261 - Restorative Justice

Full transcript available

Justice for all

Restorative justice is an important topic to understand and discuss. Andy Izenson, Sr. Legal Director at the Chosen Family Law Center, Inc., joined us for this episode to offer their expertise about the topic.

Restorative justice and transformative justice are sometimes used interchangeably, but they’re two subcategories of the same concept with the underlying foundation that a community should focus on healing rather than punishment when responding to harm. Restorative justice is specifically geared towards healing the harm that was suffered by the person experiencing it. By contrast, transformative justice is a broader concept, relying on the idea that if something bad happens between members of a community, everyone is somewhat responsible, because the community members played parts in collectively setting the norms that govern everyone’s behavior.

Criticizing restorative justice

Some critics of restorative justice claim that it trivializes the harm done by essentially claiming that the perpetrator got away with whatever they did if there was no punishment or consequence. However, this mindset often misinterprets restorative justice to mean that nothing should be done. Instead, those who advocate for restorative justice acknowledge and empathize with the victim’s pain, which arguably is more healing than simple punishment. Through this lens, justice does not equal punishment.

“That's the version of [my abuser] that needs to die and to be destroyed. Not the dude who lives in Wichita and is a used car salesman now. Whatever happens to him doesn't actually impact my healing. The guy that needs to die is the guy in my head.”

Andy Izenson

There is also the assumption that this means there is no anger to be felt, which is also incorrect. Anger isn’t necessarily a bad emotion: what its presence is saying is “I deserved to be safe and I wasn’t.” It’s proof that you value yourself enough to be upset about what happened, and that’s important to feel. What can help with the snap judgement of “I’m angry because this happened to me and the person who did it needs to suffer” is practicing mindfulness and discernment. Recognizing that you’re acknowledging your right to feel safe and that you weren’t safe and not deciding whether or not someone needs to suffer is the first step towards healing.

Make sure you listen to the episode to get Andy’s full and valuable perspective, along with their recommendations on how to take action in your community. Visit www.chosenfamilylawcenter.org for access to educational resources and information about legal counsel, as well as details about their upcoming fundraiser on April 30th.

Transcript

This document may contain small transcription errors. If you find one please let us know at info@multiamory.com and we will fix it ASAP.

Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory podcast, we're going to be exploring the incredibly important topic of restorative justice, what it is, what it's not, and what each of us can do to make our communities and our world a better, safer place. To join us for this today is Andy Izenson, Senior Legal Director for Chosen Family Law Center Incorporated based in New York City, working with and advocating for LGBTQ, polyamorous, and non-traditional families. Andy, thank you so much for joining us today.

Andy: Thank you. I'm really excited to be on.

Emily: Yay.

Dedeker: Yes, so really quick content warning to our listeners. We're going to be talking about the criminal justice system. We're going to be talking possibly about abuse, possibly about suicide. We're not going to be talking about these things in any kind of graphic detail, but they will probably come up in this discussion so take care of yourselves out there. Andy, we want to start off just I guess as broadly as possible and starting off with what are the basics of what restorative justice is or transformative justice, what it is, and how it compares to our current justice system.

Andy: Yes, one of the big questions is always what's the difference between restorative and transformative justice? Why do some people use one word, some people use the other word? They're two subcategories of the same concept. The underlying concept of both restorative and transformative justice is that the aim of responding as a community to harm within that community should be healing rather than punishment. The idea of restorative justice, in particular, it's a little bit more small scale, a little more zoomed in, so it's looking at the relationships between the people involved, the individual needs of the person who experienced harm.

We use these terms, person who experienced harm and person who caused harm or person who was responsible for harm because, in all levels of this, we're trying to resist the logics and the language of the criminal justice system. When we find ourselves using terms like victim and perpetrator, often the logics and the emotions that come with those terms come along with them.

With restorative justice, we're looking at work to heal the harm that was suffered by the person who experienced harm. To reintegrate them into their community, to find what they need to feel safe and to be restored to a place of safety and wholeness. This is with the understanding of course that a lot of the harms that we're dealing with do take something away that can never be given back. We're not trying to, or pretending that we can return to the place that we were in as individuals or as a community before the harm happened, but rather heal and grow.

By contrast, transformative justice tends to take a little bit of a broader view. It's based around the idea that when some kind of harm happens in a community between the members of the community, it's not just the fault of the person who committed the harm, who did a bad thing because they're bad and they have to be punished or thrown out and then everything will be fine again, but rather that everyone in the community is responsible for collectively setting the norms and community agreements that govern the behavior of the people in the community towards each other.

That when those norms allow harm to happen, it's the responsibility of everyone in the space who collectively contributed to the norms and base ideas of the community that permitted that harm to happen. So the responsibility to transform the conditions that permitted the harm lies with everyone in the community and not just with the person who committed the harm.

For example, if we look at this on a larger scale before we zoom in and talk about polyamorous community. If you look at, let's say I own a bodega. I own a corner store and Jase, you come into my corner store and you take a loaf of bread and you stick it in your bag and you run out the door. Now, in the criminal-justice system, the broader-legal landscape that we exist in uses, there's a couple of things that that means. One thing is that you Jase, you are now a criminal. You did a bad thing. You are now a bad person. You have rendered yourself in the category of people who deserve punishment, who cannot contribute to their community in a meaningful or positive way and who at the base of it, don't matter.

The other thing that this means is that I will be under the logic of the criminal justice system, which we call carceral logic, the logic of incarceration. Under carceral logic, the way to make me whole again, the way to heal the harm that I have suffered at your hands by you stealing my bread is for you to be punished. If you are punished, I'll feel better. My harm will be made whole. My hurt will be healed. Now, if we think about that for just a second, it doesn't make sense. It doesn't actually make sense that I will be in a better position if I see you suffering. We have been taught this and we're going to talk a little later about why we've been taught that it works this way, because it's not for no reason.

Emily: Yes, I just feel like you're Jean Valjean and Javert in this situation.

Jase: I'm totally Jean Valjean here.

Emily: Yes exactly. In that situation were rooting for Jean Valjean, so.

Andy: Right, and aren't we always really?

Emily: Maybe, I don't know.

Andy: I've always been an Enjolras guy, but we don't have to- take that tangent. From a restorative-justice framework, just in this tiny microcosmic very simplified story. In restorative justice, that we go to you Jase and we're like, "Jase, you took Andy's bread, give it back." The thing that makes this better is that the harm is healed. That it's fixed. That I get my bread back and that the harm to my business and to my livelihood and my ability to continue to survive myself is repaired. That's the first step.

When we then zoom out and take a transformative justice lens to this, then we look at it on a more systemic level and we say, "Well, okay Jase, you are a human who is alive and has value and you should be able to eat when you're hungry." People don't steal bread for no reason. You didn't steal bread because you decided that you wanted to mess with me for no reason. You probably stole bread because you couldn't afford it and you needed food. If that's the case, the solution to this problem is not to punish you, it's to help you get into a situation where if you need food, you can get it.

We look at these broader systems, and these are the things that are actually engendering the problems. The problem here is not Jase is a jerk and should be put in a box forever, the problem here is systemic poverty. The problem here is that not everyone who lives in our society that needs to eat food on a regular basis in order to survive is able to do that. If we really refocus towards that being the problem then putting people in cages makes a lot less sense.

Jase: Right, so if I were to sum up then the difference between the two, the transformative justice is more the part where we're looking at how can we fix these problems so that I don't feel the need to steal bread, and then restorative justice is more about looking at between you and me, how can we restore you as much as possible and kind of get you back to a place of as much wholeness as possible?

Andy: That's how I use them differently. I should be clear that these are terms, they're a little bit queer that-

Jase: I see. Yes, kind of means a lot of things, yes.

Andy: Different people that use them, use them differently. My definitions are not more or less valid than anyone else's. That's the distinction that I make when I use them.

Dedeker: I think that for most of our listeners listening to this, it's very clear that this is so different from how our current justice system operates. I want to know more about the concept of carceral logic and specifically, we read an article that you wrote on a medium a couple of years ago that was fantastic where you did talk about and kind of tease about how capitalism and oppression have influenced us really internalizing that carceral logic. Can you tell us more about that?

Andy: Yes. We're going to take a really broad view here. There are a lot of intersecting systems of oppression that modify the landscape of the world that we live in. At the base of them, all of them are about sorting who matters from who doesn't, who is important and who isn't, who deserves to be resourced and safe and have what they need and who doesn't. That boundary is often drawn on racial lines, when it's drawn on racial lines it looks like white supremacy. It says white people matter and people of color and particularly black people do not. When it's drawn on gender lines, it says men and masculine people matter and women and feminine people don't.

When it's drawn on class lines, it says wealthy people matter and poor people don't. All of this is the enforcement mechanism of the state. The reason that we need to believe this, the state needs us to believe this is because if we didn't believe that there were people who didn't matter, we would never tolerate prisons. So we need to be very carefully taught that there are classes of people whose well-being doesn't matter, who are so bad and so worthless that there's nothing that can be done to them that is over the top, in order for us to accept the idea that we throw whole classes of people away and turn them into an unpaid labor force, which by the way runs our whole economy.

All of this is necessary in order for our economy to have the unpaid labor force that it needs to keep running. So all of this is built on the foundations of our country desperately needs slavery in order to keep working the way it works, and if we want to question any part of this, we have to question all of it. We can't talk about things like restorative and transformative justice without talking about the prison industrial complex and without talking about its roots in slavery and white supremacy.

Jase: Yes. That capitalism's tied in there as well as racism and sexism and classism and just sort of all these things kind of wrapped up together in this system that's somewhat fragile if you examine it too much.

Andy: Right. Well, it's so powerful because it holds all of these things that we need to survive over us and demands our compliance. All of these systems are set up to say, if you want to survive, if you want to be able to eat and live in a house and not be put in prison and not be thrown away and not be killed, you need to comply with these rules. You need to live in these ways and you need to believe these things because only by living in these ways and following these rules and believing these things, can you make sure that you stay in the class of people that matter.

That's what's at stake. Because if you don't believe the right things, if you don't stay in the class of people that matter, the consequence is that you get put in the class of people that don't matter. It's necessary for the society to be built up in a way that retains a class of people that don't matter as that consequence.

Dedeker: Yes, and I feel like kind of what's blanketed over the top of all of this is what I imagine comes from a culture that's based on Christian morality. This idea that it's possible to have purely good people, purely bad people. Someone's going to heaven, someone's going to hell already kind of built into this belief system, this very carceral belief system that ultimately either you get the ultimate reward of going to heaven or the ultimate punishment if you really don't matter because you're going to hell and even God doesn't care because you're going to hell.

I think that that's something that I definitely see really, really permeates to such a fundamental level, the way that we think about human beings. Because it's also, even if you didn't come with any kind of Christian upbringing personally, it's also reinforced by all of our media of the good guy and the bad guy, the unquestioning good guy and the unquestioning bad guy that I feel like that's another big part of this is that as soon as someone's labeled as bad, it's just so easy to think like, well then they deserve whatever they have coming to them.

Andy: You're absolutely right, including hell. Yes.

Jase: Right. Could we before, we want to go into kind of some common objections to restorative justice, but before we go there, I was wondering, could you give us kind of some more concrete examples of this rather than kind of the abstract sort of Jean Valjean, very simplified, someone's poor and so they steal a bread and that's- What about in our real day to day lives? How is this being applied and how is it different from the way the normal criminal justice system is doing it?

Andy: Yes. One way that I like to think about it is that these alternative justice or community justice systems are just a systematization of how we treat each other when we love each other. If my partner and I, we're living in our house together and they do something that hurts me. Let's say they eat the last piece of pizza and I really, really wanted that last piece of pizza. As opposed to if someone in my office building takes my last piece of pizza out of the fridge and I don't know them, we don't have a relationship, they eat my last piece of pizza. Those are two very different things and I react to them differently.

If a stranger eats my last piece of pizza that I really wanted, it's very easy for me to write that stranger off and say this person is a jerk. They don't have any respect for my personal pizza. They're thoughtless, I don't ever want to have anything to do with them, and I know that from this one piece of information. If my partner eats my last piece of pizza, that's not going to probably be my reaction. I'm probably not going to write them off completely because they ate my pizza. Probably I'm going to say, "Hey, I really wanted that pizza. Can you get me another piece of pizza please?"

Or can you make those brownies that you make that I like so much more? Can you in some way let me know that you didn't do this because you don't care about my well-being and that actually you can demonstrate that our relationship is strong even though my feelings are hurt by this thing that you did.

Jase: Right. Yes. Or even if you were just like, "Hey, I'm pissed off because you ate my pizza," they get the chance to say, "Oh my gosh, I'm sorry. I'll go get another one" or they could even offer it. Even if you don't ask.

Andy: Right, so community justice is just that scaled up. We all already have the instinct inside us to function in this way. It's just a question of reorienting how we're applying them so that we're treating all of the members of our community as if we care about them. Now, you can't just start acting as though there's a basis of mutual trust without building a basis of mutual trust. These things can exist in a vacuum. This is why a lot of the time, communities, groups, conferences, whatever, they'll call me and they'll say, we had an incident, can you come in and fix it with restorative justice?

It doesn't really work that way because you can't just plonk restorative justice on top of an existing situation that's dysfunctional and have it fixed the problem when you're already in crisis. A lot of these practices are about how your community operates on the day-to-day. For example, a lot of the practitioners who are doing restorative justice right now are doing it in schools. They're going to get children. It's incredible. I think it's the coolest thing because they teach these kids and we're talking like elementary and middle school kids like children. They teach them how to circle, to do a talking circle.

They do regular circles as part of their school day and then these children, once they know how to do it, they have it as an instinct. When they get into conflict amongst themselves, instead of going to a teacher instead of fighting about it, their response to conflict is, "Let's take this to circle." Because they know they have this practice tool, they already have this basis of trust, they're already in a circle together, they know they can do it. So it has to be something, it's not just a crisis management tool. You have to have it already.

Dedeker: We'll talk about that a little bit later because first of all, I think that's just so different from how I've seen restorative justice at least used in the online communities that I participate in that I think there's still this sense held by these micro-cultures online that it is this situation, we can just plunk it in.

Jase: Right, it's something you do.

Dedeker: For this situation, this is going to be a bandaid that we're going to use, which is understandable because I think that's what I thought about this also honestly, on the surface level.

Andy: It would be nice if it worked that way. It would be helpful.

Emily: It sounds like you're saying--

Dedeker: Probably easier.

Andy: It would definitely be easier. Unfortunately, you got to totally reorient your stance with regards to the prison industrial complex in capitalism if you want to fix this problem.

Dedeker: Oh, boy.

Emily: That's big. It does sound like the underlying issues are the things that need to be changed as opposed to especially within a tight-knit community, for example, or the polyamorous community, which for many of us is very tight-knit, and we do know a lot of the same people. It's as though these things need to be implemented from the very beginning to a degree because that is the thing still in restorative justice that I've seen online, it still has this feeling of, "Here's the person who did the very bad thing," and we're all trying to come to some agreement, or happiness or goodness coming out of this, but it still pits everyone against that person in a way. It doesn't sound like that's what we're going for here what you see it as. The potential for goodness is very different from that.

Andy: My teacher says the best time to start a restorative justice practice is 10 years ago, and the second-best time is right now. Let's take as an example something that happens all the time in the polyamorous community and really in a lot of these communities where personal interest and professional field overlap in a nebulous way. The field of sexuality is one of these, the field of psychedelics is one of these, often the field of spirituality, where at events and at talks and things, you have people who are there, because it's their job. Because they write books in the field because they have name recognition, and you have people who are there who are enthusiastic amateurs and they just care a lot about it, but it's not their job.

When you have that kind of complexity in different reasons for being there, you end up with a lot of potential for misuse of power because you have this complicated mix of interpersonal power, and professional power, and power in the context of the structures that you're in, whether it's a conference, or online group, or a meetup, whose house are you meeting at, who's bringing the snacks who's got the money? All of these power dynamics influence how people interact with each other and it leads to a lot of possibility for coercion because the person who's got the power doesn't see the power.

If you're a person who has power, whether it's in your circumstance, or whether it's systemic power, or whether its power based on your being white, or being a man, or being wealthy, whatever it is, it doesn't look to you like you're exerting power over people. It just looks to you like everything's fine and people are being really nice and giving with you, and so things look mutual when they're actually coercive, which puts this responsibility on the people who have the power in these situations, to really dedicate themselves to understanding what that means, what it looks like, how it works, and what they can do to mitigate it?

Because if they don't really put a lot of effort into that, they're going to end up messing a lot of people up without making a conscious decision to do that. I think that's one of the things that we see happen all the time in polyamorous communities, in the sex positivity world where these really prestigious people, these people with a lot of community cachet that people listen to all of a sudden, they'll get this avalanche of call-outs of people saying, "This person coerced me. This person manipulated me. This person abused me," and all of those experiences of pain and hurt are genuine. Under no circumstances am I suggesting that they're not real.

Also, that can coexist with, "This person didn't make a conscious decision to do any of that." This is one of the fundamental ideas of community justice, right? That if we look at the carceral logic of who does bad things, it's bad people. They do bad things because they're bad, right? If we pull that apart and look at it in a little bit more of a nuanced way, who does bad things? Well, all of us do bad things. Who is a bad person? There's no such thing as a bad person. There's no such thing as a good person. We all have the capacity to hurt each other. We all have the capacity to do incredible acts of kindness and selflessness.

We're all complicated, mixed-up people who cannot be categorized in such a simple way. If we accept that we all have the capacity to cause harm, then we're going to move through these interactions with a lot more cautiousness and a lot more care around the power that we're wielding, but without realizing that we have to pull apart deciding to cause harm and causing harm.

When I was first teaching about this, I had this story about a car. This isn't a true story, by the way. Let's imagine that you're driving your car. We're in New York City, you're driving your car down Broadway, and you see me in the crosswalk ahead of you. Now, one of three things happens. In scenario number one, you're driving, you're a good driver, you're doing your best, you're being careful, but there's ice on the road. Your car skids out of control, without you meaning to, without any intention on your part, the car wrecks me over and breaks my leg.

In scenario number two, you're driving, you're being careful, you're not being negligent, but you sneeze while you're driving. While you sneeze without meaning to, your foot goes down on the gas pedal, your car runs me over and breaks my leg. In scenario number three, you see me in the crosswalk ahead of you and you're like, "Oh, fuck that guy. I hate Andy." You slam your foot down on the gas pedal on purpose meaning to hurt me. You run me over and break my leg. Now, what's different in those three scenarios?

Emily: Intent.

Andy: Bingo. What's the same?

Jase: The harm that was caused.

Andy: My leg?

Emily: Your leg was broken.

Andy: Does it matter to my leg bones what was in your head at the time?

Emily: No. Not at all.

Andy: Not really. We could take this to say intent doesn't matter. I'm going to say intent doesn't matter as much as we think it matters because it does matter to the extent that it informs what you do next because that's how I know what was in your head. Because if you get out of your car, and you're like, "Holy shit, your leg's broken. Let me call you an ambulance. I'm so sorry. Let me help you get out of the road. I'm here. I got you. I'm going to take care of this." What I learn from that, is you probably didn't mean to hurt me and you probably want me to be okay.

If you drive away, just flipping me the bird in your rearview mirror, I learn something different from that. If you get out of your car, and you're like, "I didn't mean to run you over, so why is your leg so broken?" What I learn from that-

Emily: Stupid leg.

Jase: It sounds absurd in that situation but we do that with more emotional hurt for sure.

Andy: Absolutely.

Emily: Absolutely and get defensive.

Dedeker: I think we have this aphorism that gets tossed around a lot in these spaces of intent is not more important than impact, or intent does not cancel out impact. However, I do think that that not aphorism kind of has the subtext to it of therefore, intent doesn't matter at all which I think is also not quite accurate. At least that's the way that I've seen it used is that impact is the only thing by which we're going to judge the situation. We don't care about intent at all. I do like you mentioning that it's like intent is important, but not as important as you think it is, is the in-between, the middle ground there.

Andy: Right. It's important to the extent that it informs how you respond. Because if your intent is genuinely, "I don't want this person to be hurt, I want them to be okay," then that's what your actions are going to reflect. If you hurt someone without meaning to, and you genuinely don't want them to be hurt, that's going to show in what you do next. If you're more invested in your idea of yourself as innocent than you are in them being okay, that's also going to show in your actions and what you do next, and that's what people are going to see.

So when people respond to being told, "Hey, you hurt me." By saying, "No, I didn't, I didn't do anything wrong. I'm not a bad person." That defensiveness, it makes perfect sense if you're someone that's been steeping in carceral logic your whole life--

Jase: Which is all of us, right?

Dedeker: Which is all of us. That's the thing. Then it really becomes clear, it's such a systemic thing that of course, we can't come forward and take ownership of the harm that we cause because then that as a bad person, and we can't do then we are going to be cut off our community and then it's just-- Yes. It spirals out. Jesus.

Andy: Exactly. It's terrifying. The consequences, the stakes are so high. That's part of why trying to implement this stuff as a band-aid is too little too late. Because if you're trying to step forward into accountability, that takes trusting your community to catch you. If your community is not ready to catch you, you could end up face-planting.

Dedeker: I've definitely seen that.

Emily: Oh, all over the place. Yes.

Dedeker: Yes, I've definitely seen that.

Emily: It reminds me of when I was learning how to drive as a teenager that I remember one of the things I was taught was, if you're ever in an accident, never say you're sorry. You could say, "I'm sorry that that happened," or "Wow, this is terrible. Let me get you help," but never say you're sorry because then you're admitting fault and your insurance will go way up. Right. I remember when I was in an accident where someone hit me and they said they were sorry. She was like 16, just started driving and she hit me on my motorcycle. She was so apologetic and in my head, I was just like, "Oh, no one taught you not to say that. You shouldn't be saying these things."

That's fucked up when I really think about the whole implications of that for us socially. That to me is like, "Gosh, this girl needs to learn."

Andy: Needs to learn to apologize less. Yes. I think there might be a different problem there but I hear you.

Emily: Absolutely.

Andy: This is not something a few people can functionally do within-- As an island in a sea of people still operating from carceral logic and fear. This is something that we all have to decide to do together.

Emily: We're going to address some of the more common criticisms of restorative justice, but before we do that, we're going to talk about a couple of ways that you can support our show. I wanted to get into some of the criticisms that people have of restorative justice. There are quite a few and I'm interested to see you pick those apart, but one of the first ones is that it trivializes crime, particularly men's violence against women. There are a bunch more but that one to me is a big one and I'd be interested to hear what you think.

Andy: Can you say what you mean by trivializes?

Jase: Yes. I think you almost got into it earlier of this thing of, on the one hand, you're wanting to say, I always want to believe the victim or the receiver of harm, if we want to use the restorative terms. I always want to believe that person and so if then I'm saying, "Yes, I believe you," but also I'm not going to agree with you that this person's a bad person and should be exiled and punished. That like, "Oh, well, then you're just letting them get away with it?"

Emily: Yes. Just there is this idea out there that especially I think in the Me Too movement, that it's like, "Okay, this person did this thing and therefore, they need to be gone out of the community at large forever and they can never enter back into it." Some people go so far as to be like, "Lock them up forever," or "Cut off an appendage," or something along those lines. They get very visceral reactions to it. I think on the flip side of this, some people might say, well, if you are wanting restorative justice, then it's trivializing the harm that this person caused to this other person, but yes. If you can pass that apart?

Andy: Okay. I think part of this comes from the way that people misuse restorative justice to mean, we don't want to do anything about this. Because it's easier to slap that term on top of saying, "Oh, well, we don't think this is such a big deal. They didn't really do anything wrong, it doesn't really matter, we're not going to do anything and we're going to call it restorative justice because that is a less punitive way of responding." I think when you say restorative justice and what you mean is, we're not listening to your story and we don't care about what happened to you, absolutely trivializing. Shouldn't do that. It's bad.

The way that I actually got into this work is, must have been like 10 years ago at this point. I found out that the guy who had abused me for years was suicidal. I found out that he was trying to kill himself, actively. I had spent a really long time assuming that I wanted this guy to suffer and die because that was the narrative that had been just plunked on top of the hurt that I was feeling. "This person hurt me, I would feel better if they were suffering, I would feel better if they died." I'd never really questioned it. I just assumed that it was true because that's the way it works.

I found out that this guy was in such distress. He was suffering so much that he was trying to die and was maybe going to die. I was like, "Okay, so I feel better, right? Why don't I feel better?" He's suffering. He's maybe going to die. He's being as punished as a person could really be and my hurt hasn't gone away. Something about how I was taught about how this works is wrong. I had to go into trying to research like, what are different ways of understanding this? If this guy's suffering isn't going to heal my pain, then what actually is going to heal my pain? What will actually make this better?

For me, what actually has brought me healing over the last years is doing this work and being with other survivors in their pain and saying, "I see you, I care about what happened to you. What happened to us matters, and no one can tell us that it doesn't." At the same time, I can tell you from personal experience, that punishment doesn't create healing in the way that the prison system tells us it will. What I want to work towards is actual healing. Let's find out for you a person who has been harmed, what actually would healing look like for you? How can we actually transform this world into one that wouldn't allow the things that happened to you to happen to anyone else?

That's the solution that I find more valuable than just, "Let's lash out and have revenge because the narratives that were taught about how justice works tell us that that will help." I know it won't help. It didn't help me. There are all these other reasons that we're taught that besides that it's true. If we understand that it's not true, then we say, "Okay, what's real? What would real healing look like? What can we actually do to take steps towards it as individuals and as a community?" Transformative and restorative justice are those steps for me and in my work.

It's not about making light of the harm, it's about trying to deal with it as it is instead of as the place that it holds in the false narrative of justice that we're fed by this culture that we live.

Emily: Yes, I'd say that is another common criticism is this idea that restorative justice fails to actually provide justice in the sense that we think of what justice is, I guess, in our current society. Yes, you essentially said that you hit the nail on the head there.

Andy: Yes. It doesn't provide punishment. That's true. It doesn't.

Emily: Yes.

Jase: If we think that justice means punishment then yes.

Emily: Punishment, yes. Then that's the only thing sure.

Jase: I almost wonder if there's a jealousy comparison thing that can happen to where if it's like, I was harmed, and my community is like, "We're going to try this restorative process," and I'm like, but the last person that got harmed got to get the person punished and kicked out and their job taken away, there's like almost this weird competitive thing that can happen too.

Andy: Well, or that because that's what we've been doing for so long, that either if you come out and you say someone hurt you, one of two things has happened historically. One is no one listens to you, no one cares. Eventually, you go away and stop saying it, or people listen, and the person that hurt you gets kicked out, right? If those have been the two options forever, then what everybody learns and internalizes is either my community kicks this person out or my community doesn't care what happened to me.

Dedeker: Gosh, like that binary. It's so powerful that you talk about your personal experience, the fact that like, this personal experience of learning about your abuser being suicidal was what brought you to this work and so, myself, also having an abuser, unfortunately, I've grappled with a really similar confusion. I would definitely say that at my darkest moments, at my moments of feeling the most pain, or the most intensely triggered or whatever, there's definitely that part of me that just wants suffering for my abuser, but those moments are actually surprisingly few and far between.

Even when I'm suffering just a tiny bit less or having a good day or whatever, it's not necessarily that I don't necessarily want suffering or punishment for this person, however, I know for myself, ever since learning about restorative justice as a concept, I've tried to put myself in the position hypothetically of like, what would it be like to go through that process? What would I actually need for healing, and while I don't feel aversion to the process, my brain just kind of short circuits and I don't even know what it looks like.

It's like I feel like yes, that seems interesting but I don't even have a concept of what it could possibly look like and I think that a lot of people that I see the community have the same thing, that it's like literally, the only thing we can imagine is, like you said, either we just forget about it and no one cares and I just deal with it, or it's big and it's punitive and there's punishment and this person gets kicked out, but anything outside of that, it's like, I can't even envision what that would look like.

Initially, I wanted to ask what's been the evolution of your feelings about your own personal situation as you continue to do this work professionally, which you kind of answered already. I'm also curious about like, for a situation like that, what is even within the realm of possibility as far as what might actually heal that because I think that's also a problem is people don't even have the vision, don't even know where might we be headed with this.

Andy: Yes, so there's a couple of different sort of tracks of answers here. One is, what does a restorative justice process look like in action? There are a lot of ways to do it, there are as many ways to do it as there are people who do it but, as an example, one thing that often happens is that the people, the organizers who are taking responsibility for the process will convene groups of people who serve as support for both the person who experienced harm and the person who committed it, so you would have, as the harmed party, you would have your support system around you and the responsible party would have their support system around them.

In many cases, the harmed party sits in like a healing circle with their support people for a while, meeting regularly, talking about what they need, what support can be given to them. Whether that's material support, whether that's one member of the group will come over to your house once a week and bring you a casserole, whether that's we have a scheduled call with one member of the group, so every regular amount of time to talk about your process. Whether that's the responsible party puts money into an account for you to get trauma therapy, whatever that looks like for you to get your support from the people that know how to give you support.

Then in parallel to that, the responsible party also has a circle and a support system and has to be sitting in circle with people that care about them. That that they know won't throw them away, whose presence helps them feel safe so that they can really open up their understanding of what they did to you and why. There's, it's called a staircase of accountability and it's basically a process where you go from, you stop committing violence, then you come to understand the violence, you come to understand its consequences. You make repairs for the violence, for the harm.

Then you change the underlying attitudes and beliefs that led to the harm and then you become a healthy member of your community and you work to prevent harm on a larger scale. You start really small, you start by saying, I'm going to figure it out what I did, I'm going to really understand what I did and I'm going to commit to not doing that anymore, so that's where you start and then as you get deeper and deeper into it, you're coming to more fully understand all of the factors that impacted the series of events that led to the harm happening.

You come to understand all of the things that affected both people in the interaction or all of the people in the interaction that led to it being harmful in the ways that it was, and the deeper your understanding, the more work you can do to mitigate that harm and future harms. Eventually, in many cases, the two circles will eventually come together, the survivor support circle and the responsible party support circle, and they'll sit in circle altogether, to give the survivor, if they wanted, an opportunity to speak face to face with the person that harmed them, with their support system around them knowing that they're safe, knowing that nothing bad is going to happen and they can just say whatever they need to say.

In a lot of cases, that sort of catharsis is really, really valuable and healing. That alone is not going to solve the problem and in most cases, it's followed by the responsible party coming up with basically a concrete plan. Here's how I'm going to make sure that my continued existence in the world isn't continuing to harm you. Here are the ways that I'm going to make sure that my behavior in the future protects the people that I interact with in the future from the things that harmed you. Here are the things I'm going to do to on a large scale work towards a world that doesn't have this kind of violence in it.

Here's my reading list. Here are the support groups I'm going to go to, and the harmed party has an opportunity to say, I think you should read, I think you should also read how to be an anti-racist as well as all of these other books. I think you should also go to a support group for people who are addicted to what you're addicted to. They have the opportunity in many cases to exert some influence over what's in the plan, and then the plan is played out in a way that the responsible party is going to be compliant with it, because they came up with it, because they want to be different and they want to make sure that the things that hurt the harmed party don't happen anymore.

That's what it looks like as an example in many cases on a general scale. So that's part of the answer, which is what can this process look like? What does healing from trauma look like is a much bigger question, and what does healing from trauma when you have the person who traumatized you saying whatever you need me to do, I will do. That might be a question that's more suited to a mental health professional and often we do bring in mental health professionals to advise on this. But from my understanding of trauma, which 100% comes from having a good therapist myself, it's like this.

The guy that actually exists in the world that hurt me 15 years ago, that dude who is currently alive and has a job presumably and eats tacos and wears socks, he is almost entirely irrelevant to my healing. There is a version of him that lives in my head and goes around with me all the time, that is all of the parts of him that hurt me. It's like a ghost that speaks to me, that when I am triggered, it's activated.

That's the version of him that my healing needs to deal with. That's the version of him that needs to die and to be destroyed. Not the dude who lives in Wichita and he's a used car salesman now. Whatever happens to him doesn't actually impact my healing. The guy that needs to die is the guy in my head.

Emily: It's very powerful. It's also--

Dedeker: Yes. Okay. That's huge. Yes.

Jase: We're going to need to sit for a moment and just take that in.

Dedeker: Just sit with that for a second.

Jase: All of this talk about what actually is involved in healing and taking care of the person who is harmed. It also reminds me of something that I can't remember where or when I learned this. I feel like it was probably from one of those teachers that I look back on and go, "Wow, this teacher really helped shape the person that I am today." But it was about if something-- If someone is hurt, if they're hit in a hit and run, like your example before, or if someone mugs him and runs away, and you come up as this is happening, this question of what do you do? Do you go to the person who was hurt and try to take care of them or do you run after the person who's trying to get away with it?

In my mind, at the time, I remember it was like, "Well, obviously you try to catch the person because you got to get justice. We can't have people like that running around." The person teaching me this was actually making the argument of like, "No, the person you should be caring about the most is the person who was hurt and taking care of that person."

For me, that was this-- At the time I was just like, "Gosh, I really need to think about--." I didn't have these words but, "I need to think about reprogramming that impulse in my mind."

I think the irony of it is that when we look at it now, not with if like, "Oh, they're running away right now, and I'm here and this person's hurt on the ground," but when we look at it more like there was abuse or not even abuse, but a consent violation, even an unintentional one or whatever of this, sometimes we think that the way that I can help the person who is harmed is by going after that person and hurting them. Instead of doing what you were just saying, which is focusing on that person who is harmed and helping them heal however you can. That's such a different thing and we don't think it is.

Andy: Well, you know how Americans are really good at crisis response and really bad at sustained care?

Emily: Yes.

Dedeker: Yes.

Andy: When there's a hurricane or something, Americans are like, "We got this, we're going to raise a boatload of money and send all these-- Send tons of canned food, whatever it is.

Dedeker: Hashtag, pray for whatever it is.

Andy: Right. We're going to pull together, we're going to do it. Then once the crisis is over, everyone just dissipates and wanders off back to their regular life, and leaves the ongoing ambient radiation of the constant crisis that so many people live in, to its own devices. Right? If the water crisis in Flint, Michigan happened in the space of a day instead of over a decade, it would have been fixed. But because it was an ongoing problem and Americans, also because of racism, but because Americans don't-- We are not trained to know how to give care in an ongoing way and also because it doesn't lend itself to being a hero, that urge is a lot less strong.

If you come into a situation of harm, and you go after the bad guy and you punish the bad guy and you save the day, you're the hero, you get to feel like a big guy. If you make a callout post online and it means that someone, an abuser gets ejected from a community, you get to feel like a hero. It is a lot less heroic and glamorous to go to someone who's like traumatized and isolated and has been, however long this relationship is, just fighting to keep their psychic boundaries intact enough to say, "I don't think what's happening to me is okay."

To go to that person and say, "Hey, I'm just going to sit with you and we can just watch Great British Bake Off and I just want you to know that I'm here and I care about you and what happened to you wasn't okay and I'm your friend." That's a lot less heroic and glamorous, but that's actually what we got to do.

Jase: Yes. I feel like we could do like a whole nother episode that's just about being in that role of the supporter. Because that's so cute too.

Emily: On either end.

Jase: Right. Yes. That's a good point.

Emily: With both parties.

Jase: Yes. I'm just thinking with that carceral mindset of when someone that I care about is abused. This didn't happen to me, but I want to go kill that person. I want to-- You know, right?

Andy: Totally.

Emily: Exactly. Then I--

Andy: So now we're talking about anger, right? I love talking about anger. Because a lot of people think, well, if we're doing the restorative justice things and you don't get angry because that's the whoo whoo way of doing it, where you don't get to be angry. Because if you're angry then the punishment and all of these things. Actually, I think that restorative justice has more room for anger than the carceral systems that we were trained in because it makes space for anger as an emotion instead of as one in a series of dominoes that you don't have any control over.

Emily: Interesting.

Andy: You know how sometimes you have feelings and they tell you something, but the information you actually need from them is different from what the feeling is saying? You ever felt that?

Jase: Oh, yes.

Emily: Sure.

Andy: Sometimes if I'm having anxiety, anxiety is like, "Listen, the world is dangerous. Everyone is bad. What you got to do is hide under the bed until you die." Right?

Jase: That sounds like a good solution, yes.

Andy: We just take that on at its word. I'm like, "Okay, cool. I'm going to go hide under the bed and then one day I'll just die under there and that sounds fine." But the practice, the thing that people who call things mindfulness, tend to call mindfulness is going, "Okay, I hear you, anxiety, and I think what you're trying to tell me is I forgot to have breakfast, and I should go have a sandwich." Being able to translate the emotion into the information that you actually need from it. Anger is the same way. Anger comes to you and it's like, "This person needs to suffer and die. I'm going to burn down cities, I'm going to Bugzilla my way through this community until my pain goes away."

The way of dealing with that, that we could call mindfulness is saying, "Okay, anger, I hear you and I think what you're trying to say is, I'm in pain and I want to be listened to." You know, if someone is speaking and no one's listening, of course, they're going to start shouting. If someone is trying to get care, and they're not being given care, of course, they're going to start shouting because there's no other way to be heard. It makes perfect sense to be angry. I tell people when I'm working with harmed parties and I'm working with survivors, I'm like, "Treasure your anger, your anger is your system fueling your boundaries."

Your anger is saying, "I deserved to be safe, and I was not safe and that's not right." Your anger is a part of you that knows that you shouldn't be treated in the way that you were treated. That knows that you shouldn't have been violated in the way that you were violated or whatever it is, and is reacting to that, and that's good. You should have that knowledge. You should know that you should be treated well, and you should know that it's wrong for you to be treated badly.

It's just that when your anger says, "Because I feel this way, that person needs to suffer," that's where you have to bring in the mindfulness and the discernment and say, "Okay, what we're actually talking about here is I'm in pain and I need care. We're not actually talking about whether or not someone should suffer, just like we're not actually talking about whether I should be under the bed hiding."

Jase: Right. Yes. That's a good way to put that. That makes a lot of sense.

Emily: Before we conclude our episode today, we wanted to ask you, Andy, what are some actionable takeaways for our listeners, because we'd like to give people some things that they can do within their own lives, maybe to continue to implement all of these great things that you've talked to us about today into their own communities and into their own lives. Are there some actionable takeaways that you have for this?

Andy: Yes. I know we've been talking about some really big systems and it can seem really overwhelming, but the cool thing is that we don't actually have to believe what we're told to believe and that changing the way that we look at this stuff actually starts to change our behavior as individuals and then as groups and then as communities. A lot of these systems require everyone to believe them in order for them to work. Like Ursula K. Le Guin says, "Capitalism seems inescapable, but so did the divine right of kings."

One of the things that I think is worth just gently turning your attention to when you can is, when you feel the urge to classify someone as good or bad, to pause and think about it and think about who benefits from me classifying this person as good or bad? Who benefits from me living in a world where people can be rendered worthless or valuable by their actions instead of having inherent worth because they are human and alive?What would it be like if I could hold the truths simultaneously that someone can do things that are genuinely unacceptable and that they're still a human and alive and therefore valuable and don't deserve to be thrown away?

It's just about taking a pause when you feel that reaction and letting yourself contextualize what you're seeing and what your reaction is in the context of your understanding of the systems that we live in and how you've been taught to react to things. Is that how you want to react to this or do you want to react to it in a different way?

Dedeker: Well, it sounds like some super easy homework.

Emily: Just change your reactions and go.

Andy: The other thing that I think is a little more easy is working to make sure that in all of your relationships, you've got open lines of communication about things that are hard even when it's scary. Like I said, people only shout when they've tried talking and they weren't heard. If you make sure that in all of your relationships, your partners know if I did something that hurt you, I want to know. I won't be angry at you for telling me, I won't punish you, I won't respond in a way that hurts more. I will hold that and if I am upset about it, then I will deal with that and then I'll come back and take care of you.

Making sure that you are a safe person to say no to and that you are a safe person to say, "Hey, that wasn't okay" to. Both moves us closer to a world where this sort of thing doesn't have to happen and makes sure that you're not going to end up having an argument online about what you did and didn't do in your relationship because your partners feel safe enough to talk to you.

Dedeker: That makes a lot of sense. I really love that. We are going to keep talking about this in our bonus episode, specifically about some of those online arguments perhaps, and about how restorative and transformative justice plays out in online communities. Before we go, Andy, are there some good resources that people can turn to if listeners specifically want to learn more about restorative justice and transformative justice that you recommend?

Andy: Yes. One of the best resources that I have is the Creative Interventions Toolkit. It's put out by Generation Five. The whole PDF history online. It's a 600-page PDF but don't be intimidated because you don't have to read it from beginning to end to use it. It's a workbook. There's also an anthology called Thumbling Towards Repair, I think. It's a workbook for facilitators in particular. That's definitely worth a read whether you're already a facilitator or you want to be one or you just want to learn more about the processes. Those two things I think are the most practical resources for what does it look like to manifest these ideas in my actual behavior.

Jase: Wow. That's fantastic.

Dedeker: That's fantastic. Also, you work for the Chosen Family Law Center. Listeners will know the Chosen Family Law Center because of Diana Adams who's been on the show a number of times. Tell us a little bit more about the Chosen Family Law Center, about the fundraiser that you have coming up, and where people can find more information about that and about your work as well.

Andy: I'm the Senior Legal Director at the Chosen Family Law Center which is a small nonprofit that does mostly education and direct services for people who live in family structures that aren't otherwise legible to institutions and to the state. That includes polyamorous people, but it's not just polyamorous people, but we do education for other professionals to help them work with these populations in a culturally proficient way. We do public education for members of our communities to make sure that they're getting everything they need out of the systems and that they're able to have their families be as protected as possible, and then we do direct legal services for members of our communities who can't afford private representation.

We have a nonprofit fundraiser coming up in April on April 30th because doing all of that stuff apparently takes money.

I'm mad about having to participate in capitalism too, but we haven't destroyed it yet so we still got to have our fundraisers. I'm not mad about an excuse to have a party and get dressed up. It's April 30th at seven o'clock and you can find more information about it on our website which is chosenfamilylawcenter.org.

Jase: Got it. On chosenfamilylawcenter.org is also where people can find those educational resources and-

Andy: That's right.

Jase: -legal counsel and stuff like that if they need it?

Andy: Yes. That's also how you can get our services.

Jase: Great.

Andy: You can also follow the organization on Twitter at @ChosenFamilyLawCenter or me on Twitter at @AndyEyeballs.

Jase: Great.