Marissa Williams has seen the power of storytelling firsthand. She’s constantly telling stories about growing up in Brooklyn, New York, in the hopes that she might earn a laugh or share a positive memory.
But some stories are more painful to tell. When Williams was in high school, a gang-related incident resulted in the killing of one of her best friends. Compounding her grief, she and her friend were in the middle of a falling out and weren’t on speaking terms at the time of her death.
Williams doesn’t like to share that painful memory — let alone in front of a group of strangers. But when she was sitting with two young girls in the middle of a heated fight, she knew it was the most powerful lesson she could share on the importance of reconciliation.
With stomachs full of cheeseburgers and Pepsi, the two young girls listened to Williams’ story. They cried. They hugged. And eventually, they forgave each other.
That was a few years ago. These days, Williams says she still runs into the two young women. Their enduring friendship is a testament to the power of the Red Hook Peacemaking Program, a promising restorative justice initiative out of the Red Hook Community Justice Center, a courthouse that offers unconventional approaches to justice. The two girls found themselves in the program, which takes place in the basement of a bustling courthouse, in order to work through the hiccups in their friendship. Williams, who is by profession a housing resource specialist at the center, was volunteering as a peacemaker, the program’s version of a moderator.
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The Peacemaking Program is a restorative justice program with roots in Native American tradition. It seeks to recenter our approach to justice away from punishment and towards reconciliation and rehabilitation. Storytelling is a key component of that restoration, and trained peacemakers sit with these defendants to do more than just moderate their discussion — they’re active participants in the peacemaking process, sharing their own stories and perspectives at opportune moments.
“It’s different from a therapy session, where you’re talking to a therapist and it’s all about you,” Coleta Walker, the associate director of the Peacemaking Program, said. “This is more like, ‘Yes, we all go through things and this is my story.’ We feel like everyone has a story to tell.”
The peacemaking process is simple: Sessions are held where everyone involved in the case, peacemakers, friends and family gather to share a meal and discuss the incident. The session lasts about two hours. So that no one is speaking over one another, facilitators pass around a talking stick to ensure that only one person is saying their part at a given time. After a series of sessions that differ in frequency depending on the needs of each specific case, the offender and victim will write a consensus together.
The consensus is read in court and typically results in dropped charges.
Though this brings the case to a close, Walker told NationSwell that their “door is never closed” to those who participated in the program. The Peacemaking Program has a personal advancement session for the individuals involved with these cases. At these private meetings, they’ll receive support and resources for any challenges they continue to face. For example, the program might help an individual build a resume and apply for jobs, or find mental health resources or addiction treatment.
Having family and friends present is a key element to the circles, explained Viviana Gordon, the deputy director of Red Hook Community Justice Center.
“It brings a lot of different perspectives to the circle about how this conflict is really having an effect on kids in the home or you know someone’s partner,” she told NationSwell.
The program currently has over 170 community peacemakers and works on more than a hundred cases each year. It receives cases from a variety of streams. Anyone in the community can ask for a peacemaking session and it’s referred cases from different court systems.
Program heads originally prioritized cases where there’s an ongoing relationship between those involved — whether it be an argument between siblings, spouses or neighbors. However, the program has extended to other minor criminal cases of graffiti, assault, shoplifting, harassment, resist and arrest and petty larceny.
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The circles, which started in 2012, have been a success. They’ve helped neighbors resolve conflicts over loud music and families reunited after years of fighting.
Walker said it’s a chance for individuals to learn how their actions impact others. For example, when a young man stole a woman’s iPod and headphones, the act of stealing went beyond monetary value.
“She really wanted to tell him what happened and why it affected her so much,” Walker recalled. “It was because her father, who had passed away, had made the music that she was listening to on the iPod. And when he snatched that, that was something she could never get back.”
The Peacemaking Program gave the young man a chance to apologize and the woman a chance to forgive — something that the current criminal system doesn’t emphasize.
Beyond anecdotal success, the program hopes to track recidivism rates. Walker said the team is in need of grant funding to track recidivism specifically for the Peacemaking Program. It’s a challenge, she explained, when family and friends are all touched by the process. The Red Hook Community Justice Center, as a whole, however, saw recidivism rates 10% lower than offenders in a typical courthouse. Red Hook has experienced sustained decreases in crime in the police precincts served by the Justice Center. Finally, these changes all add up to money saved. In a 2013 independent evaluation, it found that taxpayers saved nearly $7 million.
“It showed a two to one cost savings,” Gordon said. “There is a lot of upfront investment, but it shows that it does reduce recidivism.”
That success has also been seen in other parts of New York. The Peacemaking Program was adopted in Syracuse, New York, in a neighborhood that experiences some of the highest concentrations of poverty. During its first year, it worked with over 75 members of the community.
South Brooklyn High School, a “second-chance” transfer school where students may have fallen behind or been expelled, now trains students to become peer peacemakers as part of a civic engagement class. The 22 peer peacemakers work with their classmates to solve issues and minor incidents, like cell phone usage, disrespecting a teacher or dress code violations.
Before peacemaking, the school had a zero-tolerance policy. If someone broke a rule, they were automatically suspended.
“And to me, it was just feeding that whole school to prison pipeline,” Walker explained. With peacemaking, the students have the chance to understand how their mistakes impacted others. “Having that support in the school and giving that to them is what has helped change the school culture.”.
Williams said she wishes it was something she could have had when she was fighting with her friend years ago. She said she’s happy to see it’s impact in Red Hook and hopes other neighborhoods pick up on restorative justice.
“There’s a lot of young kids that make stupid mistakes, and if they could get a second chance at fixing their wrongs, this is a great thing to do,” she said. “Let’s give more second chances.”
More: Restorative Justice Programs That Work
Tag: restorative justice
This Nun Found a Way to Save Prisoners’ Lives — All by Spelling ‘God’ Backwards
Sister Pauline Quinn says it was a German shepherd who saved her life.
After running away from an abusive home and being shuffled between different institutions throughout her adolescence, Quinn was released onto the streets at age 18.
“Where do I go? What do I do?” she remembers. “I lived in abandoned buildings. Slept in doorways, on a bench.”
Living on the streets made her even more vulnerable to abuse, Quinn says. “I was taken advantage of by people in authority, such as the police.”
Quinn would visit dogs in kennels as a way to cope with her mistreatment. When she eventually adopted a German shepherd named Joni, everything began to turn around.
“That became the start of a different life because I learned I had power within me at that time. She gave me the power,” Quinn says. People started treating her differently, staying away as she walked down the street with a big dog by her side. “I liked the feeling so much I got another dog. I knew that they would protect me, which people did not do for me.”
With the confidence Joni gave her, Quinn started thinking about how she could use dogs to help other people who were suffering. She couldn’t afford to take her own dogs to dog-training classes, but trainers allowed her to sit in on their classes and observe what they were doing. In 1981, after years of self study, she teamed up with Leo K. Bustad, the dean of Washington State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, to launch the first-ever Prison Pet Partnership.
The program operated out of the Washington Corrections Center for Women (WCCW) and paired previously homeless dogs with inmates who trained them as service animals to help veterans and others suffering from trauma.
“I wanted the inmates to learn how to become others-centered, using the dog as a tool for change, but also for them to learn a skill that they can use when they get out, like dog training,” Quinn says.
After a three-month trial that showed the model could work, WCCW implemented the pet partnership as a permanent program — and similar programs began sprouting up throughout the country. Today there are over 200 prison dog programs in the U.S., as well as a handful in foreign countries.
Different programs have different objectives and funding sources, and there has yet to be a comprehensive study on the programs’ efficacy. But there are plenty of anecdotal reports on programs successfully reducing recidivism, improving inmate self-esteem and reducing conflicts within the prisons.
Inmates themselves report feeling empowered by their work with the dogs. “I thought that if I could do something to make someone’s life better, maybe it would help balance the scales a little bit,” says writer Charles Huckelbury, who served 38 years for homicide. “It gave me a good feeling knowing that I was helping somebody instead of hurting people.”
And Dunasha Payne, an inmate at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, tells NationSwell through tears that the dogs are a key way of coping with life behind bars. “They make you feel like you’re worth something, and they make you wake up every day, that you have a purpose in life and that you’re not just a prisoner.”
Watch the video above to learn more about Quinn and her work to bring about healing through the power of human-animal connections.
More: These Dogs Are Giving Inmates a Paws-itive Path Forward
Restorative Justice Programs That Work
This past July, two men were brutally beaten while heading back to their hotel in New Orleans’ French Quarter. Four men were charged with the attack, but instead of pushing for a harsh jail sentence, the two victims proposed something else: a face-to-face meeting with the perpetrators.
The idea is based on a process called restorative justice. In a country where criminal justice often involves harsh penalties like jail time and steep fines, restorative justice asks everyone impacted by a conflict or a crime to develop a shared understanding of both its root causes and effects. Restorative justice considers the harm done and strives for agreement from all concerned parties on how to make amends.
In the U.S., restorative justice takes a number of forms. In many cases, offenders and victims face one another and discuss the reasons underpinning a crime and also work on potential solutions. But other models of restorative justice might include roundtable discussions or community involvement.
And it’s not just for courts: Restorative justice programs are also being used in schools to keep students from being suspended, which many say is ineffective and more like a vacation than anything particularly edifying.
Here are a few examples of restorative justice programs around the nation.
A Jury of Your (Teen) Peers
In the isolated waterfront neighborhood of Red Hook, in Brooklyn, teenagers are trained for 30 hours before being given an opportunity to help fellow teens, as part of a program administered by the Center for Court Innovation in New York.
For offenders between the ages of 10 and 18, low-level offenses such as bullying, assault or theft — cases that could easily land in a family or criminal court — are heard by a youth judge, a peer jury, a tribunal, an adult judge or some combination therein.
While the model is a flexible one, the end goals are much the same. According to the court’s training manual, “Youths have a primary role in presenting and hearing cases and the youth court’s fundamental approach should be restorative in nature, focusing on positive peer interactions, allowing the respondent to redress any harm done to the community and providing opportunities for positive youth development for both members and respondents.”
The success of the program has led to the introduction of youth courts in every NYC borough. Mayor Bill de Blasio endorses the program. “Young people must have confidence in the criminal justice system,” he said in a recent press release. “That starts by understanding how it works and by seeing themselves as a part of the administration of justice.”
A “Whole School” Approach
Three years ago, in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, a young black student threw Skittles at another student, landing him in jail.
His arrest was just one of many such incidents within the Jefferson Parish public school system that penalized black youth more frequently and more severely than their white peers, and it resulted in a complaint filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center against the school district.
As a result of the arrest and subsequent national attention, the school district decided to implement a new discipline plan featuring restorative justice, where students have the right to request a restorative circle before they are suspended. This is called a “whole school” approach, where anyone who is impacted by an incident — teachers, students and even parents — sit in a circle and express themselves in a nonjudgmental forum. At the end, participants come up with a way to address the problem or harm the incident caused.
At a school in Marrero, a city inside Jefferson Parish, suspensions in one school dropped by 56 percent, according to CityLab. Other schools in the district that have embraced a similar approach have also seen declines in suspension rates.
Once Offenders, Now Volunteers
Instead of locking up bullies, why not try talking to them instead?
That’s the goal of L.A.’s Teen Court, an intervention program which provides selected juvenile offenders with the opportunity to be questioned, judged and sentenced by a jury of their peers.
David S. Wesley, presiding judge for the Los Angeles Superior Court, thinks that having youth offenders plead their case to a jury of their peers, is a much more effective way of preventing future skirmishes with the law than traditional punitive measures.
“Punishment was not punishment,” Wesley said in a Center for Court Innovation podcast, explaining the basics of the court’s SHADES (Stop Hate and Delinquency by Empowering Students) restorative justice program. “It was what we could do to make sure the minor [didn’t] get in trouble again.”
The Teen Court approach differs from that of New York’s Center for Court Innovation, where the victim of the crime might be involved in the restorative justice process. But both models appear to be effective.
“We know anecdotally that our recidivism rates are very, very low,” Wesley said. “What ends up happening is that after their [sentencing], they come back [and volunteer as jurors].”
Men As Peacemakers
It’s estimated that one in three women have experienced some form of violence by a partner in the U.S., and one in four have been severely abused by a significant other.
And despite the fact that domestic violence against women is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men, many men do nothing to stop it.
That’s the goal of Men As Peacemakers: to reframe the narrative of healthy male behavior for youth offenders.
The Duluth, Minnesota-based nonprofit focuses its efforts on reducing commercial sexual exploitation and on domestic violence restorative programs. The group uses a “circle process,” rooted in traditional practices of Native American tribes, in helping facilitate discussions about problems with race, equity and education.
According to Men As Peacemakers, the purpose of their restorative justice program is to give youths a positive male role model to follow and “to acknowledge that [abuse] is a male problem.”
Fashion’s Sustainability Moment, the Ridiculously Cheap Device That Could Save Lives and More
The Future of Fashion Is Mushroom Leather, Bloomberg
When you think about how high-end fashion items are manufactured, you might conjure up images of factory pollution, mistreatment of animals and poor labor conditions (and you’d be right). But François-Henri Pinault, CEO of Kering — the luxury group behind Yves Saint Laurent, Gucci and others — is taking major strides to fix the supply chain. In the last four years, his company has invested in alternatives to leather, embraced the use of recycled textiles, worked to reduce plastic use and even links CEO bonuses to sustainability achievements. “It’s the new moon,” says Pinault. “The new frontier is the sustainability frontier.”
The Paperfuge: A 20-Cent Device That Could Transform Health Care, Wired
A team of Stanford bioengineers has developed a device that costs less than a quarter to make and can help save lives around the world. Dubbed the Paperfuge, it operates like a traditional centrifuge to spin bio samples and help diagnose diseases like malaria, but it requires no electricity and fits inside a doctor’s pocket. The device embodies “frugal science” — the idea that affordable yet powerful tools can transform global medicine.
New Court Aims to Redefine Young Adult Justice in Chicago, Christian Science Monitor
For young people charged with nonviolent crimes, a criminal record can mean diminished job prospects, continued poverty and a seemingly inescapable life of repeat offenses. But a pilot program in Chicago aims to break this cycle by letting perpetrators make amends to those they’ve wronged and contribute positively to their community instead of serving time. Ultimately, if the offender completes the program successfully, his or her record can be wiped clean.
Giving Poor Kids a Leg Up in Youth Sports, Recruiting Vets to the Ivy League and More
Poor Kids Are Being Priced Out of Youth Sports: Here’s One Solution, Washington Post
Low-income parents often can’t afford to buy their children a $300 baseball bat or $250 hockey skates; they may struggle to scrounge up even the $50 fee to join a youth sports league. In Gaithersburg, Md., an outlying D.C. suburb, officials simplified the fee-waiver process — from an explanation why parents couldn’t afford the entry price to a simple checkbox — and participation shot up by 80 percent in high-poverty schools.
Veterans in the Ivy League: Students Seek to Up Their Ranks, Associated Press
Only three Harvard undergrads served in the military; at Princeton, only one. A new intercollegiate student organization, the Ivy League Veterans Council, is advocating that the elite schools’ administrations should do more to bring former service members into their colleges by recruiting soldiers as if they were athletes, establishing a veterans’ office on campus or accepting transfer credits.
King County Tries Counseling, Self-Reflection Instead of Jail for Teens, The Seattle Times
Which juvenile justice system seems preferable: one where kids leave hardened by disruptive prison sentences or one where teens emerge with a better understanding of themselves and their crimes? In a first attempt at restorative justice, the top juvenile prosecutor in King County, Wash., put one defiant, 15-year-old robber through 108 hours of hearings to see if self-reflection could change his attitude where prison cells had failed.
The Zero-Energy Way to Produce Food, How to Build Hope in a Poisoned City and More
What’s Growing On at The Plant?, onEarth
On the southwest side of the Windy City, a former meatpacking plant is now the home of The Plant, an incubator of 16 food start-ups. Tenants work together in order to be as sustainable as possible — literally, one business’s trash is another’s storage container, recipe ingredient or energy source. The long-term plan for this urban agricultural experiment? Sprout numerous Plants across the nation.
Life as a Young Athlete in Flint, Michigan, Bleacher Report
In a city under siege by its poisoned public water system, hometown heroes are using basketball to raise awareness and kids’ spirits. Kenyada Dent, a guidance counselor and high school hoops coach, uses the game as a tool to motivate his players towards opportunities outside of the struggling city; another coach, Chris McLavish, organized a charity game featuring former collegiate and NBA players that grew up in Flint. The activity on the court doesn’t make the tap water drinkable or erase the damage already inflicted, but it does bring much-needed joy to a city overcome with despair.
Truancy, Suspension Rates Drop in Greater Los Angeles Area Schools, The Chronicle of Social Change
A suspension doesn’t just make a child miss out on a day of learning, it also increases the likelihood that he’ll go to prison. Because of this, many school districts in the Golden State now implement restorative justice practices — a strategy that uses reconciliation with victims as a means of rehabilitation — instead of traditional, punitive disciplinary measures. Suspension rates and truancy filings have decreased, but racial discrepancies still exist when analyzing discipline statistics.
MORE: Suspending Students Isn’t Effective. Here’s What Schools Should Do Instead
All It Took Was One Judge and Two Veterans to Provide Another Chance to Countless Soldiers
In 1986, one in every five inmates in state prison was a former member of the military.
Today, many post-9/11 veterans are still running into trouble with the law. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) affects at least 167,500 veterans (that’s just the number diagnosed by VA doctors) who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan — and it could afflict as many as 620,000. The disorder has given soldiers their toughest mission yet: successfully reintegrating into civilian life. The nightmares and flashbacks, anxiety, hyper-vigilance and other unresolved mental health issues caused by PTSD often translate into drug and alcohol abuse, homelessness, domestic violence and lawbreaking.
In a society that’s appears increasingly disconnected from the experience of war, there’s one civic institution that’s taking strides to accommodate veterans’ unique situation. Courtrooms across the country are now adopting veterans treatment courts — at least 180 established locations and many more are in development, according to the nonprofit Justice for Vets. It’s a model that tailors the criminal justice system’s response to the circumstances: Similar to drug and mental health treatment courts, judges are less inclined to mete out punishment to troubled vets, connecting them with help, particularly from the VA and local military members. If a former warrior successfully completes the program (which can include counseling, substance abuse treatment and job training), all the charges against him are dropped; if he fails to finish, the original jail sentence goes into effect.
“Many veterans will say, ‘I’m okay, I don’t need any help,’ but sometimes it takes another veteran to say, ‘You know, things are starting to spiral out of control,’” says Judge Robert Russell, who convened the first court in Buffalo in early 2008. “It could be traumatic brain injury. It could be PTSD. It could be any number of things that are left untreated. They’re not only debilitating, they’re what’s placing the person in the criminal court system and will continue to keep them in the criminal justice system.”
Russell says the “impetus of the court” began with a single case that came before him in 2006. A former Vietnam vet who’d appeared in his drug treatment court didn’t seem to be responding to the program. Group sessions didn’t work; neither did one-on-ones. “He wasn’t really engaged,” Russell recalls. “When he appeared in court, his posture was slumped. When I asked him what was going on with counseling, I didn’t get much of a response, just sort of like, ‘Huh?’” Russell pointed to two men in the room — Hank Pirowski, a former Marine, and Jack O’Connor, an Army vet — and asked them to talk to the downcast man out in the hallway.
Twenty minutes later, the three reentered. The defendant strutted to the front of the room and stretched to his full height, a tall 6’4”. He stood with his legs slightly apart and held his hands clasped behind his back — a military posture known as “parade rest.”
“He looked directly at me and said, ‘Judge, I’m going to try harder,’” Russell says. Afterwards, Russell met with Pirowski and O’Connor to find out what they said to the guy and how they got a response from him.
The two veterans had discussed their service, and after they’d established a common background, they told the man they cared about him and explained how important counseling would be for him to move forward. As simple as it sounds, the man needed to hear it from someone who’d struggled like he had, someone who could reassure him a future existed.
From that day forward, the trio collaborated on setting up a treatment court for veterans. Their goal? To “afford the best opportunities for the men and women who have served,” Russell says, setting aside one day each week to dedicate entirely to members of the military. The time was used to assemble a team of outside services, so referrals could begin immediately. If a vet hadn’t signed up for VA care, for example, a health official could immediately engage him that day, scheduling appointments and enrolling him for benefits right there in court.
An essential aspect of the treatment court is the volunteer veteran mentors, who function as a coach, sponsor and supporter, providing help with bus passes, rent, furniture or just talking through any crisis. “If they need something, Marines talk to Marines more than they do their own lawyer,” O’Connor says. Many are Vietnam vets who want soldiers just returning home from the Middle East to receive a different welcome than they did. “We never tell anyone about stuff we dealt with because no one liked us. People really hated our guts. Now a lot of Vietnam vets are in positions of authority. They’re in their 60s, they’re on boards of corporations, they own their own companies,” O’Connor adds.
As so many restorative justice programs have shown, rehabilitation like veteran courts reduces crime over the long haul by addressing the problems that initially led to criminal behavior. As O’Connor, who now coordinates the volunteer mentors, says, “You treat the illness, you stop the addiction.”
There’s stories like Gary Pettengill, a 23-year-old Buffalo resident arrested in a drug sweep. In 2006, while serving in the Army in Iraq, he injured his back and was forced to take a medical discharge. Nights were intolerable, alternating between sleepless pain and nightmares, so Pettengill began smoking marijuana to cope. Unemployed (in part because of his injury), he began selling weed to make ends meet and was eventually diagnosed with PTSD. Pettengill never did any jail time, and he credits the program with saving him from suicide, an option that had once looked inevitable.
Pettengill’s just one of the program’s 150 graduates in Buffalo. Another is the man whose appearance before Russell sparked the court’s conception. The man’s case manager at the local VA hospital said he had never seen the man smile before, but after the court was established, he became one of the cheeriest men at the facility.
O’Connor gives each of these men a special coin at graduation. It harkens back to “challenge coins,” small medallions that are unique to each unit of the military, only these have the scales of justice on one side and the phrase “Leave no veteran behind” on the other. He tells the grads to carry it with them, so if they ever run into trouble, they’ll remember how far they’ve come.
Data coming in from across the country backs up these stories. A three-year pilot in San Diego (home to multiple Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard facilities) found that recidivism dropped for those in the program, most of whom had been booked on DUIs or domestic violence charges. Of the 74 enrolled, only three reoffended — a rate of 4.1 percent, far below the 65 percent figure for state prisons. Even better, among the 27 who graduated the program, not a single person committed another crime. The county estimated the program’s savings at $3.985 million in jail and treatment costs.
“Once you’re seen the success rate, you can’t hide it,” O’Connor says. “Something’s working, and it’s working all over the country.”
That’s not to say there’s not criticisms of the concept. Although most are quick to thank veterans for their service, some wonder if the military is receiving special treatment that should be more widely available. After all, why do former service members receive a get-out-of-jail-free card while others are locked up? Russell says this is partly a matter of logistics. Veterans need specialized care, so scheduling their cases on the same day creates an easy one-stop shop for both client and service provider. The alternative sentencing is not a free pass, either. Former soldiers are expected to make regular court appearances and are subject to randomized drug testing.
Russell says he can’t believe how quickly the courts have taken off. “When we started it, we thought it was the right thing to do for the community in which we were serving,” he says. “But it was something that touched the heart and spirit of many around the country. They’ve embraced the concept. They’re affording veterans some of opportunities inside their justice system to help them get back on track in their own community.”
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Suspending Students Isn’t Effective. Here’s What Schools Should Do Instead
A decade ago, 60 percent of students at one South Los Angeles middle school were suspended at some point during the school year. Out of 1,958 sixth, seventh and eight graders, 1,189 were written up for drugs, violence or class disruptions. But this zero-tolerance discipline policy didn’t have the desired effects. Troubled kids isolated themselves, academics lagged and enrollment sharply declined.
Led by a new principal and funded by a federal grant, Audubon Middle School and Gifted Magnet Center, an inner-city junior high school with one of the largest proportions of African-American students in L.A., joined the growing movement of implementing restorative justice in schools: Instead of simply penalizing misbehavior, the strategy involves talking through the reasons why a child is acting out. Prioritizing resolution over retribution, it’s all about keeping kids in school while maintaining the best learning environment. Audubon has taken the idea to a whole new level. Last school year, out of 827 middle school students, only 13 were booted from class — an astonishing 98.9 percent drop from 10 years ago.
In this community, too many African American and Hispanic students fall victim to a life of crime and end up imprisoned, says Kevin Dailey, a behavior intervention specialist with 31 years of experience at Audubon. “People are behind the gray walls because they don’t know how to communicate or because they didn’t have those supportive relationships,” he explains. “We have to do whatever we can to keep them out of that. Knowing how to communicate, how to listen and how to speak from the heart are very important.” In his mind, communication is the difference between being facedown on the ground in handcuffs and enrolled in college.
Restorative justice teaches those skills primarily through something’s known as a “peace circle.” After an incident — whether it be mouthing off in class or shoving a student in the hall — the kids in the classroom talk about what happened over cups of hot chocolate. Rather than referring to “the victim” and “the perpetrator,” which establishes permanent roles for the kids, the circles focus on the action — “the harm” — and how it affects both students. As a small totem is passed around (determining who can speak), all of the participants try to arrive at some consensus for how to address the behavior moving forward.
Sure, there may be consequences, but that’s no longer the focus. Suspensions are now used very selectively because educators don’t want kids to fall behind in their studies. If there is a serious problem, administrators now find it’s better to hold conferences with parents and, if necessary, refer the student to anger management classes or other counseling.
“I don’t know if this is the definitive terminology in the textbooks, but what we see in action is restorative justice means giving kids an opportunity to speak their minds, to listen to them and agree on the next step,” explains Charmaine Young, the school’s principal since 2012. “We’re taking the punitive power of the referral slip and getting to the why of the behavior.”
It’s also why Young encourages teachers to get to know kids outside of the classroom — so they can understand them as young people with personalities and ambitions, rather than just as students who perform well or falter academically. She believes that teachers need to balance academic instruction with social development, like a seesaw. A class can’t be all fun and games, but it also can’t be entirely lessons, Young says. Students are more willing to learn if they feel the teachers actually care about them personally.
That’s where the new policies come into play: if there’s a problem in class, teachers will tailor the response to a student’s unique situation, rather than worrying about getting back to the lesson plan. It’s why administrators no longer issue suspensions for not wearing a uniform, for example, and instead ask if the student’s family has money for the right clothes.
Restorative justice isn’t a new concept, but its adoption is gaining traction, particularly in the Golden State. Last year, the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing required all new principals and administrators to receive training on positive school discipline, and in September, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the nation’s first law eliminating suspensions for young children (grades K-3) for minor incidents like talking back or showing up without school materials. Los Angeles Unified School District went one step further and said that no student in any grade should ever be suspended for “willful defiance,” a catch all offense (outside of two dozen specific categories like bullying and possessing drugs) that had been disproportionately targeted at minorities.
We must “change direction, keep all children in all schools and invest in restoring our children’s sense of purpose, despite so many institutions wanting to throw them away,” says Roslyn Broadnax, a core parent leader of CADRE, a group of minority parents with kids in South L.A. schools. “Over the past 10 years, we have begun to chip away at the belief that removing children of color from school for minor behavior, and leaving them vulnerable to harm and disconnected from the classroom, somehow improves our school safety and test scores.”
Recently, one boy in the after-school program at Audubon accidentally hit a fire alarm, disrupting a school site council meeting. A star basketball player, the youngster was worried he wasn’t going to be able to play in the upcoming league games. The very next morning, he arrived at the main office at 6:45 a.m. — more than an hour before the first bell rings at 8 a.m. — and sat in a chair waiting for the principal to arrive. “I just wanna know, Ms. Young, if I can have a cup of hot chocolate and explain what happened?” he asked. “Before you hear it from anyone else,” he added.
“Who does that?” Young wonders aloud. These are the kind of young adults Audubon is nurturing: kids who can own up to their mistakes or ask for help when it’s needed. Either way, the graduates will be students who know how to speak up for themselves.
Young points out a recent example of their success: Last year, the valedictorians at several L.A. high schools were all alums of Audubon.