 Welcome back. This is our 24th show in a series of shows entitled Rehabilitation Coming Soon, where we have been discussing the mass incarceration practices of the United States and those effect of those practices on the state of Hawaii. I am Aaron Wills. I'm a William S. Richardson Law School graduate and a research consultant for Abigail Kwanakola's Research Center. I'm also a paralegal for retired Judge Mike Towns' private mediation practice. Over the past four months, we have heard from numerous professionals in the community who are willing to discuss the criminal justice system and see the problem of mass incarceration from different perspectives. Today, we'd like to hear the perspective from a public health educator and restorative justice lawyer, Lauren Walker. Welcome and thank you for coming on our show, Lauren. A little bit background on our guest. Lauren, for the past 20 years, she has been developing and talking circles and studying them to address crime, trauma, and injustice. She directs the Hawaii Friends of Restorative Justice at www.hawaiifriends.org and is a senior Fulbright specialist sponsored by the U.S. State Department to provide restorative justice training internationally. She reviews articles for five academic journals and has authored over 60 publications. She has visited prisons throughout the world and has received national awards for her work in restorative justice and solution focused approaches. Our website is www.laurenwalker which is L-O-R-E-N-N-W-A-L-K-E-R dot com. Welcome, Lauren, and thank you for taking the time to come on the show. Thanks. Well, let's just, we're going to talk a little bit about restorative justice today. So let's start out with just talking about what led you to start doing your current work. Okay. Actually, I learned about restorative justice when I was studying for my public health degree after I had been a practicing attorney for about 10 years. And as I was studying for the degree, I was also doing cases. I'd come from being a deputy attorney general doing just regular civil litigation for the state of Hawaii. And I actually had a lot of cases where I defended prison guards in the state of Hawaii in lawsuits that had to do with the prisons, foster care, that kind of stuff. And after I quit doing that, I started getting the master's degree in public health, and I was taking cases from the family court to represent indigent people, indigent children, and adults who were charged with crimes and also neglect of children, you know, parent cases. And Judge Town actually was the senior judge then. And I was in public health, we learned about group process and about how that's the way to change people's behaviors is to get them to want to do that and to talk about it, talk about their values and, you know, motivation, stuff like that. And Judge Town, because I was talking also, you know, I was in court and these things were happening in court that were odd, Judge Town said, you know, Lauren, you should get into restorative justice. And that's how I first heard those two words was Michael Town. Okay. So, and that was over 20 years ago now. Well, he's been, you know, he's been championing that cause for a while. I know we talked a little bit before the show about this. What is restorative justice? Well, restorative justice, there is restorative justice philosophy, and there is something else called restorative practices. And this is like a new field that started in the 70s, but it goes, it has ancient roots to indigenous people's practices for reconciliation and conflict resolution. And it's, the restorative philosophy is basically that justice should be about healing. Justice isn't just retribution, punishment, and being angry at someone for bad behavior. It is restorative justice is that justice should really be about healing, and it should include the people who were hurt. And we should honor them and have autonomy, they should have autonomy and have a place at the table. So instead of a restorative, so then we get to restorative practices, which apply this philosophy of restorative justice. And basically the, the, and there's no, no one agrees on any of this stuff hardly. You know, it's all, it's like justice. What does justice mean? Everyone agrees about it. And with restorative justice too, people don't agree on it. But the, the person that I follow is a man named Howard Zaire, who is, he is probably one of, he is the most, one of the, in the United States he's definitely the most renowned restorative justice person. And he started this very early getting into this restorative justice work. And the way Howard describes it really fits with my background in public health, which is that restorative justice is, restorative practices are a set of questions that when there is a wrong doing, and that's another thing too, it's about wrong doing, when there's a wrong doing. So it's not just really when people are in a dispute and I'm arguing with you about you're playing your music too loud. I'm trying to go to sleep. This is a dispute we have. So restorative justice really is about where you were playing your music too loud and I came over and I took the iPad and threw it at you. And so then now there's a wrong doing. And so we're going to use a restorative practice to deal with this. And I want to do it. I'm taking responsibility. I recognize my role and what happened. And then there's a set of questions in there. Who was harmed? Who was harmed by what I did? How were they harmed? Whose obligation is it to fix this? And what do you need for me to do to repair the harm? So it would be stuff like if your eye got cut, maybe you need help to get to the hospital and me to pay your bills, stuff like that. Take your dog for a walk. Judge Town always brings up this point when he talks about restorative justice. He says the key is making the victim whole again. Trying to. It's like a cut. A crime and wrong doing. Especially a crime. I personally too, that's how I got into this work was I was the victim of a very serious attempted murder and attempted rape and assault that left me. I was in the hospital and had to have plastic surgery and it was a really really scary, huge event. Actually it changed my life for the good because I ended up going to law school. And I'm going to college even. I wasn't even in a college graduate. I mean a high school graduate. So it ended up being a good thing for me. Not a good thing but I made something good out of it. But anyway, it's really a serious violation and it's like when you're really seriously violated. I'm not saying every single thing is a serious violation but when you are, it's like a wound. You can heal a wound but you will always have a scar. Hopefully people can make something out of the scar positive, like tougher skin. Like in my case when I was almost murdered it did. It led to positive results for me. That's good. Let's talk about the restorative justice project that you're working on and have developed and studied. Okay, well right now we've done a lot. In the last 20 years we have done a lot. We have done actually I think we've done more than almost any other organ. I don't know anybody else who's done as much as we have done, the way friends of restorative justice. And we've done stuff in public housing, with schools, with the police department, with the courts. We have a project right now, a federal court. We've done a state court. But our big project we've been working on for 10 years now is a reentry planning process for people who are in prison. And we've done about 140 of these, we call them circles, hui kahi circles. It means a group and individual coming together and they make a plan. And it's a restorative process and we've done a lot of research and we've had 600 people participate in these circles. So the circle takes place in the prison. The person applies for it. It's only for people who do want to take responsibility for any wrongdoing that they did and how their incarceration affected their family. So we have actually had two cases, one here in Hawaii that was written about and it's in a published paper that was recently published about a woman who was innocent, who had one of these. And she was able to talk about her injustice and also she felt like she had treated her children badly. She was a teenager who had a lot of problems. So this reentry program is really big. We've done a bunch of research. Children who have participated in them in the circles find that they have experienced healing. They've been able to cope with traumatic events. So they've become more optimistic after they've had a circle. And they've had less rumination, which is the psychology word for thinking about the event over and over again. They've been able to let go of the hardship of losing a parent to prison. And then we just did research too on recidivism and we do have a significant we have significantly less repeat crime for people who have these circles. I'm not saying that they totally changed somebody, but we did a very good study with Janet Davidson at Chaminade Independent Evaluation. We do have the people who have these circles compared to people who wanted a circle but didn't get one. We're not funded hardly. And then compared to the state's rate, three years after leaving prison, the people who had these reentry circles do have less recidivism. Well, that's exactly what we're trying to reduce. Yeah, exactly. There's a lot of issues that come up because recidivism rate is so high. We had Senator Willis Barrow on the show and he was talking about what he suggests is what's called a reentry program, a reentry center. He wants to build a reentry center where people, they can build up the skills as you're about to go out into the community again, better employment, employable people. But he was off of the boat of building a new prison and he doesn't want to do it at all. Maybe either. Well, it's interesting you bring that up because most of our show we kind of just want to ask people, why do you feel that way? Just because given OCCC is made in 1913, 16, the place is dilapidated. We had an attorney, Jack Tanaki on here who said that the conditions in OCCC right now are at crisis level. So what do we do? Well, we've got too many people in our Hawaii prisons. We have, according to Kat Brady who is an expert in statistics too, 74% of the people in the Hawaii state prisons, and we have about 6,000 people, 74% are class C felons who have done things like violated parole and the stuff for parole violation is like, I said I was working 40 hours but I was really only working 28 or 30. I moved and didn't tell you other residual, that you find a pipe with some residual drug on it. You know, these crimes, we don't need all these people in prison. When I first started working in the Hawaii prisons, I was in college at UH and I worked at the women's prison under Olamana, which is now the children's prison and there was only like 20 women. I knew all their names in the whole state. That's all there was. I mean on the outer islands there was probably some people too, but today there's like across the street now is where the women's prison is where we're doing projects and there's like 250 people 300 people in there. So we have too many people in prison and the state of Hawaii right now, I have not heard any plan for decreasing prison population, which is what we need to do. We need to do more of this re-entry I like the idea of a re-entry center. We need to do more of these talking circles to help people re-establish bonds and relationships that have been hurt and bring healing to the families. Something that is really that your listeners might be interested in knowing is that there is this one of the most accepted concepts in criminology. It's called the victim offender overlap and that is where people who are victimized sometimes unfortunately because they have been treated so unjustly, they turn to bad behavior and become offenders. And we have I would love for everyone to know the people that I know in the prisons, these people, their life stories it's astounding. I brought people in who have experience working with child welfare for years and lawyers and guardian of light and they're just blown away by the level of trauma that people have suffered who are in prison. So we need to stop that. We need to bring healing and I think restorative justice can do that. I agree and rehabilitation is something we've been driving hard for this show because another thing that Kat Brady brought up was the amount of simple drug users we have in and that rehabilitation really comes down to them the help that they need and there's not enough programs. There's just not enough out there and so they sit and they either get worse or they don't get the help. Okay, well we will be right back with Lauren Walker. My name is Aaron Wills and this is Rehabilitation Coming Soon. Hi, I'm Steven Phillip Katz. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist here in Hawaii and I'm the host of Shrink Wrap Hawaii which is on Tuesdays at 3 o'clock. Have a great summit. Take care of mental health. Hi, I'm Stacey Hayashi and you can catch me on Mondays at 11 on Think Tech Hawaii. Stacey to the rescue. See you then. Aloha everybody. My name is Mark Shklav. I'd like you to join me for my program Law Across the Sea on ThinkTechHawaii.com. Aloha. Hello, I'm Maryann Sasaki. Welcome to Think Tech Hawaii where some of the most interesting conversations in Honolulu go on. I have a show on Wednesdays from one to two called Life in the Law where we discuss legal issues politics, governmental topics, and a whole host of issues. I hope you'll join me. Welcome back. I'm Aaron Wills. This is Rehabilitation Coming Soon and we are sitting here with our guest Lauren Walker. Okay, Lauren, well let's talk a little bit. How does, you know, you mentioned it a little bit, but how does justice help people heal and rehabilitate? I mean, how does your program actually work out those details? Well, people feel really uncomfortable. Like in my case, I'll just talk about my case, when I got assaulted and went through this really horrendous event, my friends didn't talk about it a lot and my family didn't talk, people didn't talk about it and it's really funny because years later one of my other friends had heard a rumor and I had a daughter, when it happened I was a single parent and for some reason he thought that my daughter was the child of the rape and you know what I mean? It was like there was no discussion about it so being able to talk about it is really important for people who want to do it. People who don't want to, I'm not saying ever, never force anybody, but giving people an opportunity and most people over half of the world really want to have some kind of discussion. So I think talking about it and processing and having the opportunity to have your emotions out, a lot of times people think like I don't know if you've ever done, I don't know if it's ever happened to you, but when you feel something and someone will say, oh we shouldn't feel like that, well a restorative justice process never is like that. It's always, everyone is hugely respected and however you feel is that is respected and so I think it's really important for people to have that opportunity. I think Americans especially, we don't have a lot of emotional intelligence training and we don't talk about like little kids at school, your friend doesn't like you, it's just like you should share that Erin, share your truck with her. It's like let's just talk about he doesn't like me, let's talk about this, how I feel okay, we don't always get what we want. So I think having the discussion, the dialogue, the talking, circle is really important. Absolutely and especially when the traumatic event has happened. I'm glad that you brought up your own story. When I was 19 I was stabbed in the face and the chest and you can kind of see the scar on the face. It was a fight and we were kind of at a party and me and my friend got cornered in a kitchen and so we had to fight our way out of it and as I was walking home and I didn't even know because I was so drunk and my friend was like man you're really injured and I was like I am and so I saw my reflection in the mirror and I got home and there's my cheek was hanging off, I could see all my teeth. I got stabbed in the chest too and then I started freaking out and it was four hours of surgery, staples. At that time I was a full-ride scholarship athlete at University of Nebraska on the football team and we were defending national champions so I went down there and I'm zipper faced. I have 44 stitches here four staples in my chest and just the look that I got was just terrified. They were terrified of me. My coaches were like you got some rough friends, you got some scary friends. I'm like my friend did not do this to me, friends don't stab you in the face but I never talked about it. I didn't talk about it for four years because I had to get out of there and once I got out of school in one incident where I actually could sit down and talk about it and it's amazing what happens when you can talk about the things that really affect someone personally and deeply and personally. And a lot of these people who are in jail never get that opportunity because what happens is they go through the process of this criminalization process, they end up behind bars. They become the bad ones. Right and then they want to tell everybody how they ended up there and no one wants to listen. So I'm glad that these circles are actually giving them an opportunity to kind of open up and heal because that's what the whole point is. How can restorative justice help prevent crime? Well I think by the healing because see people are also victims feel they can have healing from it and then the other piece is that the person who did the wrong doing, they hear the person face to face. It's not a judge looking down at them telling him how come you did this and you're bad and everyone's bad at him or her and instead they can hear someone. That's what I noticed in Family Court when I first got into this stuff was little kids were like because they were getting in trouble all the time they became very self-absorbed. Everything was about me protecting me you know and I'd be like I'm a parent of three kids you know I'd be asking my clients you know dude look what you did to that lady over there do you want to say they'd be like Lauren you don't know what it's like for me they just didn't have room to because they were so afraid and that's part of the problem with our current criminal justice system because it's so punitive people don't have space they don't have room to develop empathy because they're so protecting themselves you know and so that's a great thing and it helps people and there's been research on this brain research with psychopaths that it has increased empathy. Well as far as you know the Hawaii prison system and we talked about this you know with the reentry center what are some other ideas that maybe that you're working on or that you have that the Hawaii prison system could do to increase the rehabilitation aspect of the prison system. Well first of all they could have a plan for decreasing the prison population instead of just a plan and putting like 16 million dollars into planning a Maui prison you know that money could have been put into rehabilitation for people please and so they could have a plan for reducing prison population and using these restorative practices and doing more work for a low you know and if we all the money we're taking to build the new prison which I understand from the state legislature from a resolution is going to be one and a half to two billion dollars that money could go into rehabilitation you know it's not a panacea restorative justice not a panacea it's not going to fix everybody there's going to be somebody who has this and who goes out we've already had people do bad stuff again it's not going to be a cure all right you know there's going to be people who mess up on parole and whatever but we can't just give up we can't throw the baby out with the bathtub or whatever that's saying you know we got to keep trying and giving people the opportunity to learn and get better and we can't keep these class C felons 35% of them imprisoned that money could be used for rehabilitation have you talked to Bob Merce at all about his trip to Norway yes I have and I've been to Norway I've been to Halden prison myself some years ago I've been to prisons actually all over the world and I even stayed in a prison in Brazil I slept in one my husband enjoyed that and it was a restorative prison it was an amazing experience what is your feelings about the prison it's just some in Norway because it's way better yes yes it is very better they encourage relationship with the jailer and the person who is in prison people don't wear uniforms they wear street clothes they're treated humanely they're not just a number and it's not like a metal building with a box no it's very no it is they have they do have television a flat screen TV yes I've seen it I was impressed and I know it's such a radical jump from where we're at we're actually you know I'll tell you honestly and I visited prisons all over the world except Africa and Australia and our Hawaii state prisons are only worse than Indonesian ones that I've seen so far the Indonesian but Hawaii state prisons are really bad compared to Italy Spain Brazil the Brazilian one I saw I mean the state prison in Brazil is probably more like Hawaii state prisons I saw it a little bit it's probably more like Hawaii state prisons but the one I saw was a faith based restorative prison how does Hawaii like compare to other states well I haven't visited a lot of other states California I've seen a little bit but I do compare it to the federal system I've seen the federal system which is a lot a lot better it is so much better yeah they just put a lot more professionalism into the people who work there they get really good training there's a lot more support for rehabilitation I think it's just completely different they have educational programs higher education you know it's not like ours what we do I agree well let's talk quickly before we end here what could the Hawaii public schools do to start helping prevent crime okay they could start having less zero tolerance less three strikes more opportunities to learn when Erin is hurt you know we can bring in the people who hurt him and have these talking circles it doesn't take a lot of money there is no need for hundreds of thousands of dollars to start these restorative programs we have been willing and have contacted the DOE in the past Pat Hamamoto the former superintendent was kind of we almost had her interested and she laughed but you know we're always open to helping any school that wants to start a restorative program it doesn't take a lot okay and so what about individuals I mean if they're going to apply restorative justice in their daily lives how would someone go about doing that if there's some kind of principles that they can follow okay well the first thing I think is to have respect for someone who's someone who's been hurt to have respect for them and if they're talking about their feelings don't jump in and say oh you shouldn't feel like that you know don't ever say that let someone let them let them feel how they feel and don't ask why so much like well why do you feel like that why did that you know we're so like want to know why it's like you know what people don't know why you know I don't know why the guy who hit you he probably I don't know why I was drunk right I mean you know why is not so important is important is what are we going to do about this what can we do to help Erin or what can we do to help Lauren when she got attacked you know what can we do to help things what can we do to make things better so look at it like that so if you're a parent and all of us have some kind of relationship usually with kids we can do that when kids do and kids naturally do wrong things okay that's another thing the schools can admit and see kids are going to do wrong things children are going to misbehave teenagers especially and teenagers have the highest rate of rehabilitation even from the most serious crimes that they commit they have the highest rate of rehabilitation and all of us have done stuff I don't know any adult that never did anything wrong as a child you know in a teenager so so have a little bit more respect and and ask what we can do to make things right and I believe in that I mean you know as far as the rehabilitation as far as teenagers go I was I mean I wasn't an easy teenager and I got around about 15 or 16 I kind of you know my mom was constantly she had me swimming since I was like 6 years old so I was a competitive swimmer my whole life I ended up so this is the long story short is this when I was 14 15 I told my mom I don't want to swim no more she's like okay well then you're going to get the job and so she took me down to an old folks home and I had to apply and I got the job and they put me in the kitchen and so I had to serve food and then clean up after them and then it was the worst job of course ever and after about a month of doing that I came home okay I want to go back to swimming I'll swim I do whatever you want me to do and I ended up winning state being a captain got a bunch of scholarship offers but then I played football and then I got a scholarship offer that I accepted for that so you know teenagers can go down so many different paths yes and you know I don't have a teenager yet my son but he's getting there and you know you have to look forward to yes and what you have to mean the main thing you have to do is you have to listen my dad I think one of the main criticisms I have of him among many was that he just wasn't a very good listener you know he was a hard 1950s kind of attitude I bring home the bacon I want to come home don't bother me you know you cook the dinner kind of stuff pick up after me and I just I don't want to be like that I don't want to listen I want to listen to my kids and I think it starts with your own attitude so if you have the attitude that you want to listen you will stop and listen to everything your kid tells you and so my son and I have a really close relationship he was kind of giving me the heat this morning because I went to the gym late last night he's like you're going to take me to the gym tonight aren't you dad so you know so it's just being able to listen to what they're telling you and to really respond to it and I think that's what you can do to be a good parent and a good individual and nothing is permanent your feelings are never permanent if you worry about your children you know just hang in there and nothing is permanent and stay optimistic stay optimistic and keep your faith well thank you for helping us with this show and talk about this subject and help us continue to help us to continue to keep this discussion going until another show of rehabilitation coming soon we hope to continue our discussion of the criminal justice system and the fact the effect of mass incarceration on the state of Hawaii very soon so stay tuned coming up next is Sustainable Hawaii with Kirsten Turner thank you