Conflict is a Good Thing

Restoration begins with the simplicity, elegance, and wholeness of a circle. One person speaks from the heart and everyone else listens – listens attentively. The wonderful gift of attention signals caring. A context of caring begins to transform people. Participants speak of what they felt, what they were looking for at the time they chose to act, and what they're ready to commit to doing.

Dominic Barter points out that the very term “conflict resolution” often functions to encourage us in wishing the conflict would just go away: “resolve it, get it over with, get it out of my consciousness.” Conflict is a good thing. It's true that sometimes conflicts get started by actions we wouldn't judge "good." Even so, the actions are always products of a system of relationships. Relationships inflict wounds, and they also are ultimately our only chance of healing. Having conflicts, engaging conflicts, is the way that we attend to building and maintaining relationships and community. Show me a community without conflict and I will show you a group of people so detached and disengaged as to not be worthy of the name community.

One of the points that Dominic Barter stresses about Restorative Circles is that the community must understand and approve – buy in to the process for how to have conflicts. That understanding needs to be in place. It doesn’t work so well if a conflict is already erupting and then someone says, “I’ve heard about this thing called Restorative Circles; let’s try it,” yet no one else knows what it is. In that case, the learning of the process, how to engage it, gets distorted by the emotions that are already swirling around the particular conflict.

If the whole community understands and has accepted Restorative Circles, then the reverse happens: the way people initially process the conflict in their own hearts and minds is shaped by knowing in advance how that conflict will be engaged.

The restorative justice movement has its roots in clearly illegal harms that one person may inflict on another – murder, battery, property damage. Yet we need restoration, too, in cases where, evidently, no law has been broken. We need restorative processes whenever there is conflict. So some schools, churches, workplaces are beginning to adopt restorative circle practice. A number of Unitarian Universalist Fellowships have used Dominic Barter's Restorative Circle process, and others have begun to explore that possibility.

If it’s going to work for any community, its members will need to know the details and be trained in a method for engaging conflicts before they arise – a method that encourages rather than suppresses conflict, and thereby allows for healing together. Absent such a method, the only choice is between nursing ones wounds silently to onself, or lashing out in a way that only wounds others in turn.

“Sacred One, teach us love, compassion, and honor. That we may heal the earth and heal each other” (Ojibway prayer).

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This is part 5 of 5 of "Restorative Justice"
Previous: Part 4: "Making Healing Part of Justice"
Beginning: Part 1: "Crime and Punishment"

Making Healing Part of Justice

In a Restorative Circle, in which authors, receivers, and community are brought together, the first stage is for everyone to speak what they want to say and receive confirmation that they have been heard. The second stage, then, is identifying good reasons why the horrible thing happened. What were “the underlying values that people were attempting to take care of when they said those painful words, when they did those painful things.” As Dominic Barter says,

“When we listen not just to words, but to meaning, when we start to connect on that level of meaning, we suddenly discover that actually we have the same fundamental values.”

The third stage is for each person to articulate what they are now prepared to do next.

Our current justice system pretends that it might change behavior by threat of repeated punishment. That pretense has been growing more and more obviously false. Restorative justice aims to change behavior through healing.

Our current justice system pretends that individual behavior is primarily determined by rational calculation to avoid even small probabilities of long-term punishment. That pretense entails ignoring a fundamental fact: the people most likely to cause harm are those who have been harmed themselves. The abused become abusers. Restorative justice makes room for greater complexity. It recognizes that all people are built to want safety, status, acceptance, security, self-respect, and that their environment powerfully shapes what strategies are available to them to get these things. Gang membership, for instance, is a strategy for safety, acceptance, and status, and when that is the best available strategy, then that strategy is going to be taken. Authors need to be in relations of accountability for their actions – we are responsible for what we do. Communities are also responsible for shaping the context that makes certain strategies appear – or be – the best bet.

Our current justice system makes crime and punishment the province of specialists. We delegate the responsibility to the police, to prosecutors, to judges and juries. We expect the system to make the danger disappear, make offenders disappear, keep them out of sight. While current system is far superior to a system of personal vendettas, the current system is also far inferior to a system providing peaceful ways to be involved and connected with a process of healing.

A retributive justice system amounts to the state executing revenge on our behalf. It’s still got vengeance – retribution – at the core. The best possible outcome in our current system is that we get even. Restorative justice offers the possibility that we get well.

The work of Roca was brought to my attention by my colleague, Rev. Rob Eller-Isaacs. He learned about it from Carolyn Boyes-Watson’s book, Peacemaking Circles & Urban Youth: Bringing Justice Home (Click here.) Roca is “a feisty community-based youth organization” that serves one of the “most broken and dangerous urban neighborhoods” in the United States. Roca’s mission is “to promote justice through creating opportunities for young people to become self-sufficient and live out of harm’s way.” The Roca staff began to employ a form of restorative justice called peacemaking circles. These circles echo the practices of social healing used by indigenous cultures since time before time. Restorative justice approaches such as Roca’s have begun to lower juvenile incarceration rates around the country.

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This is part 4 of 5 of "Restorative Justice"
Next: Part 5: "Conflict is a Good Thing"
Previous: Part 3: "Authors and Receivers"
Beginning: Part 1: "Crime and Punishment"

Authors and Receivers

Rather than send people away, restorative justice invites people in. There are a variety of ways to do that. One of them was devised by Dominic Barter in Brazil.

Dominic Barter, an Englishman from north London, went to Brazil in 1992. He found a land of beauty and a people with a tremendous joy in living. He also found an enormous disparity between those with access to wealth and those without it, and high levels of social tension and violence. Gradually he began to form connections with people and with various projects in the shantytowns. As he interacted and listened, people told him about the conflicts in which they were embroiled. These were communities in Rio de Janeiro that were pretty-much beyond any police control -- communities run by armed gangs. People in these communities were largely on their own to work out resolutions of their conflicts. Some of those ways worked fairly well, actually, and others didn’t. Of the various approaches that organically emerged, Barter’s work was in finding what worked, combining it with other things that worked, eventually seeing an overall system emerge, and then helping that spread.

What emerged for him, he calls Restorative Circles.

The approach assumes there are always three parties in a conflict. The first two are called "authors" and "receivers" -- rather than "offenders" and "victims." "Offender" and "victim" may sound like a permanent state of being, and one that allows a given person to be, at most, only one. Authors, on the other hand, are those who have done some action that needs to be talked about. Receivers are those who felt, willingly or otherwise, an effect of that action. The language “author” and “receiver” identifies participants as playing roles we all play at various times. In fact, in one given interaction we are likely to have done both some authoring and some receiving. "Author" and "receiver" are more free of the connotation that the action authored was inherently wrong or that the impact received was intrinsically harmful.

The third party is the wider community.

In one restorative circle there might be a number of authors, and a number of receivers, and some people who are both, and others who are neither. While some forms of restorative justice are particularly victim-sensitive – oriented toward an encounter with the offender that will yield some satisfaction for the victim – Dominic Barter’s approach is not skewed toward sensitivity to the victim. His Restorative Circles are contexts for dialog as equals.

Authors, receivers, and community representatives come together in a circle – sometimes a pretty big circle. There’s a facilitator who guides the conversation through three stages.

The first stage is to re-establish the ability to hear each other. Everyone in the circle has the chance to speak to any other member of the circle and tell them what they want them to know. After someone speaks, address their remarks to someone else in the circle, the facilitator asks the listener to say in his own words what he heard. If he doesn’t get it quite right, to the speaker’s satisfaction, the speaker clarifies, and the listener tries again.
And so on, as many times as necessary until the speaker is satisfied that she’s been heard.

Then the next speaker addresses someone. And so on, until everyone in the circle who wants to say something to anyone else in the circle has a chance to do so, and to receive back from that person a satisfactory confirmation that she has been understood. It may take a long time, but it’s crucial to re-establish the ability to hear each other.

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This is part 3 of 5 of "Restorative Justice"
Next: Part 4: "Making Healing Part of Justice"
Previous: Part 2: "Incarceration Nation"
Beginning: Part 1: "Crime and Punishment"

Incarceration Nation

From 1920 to 1980, the number of prisoners in the US increased slowly and steadily – as the country’s population was also increasing:

• 1920: 110,099 prisoners
• 1940: 272,995 prisoners
• 1960: 332,945 prisoners
• 1980: 474,368 prisoners

Beginning in 1980 and the election of Ronald Reagan, who launched a “war on drugs,” our incarceration rate took a steep turn upward. Suddenly, we were up to 1.15 million prisoners by 1990, and over 2 million by 2001. In 20 years, the US prison population more than quadrupled. What are we doing?

We’re certainly not healing the wound created by the crime. We’re not making things right – as the term “justice” implies. We are warehousing the ones we think are dangerous, walling them off in the interests of our safety – though, in fact, most of our prisoners are in for nonviolent offenses.

But the idea of restorative justice – restoring what was lost, healing what was injured – calls to our hearts. We want to find a way to come back together to walk the sacred way, for we have been divided by the prison walls that keep us apart. We are further divided by delegating responsibility for our collective well-being to authorities entirely outside ourselves. All we can do is call in the police, prosecuting attorneys, and they take it from there. They do…whatever it is that they do.

Of course vigilantism is always a bad idea, and measures to prevent it are good. At the same time, we as a people are damaged by being so completely divorced from the systems that provide us the only kind of justice available.

Of course there are people so damaged and so dangerous they have to be restrained.

Of course there are times when the armed force of police is necessary. That restraint and police force are sometimes needed does not mean they are always needed when a law has been broken, and we have become a people that rely on them much more than we have to.

New work and new experiments into the possibility of restorative justice are emerging.

“We know that we are the ones who are divided. And we are the ones who must come back together to walk the sacred way" (Ojibway prayer).

Paul Tillich, the 20th-century German-American existentialist theologian, said justice was “the work of love in community.” He said love was “the longing for the reunion of the separated.” As a people of justice and love, a people attuned to the work of love in community and a people longing for the reunion of the separated, our faith and our hearts call us toward the promise of restoration. Restorative justice is, as John Braithwaite defines:

“a process where all stakeholders affected by an injustice have an opportunity to discuss how they have been affected by the injustice and to decide what should be done to repair the harm. Restorative justice is about the idea that because crime hurts, justice should heal. Thus, conversations with those who have been hurt and with those who have afflicted the harm must be central to the process.”

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This is part 2 of 5 of "Restorative Justice"
Next: Part 3: "Authors and Receivers"
Beginning: Part 1: "Crime and Punishment"

Crime and Punishment

On the one hand we know that crime is an intractable part of our reality – it isn’t going away. So we watch it on police drama shows TV and movies and crime thriller novels. We learn to appreciate the cleverness of a double-cross. We see the humor in some of it, as ways to cope with this world where crime happens.

On the other hand, we also take steps to keep crime, criminals, and punishment as far out of sight and out of mind as we can. We hide prisons and prisoners away and prefer not to think about what’s going on in our prisons, and how many people we have in them.

At the same time, in the quiet of our hearts, there is a longing for a healing.

“Look at our brokenness. We know that in all creation, only the human family has strayed from the Sacred Way. We know that we are the ones who are divided. And we are the ones who must come back together to walk the sacred way. Sacred One, teach us love, compassion, and honor. That we may heal the earth and heal each other.” (from the Ojibway Indians of North American)

We stray from the sacred way of walking together in harmony.

It may be that other species also yearn – however inarticulately -- for a way to heal their divisions. One thing humans do, though, is develop institutional ways of handling those we deem trouble-makers. We probably aren’t the only species that punishes, but we do have the most elaborate institutions for doing it.

In the history of human punishment, we’ve tried all manner of ways to inflict pain or death or deprive of resources through fines and property penalties. Or we punish by separation: either banishment to push the offender out or imprisonment to hold the offender in. None of these has ever been very good at repairing the relationship damaged by the crime.

Indeed, in the history of crime and punishment, the human need to “come back together to walk the sacred way” – for restitution after injury – has slowly been pushed further into the background. Ancient law codes often provided measures for restitution for violent crimes, property crimes, or both. These included Code of Ur-Nammu in Sumer more than four thousand years ago; Babylon’s Code of Hammurabi, Israel’s Pentateuch, and the legal systems in ancient Rome, Old Ireland, fifth- and sixth-century Germany and England. The indigenous peoples of North America and Australia had systems that included restitution – restorative justice. Around the 11th- and 12th-centuries European law began to shift toward regarding offenses against the “king’s peace.” Crime’s primary legal status shifted to being an offense against the state rather than as an injury to a person. Thus retribution became the central principle rather than restitution. The formalization and development of legal systems moved us away from our natural intuitions about what justice is – away from the healing and restoration our hearts and spirits yearn for when a wrong has been felt.

The U.S., in particular, driven by a desire for justice and having no structures for restoration, we have gotten more and more extreme in imposing retribution. One in every 34 US residents are currently being penalized by our judicial system. One in every 200 are locked up. That’s 2.1 million people in prison in the US. That’s fully one-fourth of all the prisoners in the world. The US has four percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. This means that 1.7 million children in the US have a parent who is locked up. What are we doing?

As a deterrent, this is essentially nonfunctional. We know that it’s the certainty of being caught, not the severity of the punishment, that deters crime. If you don’t think you’ll be caught, it doesn’t matter how sever the punishment is. Nor do our prison systems rehabilitate, or deter future crime from those who are caught – as the recidivism rate shows. What are we doing?

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This is part 1 of 5 of "Restorative Justice"
Next: Part 2: "Incarceration Nation"