molly - Restorative Justice On The Rise

with very special guest
KRIS MINER
Executive Director, St. Croix Valley Restorative Justice

Building it from the ground up:
Restorative Justice and
how it is not only possible...it is happening.

Kris Miner is the Executive Director at
St. Croix Valley Restorative Justice Program (SCVRJP). Her professional work experience includes in-home family therapist, social worker, juvenile justice and child protection supervisor. SCVRJP provides a range of Restorative Justice services including victim-offender conferencing, victim impact panels, underage consumption panels, controlled substance intervention circles, teen driving circles, victim empathy seminars and restorative response programming. Restorative Response addresses sudden and traumatic death by providing support groups, circles, trainings and a guide for grieving families. SCVRJP provides trainings and workshops on Restorative Justice topics. SCVRJP has received local, state and national awards.

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EDWIN RUTSCH
Founder of the Center for Building a Culture of Empathy, and facilitator, Restorative Empathy Circles

RESTORATIVE EMPATHY CIRCLES
WITH THE CENTER FOR BUILDING A CULTURE OF EMPATHY'S EDWIN RUTSCH
Edwin Rutsch is director of the Center for Building a Culture of Empathy. The Center is the home of the global empathy movement. Our mission is to build a movement for creating a global worldwide culture of empathy and compassion. The site contains the internet's largest collection of; articles, conferences, definitions, experts, history, interviews, organizations, videos, science, etc. about empathy. The Center is also hosting a Sub Conference on Empathy in the Justice and Legal System. http://j.mp/Jz7lk9
We are forming and holding weekly empathy circles online that have the intention of building a culture of empathy. We are also starting to hold Restorative Empathy Circles for individuals and groups that are in conflict. These circles have the intention of fostering, restoring and deepening empathic connection and understanding between all participants.

Empathy Movement Home This is the home page for the Empathy Movement. One of the primary ways we do movement building is through Empathy Circles which are small groups that meet weekly via Google hangouts.

Restorative Empathy Circles
We hold Restorative Empathy Circles for individuals and groups that are in conflict. These groups support healing through the fostering of empathic connection and understanding.

READ TRICYCLE MAGAZINE Interview with Acharya Maull, "Prison Monk"Download PDF HERE

Fleet Maull, a longtime student of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, founded Prison Dharma Network (now Prison Mindfulness Institute) in 1989 while serving a 14.5 year mandatory-minimum sentence for drug smuggling at a maximum security federal prison medical facility. He led a twice weekly meditation group in the prison chapel for 14 years (1985 - 1999). He also helped start the first inside prison hospice program and provided daily care to dying prisoners until his release. In 1991, he founded National Prison Hospice Association, launching a movement that now includes hospice programs in over 75 state and federal prisons.

Fleet is an Acharya (senior teacher) in the Shambhala Buddhist Community. He is also a Sensei (Zen teacher) and dharma successor of Roshi Bernie Glassman in the Zen Peacemaker Order and a senior priest in the Soto Zen tradition.

Acharya Maull has written many articles and given numerous interviews on a variety of prison related topics in publications such as the Shambhala Sun, Tricycle, Tikkun, Hospice Journal and Turning Wheel. He has also been a guest on NPR's Fresh Air program and other radio and television programs. His story was included in Roshi Bernie Glassman's book, Bearing Witness . He is the author of Dharma In Hell, the Prison Writings of Fleet Maull and leads prison programs, meditation retreats, chaplaincy and hospice trainings, activist trainings, bearing witness retreats and street retreats throughout the world. He is also the founder and executive director of the Peacemaker Institute and co-founder of the Upaya Chaplaincy Program.

To learn more about Fleet Maull, read: "Prison Monk: Tricycle Interview with Fleet Maull" from Tricycle Magazine, Spring 2004

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Sujatha Baliga, Director | Restorative Justice Project, Senior Program Specialist

Sujatha Baliga's work is characterized by an equal dedication to victims and persons accused of crime. The convergence of Sujatha's interest in Tibetan ideals of justice and her work with women accused of killing their abusers drew her to law school and ultimately, criminal defense work. After several years as an appellate public defender in New Mexico and at the Office of the Appellate Defender in New York City, Sujatha relocated to California in 2006 to work on capital cases. In 2008, Sujatha was awarded a Soros Justice Fellowship, which she used to spearhead a successful restorative juvenile diversion program in Alameda County. Sujatha has served as a consultant to the Stanford Criminal Justice Center for a symposium titled "Rights, Needs, Power: The Victim in Criminal Justice." She has taught restorative justice at the college and law school levels, is a frequent guest lecturer at academic institutions and conferences, and has been a guest on NPR's Talk of the Nation.

She often speaks with groups of incarcerated people about her personal experiences as a survivor of child sexual abuse and her path to forgiveness. Today, Sujatha is the Director of the Restorative Justice Project at the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, where she assists communities in implementing restorative justice alternatives to juvenile detention and zero-tolerance school discipline policies. In her role as Senior Program Specialist, she provides technical assistance to the US Attorney General's Task Force on Children Exposed to Violence.

Sujatha earned her A.B. from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges, her J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and has held federal clerkships with the Honorable William K. Sessions, III, former Chair of the U.S. Sentencing Commission and with the Honorable Martha Vázquez. Sujatha lives in the Bay Area with her partner of 14 years, Jason, their son, Sathya, and their sweet dog, Django.

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with very special guest ANDREA BRENNEKE

Read her TIKKUN Article, A Restorative Circle in The Wake of A Police Shooting

Andrea Brenneke (J.D. Harvard Law School ?92, BA University of Washington, ?88) is a passionate advocate for justice and facilitator of individual and community healing and empowerment. She practices civil rights and employment law at MacDonald Hoague & Bayless in Seattle. www.mhb.com. A tenacious litigator and strategic negotiator, the results she obtains compensate her clients for violations of their legal rights and dignity and secure other types of injunctive relief and policy changes that make a lasting difference in society. Her litigation successes include substantial trial verdicts and settlements in sexual harassment, disability accommodation and discrimination, gender and race discrimination, retaliation, police and government misconduct. She supports employees through all types of work place disputes, contract negotiations, accommodations and claim reporting procedures. Andrea also facilitates creative solutions and negotiated resolutions to legal and social conflicts. Originally trained in negotiation at Harvard Law School, she now is a certified LR 39.1 mediator, a Restorative Circles practitioner, and an apprentice to Dominic Barter.

More...In her own words and a few resources:

Seattle Times Article
http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2014113565_diazreport03m.html

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ABPub/2011/02/02/2014113681.pdf

Also, with regard to the healing after the shooting, the work of the JTW project is really important to link to for me. That was another restorative response to the shooting -- a public art project and the totem pole. Check out: http://www.thejtwproject.org/

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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