(upbeat music) - [Announcer] A Slice of the Community is made possible by the support of the First Horizon Foundation.

- Hello and welcome to another episode of A Slice of the Community.

I'm your host, Jerome Moore.

And today we are joined by founder of Unheard Voices Outreach Rahim Buford and community organizer, Reverend Janet Wolf.

How y'all doing?

- Pretty good.

How you doing?

- Great.

I'm ready to dive into this conversation about the power of restorative justice, right?

Before we get into that conversation, I want people to really understand personally and professionally why that topic in particular is important to both of you all.

And so I'll start with you, Janet, on why the power of restorative justice is important to you from a professional personal level and what that means.

- We actually decided that Rahim was gonna go first.

- Okay, Rahim, why don't you go ahead.

- Okay, well fine.

That works for me.

So from a personal level, I was introduced to restorative justice while I was in prison back in 2002.

At that time, Harmon Wray may he rest in peace had given me his book on restorative justice, where he had written it with someone Marian.

I forgot her name.

But as I went back into the cell and I read about restorative justice, I began to think about the version of justice that had me in prison.

And so I said, if this were the way for this country, people who cause harm would understand that it's not because they're bad people, but because things happen in people's lives and they do bad things, but that's not who they are.

But even more, than healing will be a part of that process.

So from a personal perspective, one of the reasons why there continues to be so many problems socially is because we're not healing from the harms that are caused in the community.

But from a professional perspective, I don't think much about it in that context 'cause I don't see myself as a professional.

I think it's all personal because I subscribe to the idea that I'm a part of a community.

So restorative justice is a way of doing community justice for me.

- Janet, now it's your turn.

- Now it's my turn.

So I remember I was teaching and one of the students that I knew his mom moved, didn't tell him he had no place to go.

He ended up being part of a robbery.

Then he was tried as an adult and it was a long story, but I remember being behind a school bus one day, not long after I'd been in court with him and thinking this is gonna end up in prison.

I mean, this is the criminalizing of young folks.

So many don't have the opportunity to be who they are.

They're so shaped by all that's happening in the community, the lack of resources, the kind of battering from systems, the belittling that happens so often at school.

And I tried to figure out, there had to be some other way.

So way back when I was trained as a mediator by Victim Offender Reconciliation Project, which I'm not sure exists anymore.

But, so we did community mediation and it was challenging and transformative.

I mean that there was a different way that justice is not about vengeance.

It's about healing.

Justice is not punishment, it's about setting things right.

And trying to figure out how that might happen with the input of everybody who's impacted by whatever went down.

- Now what happens, and I'm gonna come to you with this one, Janet.

- Okay.

- What happens if we stick strictly to a punitive system and not pivot more so to restorative justice system?

- What is- - You increase the harm.

- What is yeah- - You increase the harm, you increase the violence, and it's much more expensive.

I mean that what we see in, and we call it transformative justice 'cause we're trying to change systems and communities looking at what are the underlying causes that created the possibilities for the harm to happen in the first place.

- Rahim, as a person that has literally been in the system, prison system specifically, is that a realistic approach for the system to change to a restorative justice system, especially at the adult level?

- It is a realistic approach, but I'm not so sure that it's a system approach.

It's a community approach where the people have to come to a realization that if we want real change, real transformation because certain things can't be restored, then the people have to make that decision themselves.

For example, if in my community someone commits an act that we consider to be a crime and someone is harmed, I should not have to seek beyond that community for a remedy.

But as of now, the state somehow through its laws, decides what justice is going to be.

And often it has no healing, it has no transformation.

And the people who were harmed do not even receive treatment of any sort.

So it's real for us to do it ourselves.

And it's real because if we wanna reduce recidivism, which is like upper 70% all across the United States, when people get outta prison.

If we wanna reduce what we call crime, we have to have a different model because the model that we have now, which is retribution, meaning a form of revenge, it is miseducating people, misinforming people thinking that if someone does something wrong, we have to make them feel pain.

That's incorrect.

- Janet, did you wanna speak to that?

Did you wanna speak to that?

- I was just gonna our friend Preston Shipp is coming out with a new book this month, Confessions of a Former Prosecutor.

And he talks about how as a prosecutor under this state sanctioned vengeance, he simply looked at the number on the case, what law was broken, who broke it, and how to punish them, had no clue about who the person was.

- [Jerome] Right.

- And no idea about the damage this was adding to the harm that had already happened.

And possibilities for alternatives can be really simple.

The last church I pastored, we trained our teenagers in restorative justice and mediation, and we did community meetings.

So someone whose kid's bike was stolen could call the church and say, "Hey, I want the bike back.

I don't want it to get stolen again, but I don't wanna call the police."

- [Jerome] Yeah.

- Because when you call the police and you put a juvenile with a criminal record, they're 50% more likely to end up in an adult prison.

- So that brings this to the community part, personal story, right?

I have a 3-year-old son, right about to be four in May.

And this happened maybe less than a year ago, right?

We're playing and he says, "You're bad.

You're going to jail."

- [Janet] Oh, ouch.

- What?

- [Janet] Yeah.

- You know, so being in this work, it made me look at like, hold on, wait a minute.

One, where did you learn that at?

Like what did that, like why am I going to jail?

Why is that already being taught to a 3-year-old that didn't come from me?

Right?

And so it makes me think about from a community standpoint, where do we start to shift in policing or prison or jail is not the first response to discipline even with kids.

And a lot of this, you know, this school to prison pipeline, we talk about a lot of that behavior is taught unintentionally or intentionally in our schools from getting demerits, suspended and then you expelled, you kicked out, you know, those type of things.

How do we correct some of that stuff that I think also plays a part in this system that we're talking about that is punitive and not restorative?

- Yeah.

I think we talk about the cradle to prison pipeline 'cause we think that kids are targeted from the day they're born in some communities to end up being criminalized and caged.

And I think the alternatives are, I mean, there's a wide variety we were talking about earlier.

It's about language, it's about culture, it's about relationships.

It's about building both transparency and safe, brave space for folks to come in.

One of the things that Rahim was part of was organizing with young folks in schools to create different models in the metro public school system.

And it was things like a kid would come in with a hat on.

The teacher says, "Take your hat off."

Keeps walking.

"I told you, take your hat off."

Keeps walking.

And now they're gonna suspend this 14-year-old from school without ever asking, "What's happening with you today?"

Turns out his brother was shot the night before.

He's coming into school with all this hurt.

He shows up and there's got to be room wherever we are in our communities to recognize the trauma.

- [Jerome] Yeah.

- To invite some kind of listening that moves us to a different place.

Did you wanna add?

- Well, I was just gonna say, we have to create different avenues of listening for our young people because a lot of the behaviors that our young people engage in, some of it they learn in the environment where they live and at home.

But for example, we were just talking about how we have to start doing circles and having conversation listening to see what the kids have to say.

There's so much going on inside that we never really take the time out to listen.

Even to the parents who are so frustrated.

We were talking about poverty earlier and how that overwhelms people so much to the point to where they never really get a chance to like internally breathe, right?

So when you present a different model of what it means to address a disruption, to address what we may call harm, this is foreign.

So when we create language to have conversations where young people can see that there are alternatives to how I can respond rather than react to a moment, this has the ability to transform.

- Now we talk about youth and we have a practicing restorative justice approach with in our juvenile system here in Nashville, but not an adult system.

Right?

How's that approach different, right?

Is there limitations to restorative justice, especially at that adult level depending on the harm?

- Well, Raphah Institute that defines justice as healing and does the work in juvenile court creates the alternative.

So there is no criminalizing, there is no caging, there is no record if the person goes through the process and completes all the requirements, but they're also working with the DA in Memphis for 18 to 25 year olds.

I mean, it is possible to deal with forms of transformative justice for anything that happens.

It becomes harder if it's murder or rape, but it's possible.

- Right, because when we talking about murder, those heinous crimes, it's difficult I think as Americans, the way I think we are conditioned with punishment and harm to say, "Hey, you just killed my sibling.

You just killed a peer of a friend of mine.

I want to take a restorative justice approach."

It's hard for many of us to hit that switch.

People that are watching this are probably thinking that, like, "I don't know if I can take a restorative justice approach in that case", but how can we get to the point where we look at ourselves and like, why are we conditioned this way as human beings to automatically say, "Hey, I want you to feel the same harm or I want you punished."

Can we unlearn some of those things?

- I mean, we see people unlearn that.

Did you wanna say?

- No, you go ahead.

- We see people learn that in the circles that we do in the community conferencing, in mediation.

Because in a courtroom, folks who are harmed don't have much say; they can't decide how the person is charged, what the punishment should be.

They have very little part in the whole court proceedings.

In the transformative justice, they have a voice.

Their voice matters.

The way they tell the story matters.

They come with the support system.

They're part of a community, and they get to define what does repair of harm look like?

What do you need?

What's going on?

- Two examples.

One, Rafael Muhammad whose son was murdered.

And almost like the instance after it had happened, she face to face with the person who had taken her son's life.

And at some point she came to the conclusion that I'm not gonna give another child to the criminal legal system and not even know what the fate of this child will be.

But what she did do is like, there has to be some accountability.

They contacted Clemmie Greenlee and they asked would she be someone that they could, would be a part of this process, right?

And this young man has been given a different justice than myself.

I was given a life in 20th sentence, right?

Another example, my sister was murdered in the year 2000.

And that was a very tough time because prior to that, I didn't even know what it felt like to have such a disruption.

And I remember looking at my sister in this casket.

I got chains around my feet, around my waist, around my hand.

And I'm looking at her and I had a moment where I came to this conclusion.

This is what you did to somebody else's family.

So I get back to the cell, I get on the phone and my mother is like, all over the place, "Your brothers and them, they about to try to."

I said, "Put him on the phone."

I said, "Look here, I can't stop you 'cause you gonna do what you want to do.

But if you do anything that's gonna cause more harm, you're saying that I deserve the same thing as the man who took our sister's life."

So we have to uplift real life examples of what restorative, transformative justice looks like, no matter what it takes.

Because until people can see that human beings actually can endure the magnitude of this kind of loss and come out of it human.

- [Jerome] Right.

- The system, inhuman.

These are the difference, humanity and inhumanity.

That's the choice that we have between restorative, transformative justice and retributive justice.

- Let's visit that word justice, right?

Some people even like to refer to our criminal system as a criminal legal system or criminal justice system.

But some people who don't believe that, quote unquote, we have a justice system refer to a criminal legal system.

- [Janet] That's the term we use.

- That's the term you all use.

What does that word "justice" mean?

And have we experienced justice?

Do we have a justice system?

- We don't have a justice system.

That's a really easy one to respond to.

I do think Cornell West says, "Justice is what love looks like in public."

And the roots of justice for any kind of transformative, the circle process are old, they're ancient from indigenous peoples, from aboriginal peoples, from many places in Africa.

This notion that when one person is harmed, the whole community is harmed.

And so what is it that it takes to set things right?

That's just.

That's just.

It's putting pieces back together in a way that everybody is healed, that life becomes more possible.

- So it was a misnomer to include criminal justice system to begin with because it implies that an act that is fair, that is balanced, is going to take place through a process, right?

And what I found out is that in the criminal legal system, justice is defined by the process.

When you are arrested, did they read you your rights?

You have opportunity to get an attorney, you can go to trial, various things of this nature.

That's what justice, it has nothing to do with who was harmed, has nothing to do with right, wrong, morality, anything.

It's just a process, right?

But when you think about restorative, transformative justice, you're thinking about human beings and what they had to experience and what you can do to bring about some kind of healing.

What's interesting about the indigenous culture is that they don't have a word for offender.

You know what the term is?

- What is it?

- Unhealed.

And so this is what happens when we replace language that does not include humanity.

And that's what English does or the system does.

It removes humanity.

It replaces it with language so that now these are no longer human beings.

You don't have to concern yourself with how they're being treated.

And so when we say caged, we're not talking about prison, we're not talking about incarceration, but we are.

You get a different image, but when we talk about love, how does that express itself among people?

The system doesn't want love.

- I mean, one of the things we've seen, Rahim and I are part of an organization called SALT, Schools for Alternative Learning and Transformation.

And we've trained mediators on death row.

And it changed the culture, right?

Because if people begin to believe that community is possible and defiance of this belly of the beast and the systems that are pushing to separate and criminalize.

If we believe that's possible, then people begin to invest and they listen differently.

They hear what's underneath people's words.

They begin to value what other folks are trying to search for in creating a safe place for themselves.

- Why is it crucial and important for those who have been a part of the system when they return home to participate in that restorative justice approach?

Rahim, you are a great example of that.

But for those who may have been in the system encaged that are watching and listening to this, why is it important for them to also now participate and build community power for those that are currently encaged or in prison today?

- Yeah, so there's a lot of ways that I can answer it, but the most simplest way is that people can be redeemed.

Transformation can happen.

And when people like myself are released, the accountability factor is not like we got so much in time.

No, it's that I feel as a human that I did such a bad thing, that I'm gonna prove it to myself that I can be reconnect to this community and be a positive force in this community.

And that all those people that you still have caged, they have the same potential as myself.

I'm not better than them, but for the way that we arbitrarily continue to make these laws, the life sentence that I parole, you have 2,700 people with a different kind of life sentence that will die in prison.

If we do not change that life sentence back to a 25 year possibility.

It doesn't mean that they'll be released.

So me being out here is saying that if he can change, they can change too.

We just have to remove that fear, which is false evidence appearing real.

And the system has a monopoly on that.

- And I think there's another part of it, which is the people who struggle the most are the people who have the solutions to what's gone wrong.

- [Jerome] Break it down.

- Well, so I've been going into prison since 1975 and I still get it wrong, and anybody who's been caged will tell you that because that's not my experience.

And so if we wanna know what healing looks like, particularly for folks who have been part of this violent system, we need to listen to the folks for whom that's a firsthand experience.

Philadelphia is a restorative part of this restorative city initiative.

And part of my work has been starting think tanks inside prisons.

The folks I knew in Pennsylvania Graterford Prison 20 years ago are restorative, transformative justice facilitators in the streets of Philadelphia.

And the goal is in every neighborhood to have a facilitator who can create alternatives, visible alternatives to calling the police, to locking somebody up.

- I think that wraps back around like to what role can community members play 'cause right, 95, 98% of the people that are encaged come return back home, right?

But a lot of times we understand that that's barriers to the workforce development.

That's barriers to housing, that's barriers to being able to just be a contributing community member.

And a lot of that has to do with the current community members not wanting to help heal or be a part in the healing process.

So there's community members watching this, right?

That may feel like, "Hey, there's some crimes that people are not redeemable, right?"

Even if they come back home.

How can we shift that mindset around community?

How can they participate in making sure Rahim, when he's released, "Hey Rahim, I know you're struggling with this, but let me be a part of that healing for you because I know you are having a hard time getting a job.

I know you're having a hard time finding housing.

I know you just having a hard time connecting with people 'cause it's this label on you now."

Even though you quote/unquote paid your debt to society, I'm still not going to, you know, that debt is really never fully paid.

- Yeah, and you know, you can't force people in America to behave or think one way or another.

But I'm thinking about faith in this context, particularly from the Christian perspective in the beloved community.

When you can open your heart up to someone who is considered to be a sinner, someone who is committed wrong, and see yourself in that person, then maybe you can change it a little bit.

Because see, we have to understand that a lot of society, majority of society is harmed too.

It's hurting, it's dealing with trauma.

And so a lot of the times it's the mirror effect.

It's really not their humanity that's addressing or responding, it's their unhealed feelings.

So we gotta create facility, have conversations, sit face to face.

This is what restorative, transformative justice can do in these conference circles.

And we are actually listening to one another.

I need to hear your pain, and I need to keep my mouth shut.

You see?

And then see what happens.

- Janet, 30 seconds closes out.

- Oh.

I don't know about 30 seconds.

I think that the question is what does healing look like?

We can see that things are broken.

That damage is being done, that violence is escalating.

So the question is, what does healing look like?

I would really encourage everyone to go sit in court watch, just see what's happening in the criminal legal system.

Look what's happening, especially among youth and the capacity for alternatives.

So Rahim was, this is too long, but Rahim was part of a community program where we worked with high school kids who learned everything from restorative justice to yoga to politics.

And it made a huge difference for someone to see, to value, to affirm, to welcome, to say, "Man, you're gifted."

In defiance of a school system that's dumped so many of our kids in the streets.

- Well I wanna thank both of y'all for having this powerful conversation.

- Thank you for your work.

- Around restorative justice and thank you all at home that's watching and tune in to the next episode of A Slice of the Community.

And I appreciate y'all.

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