my favorite job

One of my favorite jobs (before I formally became a teacher) was to pilot a restorative justice program for youth. I wrote about my time in that role as it helped me to see a future without police, prisons, and jails more clearly.

My favorite job was seeing the future. 

From 2013 to 2016 I worked as a restorative justice practitioner piloting an out-of-system referral program for youth who would have otherwise faced incarceration. It was my job to lead young people through processes that centered speaking openly about harm, confronting harmful behavior(s), and making amends through actions called for by those who were impacted.

The project worked like this: a young person was arrested, their case went to the juvenile DA, there was a randomized process to determine whether the case went to our RJ program or to court. If it was sent to RJ we made contact with the young person and their family to gauge their interest in the program. If it aligned 1) they were in fact the person who caused the harm 2) they were willing to claim responsibility for the harm 3) they were willing to make amends with those impacted. Upon completion of the program no charges would be filed and the case would be closed out of court.

Here’s the larger context: The United States (and other countries, but really the US) has prisons and jails for kids. Kids can’t go to a dentist appointment on their own but they can be thrown into jail. Kids can’t go to certain movies without a parent but they can go to jail. This fact is known by people walking around in the world but the cognitive dissonance is very similar to that of people’s relationship to prisons and jails for adults: centered on the question ‘well what did they do?’ as if considering this justifies why anyone could be rightfully isolated from their family and community, and have their freedom and autonomy to be a human taken away. Prisons and jails for kids hide directly in our faces. In San Francisco the big building where kids are locked up is on a hill directly across the street from my old high school. Some kids get to go to school and some kids go to jail. The jail was modeled based on an adult jail downtown.

I approached this restorative justice work knowing that incarceration as a young person increases your chances of adult incarceration because of the grip and surveillance of carceral systems. I grew up with security guards in my schools. In middle school after speaking back to a white teacher, I was told to stand outside the door of my classroom. In high school, I was made to wait outside the closed door of my first period classroom until my white teacher felt like opening it, if I arrived late. Other white teachers said my name wrong on purpose and asked me to read extensive passages rather than calling on other students to read after me. In response to this, I acted in: negative self-talk. self-doubt and gaslighting. becoming mutable to fit in with my white peers. 

While I worked in the restorative justice program, I noticed that the young people being sent to participate after being arrested where youth who acted-out by replicating the harm that was caused to them onto other people. Many of the cases I received were considered felony level crimes by definition of the law. But in RJ we didn’t think about behaviors as ‘crime’. We discussed behaviors in terms of the harm they caused. The distinction is important because it is a divestment from punitive legal language that marks youth for the rest of their lives.  

While I had day-to-day tasks like writing case notes or meeting with youth and their families, I was committed to the larger work of placing agency to heal back into the hands of communities. Since the establishment of the courts, prosecutors, police, and judges have choked our collective ability to grow through conflict resolution and transformative justice by intervening and taking center stage. We see this happening in formalized ways like trials where documents say ‘insert young person’s name’ vs. the State of California. Although this is considered normal the perspective is hugely problematic. Like, if I don’t have what I need to survive and I stole something so that I could sell it to buy necessities, what does that have to do with the state? Isn’t this between me and whatever establishment or person I took from? But the state sees it as “you broke MY law so you will PAY me by sitting in my jail. You will pay me with your life. You will pay me with time that you will never get back. I will punish you by making you work for pennies on the dollar, taking you away from your family and your community. Etc.”

In cases of harm, this framing (of young person’s name vs. the state) also takes agency away from folks who have endured harm. The state rushes in to punish youth as a means to get their funding for filled beds that there is no room for folks who were impacted to say, “Actually, jail time for this young person has nothing to do with me and it’s not what I want. I just need to know why they did it. I want them to promise they won’t do it again. And I want my stuff back.” 

RJ conferences were a place where we came up with solutions that were called for by the impacted parties which included those directly harmed or impacted, community members, family members, and the young people themselves. 

Many of the cases we dealt with included physical harm. 

Some youth were forthcoming about physically harming the other person. Other youth needed time or were afraid and reluctant to admit that they have done something that impacted someone else. Afraid that admitting to the behavior would lead to punishment and/or that they were being tricked. It made me ask--when and where can young people own up to their mistakes and not be thrown away? Not be tricked or punished for telling the truth? Where can young people be seen as whole humans who make mistakes and make amends?

Restorative justice does this to a degree. But transformative justice is one of the only spaces I know that creates that container. 

There were many hard parts to that job. The hardest part was seeing young people willing to be transformed but NOBODY and NOTHING ELSE IN SOCIETY being willing to mirror that change to create better options and conditions for these youth. Another hard part was when youth were willing to be transformed in their understanding and embodiment of empathy, honesty, and responsibility/accountability but THEIR PARENTS were not able to embody that for them and in turn sabotaged the process by insisting on punishment of the youth because that’s what they were most familiar with. 

The onus of change and transformation without change in conditions, access, or autonomy for young people is gaslighting. It’s a violence. Young people see the ways the world works. They see that responsibility is for some and not for others. To act as if this is not the case is another form of harm. It is difficult to hold these realities in the same hand: You caused harm and you must make it right to be in right-relationship with community and yourself. WITH The world has caused harm to you and nobody has been held accountable for that. 

I held those things in the balance by telling the truth. By not pretending that a young person’s behavior exists in a vacuum. I held these things by validating the fear of being thrown away and committing to do my best to support their freedom. I held these things by committing to the future I want to create, which might look small in the context of this large, unjust raggedy world. I held these things by knowing that freedom as a young person is central and important and they deserve better options.

Each of us is stunted when the law intervenes. Each of us has the potential for a bigger imagination, a bigger chance at feeling justice. A better chance at healing when we hold these things together. 

It can be messy. It can be ugly. It can be awkward. It can be uncomfortable. It can be scary. Because for many of us it is new. For many of us, telling the truth about something we are ashamed of makes us feel like death. But when we try to build the container for that unknowing and discomfort, we also invite the deep knowing and the potential for freedom from shame and fear on the other side. I want this for all of us.