with the amazing Lauren Abramson,
Founder of the Community Conferencing Center of Baltimore, MD.

Lauren Abramson is Founder, Executive Director, Community Conferencing Center and also Assistant Professor, Child Psychiatry, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She is a psychologist who has worked with children and families in communities for the past 25 years. She is the Founder and Executive Director of the Community Conferencing Center in Baltimore, Maryland and Assistant Professor (part-time) in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Lauren focused attention on Community Conferencing in Baltimore in 1995. She advances conferencing as a means of building social capital and collective efficacy on many levels, including:
• empowering individuals and communities to resolve their own conflicts
• keeping young people out of the criminal justice system, and
• mobilizing the existing untapped human assets in communities.
Lauren publishes articles on both the theoretical and empirical socio-political aspects of conferencing. The work of the Community Conferencing Center is groundbreaking for its multi-sector use of conferencing in highly distressed urban American communities.
Conferencing has helped Lauren learn that: while we can learn about conflict resolution through books and concepts, conflict--and personal--transformation happens through relationships and meaningful emotional experiences.

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Transitional Justice from a restorative Lens

with Dr. Carl Stauffer of Eastern Mennonite University
Dr. Carl Stauffer teaches Justice and Development Studies at the Graduate Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, Eastern Mennonite University Harrisonburg, Virginia.

DOWNLOAD PDF OF CHAPTER
Finding Justice amidst the Rubble: Restorative Interventions in Post-war Contexts

Stauffer was born and raised amidst the war in Vietnam. In 1975, his family fled Vietnam and moved to the Philippines just as the Marcos regime was beginning to crumble. After completing his university education in 1985, Stauffer worked in the Criminal Justice and Substance Abuse fields.

In 1991, Stauffer became the first Executive Director of the Capital Area Victim-Offender Mediation Program in Richmond, Virginia.

In 1994, Stauffer and his family moved to South Africa under the auspices of the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), a faith-based international relief and development agency. In South Africa, Stauffer worked with various transitional justice processes such as the Peace Accords, Community-Police Forums, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Local Community Development structures.

From 2000 to 2009, Stauffer was appointed as the MCC Regional Peace Adviser for the Southern Africa region. His work has taken him to twenty African countries and ten other countries in the Caribbean, Middle East, Europe, and the Balkans.

Stauffer's academic interests focus on narrative studies, restorative/transitional justice, and post-war reconstruction and reconciliation. His research concentrates on the critique of transitional justice from a restorative frame, and the application of hybrid, often parallel indigenous community justice systems.
Stauffer is married to Dr. Carolyn Stauffer who teaches Sociology at EMU, and is the proud father of two university-aged children.

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Mikhail is a member of the teaching faculty in the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where, among other courses, he teaches an undergraduate course called Psychology of Race and Ethnicity and a graduate-level restorative justice practicum based at a youth detention center.

Since 2009, he has been a student and practitioner of Restorative Circles, a restorative practice developed in Brazil by Dominic Barter and associates.
Mikhail also writes a blog for Psychology Today called Between the Lines. This blog is primarily about race. The name comes from a DuBois quote: "The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line."

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Description: We covered a great deal of ground during this conversation with Michelle sharing background from her internationally acclaimed bestseller The New Jim Crow, personal insights and motivators for her in her work, and her belief that restorative justice provides a powerful solution to many of the problems we currently face. This dialogue is packed with stats, facts, and inspiring all the way through.

Brief Bio: Michelle Alexander is an internationally-renowned author and lawyer. Her most recent book, The New Jim Crow, has gained global acclaim for its pinpointing of the very real yet hushed critical issue of racial profiling and mass incarceration. She has been featured in major media worldwide, including Moyers & Company, NPR’s Fresh Air, CNN, and many others.

Quotes/Highlights from Transcript:

“It wasn’t long into that work (with the ACLU Racial Justice Project) that I realized that even I, someone who cared a lot about racial injustice and thought that I knew a lot about our criminal justice system, that I was deeply misguided and in a lot of denial about the way in which our criminal justice system wasn’t just in need of reform but had become the primary vehicle for creating and sustaining racial inequality in our time.” (10:08)

“I think that what I’ve come to see and understand better in recent years is that the American dream is just not real for millions of Americans and its not a matter of not trying.” (15:45)

“It (restorative justice) is definitely not a pipedream. I’m so encouraged by the movement that is growing around restorative and transformative justice. I think that one of the reasons why it’s such a crucial part of the work to end mass incarceration and to break this cycle of caste like systems in America is because it helps provide an answer to, well, if we don’t have prisons, if prisons aren’t the answer then what, what are we going to do about the harms and people affected. I think there is kind of real harm that has to be acknowledged and addressed. People do violate each other’s rights, commit real crimes against each other that cause pain and suffering in our communities.” (55:29)

Open-Source Copy of Transcript:

Michelle’s full bio: http://newjimcrow.com/about-the-author

More about The New Jim Crow: newjimcrow.com

Michelle’s joint interview on Moyers & Company with Bryan Stephenson (jus
t below) of the Equal Justice Institute):
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04022010/watch.html

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of the Metta Center for Nonviolence (www.mettacenter.org) , who've just rolled out a stellar and comprehensive Roadmap for Peace.

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Peace in the Middle of the Storm_ Inner City Gangs, Rebuilding Peace with Nonviolence

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The River of Peace and Justice: regaining interconnectivity to sustain and flourish amidst conflict and change with heart phoenix, dot maver, and jeffrey weisberg of the river phoenix center for peacebuilding

Heart Phoenix, Jeffrey Weisberg, Dot Maver
(L to R) of the
River Phoenix Center for Peacebuilding

Thursday, May 3rd
Focus: We will explore the foundational, grassroots aspects of regaining our human connectivity and underscore the consciousness plus practices that support a more humane justice: one that seeks to understand, amend, atone, and heal individual and collective wounds. It is my pleasure and honor to host Dot, Jeffrey and Heart and to honor the powerfully service-oriented and conscious life of River Phoenix, who devoted his life to raising awareness of these very principles of a unified humanity and planet.

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Please visit Living Justice Press for books on Restorative Justice and beyond.
www.livingjusticepress.com

Kay served the Minnesota Department of Corrections in the position of Restorative Justice Planner from 1994 to 2003. In that position she provided education to the criminal justice system, other agencies and the general public about restorative justice. She also assisted groups interested in implementing the principles of restorative justice in their communities through system change and community empowerment. She worked with leaders in corrections, law enforcement, the judiciary, civic organizations, neighborhood groups, faith communities and education to develop a comprehensive response to crime and conflict based on restorative justice.

Kay continues to be active in the field of restorative justice, providing training and technical assistance to national and local initiatives with a special emphasis on the use of peacemaking circles. She has been involved in the development of circle processes in criminal justice, schools, neighborhoods, families and the workplace. She is a co-author of the book Peacemaking Circles: From Crime to Community and author of the Little Book of Circle Processes: A New/Old Approach to Peacemaking. Most recently she is co-author of Doing Democracy - Using Circles for Community Planning.

Kay is an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University, Eastern Mennonite University and Southwest Minnesota State University.

Kay has served as a consultant, curriculum writer and trainer for the National Institute of Corrections, the National Institute of Justice, and the Balanced and Restorative Justice Project of the Office for Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. She serves on the Board of Reference of the Conflict Transformation Program at Eastern Mennonite University and the Board of Directors of Living Justice Press, a non-profit publisher for restorative justice.

From 1988 to 1994 Kay worked for the Minnesota Citizens Council on Crime and Justice in public policy research and advocacy. Kay's background in community activism includes nine years of service on a local school board and three years as chair of the board of the Southern Valley Alliance for Battered Women.

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