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By Molly Leach

July 23, 2025

I recently read an Op-Ed written by the current Executive Director of a Community restorative justice program that I directed for a year during a volatile but positive transition time, working alongside courts, schools, LE, and the community as a whole--and one that was rapidly expanding due to the excellent work of the previous director. His Op-Ed celebrates and clarifies what RJ is with a clear eye on statistical evidence and illuminating its good principles and how they ideally should play out, in practice. I wondered, seven years now after my involvement in that program as its leader, have they changed how they operate on the inside?

When I got called to take over the program, it was jump-time into multiple counties as judges, DA's, police, and schools began to see the efficacy of our work offering a restorative process as an alternative to sentencing. Given this program is within the state of Colorado, it also legally was, and is, able to receive direct pre-file inquiries due to the stipulation (HB24-1101) that citizens have a right to restorative justice. Yet that stipulation put into law was only the beginning of much deeply needed work to build trust and alliances with all concerned. Having an RJ based law in place is a great first step--then the real work begins, of finding common values with justice officials and principals, of slowly building basic trust and avoiding trying to convince anyone that restorative justice is what they should be doing. We have to show them, and let them come to us, based in the time we take to demonstrate that we are all on the same team.

But the point of my post is that in all this key and critical work on "the outside"--meaning what we offer out to our communities--we are missing a big piece. What I experienced directly was a top-down delivery of power and politics that harmfully extricated me from a position I was dedicated to, without any form of restorative process--even as I asked the board for that process--not selfishly, but for all involved. I knew I was responsible, and so were others--the Board included. I knew I could have done some things differently and I knew that policies that reflected what we offered on the outside could have been game-changing, if we had them on the inside. Meaning, we were doing RJ for others but not for our internal systems. I'm not the only one who has experienced this. I've heard many stories over two decades of social justice organizations doing one thing on the outside and an entirely different one on the inside. The gap is frankly surprising yet not. And we need to do something about it--it's not that difficult.

Let me explain briefly.

What I experienced as that program's director was an insight, albeit a very difficult one, into how well-meaning non-profits doing restorative justice are actually doing harm to their own staff and perpetuating the lesser qualities of nonprofit work: high pressure, many hats worn, financial limits and lacks, rush culture, all the things that Tema Okun points out in her work (see our podcast "Transforming Systems Broken By Design", with her). When RJ organizations do not do RJ within, it is bound to fail at some point, and, perpetuate greater dysfunctions within the organization.

In writing this, I wish to emphasize that I am responsible along with those I worked with, and to date my inquiries for a restorative process were not replied to by the Board. Yet individuals--not all of them--were willing to have conversations of repair--and for me, wanting to repair and hear what I'd done unintentionally, to cause harm. I wanted to be responsible, and I also wanted responsibility and was curious why things became so harmful and destructive. Part of the reason was because the Board often functions as a rote activity of low responsibility and high status, as well as often a sense of disconnection from day to day work. There is also a prevalence of assumption across organizations as to what restorative justice is--as many board members as there are opinions about the matter. This is why a continuum of circles for connection and understanding are so important to any non-profit or any human system. Why we continue to gloss over and think that our old, tired, harmful policies work, is truly beyond me.

What I gained was an incredibly hurtful experience that clued me in on what to recommend to anyone doing any kind of work where two or more are gathered:

• We really need to consider individual and collective responsibility within a framework of restorative practices (-Kay Pranis) in order to frame how we move together
• We need conflict policy just like (or similar to) what we offer on the "outside"
• We need non-conflict practices on a weekly, or even daily, practice that keep us connected and to build trust
• We need to have ongoing community building circles with Board, Staff, Volunteers and interested potential facilitators to discuss the ever-evolving thing we call restorative.
• We need these systems/policies to be carefully heard and documented into policy not just by Board, but by voice-ins from all concerned.

What would you add?

*****

So when I read Op-Eds by people doing great work in this field, specific to an organization I'm pretty sure still hasn't fully learned its lesson from the harms it laid only on my shoulders, it stings but not like it used to at all--I know that some of us, not just myself, in this field, have experienced the severity of a values contradiction that is directly significant to one's professional and personal life--where one thing is said or offered, and yet the opposite is carried out.

My invitation to the Colorado program this concerns is, would you be willing also to learn from what happened? What can be done to support others in this field out of our mistakes? Is it ever too late for learning and to amend punitive internal policies? I wish my former colleagues all the best, and I still extend an invitation to the board to reconcile alongside and with me.

*this piece originally appeared at truthout (with special thanks to Editor Maya Schenwar)

By Molly Rowan Leach, Founder of Restorative Justice on The Rise

In 1995 my mother went into full blown psychosis as a result of a drastic change in the medication she was taking for schizo-affective disorder. She lured some of our friends and neighbors into our home and took the youngest, a toddler, into the basement bedroom. Once there, she slashed the child’s throat with a knife because of a voice telling her she had to. The toddler survived despite a massive loss of blood.

Mom had suffered from mental illness for most of her life in some form or another, and her new doctor at that time had reduced her antipsychotic medication without monitoring the effects. She had tried to take her own life after I was born, so afraid of being a bad mother that she thought it would be better if she exited, but I had no idea that she was managing life with depression that turned into bipolar disorder in my teens. She never harmed me. Quite the opposite — I was loved and supported by both my parents. But I do remember, and live with, the stigma that surrounds people with mental illness and everyone who loves them.

After the attack my mother was arrested, obliterated out of her mind. The media went wild, and she became the town monster. The magnitude of what she had done and the fear it elicited was everywhere. Others in the neighborhood began monitoring my family. They wanted to make sure the monster was put away for life. People I had known since I was a kid turned against us.

Restorative justice values and strives to honor the needs of everyone involved in the most humane ways possible and in a safe environment — those who commit crimes, and those who suffer from them. In so doing, it brings humanity back into the justice system. It converts a limited worldview based around isolation and individualism into a much more positive vision that is rooted in honesty, accountability, and the visible connection of causes with effects. And it works in concrete terms by drastically reducing recidivism and costs. Most important of all, it nurtures new relationships and a strong sense of human unity. In that sense, the root power of restorative justice is love expressed in action.

This is not to shy away from the need for accountability or regret. I cannot overstate the utter sadness that I and my family have felt for what happened ever since, the desire to take away the pain from my mom’s victim and those who love her. The empathy and care we felt and still feel has never had a chance to be fully seen or expressed given the shambles of a criminal justice system that pits people against one another to further detriment and destruction — not to mention the total lack of opportunities for a mentally ill person to try to communicate their authentic feelings and reach for accountability under the harrowing conditions of imprisonment, where they are denied proper psychiatric treatment. This has been a hex for us all.

My mom was put on trial in the spring of 1996. I testified that she was not a criminal, but has a mental illness. I stand by that to this day. The court was cold and bifurcating: divided aisles, and a mix of fear, judgment and unspoken hatred mingling in the air. The judge ruled that my mother did not belong in prison due to her illness, and she was sentenced to house arrest and stringent rules for probation. If she violated them, she’d face 15 years in jail. And that’s when the neighborhood witch hunt resumed in earnest.

In 1996 and 1997, the Probation Officer received slews of calls about my mother’s case, falsely reporting violations. One group of neighbors followed my family around like bloodhounds, and one day at a water aerobics class at the local YMCA they found out that her caretaker had gone back to the locker room because she had a cold. Although my mom was in the pool with other responsible adults, this was one of the things cited by the group as a violation of her probation.

She was summoned to a hearing and from there to prison to begin her sentence (the judge who had issued a clear ruling against incarceration at the initial trial was now up for a possible spot on the state Supreme Court, and this may have influenced his decision). I remember the day she was taken away very clearly. My father and I sat with her. “Molly, you have to live your life — go on,” she told me. That was the last time I saw her outside of prison until 2014. It was 1999. I was 29 years old.

I visited my mother at the Pocatello Women’s Correctional Center in Eastern Idaho, a dank university town with a strange oppression in the air. The prison is located as far as possible from most of Idaho’s other major cities, which is a common pattern in American society — to make it as hard as possible to keep up any kind of contact or relationship with incarcerated family members. My mom became another number, 48985 to be exact.

In the western world prisons have become de facto asylums. Data are very difficult to gather, but it’s estimated that over half the prison population in the USA are mentally ill. At Pocatello, female prisoners shared a host of human rights violations with me: one belly-chained at her child’s birth with an officer watching the whole proceedings. Others forced to strip naked and be probed in their vagina or anus on suspicion of hiding items. Women with babies and small children who were not allowed extended or overnight visits. Mentally ill prisoners like my mother who were punished in the ‘hole’ — placed in solitary confinement — for being honest about their symptoms. On and on, repeat ad nauseam.

In our failure to acknowledge everybody’s shadow side we act out our fears on the most vulnerable members of society. We scapegoat the mentally ill and treat them as though everything is their fault. We are unwilling to acknowledge the sickness that imprisons us in our own patterns of projection. Afraid to face the truth, we cannot enact true or lasting change. Transformation is only possible if we set ourselves free from these limitations and acknowledge the injustice that lies at the heart of the justice system.

My own work as an advocate for restorative justice emerged from these experiences. I saw needs go unmet for decades for everyone involved. I saw no chance of healing, or even of the slightest opening towards it in the prison system. I knew that what I’d experienced was the exact opposite of justice. Justice is respect and communication, and true accountability and reparation. It means distinguishing the individual as separate from their crime and the harm it has caused, and truthfully evaluating the unique conditions that inform a person’s actions. Justice is helping all people — including offenders — to be and feel accountable for what they have done, and to work together to make things right.

I can’t be anything but grateful for the opportunity to choose love over fear again and again throughout the last 25 years, and to live out that commitment in my work. I’ve done everything I can to respect and understand how my mother’s actions have affected others in the community, and to listen to the often ugly, revenge-based messages I’ve received from strangers. I know that housing 25 per cent of the world’s prisoners in American jails when only five per cent of the world’s population lives in the USA is both morally wrong and substantively ineffective as the basis for justice and reconciliation. I know that corporations with vested interests are passionate about filling every prison bed. I know that punishment only exacerbates the problem.

I know that stories like my mom’s must be held and heard safely to provide the raw material for healing. I know that people do not heal when they are pitted against each other and made to play a ruthless game of blame and shame. I know that by humanizing those stories we release the possibility of redemption, and come to understand our shared humanity. Without doubt, I know that restorative justice makes real the fact that conflict, pain, suffering and crime are part of all our existence. They constitute our shadow side.

Facing those shadows head on, naming them, and valuing people for who they are and not for the crimes they have committed, opens the way to offer a renewed sense of belonging to those we realize we have discarded. As Carl Jung once wrote, “if [we] only learn to deal with [our] own shadow [we] have done something real for the world. We have succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.”

Salzburg Global Fellow and Founder of Restorative Justice on The Rise Molly Leach knows from experience that storytelling has the power to restore human connection

*This op-ed article originally appeared at the Salzburg Global Seminar's Media Academy site and is credited thus.

This op-ed was written by Molly Leach, who attended the Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change in July 2024.

The central theme of this year's Salzburg Academy on Media and Global Change was exploring the deep human need for belonging and the obstacles we face as artificial intelligence (AI) encroaches into every aspect of our lives. Titled “Belonging in The Age of Machines: Reimagining the Soul of Media”, participants from across the world collaborated for two weeks in Salzburg, fueled by the heart and spirit of the 40,000 Salzburg Global Fellows before us who have aspired to make our world the one we know is possible.

During the second week of our intensive and extremely generative space, faculty member Roman Gerodimos invited us all to participate in the "Living Library", a project that was inspired by his long-time attendance at the Media Academy. He offered a space for people to choose to be either a “book” or a “reader” to share personal stories of social exclusion and disconnection. This project is an example of the many life-changing initiatives that have resulted from the Media Academy and continue to this day.

This experience was profoundly moving for me and everyone involved – “books” and “readers” alike. I heard how meaningful it was for “books” to feel listened to deeply, some for the first time, and for “readers” to feel the transformation in themselves through this common humanity across real and perceived barriers.

I participated as a “book” alongside seventeen other people. My title was “Daughter of A Monster”, as I recounted the details of when my mother became criminally insane and was incarcerated; my written essay elaborates on my experience.

The concept of belonging and its interrelationship with the power of storytelling has been at the heart of my work, much of it inspired by my own lived experiences in the United States as the daughter of what society would term a violent criminal. I have experienced the implications of how that impacts life in very subtle and very overt ways and the role media plays in perpetuating destructive narratives.

I have seen firsthand how our criminal justice system destroys lives, profits off of people’s mistakes, categorizes and discards individuals, takes voices away from the already voiceless, and perpetuates a state of discord and destruction.

At the heart of our humanity resounds the deeply important need of belonging - to be seen, heard, and truly understood. Feeling safe in one’s storytelling is unequivocally one of the most urgent and important aspects of creating spaces of connection. We underestimate the power and impact of micro-spaces that are fugitive, and free, and bridge people back from isolation and exclusion. Throughout the Media Academy, we returned to the quote of Salzburg Global Fellow Margaret Mead, who said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

We asked tough questions and dove deep into the challenges and discomforts of our current media hemisphere. If we think of media as a reflection of our current state of connection, or disconnection, we see some challenges. We must simplify and return to the ground level of our hearts, minds, and being-ness, in order to understand the solutions to the gargantuan problem of AI and the way many technological devices have in fact taken us away from each other and out of presence.

The art of presence requires us to be with one another in deeply meaningful ways, like only humans can do. We have imagination, we have creativity, we have will, and we can manifest these key qualities that are not characteristics that come from machines.

The "Living Library" experience offered a space for human connection that reveals a sense of connection and understanding, and a potential to bear witness to the shame and pain of others and find common seeds of experiences. It may seem like there needs to be a more intellectual approach to the answers that we are seeking around how we push back, how we stand for one another, how we defend humanness, and how we rediscover the deeply connected experiences we have as human beings through the stories of the “other”.

One of the keys to our power in retaining our humanity in these times is to return to simple and profound spaces that are intentional; this can include spaces online, in podcasts, libraries, lounges, or coffee houses where people feel heard. These spaces create an unquestionable feeling that it’s safe to be real, human, and vulnerable.

When we ask the question of how to create meaning and belonging in such challenging times, the answer may simply be that we must prioritize slowing down enough to create intentional spaces that allow time for people to be heard, seen, and valued. More than ever, technology offers us a global space to do that and I’ve seen it change lives. I encourage people to consider the possibilities of technology’s role in uniting us, while acknowledging that it can also potentially divide us further.

I’ve had the honor of hosting spaces online and in person where people can build connections, mobilize, be creative, emote, and be real. What comes out of these spaces is beyond any expectation when they are well held; this is the way towards imagining a world we know in our hearts is possible.

Leaving the intensive space here in Salzburg a different person than when I came, and knowing that many Salzburg Global Fellows have come and gone before me, has incited in me what my colleague and teacher in the field of restorative justice, Fania Davis, calls us to rise up to:

“Today, I believe there is nothing more subversive than helping to midwife a new evolutionary shift of the human species into an era where we will no longer be entranced with socioeconomic formations and ways of being and thinking that produce disconnection, domination, and devastation. Instead, we can be present upon the Earth in ways that bring healing, wholeness, and a sense of the sacred in our connection with one another and with all of creation.”

Molly Leach founded the first known restorative-justice-focused podcast in 2011, Restorative Justice on The Rise, a publicly accessible live forum and itunes/spotify stream, which uniquely records interviews with a live, interactive audience. She also has partnered with media companies such as CNN and supported HBO Documentaries in efforts to reach grassroots organizers and communities working to transform systems and lives. Molly is an essayist, researcher, educator, and visiting lecturer and presenter in the USA and worldwide.

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Leaf Seligman

Jabali Stewart

Jabali is an organizational consultant, a leadership coach, a public speaker, a youth worker, and a circle keeper. He has kept Peacemaking Circles in schools (K through College), businesses, families, government, and community settings. He has trained in and practices the lineage of Circle Keeping connected to Mark Wedge, Kay Pranis, Barry Stuart and Tahnaga Myers for over a decade. Besides Circle, he also practices other Art of Hosting and Participatory Leadership modalities. Jabali is a former independent school administrator, a public speaker, and has also cultivated a practice of one-on-one counsel. He enjoys collaborative problem-solving, and his work is deeply informed by his belief and practice of sensible, love-based leadership.

Find Jabali on Linkedin

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ABOUT

Tema Okun

Dr. Okun has spent over 40 years working with and for organizations, schools, and community-based institutions as an educator, facilitator, and coach focused on issues of racial justice and equity. She currently facilitates, consults, mentors, and offers talks for and with leaders and organizations locally and nationwide.

Logan Ward

Logan Ward (he/him) is an illustrator, writer, and filmmaker who values dialogue, challenging societal norms, and mutual respect. He graduated with a master’s in Media Design in August 2024, where he studied community-centered and participatory approaches to research and design.

Reach him on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/logan-ward-860620218/ 

Check out his illustrations on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/l.ward.draws/

And also on his website: https://www.loganward.net/

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In Partnership with:

Restorative Justice Coalition of Oregon

RJCO is a coalition of Oregon restorative justice practitioners and programs.

We promote and support the implementation and practice of restorative justice principles and models in Oregon’s justice, law enforcement, educational and other community institutions.

http://rjoregon.org 

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