Restorative justice and racial justice

by Rosie Chadwick

As news headlines reverberate with reactions to the recent report from the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities and the trial of Derek Chauvin, charged with the murder of George Floyd, it seems timely – indeed overdue – to reflect on the need for restorative and racial justice to go hand in hand and to acknowledge the important contribution of Fania E. Davis to thinking and practice in this area. 

In her short but powerful The Little Book of Race and Restorative Justice, Fania Davis reminds us that ‘healing interpersonal harm requires a commitment to transforming the context in which the injury occurs: the socio-historical conditions and institutions that are structured precisely to perpetuate harm.’ Not doing this, Dr Davis argues, is like being a gardener who is devoted to the well-being of individual plants but ignores the health of the soil. What’s more, ‘restorative justice risks losing relevance if we, as practitioners, do not become more skillful at identifying, navigating, and transforming racial harm.’

Dr Davis offers many practical suggestions for integrating restorative and racial justice. In schools these include:

• combining quality restorative justice training, coaching and mentoring with rigorous and continuing equity training, helping adults in schools to confront their own bias and become ‘high implementers of both restorative justice and racial justice.’

• collaborating with community organisations to enrich cultural understandings and press for public policy change.

• partnering with Universities to interrogate the data on racial disparities in school discipline and to design, test and refine interventions to narrow the divides.

In the criminal justice arena, Dr Davis calls for restorative justice programmes that are expressly designed to ‘interrupt overincarceration of youth of color’ and for victim services geared to reaching and supporting youth of color – those ‘statistically at greatest risk of being criminally harmed, yet who are least likely to receive victim services.’

And when it comes to addressing US police violence against African Americans, Dr Davis calls for a homegrown and ‘radically democratic’ US Truth Process, unveiling ‘truths that have been historically silenced.’

Challenging restorative justice practitioners to be both healers and activists for justice, Fania Davis invites us to imagine ‘how a consciousness about the healing of systemic harm committed against historically marginalized groups might animate and pervade all our restorative work.’ She also urges us to think creatively about the multiple ways ‘every restorative justice process we facilitate or participate in might involve truth-telling and promote healing of historical harm.’

It’s a call we all need to heed and act on.

Emerging from lockdown – a restorative approach to restoring relationships and rebuilding community

by Pete Wallis

Pete Wallis reflects on our recent Mint House event 'Emerging from lockdown – a restorative approach to restoring relationships and rebuilding community’. We gathered on Zoom to reflect on the impact of COVID-19 lockdown over the past year and share our personal experiences.

We are all living through a unique time. COVID-19 has affected everyone, but everyone differently – we’re in the same storm, and in different boats. 

For many the pandemic has been an anxious and traumatic experience, bringing outbreaks of loneliness, hardship and grief. Life altering times, leaving us exhausted. Often the biggest impact has been on relationships. Some have been intensified as we live within our little bubbles, some have been stretched thin, some lost altogether. Endings have been difficult – colleagues slipping away without a farewell do, funerals restricted to the closest relatives, conducted outside or on zoom, sometimes abandoned altogether. I think of the impact on our 5-year-old neighbour across the road who regressed to babyhood during lockdown, and of my 92-year-old mother separated from family and friends. I reflect on the new language we have become accustomed to; self-isolate, social distance, you are muted, you’re frozen…

For some there have been unexpected blessings as well as losses. In restorative justice, people often speak of gifts arising from the trauma of a crime. People realise how resilient they can be in adversity, notice the strengthening of family, reflect on what is of greatest importance to them in their life. They survived. In lockdown many of us found joy; in the reawakening of nature, zooming with friends and family across continents, getting to know our closest neighbours. Some families with young adults thrown back together have grown closer. In my work in youth justice, some young people have felt safer, protected for the time being from the pressures of peers to offend and from those seeking to exploit them. 

Restorative practice has story telling at its heart. Life is made up of the tales we tell each other, an expression of our need to make sense of the world and our drive to find meaning, particularly in hard times. Stories help us support one another, to build and maintain, and to repair our relationships when they are broken. We come together to heal our old stories by their telling, and to make new ones. 

Coming together to share our reflections on COVID-19 provided an opportunity to reflect on our individual journeys through this storm, to share stories of where we have been, and chart our courses towards hope and healing. Like our ancestors sitting round a fire, or the healing circles that provide the inspiration for restorative justice, we put aside time to talk, to repair the storm damage to our spiders’ web of relationships, carefully darning the holes in the social fabric of our lives.

Healing old stories and making new ones is slow, building new relationships remotely is hard. Weaving the interpersonal web has to be done strand by strand. In reading this you have joined the Mint House network, and we look forward to joining together with you at future events! 

Restorative practice in higher education – the poor relation?

By Rosie Chadwick

We’ve all read the news reports, or maybe seen the issues at first hand: ‘student mental health and anxiety a significant issue’…’calls for urgent action on racial harassment in higher education’ …’free speech under threat from ‘no platforming’ … ‘more to do to tackle sexual violence and online harassment on campus’…’students pressured to sign non-disclosure agreements’… ‘students’ rent strike threat.’

While clearly not a cure-all, there’s much to suggest that restorative practice can be part of the response in all these areas, whether through building community and strengthening relationships – creating a safe space for people to tell their stories - or by helping repair harm when things go wrong.  

Often, Universities are communities in miniature where people who have been harmed and people who have caused harm can’t just walk away but need to continue to live in close proximity.  Studies also suggest that involvement in restorative processes can be a source of rich developmental learning for students, and that restorative pedagogy enhances student learning and development, for example enabling students to take responsibility for their own learning, listen deeply and acknowledge different perspectives.

Given all this it’s puzzling that restorative practice isn’t more developed in our universities. Interest – and implementation – is seemingly on the rise in the US and elsewhere [as the reading list we’ve put together indicates]. In [another sign] of this the National Association of Community and Restorative Justice published a Policy Statement on Community and Restorative Justice in Higher Education in 2019, with a promise of implementation and management guidelines to follow.[1] The Association’s Director adds that ‘We are now seeing that interest on college campuses begin to grow for student conduct/student affairs and broader interpersonal and group conflicts on campus.  So, stay tuned -- keep watching.’ 

UK examples that we know of include Portsmouth University’s ‘Sort it out!’ conflict resolution service, run by Portsmouth Mediation Service in collaboration with the Student Union and Portsmouth Law School; and the piloting by Nicola Preston of a relational model of teaching and learning at the University of Northampton, about which she’s written for the Restorative Justice Council’s Resolution Magazine.[2] Here at the Mint House we’ve also dipped our toe in the water with exploratory conversations and small-scale training, but small-scale sums it up.

We’re keen to realise the potential of restorative practice in higher education settings, and welcome others’ thoughts on barriers and practical ways forward. Some great work has been done on restoring our schools. Restoring our colleges and Universities is surely another high priority.

 
References

[1] 2019-NACRJ-Higher-Ed-Policy.pdf

[2] Universities and Colleges – Portsmouth Mediation Service; RJC-Resolution-65-Autumn-19.pdf (restorativejustice.org.uk)

Using Restorative Practices for Environmental Disputes: sharing insights from New Zealand

By Rosie Chadwick

A silver lining of COVID has been the chance to link online with people round the world working restoratively. This week’s destination was New Zealand for a webinar hosted by Mediators Beyond Borders International looking at Using Restorative Practices for Environmental Disputes.

For the last 10 years, cases brought to the country’s specialist Environment Court have been able to access restorative meetings – though with no guarantee that judges will respect the outcomes when it comes to sentencing.

Presenters Penny Prescott and Wayne Marriott shared learning from a recent case where a sub-contractor had extracted gravel from a river illegally, causing fish to die. Participants in the restorative meeting included the main contractor, three Government agencies responsible for different aspects of the environment (each of whom came with prepared ‘scopes of work’ that could be part of contractor reparations) and the local indigenous people, or ‘people of the land.’

The gulf in perceptions of the parties at the meeting came through strongly in Penny and Wayne’s account. The contractor came keen to reassure that the damage could be fixed. For the people of the land the issue was not just with this incident but why such incidents kept happening and the ignorance it showed of the river course and its role in their food gathering.

The facilitators hoped that the harm caused and options for repair could be looked at in a single meeting. The people of the land were clear that redress shouldn’t be discussed in some remote meeting room but should take place on site, where people could see the damage that had happened and be helped to understand its significance.

The contractor was keen to reach agreement on redress before the case went to court for sentencing. The people of the land had a different time horizon and were eager that redress should not be rushed.

Another striking feature from the case study was the effort that went in to addressing the power imbalance between meeting participants. In this case, steps included paying the people of the land for their time, avoiding a situation where they were the only people in the room not being paid for taking part.

‘Do corporations do anything different as a result?’ asked a person on the call. The answer was that by and large they do, often because they think it will affect sentencing, but that lasting change depends on the voices of the people attending the restorative meeting being involved in decisions at every level in an equitable way. 

Restorative practice in education: what does research tell us?

By Rosie Chadwick

There’s been a flurry of recent studies of restorative practice in education, including two systematic reviews and a policy brief summarising what’s known about implementation and outcomes in US schools.

Strong themes from the findings are that restorative practice in schools can mean many things: we need to get much better at precisely defining and describing the approaches being used.  Implementation needs to be well-supported. We also need more robust and longer-term evaluations that look both at outcomes and at how faithfully practice was implemented.

The policy brief[1] describes five models of ‘mis-implementation’ that can cause restorative initiatives to falter or limit their potential. The five models are:

1. mandated top-down mis-implementation, running counter to the emphasis on fair process, voice and collaborative decision that are the hallmarks of restorative practice.

2. narrow mis-implementation that see restorative practice as just about changing student behaviour rather than something that needs to involve the whole community.

3. colour blind and power blind mis-implementation that focuses on individuals while ignoring the systemic and structural inequalities that affect student wellbeing.

4. ‘train and hope’ mis-implementation involving initial staff training but little or no on-going training and support.

5. under-resourcing, short-term mis-implementation that fails to recognise the time, commitment and resources needed to implement restorative practice fully.

For the authors (Anne Gregory and Katherine R Evans) avoiding these pitfalls means:

• ensuring restorative practice is principle-based and aligned with core restorative values.

• taking a comprehensive approach embracing staff as well as student behaviours, policies and procedures, teaching methods, curricular decisions and schoolwide decision-making.

• emphasizing equity, including by explicitly identifying opportunity gaps and challenging disparities in discipline.

• developing contextually sensitive implementation plans that reflect the strengths and needs of the setting and evolve as circumstances change.

• approaching roll-out strategically combining top-down and bottom-up approaches and building a strong base of champions and leaders while also respecting the critiques and questions of colleagues who are not convinced.

• creating long-term implementation plans focused on sustainability and professional support, incorporating ongoing professional development (coaching, peer mentoring, learning communities etc).

There’s much here to reflect on and aspire to.

[1] The Starts and Stumbles of Restorative Justice in Education: Where Do We Go from Here? | National Education Policy Center (colorado.edu)

Making Prison a Restorative Experience - Can It Be Done?

By Rosie Chadwick

Serving prisoner Nathan* shared his thoughts on this subject at a Mint House network event.

Hearing Nathan talk, you'd have to say the answer is a resounding 'yes'. Nathan vividly described the moments before he came face to face with the mother of a young man (the brother of his ex-girlfriend) shot dead in an act of gang violence that led to his 18 year sentence for being at the scene while someone with him fired the gun.

"I've faced a lot of things in my life," Nathan recalled, " but in that moment I was the most scared I've ever been. She told me all the hurt, all the turmoil she'd gone through, and all she wanted to know from me was why. She said 'I want you to do something meaningful with your life and make sure two lives aren't wasted.' That moment, that day in that room, changed a lot of things in my life. I left thinking I didn't have any right to hold a grudge in my life."

Nathan talks movingly about being hugged in a way he never had been by his own mother, and about the chain reaction since: his realisation that he needed to take responsibility for the example he was setting; his acknowledgement of what had gone on, including while he was inside; his journey of therapy and education; and his messages to other young prisoners saying 'this is a waste of your life.' His ambitions now are to work with young people, steering them away from gang violence. "As a child I wanted to help people. I've been restored to thinking I can help people and do it in the right way."

While a restorative meeting was clearly a turning point for Nathan, the same can't be said of everyone. Nathan's conclusion? "Prison can be restorative if you engage with it in the way you need to for your own personal development, but there are many barriers in the way...So many people get missed in there."

Timing came across as key. Prisoners need to be receptive. Victims need to feel that a meeting would be helpful. Both these things need to coincide. But when they do, lives can be transformed.

* Not his real name.

Taking People Seriously: Responding to need through restorative practice

A fascinating lunchtime talk was held at The Mint House - ‘Taking People Seriously: Responding to need through restorative practice’ by Tim Newell. His full presentation can be downloaded here.

Tim Newell was a prison governor for 38 years, with the last ten governing Grendon and Springhill prisons. Grendon is a unique therapeutic community prison for people who have committed serious crimes. Springhill is for people coming to the end of long and medium term sentences and preparing for release in open conditions. Both would be considered partially restorative in the model of three circles.

Since leaving prison he worked with various restorative practices including:

• being a facilitator for restorative conferences with the Thames Valley JRC project

• with Quakers in Britain developing Circles of Support and Accountability in the Thames Valley - the first place to establish them

• founding and developing Escaping Victimhood - providing experiential workshops for families bereaved by homicide

• supporting the community chaplaincy - New Leaf, mentoring those leaving prison and returning to the Thames Valley.

Previous talks in The Mint House Lunchtime Talk Series:

In July 2016 we heard from Colette Morgan of Safe!, her talk about 'Child on Parent Violence' held at gave a fascinating account of the valuable workshops they run, with the aim of cultivating respectful families throughout Oxfordshire.