Restorative & Transformative Justice

Rachel Gross:

There are really powerful stories about restorative justice; there’s a guy on death row in Ohio, who after several years, was able to meet the daughter and the sister of the person that he had killed. They actually sat down together and talked with each other. He said it was the hardest thing he ever did in his life, but he said it just brought relief to both sides. I know that’s not always going to happen for people, but we at least need to give it a chance to happen.

Jonathan Simon:

Sometimes we use the words restorative justice to describe a hopeful picture of how… when something does threaten people or disrupt their lives in a serious way of the sort that we call crimes now and usually results in prosecution or punishment, it could result in kind of community led effort to actually understand the full story about how that harm or that threat came about and what can be done to make it not a recurring problem. You can imagine neighbors and family members of both the victim—if there is somebody who has been directly victimized—and the perpetrator—the person whose behavior has raised alarm or threat or actual harm—coming together to actually figure out: How did this happen? How can we make it not happen? That’s a very attractive picture; I don't want to oversell it because we don’t know how that scales or how we make that happen at a scale that can address crime.

Orlando Mayorga:

Restorative justice has five components to it. One being radical hospitality—making sure that we never look at a person other than the person they are in the moment and be respectful of who they want to be. No matter what that viewpoint is in that person’s life, our job is to meet them where they’re at and offer a system and place of support where they feel safe enough to begin having those thoughts of wanting to engage in the change process for themselves. Not because it’s something we told them to but because it’s something they’re processing themselves, based on the support and the relationship that we’re building with people.

The second component to that is accompaniment. In order for a person to feel everything that I just said, we have to be willing to walk alongside that person and really be intentional about being there for people. The way that we try to model that is that instead of referring you to a job and telling you where to go, we actually go with you and advocate for you. When you go get your ID, or when you go to court, we’re right there next to you making sure that we hopefully minimize the systems that tend to oppress you, whatever those barriers or oppressive factors may be.

The third component of restorative justice that we practice is making sure that we’re intentional about relationship building with young people and their family. So, when you hear the word holistic approach, that’s what I think encompasses the relationship with young people and with their families, so that not only is the person we’re serving okay, but we’re [also] making sure the supportive systems around them are also well, in order to make that person feel complete.

The fourth component to this restorative justice philosophy is engagement or relentless engagement of systems and stakeholders. That means bringing in community folks. That means bringing in aldermen, local businesses, schools, and also sadly, the police. Whether we like it or not, they’re part of the community. We may not agree with everything they say, and they may not buy into everything that we practice, but we understand that in order for a community to be okay, there has to be some understanding between the police and the community about what it is that we’re trying to do to minimize the impact of what they do, which is surveillance and punishment.

The last component of the restorative justice philosophy that we practice is collaboration—in order for everything to work in unison and make sure that everything is working okay, there has to be collaboration across all those systems, stakeholders, and the participant.

So, that’s restorative justice in a nutshell that we try to model and practice here at Precious Blood, along with the Restorative Justice Health Network that is an operation in Chicago today.

Orlando Mayorga:

So, currently Father Kelly, my executive director, and other restorative justice practitioners are in the process of creating a model of turning these measures to community issues. The idea is to build up community people: mothers, fathers, young people that can serve as agents of support within the community. This last week, there was a group of mothers that have been impacted by mass incarceration. The mother had either lost a child to mass incarceration or had lost children to street violence. This group of mothers meets once a month to have this healing space, which is called the mother circle.

They were recently trained in restorative justice peace circles that can then serve as a model to engage people who may have been harmed or may have caused harm in the community. The idea is to offer an alternative to people in the community to be able to call upon and rely on instead of the police. Many of the issues in the community will not require the police, but that is the automatic response that community and society has when any issue arises in neighborhoods. Our plan, or Father Kelly’s plan, is to create this alternative model to community building that relies less on the police and more so on organizations like Precious Blood in the community to be able to be the response team or the response people to a lot of the issues that don’t require police in the neighborhood.

What we’re hoping is that this model can then be able to address the more serious issues in the community when it comes to violence in the neighborhood.

Orlando Mayorga:

The peace circles have many different components to it. We use peace circles to bring information to the community, to bring healing spaces to those who have been impacted by some form of trauma, to learn about trauma and self, and to be able to help people grow in the knowledge of themselves. We also use peace circles to address harm and conflict in the neighborhood. So, again, this practice is not something that Precious Blood has come up with; it’s actually a practice that Indigenous people have used to keep their communities healthy. In the movies—and of course it’s all the time—when you see Native people in circles passing a peace sign, coming together to address concerns that are affecting the community, it also serves as a social gathering. It lets people know that this is where you can come to to find support, to find healing, and to also, if needed, create a harm-repair space to be able to address some of the trauma that may have been caused in the neighborhood.

Specifically for the circles that I’ve been a part of on a regular basis, our restorative justice peace circles take on the form of case circles. People come together, we do a check-in, and we sit in a circle. In the center of the circle, there is a centerpiece in which talking pieces are located. Any object that’s within the centerpiece is a talking piece. The value of respect means that whoever is holding one of the talking pieces is the only person that is speaking. This is the way that we show respect to the process of being able to share someone’s truth and everyone being able to feel validated and affirmed because everyone is listening. So, we pass the talking piece around. The initial opening to the circle is that we read a poem, we play a song, we may share a quote, to be able to put the people in the circle space in a mindset that will support whatever conversation we’re going to be having that day. So, we do an opening reading, we then check in with usually: What is your name? How are you feeling? And a check-in question, which can take the form of: What is one thing that is going on in your mind today? How have you been sleeping? It can also be something like: If there is one place in the world that you would like to go, where would it be? Basically, just like an icebreaker question that puts everyone at ease but also expresses something about the person in that space.

Once we do that, then we go into one form of activity that engages people, that kind of breaks the ice even further. So, we do icebreaker activities. One that we do often is the “Who are you?” ice breaker, where people stand face to face—in this moment, six feet apart. They ask the question, "Who are you?" seven times. For those seven times, the person being asked has to answer the question seven times.

We would come back in a circle and have a discussion about what that activity felt like. A lot of times, people who grow up in communities that are plagued by trauma—and I don’t mean just interpersonal trauma; I’m talking about state-sanctioned trauma—you usually don’t have a true idea of who we are because we’ve been conditioned to think that we are somebody based on a prescribed idea of who we are as opposed to who we are ourselves. So that alone opens the space to dialogue that can take about two hours and continues on to our next circle.

Once again, we have that discussion and we’re able to talk about some of the more emotionally-regulating factors that go into who we are. Then, we do the same thing and we check out with a question of: What’s your name? How are you feeling? What’s one thing that you will take out of circle today? Then we end up closing with another reading pertaining to the topic that we discussed that day.

Orlando Mayorga:

So, trauma-informed care means first creating a space where a person or people feel safe enough to be their truest self. That requires vulnerability. In order for somebody to feel secure enough to be vulnerable in the space, you have to feel safe. So, for us as restorative justice practitioners, our first and most important responsibility is to create spaces where people feel that they can be that person. The one thing that I always hear from young people and people that come to our community center is that there’s a different feel when you step into Precious Blood, as opposed to everything else around the neighborhood—whether it be the block, the home. Young people and older people who come to the center say that, including myself! I, myself, have experienced that. It’s just a different thing when you come into that space. It’s not so much the space itself; it’s the people that are in that space. The people that make it easy for you to be comfortable and feel validated and affirmed—really just that somebody’s there that cares about you. Once you’re able to create that space, it lends license to be able to create the additional space like the peace circles for people to come in and talk about how hard it is to go home because [for example],a my father is an alcoholic or my mother is abusing drugs or I’m afraid that I’m going to get shot as soon as I walk out of my door.

When I talk about healing, just being able to express those things that you cannot express on a daily basis with your homies—because you’ll be looked at in a certain way—or at home—because your family is going through their own struggles—this is what the healing process is. The more that people engage in these places, the more that they’re able to learn about themselves, not because of what we’re saying as facilitators or guiders of those conversations, but because of what they are themselves expressing through voice and what they themselves are hearing from other people like them or who their friends are in that same space. It’s almost like a reciprocal life learning process that happens in that space.

Orlando Mayorga:

I would hope people understand that the degree of harm is subjective. So, I cannot convince a mother who has suffered a recent loss of a child or a young person that’s been shot… I cannot expect them to buy into or to even initially understand this philosophy that we practice. It takes time because people need to see it as opposed to hearing it. Once people are able to see the words that we speak or what we share in action, that’s when people start understanding the work that we do.

So, to someone who suffered a loss, someone who’s been shot, someone who’s been traumatized to a great degree, I would just say that there is a different way of addressing that pain than relying on disappearing people. What I mean by that is—just because we go to prison does not create the actions of our existence. We are still people with feelings, with the capacity to realize our authentic selves—to trust that there is a process that is much more engaging of our humanity than that of what we’ve been conditioned to think is the only option, which is either locking people up for a long time or just, the greatest crime that I believe is, relying on any form of death penalty, which I believe, long-term sentences are as well.