into our own hands the resolution of violence once in a while we get it right Not always but probably as often as our criminal justice system does And so what we have now in our response to violence has in it none of the core ingredients of safety And so if it does not have the core ingredients, it will not produce it And what we know it come in justice is that there are other pathways And so in the work we do Fewer than seven percent of our participants have been terminated for new crimes on our watch Of the people who started since january 2012 after our first couple years of learning One has been terminated since january 2012 in nearly six years Find me a prison that can say that Not to be sassy A little sassy. I like saying that to people who run correction systems. That's my favorite They secretly like it too They just don't show it We know how to produce safety and it's things that make sense. It's facing what you've done. It's making those things right It's developing the economic means to meet your needs other than through violence It's addressing the underlying pain that drives what you did in the first place. It's being answerable. It's being connected Um, it's Being in community with people who you make a commitment to never hurting again and to doing the work of becoming someone who won't And so we can produce safety if we choose to We cannot produce it through prisons and our ability to produce it in other ways will be dramatically undercut By the scale of our prison system in this country Because the division of families reduces safety Because the investment in prisons at the expense of everything else reduces safety Because the exit and return of people the inconsistency of community and the constant disruption reduces safety And because the violence and trauma people undergo while in prison also reduce safety And so we have a threat to our safety in this country And it is a growing threat It is one that has grown dramatically over the last 30 years And is our system of mass incarceration and unless we make it our business to eradicate that threat We will not be safe with each other The last principle that we think should guide our responses to violence Is that we believe that they should be racially equitable We believe that first for practical reasons, which is that inequity is demonstrated to be a driver of violence So if you know something produces a thing and you want less of the thing you have to do less of the thing that produces the thing Um And and we don't do that. So on the one hand, we know we have to eliminate inequity as A risk factor for our culture But when I talk about racial inequity, I'm not talking only About defendants in the system So it's important to know that there are racial disparities at every Single stage of the criminal justice system at any point where a human can make a decision Or where a risk assessment instrument developed in part by humans is used That inequities persist. So that is at arrest. It's at arraignment and bail. It is at the felony arraignment It is it charging. It is it plea offers. It is it sentencing is that parole And at each of those places the inequities that happened in the previous place are only exacerbated almost every time It's why we understand mass incarceration to be the grandchild of slavery and the child of jim crow It's we why we understand it to be For me the core civil rights question of our day It's why I believe our children's children will ask us what we did about it And we will be faced with ourselves when we answer that question and that at our current moment The answer is not one that will dignify us or will teach a lesson to that generation that we want to teach Um, and it is all of ours to account for and to fix But the inequity doesn't stop with the people who commit harm. It also includes people who are hurt So we devalue certain crime victims. We particularly devalue victims of color We pretend young men of color who were hurt had it coming to them And that young women of color probably don't feel pain quite the same way as white women do because they're so strong Right, so we tell stories that suggest that men of color deserve pain that women of color can't feel pain These are also old stories And when we do that we shouldn't be surprised by the portion of victims who don't call a criminal justice system That treats their pain as their fault or unimportant And we are not a country that fulfills its promise to equity or to safety Or its basic obligations to its citizens to treat them with dignity and equal regard And we know we can do it differently and we know that partly because of how we treat white people I say this is a white person. So I know a lot about being a white person um When I was charged with a bunch of crimes when I was a teenager I was met with mercy The judge saw in me a child who had made a mistake The judge worried about me Thought something must be happening that I made these choices The judge thought I could be something different than those choices that I probably was already more than those choices But certainly could become more than them if I wasn't yet And the judge made a decision to give me my life back. I've described it as an off ramp from my idiocy Right like adolescence is like nothing but idiocy and as white folks we get like off ramp after off ramp like we get to grow up We get to become people who got to grow up. That's what we are. We're people who got to grow up My co-defendant who's a young man of color was not met with that same mercy by any stretch And it was revelatory to me and it's partly because I think That the central the first promise of privilege the first gift of privilege Is that we don't have to experience it as such The gift of privilege is we experience it as merit We're hard-working We're smart. We're articulate. We're kind We're lucky even But surely we're not the beneficiaries of structures that give us things at the expense of others that take things from people So that we can have them That hurt people so we can feel safe That destroy families so that our family can have just a little bit more It would be hard to know we were that Right and so I had the gift of having that myth ripped from me And so I had to understand my privilege not as merit but as privilege and when that happens You understand that that inequity is a threat to your very soul And you make that inequity your enemy and you spend your life Finding the people to join with to listen to and to follow so that by the end of your days here You will have put up the best possible fight and maybe even taking it down But the other thing that happens when someone does something for you that they don't do for someone else Is that it reveals that that system can do what it wants So prosecutors in america could end mass incarceration tomorrow By exercising discretion differently Judges in the juvenile system could end juvenile incarceration tomorrow By exercising their discretion differently No one has to pass a thing in a state legislature, which i'm sure is a great relief to people who try and pass things in state legislatures For that to be possible Right Because we can choose it differently and so I think part of what our job is as white folks is to be People who testify to that fact That we have been diverted so many times I did a What I will call an experiment with some of the children in my extended family, which is a Like chosen family mixed race. This is not like a statistically significant study We grew up under the vira institute. This does not meet their standards I do not blame them for the inadequacy of this study And I asked the kids in my life what the word detention means The white kids in my life 201 said it was like when you were bad at school and had to stay after Kids of color in my life 201 said it's where kids go to jail We know this is happening No one's surprised And so shame on us For knowing and as white folks the thing we know that cannot be denied to us Is that something else is possible because it's done for us all the time I talk about whiteness as the oldest alternative to incarceration in america It produces great results in terms of like income longevity health outcomes all sorts of things All terms to incarceration work We're diverted all the time we're asked what happened instead of what's wrong with you We're asked what you need instead of what have you done Like we're asked what can we do to help Instead of how dare you right like we are met with that and that doesn't mean we're always met with mercy We're met with rage. We're met with pain. We're hurt in our own families in our own relationships in the streets Like we're not it's not that we are not also exposed to pain We unquestionably are and yet We are also met with mercy We're met with discretion And that's because we're met as though we're people who are more than the worst thing we've ever done We are people who are capable of change. We are people where the exclusion of us from a community would be a loss Where the removal of us from our families would do damage Those things are assumed to be true about us And so part of what we can do is that when systems say they have no way to do a thing We can mine our own experience for evidence that they can do that thing And we can call bs on it And we can insist that the things that are done for us are done for everyone And we can refuse to accept the things that are done for us until they are also done for everyone And so when we think about the work of ending mass incarceration It's vast it has to do with Thinking about electoral politics. It has to do with legislatures and ballot measures and alternatives to incarceration How different parts of the system exercise their discretion and what drives those choices and how we change those drivers Um, but it also has to do with that very fundamental work that I started with which is the work of being at war With the foundational myth of this country With telling true stories in its place With resisting those old stories whenever and wherever they are told And with sitting with the worst things we have done individually and together and believing That if we are accountable for those things if we acknowledge what we have done Acknowledge the impact of those actions Express genuine remorse Make things as right as possible And become people who won't do those things again That we as a country can also lift up out of that shame Back into a place of shared dignity of shared connection and of shared hope And so it's my belief that as we join together in the struggle to end mass incarceration that we are Doing the work of accountability, which I've already told you I think is an act of love And I have no question whatsoever in part based on the results we see in our work That if we do that together we'll succeed. So thank you very much for your time today For coming and thank Danielle again for giving such a wonderful presentation We're going to move into the questions and answer section of our talk You have note cards in front of you. If you have any questions, please write them down and we will be walking around collecting them and um, we will have questions fielded by Two students from the Ford School of Public Policy who I will have introduced themselves Hi, my name is Abby Oric. I'm a first year MPP interested in urban education policy Particularly school culture and socio-emotional curriculums in middle and high schools Hi, I'm Andrea Matei. I'm also a first year MPB student at the Ford School And I'm actually interested in criminal justice policy. So this is directly for me I can do the first question I have a question here that says please describe training for staff in the process In the process of crime and justice in detail I'm like that's either a teacher or it's a student who's like this is how they ask me questions. It's my turn So we do a lot of our training of our staff Um in the job and with us there's sort of aren't training programs that fully prepare people for what we do We don't look for people who have particular degrees We have great regard for what a lot of people learn in school And we don't believe that those lessons are only learnable in school settings And so some of our staff have degrees and Social work and counseling and those things and some of our staff do not Our staff universally come to us with a really sharp racial justice analysis We don't hire people who don't already begin with that But for people who do people go through intensive training and how we think about violence and what undoes it Our curriculum is really methodical So it's not sort of based in the charisma and engagement of our staff like the curriculum is entire Entirely inquiry based meaning it's all questions for 15 months We believe that people know the things they need to know to become the people they should become And so that the best way to bring that about is by asking them questions that help them sort of surface that in themselves So our staff are also trained really deeply in the process of asking questions instead of telling people things that you wish they knew Which is harder than it seems Um And of course we train people in the facilitation of circles We also do a large body of national work that is mostly concentrated in a project called healing works Which is a national learning collaborative for people working with young men of color harmed by crime It's a learning collaborative We are learning in it too not just teaching and we bring together people around the country who are doing the work of tending To the pain and violence young men of color in their community's experience and talking about the kinds of strategies that Work to help people transform it. So we are also very continually A learning organization That's best we can be I hope that was adequately in detail Thank you. So I will give the next question What do you see as the role of restorative practices in interrupting cycles of violence when they're implemented in schools? Totally so we I mean the We talk about the school to prison pipeline a lot, right and the Way we prepare people in their educational settings For a future of incarceration. There's the sort of classic example given that the way States estimate the number of jail beds. They'll need a decade out is by looking at third grade reading scores That it is the most reliable predictor more than any economic measure and certainly any crime measure So we know the relationship between what's happening in schools and what's and what's happening in the criminal justice system is profound We also know that schools Particularly in urban settings are becoming increasingly policed and policed in ways that mirror the very worst kinds of policing That happen in our streets and in our communities And so the introduction of restorative practices in schools is super helpful developmentally, right? It helps young people develop the skills of addressing and transforming conflict It helps them do that themselves to have those skills to bring to bear In their communities and their neighborhoods and conflicts that will never Involve the police because no one will call them But it also creates A real defense against the continued incursion of law enforcement Into educational settings, which without exception happens in ways that are profoundly racially disparate And profoundly damaging to children And the restorative justice for oakland youth, let me just Say their name and fania davis's name if you're interested in these things I think they are hands down the best people their practices have been Systematically integrated into the unified school system in oakland and california They started their work in Like the last step school like where kids were suspended to but the state still had some obligation to educate them That school had the highest expulsion rates and the highest rates of violence anywhere in the district And within the few it's within a few years had one of the single highest graduation rates in the district and the single lowest suspension rate So they just they work like the practices work and there are people who know how to do them And those people are like extraordinary teachers who are lucky for all of us willing to teach Restorative justice for oakland youth fania davis who I am very lucky to consider a teacher of mine Um, so um along with this restorative justice, um, how does it apply to cases of sexual violence, right? So common justice doesn't address um sexual violence We don't do that because we think it's not because we think sexual violence is worse It's because we think sexual violence is different I mean one of the mistakes we make in the way we address Violence is this in this country is we treat all forms of violence like they're the same Like a domestic violence homicide and telsa and a shooting in an open-air drug market in baltimore Are fundamentally the same thing and therefore require the same response. It's a mistake It's wrong and it generates bad outcomes for everyone And so when I say that we don't apply restorative practices to sexual violence I don't mean that they can't be applied. I just mean that we don't In places where people have begun to do that people have seen some really powerful results I think without a question these processes require Adequate preparation of all the parties so everyone has to understand what it is Have accurate expectations of what will come out of it have support going into it and Have the option to stop partway through And similarly we would never put someone in a circle who cannot take full responsibility for what they've done And so until someone who has committed sexual harm Can do the work of acknowledging that they had no right to do it I wouldn't consider a circle in those cases for people who can acknowledge That that they had no right to do what they did and own it. I do believe it's possible to do Thank you Can you speak about the role of capitalism and mass incarceration and how that either And how that either inhibits Restorative justice and how you think that we could overcome that awesome. It's really fun to get these questions and not know who's asking them Really funny and people just like go for it too. I'm like whoever said in detail might not have said that if they had to stand up So Yes So the most proximate relationship is things like private prisons are the obvious thing Though those are by no means the only way people profit off of incarceration I think the biggest growth we will see in private prisons is related to immigrant detention now and so we have to understand the place of We have to understand the detention of immigrants in our country as a dimension of mass incarceration And have to include it in our overall efforts to end it Prisons are profitable in all sorts of other ways too Like the connection fee for most calls from prisons can be as much as $15 for a single call And it's not like you can go to another carrier because those are the only phones that you can use The towns that depend on prisons for their income Depend often very fully on them So when people in those towns fight to keep those prisons open They are not fighting for mass incarceration. That's not the animating factor They are fighting for jobs. They are fighting for income. They are fighting to be able to put a roof over their children's heads I've talked to a lot of corrections officers. I have met very few who believe prisons are great It's hard to spend that much time in a prison and think it's a great idea I have met many corrections officers including ones who work in private prisons Where sometimes they are literally locked in for the course of the day um the people who work there who are whose Job is bondage Right, they are employed in the bondage business And some of them if you put another option on the table where they could make a real living Would crawl across broken glass to reach that option. And so those things are true at the same time The thing I will say To though is that this relationship is very old So when you look at prisons now, we look at their predecessor in what was called convict leasing Right, which is like the leasing of humans, which is a very clear one step removed from the ownership of humans Or the presumed ownership of humans um, and so we have for a long time um had the the sort of Filthy alchemy of this country Is the transformation of freedom into money? Right, that's been our filthy alchemy from the start and so I think it's 80 percent of The value of the stock market when it first began was derived from cotton Right, so when we think about something like reparations forget 40 acres in a mule like we're talking billions right and so I think we have to understand um We have to understand that as a country the thing we have decided to turn into money is freedom And we have to decide if we want to continue to do that or not And separately decide You know what we feel about capitalism overall Whether it's our thing or not So we talked about this in the meet and greet earlier, but um just to the larger audience When you formed common justice you have like a lot of interactions with prosecutors and da's Um How hard was it to get them involved? There's so many politics behind being on crime and and getting reflected on that platform. So was it difficult? Getting them on board in the first place It's good. We did this in the meet and greet because that'll help me not give a 40 minute answer here I like being asked about prosecutors So the narrow answer to your question is that it wasn't terribly hard in part because I Um, I started common justice out of the Vera Institute of Justice and Vera leveraged their nearly 50 year reputation on my little idea Um, and leveraged their relationship with the district attorney at the time to get us into the room and get real consideration for that possibility That helped immensely for it But the reason the district attorney said yes was not just because like a really really smart group of researchers asked him to It's because in brooklyn. We have developed a constituency that expects of their prosecutor To be forward thinking on criminal justice Like you lose in brooklyn for doing regressive things that ruin people's lives and you win in brooklyn for being innovative And I think one of the things when we think about prosecutors, we have to remember. They are elected We have to treat them like elected officials. We have to Take their jobs from them when we don't like how they do them We have to remind them who they're accountable to We have to do base building works in the community's most impacted by violence and incarceration So that the people who put them in office and can take them out are the same people whose lives are at stake in the decisions They make day in and day out which is to say we have to actually be a representative democracy And when we do that we can start to get prosecutors who rather than measuring their success by how many convictions they secure Begin to measure it by the degree to which they produce safety and fairness And we have to hold them to account for that that also means that when they take a risk And put someone in a program and that person commits a new crime. We have to stand with them We have to say we asked them to do this and we're asking them to keep doing this because despite this one failure Overall this choice is a far smarter far more sensible and far safer choice than incarceration And when they incarcerate people who should not have been incarcerated and those people go on to commit more harm We have to ask them why when in the face of all sorts of evidence that incarceration was criminogenic and likely to produce a bad outcome They went ahead and incarcerated that person and say to them that your choice to incarcerate that person The result of that which is more violence like that that blood is on your hands And so we have to invert the things that they get off the hook for and the things they're held accountable to So that we hold them to the standards that we hold most dear and if we do that they're politicians And so they'll do what we say But they are not for the most part we should I should be clear for all my beef with prosecutors Which is a lot of beef They aren't most of the time doing things other than what we ask them to do They're doing what we say They're doing what they think will get them reelected and until we convey different expectations It's unreasonable to expect them to behave any differently So I'll stop it's hard for me to stop talking about prosecutors Next so so this next one is a really wonderful kind of philosophical question Um, what do you think are some of the factors responsible for the desire for vengeance? How can society and politics devalue the need for vengeance? And correct the confusion of justice for vengeance This is a strangely funny format I think partly because when people ask questions in real life, they sort of Build on the one before in a way that's a little less funny. So this is a fun exercise. Um So the desire for vengeance like the feeling Um The feeling of satisfaction and the notion of someone else who hurt us suffering Is real It's almost never permanent It's almost never satisfying when we actually get it It never heals us It never relieves our trauma Like it is not like vengeance is not the opposite of trauma So it doesn't work, but it's it can be very appealing Um for most of us it's A temporary part It's one of the thousand things we feel as we move through the course of a healing trajectory Which is never linear. So we might feel it one time and feel it again later and it'll arise and pass I believe actually pretty fundamentally that um The desire for vengeance isn't actually quite that I think the desire for vengeance is at its most fundamental a desire for recognition It's a desire to have our pain seen and known And that is about as human beings our need to be seen and known It is about the way violence against us feels like an erasure Feels like a threat to our very existence Um And the counterbalance to that is to insist on our existence to insist on being seen and known and felt And so I think very often we need that recognition and the one thing we can think of that would do that Is revenge Like the one thing where we would know That we are seen that we are know that it is felt Is for that other person to see and feel it It's part of why the most important thing we say to victims at common justice when we reach out to them to ask them About whether they want the program or not is that we say what happened to you is wrong We acknowledge it we ask what happened we ask how it felt we say it was wrong And almost every time after we say that people are like, all right, let's do the program right We need to be seen in what's been done to us And so I think while I do believe the human need for recognition is fundamental to our being I believe that the desire for vengeance is largely a Sort of cultural phenomenon mapped on to that fundamental human need and desire the way a lot of these things are I think when individual people who are hurt Or people whose communities have been hurt now and historically want vengeance that that is appropriate to want That makes a lot of sense When systems seek vengeance, I think it's totally inappropriate. It's an irrational emotion Right. Our systems are not supposed they don't have feelings Like they're not supposed to get to do feely things. They're supposed to make sense They're supposed to be bound by reason. They're supposed to be bound by fairness and justice. They're supposed to be bound by what works And so systems shouldn't get to act out of a fleeting and often Changing emotion because part of the problem too is that unlike human beings systems don't change very fast So when you bake one emotion into it Unlike for a person Who when they are well loved or when they are seen or where they get to stand by the ocean for a minute or where they Finally get one night of real sleep since they were hurt that that feeling starts to recede Once you build that feeling into a system the system doesn't have a mechanism to get it out because it's not Alive like it's not a person. It doesn't know how to just feel a new thing. That's not what it is And so when we build whole structures around particular emotions, it means that they have They become rigid and ossified around those emotions because they don't have Kind of the involving nimbleness that we as humans do Um, and at the same time when I say this I want to be really clear that Wanting revenge when you've been hurt Is just it's there's nothing wrong with it There may be something wrong with taking revenge There is definitely something wrong with assuming everyone else wants what you want But like you get to want revenge Just like you get to want to die Right, like you get to want the things that happen when we've been hurt and we're not wrong for wanting them But what we deserve are processes that let us move from those places Into places where we feel things that like make us want to live and that make us want to live right and so And it's really important that we don't Judge people who have been hurt for as though they're somehow worse than victims who can forgive right away It's not about there's not it's not a hierarchy in that it's about which of the thousand things we feel in our pain We want to build into our structures for responding to pain And that's a decision we make collectively and it's a decision we make wisely together All right, so a lot of pressure picking the last one Um Uh, but I guess I'll go with this one Uh, the question is how do you get people who are indifferent about restorative justice slash mass incarceration issues to care about that? Easy last one. Yeah, that's okay. Thanks Um, do you mean how do I or how does one give me clarify? Um So I think um We are There are a couple ways we connect into these issues, right? Like one we connect through our own experience surviving harm or loving people who have survived harm And we're often taught that our experiences somehow don't count Because we didn't call the police because it wasn't as bad as what happened to our neighbor because we were intoxicated at the time or wearing a short skirt or because We were people of color because we had a history of committing a crime or for a thousand reasons or because we think that maybe We had it coming that we did something to contribute to it that even if we didn't in that case We did something bad in another case and we sort of believe and the idea that things come back around Right, so we do all sorts of things to devalue our own experience as being relevant to this conversation When I think we have to stop doing that I think we have to care about what's happened to us What's cared we have to care about what's happened to the people we love and we have to understand that the criminal justice system Is powered by stories about us Like if I asked ever in this room if you or someone you love not someone you've met or saw on tv someone you love Has been impacted by violence raise your hand Like it's all of us. It's not like victims Right, it's all of us And so we have to understand that these are our issues and the degree to which we've been persuaded that they're separate from us Is because of a set of stories That whether they're intentionally or unintentionally designed to do that have the effect Of excluding the vast majority of our shared experience from the policy debates about what should be done about it And then the other part is knowing That this is being done in our name Like if I said to you there's someone out there like Eating babies and he's doing it for you Like you would be like who and you would call him and be like stop Like that's not what I want you to do like I never said to do that. That's not okay Not in my name. And so we also have to Be honest that the things that are Done in our name are ours Like they belong to us um, and we have to own them and we have to Care about them and we have to stop people From doing stuff about us without our permission or consent And I think most of us don't like being talked about behind our backs and most of us don't like being used Most of us don't like being manipulated and all those things are happening to all of us And then I think for some people people care People enter into this through much more pragmatic or seemingly more pragmatic things like economics Like the reality is that it is more important to us to lock up Communities of color in america than just about anything else The one other thing that's more important to us is having a lot of bombs Like if we look at how we spend our money number one is like we want to have just like a lot of bombs Like in different kinds and in different places just like ready to go Little bombs big bombs like that's number one And then number two Is locking up people and especially people of color. That is our second shared priority Right and that everything else that we want and don't get We don't get because of the ways we prioritize those things