HARRISONBURG, VIRGINIA — Restorative justice (RJ), which has roots in indigenous circle processes, is a way of dealing with conflict and violations of trust. The practice is designed to restore relationships broken by a crime or other discord. In classic cases, a victim of a crime and the offender meet in a circle with others who have a stake in the outcome—the victim gets to ask questions about the crime, the perpetrator offers an apology and may add context to the event, and together they work out terms of reparations. Advocates say this approach, compared to that of the criminal justice system, is more likely to result in healing for the victim, real accountability from the offender, and a less divided community.
I came to Harrisonburg, Virginia, to learn about a practice that is spreading across the country as a substitute for approaches based on punishment and prison time. The criminal justice system disproportionately punishes people of color, from traffic stops through sentencing and on through post-prison employment. The United States has more than 2 million people behind bars, the highest number and the highest rate of incarceration in the world; this country imprisons its public at three and a half times the rate of Europe. Furthermore, although people of color make up 30 percent of the U.S. population, they account for 60 percent of the prison population; one in three black men can expect to spend time in prison over the course of their lifetimes.1 And once convicted, anyone finds it harder to get a job, housing, credit, or social services. So diverting people from the criminal justice system, especially young people, is one piece of untangling institutionalized racism.
“I think restorative justice offers a shift in the way we view people, from seeing them as objects to viewing people as human beings,” Jodie Geddes, a 20-something African American woman, told me when I met her at a coffee shop at Eastern Mennonite University (EMU). Geddes is a graduate student in the university’s Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding program and also had interned with the Harrisonburg Police Department.
Jodie Geddes, a student of restorative justice at Eastern Mennonite University.
“If we treat people as human beings, we begin to ask, what is their story, and how does it contribute to the acts that they’ve committed?” said Geddes. “The police and the system of policing begin to recognize the other parts of my story that may have led me there.”
I was staying in an apartment adjacent to the EMU campus that I’d rented from a friend of a friend. I explored Harrisonburg and caught up on writing and emails in between learning all I could about restorative justice as practiced in this small city in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.
An ethos of listening and respect, of peacemaking built on truth telling, could infuse the culture of Harrisonburg, noted Dr. Carl Stauffer, codirector of the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice, a spin-off of EMU that works to fuse RJ approaches into other facets of society beyond the criminal justice system. Projects based in Harrisonburg include Come to the Table, a project that explores and seeks to heal family and community legacies of racism, going as far back as the time of slavery. Among those involved are descendants of slave owners and slave traders, who recognize that their families’ wealth is a direct result of wealth extracted from the forced labor of enslaved people.2
Other schools in Harrisonburg are also involved in RJ efforts. James Madison University now incorporates restorative justice into its responses to student discipline and conflict via its Office of Student Accountability and Restorative Practices.
Younger students, too, are learning about restorative justice. I visited a Harrisonburg middle school and sat with a group of sixth-graders who had chosen to sit in a circle during recess, taking turns to speak one at a time on the same topic, and listening intently to whoever held the talking piece that gives that person sole permission to speak. They spoke about what it means to be heard, and what it means to really listen to their classmates and to feel empathy. On other occasions, their teacher told me, their talking circles center on more specific concerns—for example, disagreements among students.
The sixth-grade girls represented a wide range of ethnic backgrounds. Harrisonburg is a refugee resettlement area, and many of the students had only recently arrived from conflict zones. The girls said they felt empowered by being heard during the circle, knowing that they could have their say without being criticized or interrupted.
Their teacher, trained in RJ techniques, is experimenting with how to bring that sense of trust and confidence into her classroom. Posted on one wall is a Mayan credo, quoted by poet Luis Valdez and adapted for classroom use by educator Curtis Acosta.
In Lak ‘ech |
|
Tú eres mi otro yo. |
You are my other me. |
Si te hago daño a ti, |
If I do harm to you, |
Me hago daño a mi mismo. |
I do harm to myself. |
Si te amo y respeto, |
If I love and respect you, |
Me amo y respeto yo. |
I love and respect myself. |
Restorative justice is making inroads into schools of all levels in Harrisonburg. But could it become part of the culture beyond the classroom?
Kathy Evans, an assistant professor of education at EMU, introduced me to Police Lieutenant Kurt Boshart, who is striving to bring restorative justice into police work. We met at Bowl of Good, a quirky restaurant near EMU that sells meals by the bowl. Boshart is tall, with close-cropped hair, and he came to the café wearing civilian clothes.
“Law enforcement is not as readily accepted within the community as it once was,” Boshart said as he explained a source of his interest in restorative justice.
Dr. Carl Stauffer, codirector of the Zehr Institute for Restorative Justice (left), and Harrisonburg Police Lieutenant Kurt Boshart (right).
Legitimacy matters to police departments. “Goals—such as high success rates for investigating crimes and preventing crime—depend on the willingness of the public to cooperate with police, to provide information to the police, and to willingly obey the law, all of which can be affected by the department’s reputation for legitimacy,” according to a report by the Police Executive Research Forum.3
Part of the solution to police-community conflict is “procedural justice,” the way police officers treat people during everyday interactions on the streets, Boshart said. He is urging police officers to listen more, to show more respect to the people they stop. “It’s really about teaching officers to give them a voice, to allow them to talk and to not be judgmental.”
But at a time when videos of black people beaten and shot by police have become commonplace, much more is needed.
“Police are called during the worst of times, so everyone is seeing each other during their worst moments, and that’s the basis of their relationship,” Boshart noted. “The officer shows up, and it’s an adversarial situation, and that’s how they leave—adversarial.”
What if instead “we could actually see each other for who we are?” Boshart said. And, although it took a long time to get to this point in our conversation, Boshart agreed that racial bias is a central challenge.
Boshart said that he urges rookie police officers to recognize that they have biases, and to avoid allowing those biases to dictate their responses to perceived threats. Boshart’s example from a training he does with new officers uses his own experience to convey his point, as he explained:
I’m white, I was brought up in a white neighborhood, I went to an all-white church, I went to an all-white school. Everything around my life was white. What I watched on the news is murders, robberies in the inner cities happening by African Americans. I listen to friends and family members who say, “You need to be careful of those people. You need to be careful because they’re dangerous, they’ll commit crimes.” So I am painted a picture of this monster.
The moment took my breath away, not because it’s news—we can surmise that many white officers have only encountered African Americans in conflict situations, and that their biases are lighting up as they make the split-second decision about whether to pull the trigger. Still, I was stunned by what followed:
So if I’m faced, I have a white guy and an African American staring at me, saying, “I’m going to kill you,” I’m more likely to shoot the African American because of this. I’m not saying that it’s right, I’m not saying that my threat level wasn’t the same. My perception of threat level is based off of that. Does that make sense? It doesn’t make it any less real for me as a person, for me as an officer. I still felt that my life was in danger. So that’s where this controversy takes place nationwide.
“How do we change that?” Boshart asked. This question, which I believe was sincere, might be the most important one in American policing today.
What’s needed, Boshart said, is anti-bias training. Plus, Boshart believes, police officers must come together with people of color in the community where they can get to know one another outside of a traffic stop or a crime scene.
“Sitting in a circle, where it’s not adversarial, seeing the vulnerability of another person, goes a long way to building empathy. And the next time that officer sees that person on the street, he’s now remembering that they had a conversation.”
Could restorative justice—and the habits of respect and listening—shift the culture in Harrisonburg? Could it change the attitude of police and reduce the bias that has had such deadly consequences for brown and black people? Can the empathy evoked when people sit in a circle together as equals actually change things?
Like most of the United States, Harrisonburg still needs to do some tough truth telling about racism and trauma, and restorative justice doesn’t replace that. Still, Harrisonburg educators are teaching members of the next generation to use tools that resolve conflict and evoke empathy, and at least some members of the police force are working to adopt these practices. Harrisonburg could become a city where a critical mass of people know when and how to use restorative circles to resolve conflicts, Stauffer believes. “We want people to hear and feel RJ in a whole bunch of different places so it feels commonplace.”
