Could Oakland Become a Restorative Justice City?
by: Dave Belden on July 22nd, 2010 | 7 Comments »
Is it possible for one city to become a model for restorative justice? Can you imagine a ten year plan to make it happen? I don’t know what that might look like but I really want to hear from people who have ideas about it. Here’s an article Edwin Rutsch sent me describing the work of a number of people in Santa Cruz, California, who have that dream for their city. They say that the cities of Hull, England and Rochester, New York have already become “Restorative Cities.” I don’t have time to follow that up — have a zillion things to do for our next print issue of Tikkun — but would be delighted if anyone who knows or has time to research it could tell me (email me at dave@tikkun.org, or leave a comment below).
A good number of the pieces are there already, in programs like RJOY (Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth). The Santa Cruz article describes excellent programs for teenagers who have committed crimes: like the kid who broke into a math tutor’s car and after restorative justice circles the car owner ended up tutoring the teen to help him through school. But is there a vision for how an entire city can gradually extricate itself from the prison-industrial complex in favor of a different model of justice? It takes time to learn the skills required to make restorative justice work.
An article by Sasha Abramsky in The Nation this month,”Is This The End of the War On Crime?,” argues that the economic situation is swinging things the way of prison reformers:
In Texas a $600 million prison-expansion plan was shelved in 2007 in favor of a $241 million plan expanding community-based drug and alcohol treatment services, after researchers convinced legislators that the latter would lower crime rates more than expanding the state’s penal infrastructure. As a result, the notoriously prison-tough Lone Star State, whose leaders used to boast about its extraordinarily high incarceration rate, is implementing some of the country’s most innovative reforms, creating a network of in-prison and post-prison residential drug treatment and DWI centers, mental health facilities, halfway houses for inmates being released onto parole, and nonjail residential settings for low-end parole violators. In 2009 the state’s prison population declined, perhaps signaling the start of a reversal of nearly four decades of expansion, which saw the Lone Star State’s prison numbers grow from just shy of 16,000 in 1972 to more than 170,000 in 2008. Texas joined twenty-five other states that saw reductions in the size of their inmate population last year.
That all sounds like something less than restorative justice, and I was distressed that in the alternative programs Abramsky praised Sunny Schwartz’s program in San Francisco County Jail 7 was not mentioned. But it seems that it may be becoming possible now to construct a concept about how the entire system could be changed, and I am sure it would happen first in one city here and another there, and then perhaps a state or two, before it gets talked about in national politics. It has to be seen to work, and that takes building pilot projects.
Could Oakland Become a Restorative Justice City?
I believe the answer is yes. It seems to me Oakland is looking for a positive direction to take the energy generated by the Oscar Grant shooting.
One idea we’re proposing and working on is to hold a conference in Oakland on:
How To Build a Culture of Empathy and Compassion?
see the web page here.
http://cultureofempathy.com/Projects/Conference
The conference will contribute to building a global culture of empathy and compassion by bringing interested people from all communities together to;
* foster dialog and synergy, build awareness and grow momentum,
* inspire, support and motivate one another
* share stories, values, ideas and strategies,
* generate plans for action.
If anyone is interested in working on this please do contact me.
Edwin
Yes it can. If Seattle, can declare that it is the city of compassion then Oakland can become the city of Justice. Justice that was open, flowing, growing was loved by the neck of the ass. But the hearing attached to a bad report cut off the love of Justice in the house of the worm, twin of earth.
The worm restored the love of Justice to the 11th builder of the worms house,earth. The lover of Justice is the neck that connects the Egyptian head of Double Fruit to the Egyptian body of Double Portions. This story is related in different words in the KIng James; but this is the meaning of the original words in the 1688 BC scrolls from which it was taken.
Words are power and if Oakland desires to be the Place of Waking with open eyes and be a citadel of Justice than the Statue of Liberty will rejoice for all creation. Bright
My prayer, my joys, my energies go toward seeing that the place of waking (city) a word that comes from open eyes, will be established in Oakland. The huge oak is found in the Cave of Double Portions.
I don’t have anything specific to offer to Oakland because I don’t live there. I only know friends of mine who do live there are very supportive of this idea. This is really great stuff.
I would imagine the success of being widely or officially adopted however is wholly dependent on the owning class’ buy-in to the concept and application, since they’ve rigged the system to only function as their exclusive system with the lowers merely subjects to the consequences and costs of that system. If you can figure out what would sell them on it, I think you’d have a real shot at realizing the notion. Of course we know this stuff works, it’s those at the top that have to understand and see that too.
I can already hear the wailing and gnashing of the Meg Whitman ilk decrying this as wimpy and worse. In my city, that’s my reality. Anything that makes sense it dismissed on that premise alone. In the meantime, I’m convinced more and more that Edwin Rutsch is nothing short of a genius and a hero. I’m learning a lot from him and he has my gratitude (you too, Dave, for bringing this all to my brain and heart).
Thanks for the comments Jack. If you check the page at the link below and scroll down, see Interview 17 – this guy talks empathy and the ruling class. Those in power.
I just uploaded a new short overview video see below;
I feel it’s my best yet for seeking empathy in a conflict situation.
(only my 3rd conflict situation so far)
Seeking Empathy at Johannes Mehserle Support Rally in Walnut Creek, CA
http://cultureofempathy.com/Projects/Interviews/2010-07-19-Walnut-Creek/
“I just came back from the Walnut Creek pro Mehserle rally. There was actually a larger counter rally there as well and a heated shouting match between the two sides which were actually standing toe to toe in some cases. I and Sherry went to all sides, and directly between the sides, asking about empathy, as well as, listened to what people had to say. A lot of people actually started in heated dialog between each other. An anarchist and a Richmond City off duty woman police officer for example. It was good and amazing to see people getting into dialog. I could see a natural innate tendency of many people to want dialog. When I asked people how we can build a culture of empathy they often said ‘get all sides together to talk in a less charged environment’. Unfortunately, here’s just not a lot of forums where that can happen. Several black protesters talked about the lack of trust in the police, but they wanted the police to come to their churches to engage in dialogue and get to know each other. The Richmond Police Officer said she was willing to talk with anyone anytime.”
This is great to read here. I spoke at a Tikkun sponsored conference (spiritual progressives gathering in D.C.) in 2006 about restorative justice thanks to Rabbi Lerner. I am a national restorative justice expert and committed to this work since the early 90s. Yes, Oakland can be a restoraive justice city!
I read your blog entry at http://www.rjonline.org where I am a correspondent.
We must learn to “connect the dots” and work to expand the vision of restorative justice and move towards full implementation. It will bring healing to victims, offenders and commmunities.
Best to you,
Lisa Rea
Founder, The Justice and Reconciliation Project
Rea Consulting
California
This is a terrible article and concept as now framed, despite its seeming humanitarianism. It presumes a tribal thinking and a smug, superior wisdom and morality on the part of elders that qualifies them to “restore” wayward young people to the tribe. The problems with restorative justice is that it is precisely the unadmitted features of the larger society that create and foster the crime, drug abuse, and other troubles now blamed on young people, which in practice overwhelmingly means those young people consigned by amoral elder values to severe poverty and abuse. In Oakland, Santa Cruz, and elsewhere in America, crime and health agencies show mammoth eruptions in drug abuse, serious crime, abusive and reactionary behaviors, and related ills among middle-aged adults that dwarf anything going on among youth, one we haven’t developed the basic decency as older generations even to admit–let alone confront. We don’t want youth at the greatest risk of crime “restored” to elder-prescribed society and ways, but–in directly opposite fashion of tribes of the past–to actively resist the values and behaviors of today’s old. “Restorative justice” begins not with grownups and experts correcting teenagers, but with the humble admission that unhealthy behaviors in the young are reactions to and emulations of even more unhealthy conduct in their parents and grandparents. This is a new challenge, one that begins with recognizing that restorative and prison notions are both rooted in the tribal past that presumes that miscreants were defying the values of traditional society to which they must be “restored,” when in fact they were expressing traditional values that they should be encouraged to reject.
You make some very good points, and I wonder what your impression is of the Restorative Justice page I linked to at RJOY? That does not at all imply that the “restoring” in restorative justice is restoring an unjust and unhealthy social order, but the opposite: that it is part of an approach towards healing the social order, which in the end will be revolutionary. The question is how and where to start. The example, in the article you didn’t like, of a math tutor who comes to tutor the teen who broke into his car is a small step towards healing the social order, whereas punitive justice for the teen would have been a step away from it. I see the efforts in Santa Cruz as steps towards showing in small ways how restorative justice works. For sure, this could just become a way of keeping the basic inequalities of society going, but it could equally be part of a much bigger process by which many people get practice in restorative justice methods and start to use them in all kinds of ways in communities, in organizations, and eventually and increasingly at national scales so that instead of the Obama bank bail out we get restorative justice for mortgage fraud and derivatives fraud, so that bankers are held accountable by citizens and involved in restorative practices which would include the creation of public banks giving interest-free mortgages and loans to community-creating enterprises… Once you get the idea of involving everyone in creating solutions, there is no logical place to stop, so you get examples like the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte that has eliminated hunger: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/food-for-everyone/the-city-that-ended-hunger. But getting used to this approach at local levels is what is happening in Santa Cruz, as I see it.