Hey everybody, welcome to another exciting episode, another edition of A We Can Geek Them here on YouTube. Gio here and today we're talking this one summer from Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki. Let's do this. Welcome back to the channel everybody and yeah I finally got around to making a video about this one summer. I've had this book since 2018. I read it when I got it back then and sort of forgot about it and I was looking at it the other day and decided you know what, I need to give it another read because it's summer and I could use a quaint slice of life to you know sort of just enjoy the lazy days of July if you will. So what exactly is this one summer? Well it is a vignette of course and it is this coming-of-age story of two teenage friends Rose and Wendy during a summer in the small beach town of Awago and I hope I said that right and she is going to this cottage that her family rents every summer and she meets up with her friend Wendy. Now once they get there we start learning more about the characters through the interactions between the two girls. They see each other once every year during summer so in the catching up and all that stuff we get their conversations about life, about their family, friends, relationships, them growing up, sexuality, things that people reading this book can relate to and that's easily one of the strongest points of this first second book is that the conversations that these characters are having is pretty realistic and is pretty endearing because although I don't necessarily went through things talked about in this book for example but still you can place yourself in a similar situation you can envision yourself as a kid growing up with friends and the stories and the adventures and the just the friendship that would be formed and of course spending time in summer not having a care in the world basically and growing up and discovering about adult issues about life stuff like that so the two characters are sort of exploring the town and becoming acquainted with each other after so long and different plot threads start to form at the start of the book we soon realized that roses family or parents aren't necessarily kidding along and throughout the book you're starting to ask yourself what exactly is going on they start dropping you hints here and there I'm not necessarily going to spoil what is happening with them in this book but it is a very real raw powerful issue and problem that they're having and it it's presented through the eyes of our narrator which is Rose and her inexperience in trying to figure out why her parents are behaving this way why the conflict and she's frustrated because she doesn't she can't do anything about it but she wants things to be normal or have a sense of normalcy I guess meanwhile we have the character of windy who is a lot more carefree and funny and comedic but you also discover that there is a maturity to her when it comes to certain topics as the two of them start exploring the town they meet up at this convenience store if you will and another dramatic element of the story forms with the teenagers or the young adults working in that store with their relationship issues and how they view things obviously they're going to be more brazen and more outgoing and fluid with the language and what they're saying and doing and it can come off sort of gross to younger crowds but it definitely shapes and evolves our main characters into them realizing people are layered and people are different and they go through different things that help shape and grow into adults and I think it's a life lesson not only for them but for maybe younger audiences reading the book for them to realize how different we all are and trying to find in the midst of growing up and being a kid and a young adult trying to find your own voice and trying to find out who you are through those experiences for good or bad they will definitely define you later on as an adult so even though the like I mentioned earlier the plot isn't necessarily something that a hundred percent of the people out there will relate to you can still find parallels of what is happening to your own life or to people you know or grew up with with stories about friends and family members the art in the book is easily one of my favorite things about it the way Gillian is able to take sort of blue pen artwork and mix it kind of like black and white but with purple hues it just really brings a level of realism to the story where I think if it were just black and white it would lose some of the magic to it yes sometimes black and white stories can drive the the story along to a very dramatic tense point but by having subtle influxes of color you're able to create sort of this sense of warmth and nostalgia where it evokes more feeling for the readers and I really appreciated that it really encapsulated a small beach town I think and would and what you perceive as a beach town with you can just imagine being there and smelling the the the ocean and the sea breeze hitting you and all the sights and sounds of something like that and you know the vegetation and the stores and how rural it it all looks and I think it they did a fantastic job with this book I absolutely loved it I really do praise the art and how beautiful it looks for being minimal in tone the characters are expressive and even though sometimes they might look a little bit cartoonish they still retain their humanity and you feel what they're feeling that they're very expressive making this book feel like it was part of something that you went through or grew up with and that's very hard to do especially with the limited color palette and the nature of the story being a slice of life can sort of limit you with what you can do you sort of rely on the characters not necessarily the narrative structure because this one summer this literally means this small window where the characters come in and experience something dramatic and grow from there so when they leave they either come out a different person or through the process of change so you in that regards yes you have a lot of freedom because you're telling stories about real people but it can be a little bit hard to do because of the open nature of it there really isn't an ending per se to the story it leaves off pretty open-ended we do realize some pretty major things and you have characters that are likable and realistic and they go through a necessary change into the fall season and we just hope the best from there we can only hope that people continue to evolve and grow better and always remember what they went through in that one summer if that makes any sense but yeah overall just a beautiful slice of life slash coming of age story about maturity again i have to praise the art and the dialogue mariko tamaki did a fantastic job of writing these characters and the way that the girls are talking and even the teenagers and the adults it's very raw candid and real i could i definitely could see uh kids of that age speaking the way that they're doing in that book it is a very natural thing i i think i read somewhere that there was a little bit of controversy with the book back when it released i think it was 2014 or something like that but that's silly i think it does capture the essence of the summer season and growing up and the problems that we go through in life and it is a worthy experience to have and i do wholeheartedly recommend it i typically don't review a lot of books like this on the channel but if you guys want me to go after something similar let me know in the comment section down below because i love the slice of life and coming of age genre i love doing that and watching shows that are about that stuff so if you have any more recommendations or if you want me to cover a specific book let me know in the comment section down below have you read this one summer let me know as well what you thought of the book guys thank you so very much again thank you for liking commenting subscribing and being a part of a weekend gigtam it really does mean a whole lot there's a merch link down below if you want to check it out follow me on social media facebook twitter instagram all that fun stuff thank you so very much once again i will catch all of you on our next episode


Well, the vibe today is very exciting because we have a lot of pedestrian activity, which of course is one of the focuses and visions of the Urban Village plan. There's places for people to go. There's restaurants. There's shopping. There's where we are here in front of the post is a music venue. So just lots of things to bring people down here rather than just office space. The Race Street historically was sort of the commercial hub of the Riverside area, sort of the downtown of Riverside, if you will, where a lot of the services and businesses were located. But over time, of course, that changed. A wake up call for the neighborhood was probably the imminent planned demolition of the McAdams building, which was going on around 2004-2005. When that building was able to be saved and preserved and rehabilitated, it just created a lot of energy and excitement about what the future of Race Street could be. And of course, at that time, development interest started occurring. And so there were people interested in doing things over here.  You welcome outside investment and new ideas and new thoughts and plans, of course. But at the same time, there can be a little bit of a fear factor of what may happen. I think what there was a fear of would be that it could be possibly too much nightlife. That was sort of an initial fear. That did not come to pass. A second thing was, which is still a concern now, was the influx of apartment units. How many could the street, the urban village, the community support? Riverside Baptist Church was a very large congregation, an old congregation in the Riverside area. They have a very large campus with some very large and what I would consider monumental buildings. There was a threat that those buildings would be demolished to build new apartments. So residents, first of all, were concerned about additional apartments. Secondly, just the loss of those buildings and how it would affect the streetscape and sort of everything about this area, because they've been anchors for the six-point intersection for so long. So it really brought the community together. We had someone come in who was willing to save the buildings and convert them, the buildings themselves, to apartments. But it was going to be an affordable housing project, and that created concern with a lot of the community members. But there was a lot of public input, education done by the developer of that project, and at the end of the day, everyone was anxious to see those buildings preserved. They recently were listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The developer sought state and federal preservation tax credits to help with the financing for the project, and they've done a great job working with our preservation office to make sure that the rehabilitation is appropriate. We wouldn't be able to support a preservation program in Fort Worth or have historic districts without neighborhoods or neighborhood organizations. It's a completely grassroots-led effort. We work with them very closely to ensure that what's important to them is retained and protected for the future. So it's sort of been a success story for the community, and now we're going to get to keep these just beautiful and, again, I'll say monumental structures. And you won't even really be able to tell that they're apartments, but we won't have this gaping hole that would have been there if they would have been demolished. Race Street is an urban village, but it's also in a neighborhood empowerment zone, so people can take advantage of both programs at the same time. The NES program will waive a lot of your development fees, so that's a really big savings for developers or individuals, because the program is for single-family, multi-family, commercial, industrial, and mixed use. This building actually took advantage of the facade improvement program. The concept behind the facade is that's the first thing that everyone sees when they drive down the street. So that's what you notice, and that's what will bring you to an area. The facade improvement program will reimburse developers $1 for every $3 that they spend on improvements to the facade, and we reimburse up to $30,000. So your doors, windows, permanent awnings, painting, replacing brick, wood, everything on the facade of the building. The neighborhood associations, and particularly the Riverside Alliance, which is a coalition of our seven neighborhood associations, we monitor what's going on with the city planning department very carefully, including the comprehensive plan, because updates are made to that every year, which can sometimes change the trajectory of where developers are looking. We just try to stay abreast of what may be coming and what's out there and keep our sort of our ears to the ground, if you will. I would say work as closely with your elected officials as possible, because they often know of a project or development interest long before anything is happening, and long before the public may know. They may not always be at liberty to share that with you, but you just have to stay ahead of what's happening, because once a developer goes in for maybe a zoning change or building permits or something like that, the plans are in motion, and it's often too late to change anything. And it may not be something that you're comfortable with, and you may not have had input into that plan. I think the developers would do themselves a big favor, if they would reach out to those groups that are in the area when they arrive on the scene, to get the lay of the land, to start building some relationships there, because the developers may just not have an awareness, and you can't hold that against them. They may not know the character, the thoughts, and what people are thinking in the area. So I really think communication both ways is vital and is a two-way street, and it can head off a lot of miscommunication and disagreements about some things. Neighborhood Empowerment Zone Program is for all kinds of development. One of the biggest is single family development and redevelopment of existing homes. So it encourages people to make improvements to their own home, and they get a break for doing it. It is the only program that will let a homeowner get a tax abatement. There's the local historic site tax exemption, which will basically freeze your property value at pre-renovation levels for 10 years. There's state and federal tax credits, which can help offset about 45 percent of rehabilitation costs on historic structures. It's been a great benefit to our neighborhoods over the years. It's provided a lot of positive change, and we've seen great success with preservation and Fort Worth. The decision-makers, not only the staff, the professional planners, but your elected officials also need to know that there is interest, that there's citizen engagement, and that we want our voices and opinions taken into account. I would just say that patience is important. The development here on Ray Street has taken a long time to come to fruition, and I think it's really gaining momentum now. There have been some setbacks, but I think that's the main thing, patience, because it's not going to happen overnight or even in a year. We want to protect our historic resources, as well as attract new development and new construction, and we don't think they're mutually exclusive.


In this video, I'll show you how to define some basic project settings in Easytitles. When you start a new file, the Project Settings window shows up. You can also find it later when you go to File, Project Settings, or simply click this icon on the toolbar. As a subtitler, you probably work for different clients, who have different style guides and requirements on subtitle settings. Easytitles allows you to define a different template for each client, so that you don't need to change the settings each time you run the software. You can even create groups of templates, if you wish. So let's create a new template now with new settings. So I click on New and give it a name. Let's say it's for our SDH course, so I'll call it SDH. And I can include it in my AVT Masterclass group. Let's go over the basic parameters that you can see in the tabs on top here. First thing you choose is a type of project, the type of subtitles you will create, or closed captions, that is the option for the US market. Choose the right video format and the frame rate here. The program will automatically recognize the video format and the frame rate and it will prompt you if there are any inconsistencies in the project settings. Let's have a look at the next tab, Save Area. Here you can choose the maximum number of characters per line. In my case, it's 40 characters. In the subtitles tab, you can choose the default alignment. If you want your subtitles to appear in the center, this is where you need to click. Another important setting is the reading speed, which you can conveniently choose in either characters per second or words per minute. Just make sure you tick the option, Count Spaces and Count Punctuation. Finally, in the last tab, Cues, you define the minimum interval, that is how many frames you want to have as a gap between consecutive subtitles. In my case, it's two frames. You can also define your threshold for chaining here. In Durations, you set the minimum and maximum duration of a subtitle. In my case, it's one second and six seconds, respectively. You also define how many frames before a shot change a subtitle should end and how many frames after a shot change a new subtitle can begin. And again, I have two frames in both settings. If you tick the box, Snap to Shot Changes on Set Queue, the program will automatically snap the in and out queues of your subtitles when you are spotting. And that's it! We have just defined the most important project settings, which you will typically find in your client's style guide. Now make sure you save these settings if you want to keep them for the future.


Hello lads, I'm yet again checking in from epic autumn forest of wisdom and you might think that the title of the video is a bit black-pilling, it's a bit negative, but as you might notice on my demeanor I'm in a good mood because things are going well after all and that's the point of my video here as well so so even though the tyrants at YouTube have cut my YouTube journey short I am still in a good mood now what I'm talking about is of course that I've been demonetized and shadow banned for one and a half years the demonetization and Almost two years being shadow banned And of course if I'm talking about my dream then that is to continue to grow YouTube etc to reach every new heights and For any other youtuber watching this you know how extremely Awesome it is to just keep growing your YouTube channel seeing the amount of subscribers Increasing seeing the amount of views, you know, you like making videos I still like making videos by the way, but the charm with YouTube is also that you can see the growth of it and if someone cuts that short it's not quite the same and Of course, I'm hardly the only one who's been shadow banned even PewDiePie was shadow banned For a little while there So that's my dream then that got cut short Of course, you can still see this so I'm still on YouTube obviously, but it's not quite the same and if we're talking about shadow banning It's not black and white. It's a lot of different algorithms that they can tweak to make you either grow or To not make you grow So to take an example the recommended list you get on the side of our video. That's huge It's hugely important to to be on there, but I'm not gonna lament this I will instead use this as an opportunity to talk a bit about how I have dealt with it So while back I said to myself, you know what unless I back down on what I have said Politically, which I won't because I have no regrets. I've said absolutely nothing wrong I've said absolutely nothing hateful or harmful.  I have no regrets for Standing on the side of Europe's native population. I still do and I will continue to do so no matter what happens because it is the right thing to do no matter if YouTube wants to Shadow ban me or not or demonetize me. It's it doesn't change anything I'm crossing a bridge here. So that's why my I'm balancing here Now there we are So anyway, that is my perspective. So if you wonder, oh what sort of dream of Mine has been broken. Well, it's not really broken since I'm still here But if I hadn't been shadow banned, I probably would have reached more subscribers, but a while ago I decided You know what if I put in a lot of work here, it won't really lead to much more because of this These circumstances so instead I switched focus and started working more started spending more time with another passion of mine Which is the clothing company. I've always had an interesting clothing and more specifically in style and aesthetics And that also as I said in my telegram channel a while back It feels more real. It feels more real to have a Company that actually has production in Europe Creating high-quality clothing. Now, of course, it's small company still, but it's at least something that It feels more real than just being on YouTube. Now, of course working metapolitical on YouTube It is important. It's an important message to spread, but it's also Not quite the same as having a company and as I also Mentioned on the telegram channel, you know, people don't like a Politician or an aspiring politician who has never run a business or who has never worked on a Normal job. So for me if I want to enact regime change, which is of course the grand goal of all to Get rid of the corrupt Swedish regime Yes, then it's much better for me to actually have a good track record of a well-run business Than it is to just have been on YouTube. So in the grand scheme of things being Having my YouTube journey cut short actually been a blessing in disguise Because it made me realize, okay, I need to focus on other things Then just be making videos. Now, of course, I will continue making videos for as long as possible But it was a good call of me. So now I actually spend much more time building the clothing and the supplements and also Writing books. So I've promoted Dauntless quite a bit since I released it last year and now as I said in a recent video it's been released in German as well and If I get Dauntless out Sell as many copies as possible in physical copies, then it doesn't matter if I'm shadow banned on YouTube So that's another goal instead of reaching two hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube. Yeah, if I can get 50,000 Dauntless copies out in out in the world. Yeah, that's a much greater victory. And it's something that it is not as Dependent upon the goodwill of the individuals at YouTube Although I have a little shout out to certain people on YouTube. I really really appreciated you sending me the Silver play button it was It was a decent thing to do and I I respect and And like you for it. So thank you again But then if someone on YouTube actually sees this I would much appreciate exactly if you could say exactly when and where I've said something hateful Hateful or harmful because as far as I remember I haven't said it even once I've only ever had a good and respectful tone to watch everyone So anyway, that is my Individual perspective on on how to deal with broken dreams and again, I will still be on YouTube I still like making videos sometimes in love making videos, especially the training videos just making cool shots Going over the top Ultimate testosterone and glory sometimes, but it's it's good. It's good fun. It's stuff I like myself to watch in videos So yeah, no worries on that account but for you the takeaway point is that There might come a time when you Have to say to yourself Should I continue along this path I've taken or is it time for me to Switch focus on something that will be better in the long run. Of course, I've said this before I'll say it again. You should never give up on anything But you should also be realistic about your goals. Can you achieve a certain goal? If you can't yeah, then it might be a good idea to re-evaluate the situation and say, you know what? This was completely unrealistic. I will not go through with it but if you have a realistic goal such as completing a military service or reaching a Strength goal in the gym or finishing an education. Yeah, of course, then never give up but if you are in a situation where you have in a moment of of hubris you have said to yourself I will achieve all of these things and Realistically speaking you maybe have good friends who will tell you this that you aren't up to par for whatever reason Maybe you need more time or maybe you don't have the correct Personality traits to do something Yeah, then it might be a good idea to be humble be realistic and say this wasn't a good idea. Let me Focus on something else. So you don't waste a lot of time Doing something that won't lead to anywhere. Now second point is If you have a broken dream and it's already broken and you understand that okay, this won't lead This won't lead anywhere This dream has been Yeah, it's not going anywhere. Then you have two choices either you lament the fact and say like oh If I hadn't been shadowbound on YouTube, I would have been so great and everything in my life would be perfect And if only those individuals hadn't been mean to me Then things would be great And you continue to lament it and you don't want to do anything else because you're still preoccupied in your mind With only thinking about that one goal you had that one dream That's a bad option. The good stoic the glorious pill option is of course to say, okay. Yeah, that's that's hurtful It's not nice when a dream Breaks, but I will not let it completely Break me instead. I will focus on something else and instead of wasting time and energy getting into a negative spiral negative emotion and energy You say to yourself, okay, cool. Let me Focus on something else. Let me not waste a single day being bitter or angry. It is what it is focus on something else And of course if you see where things are headed Maybe you For whatever reason you understand that your initial dream it won't take you To where you want to go. Yeah, it's no shame in understanding that Refocusing your energies and as soon as you do it The further along the way along the path of the new endeavor you will go So this can be applied into anything really so the main point is don't dwell upon these Things too much. If there's nothing you can do about it for me Sure, I can do something about it But that would break my gravitas my respect for myself the greater dream, which is of course regime change So I can't say oh, you know, I regretted myself because that would be to betray myself and to betray my greater dream so Sometimes so sometimes you have no You can't do anything about it at all then yeah, don't worry about it Sometimes you have an option, but that option would mean that you you know compromise something else Yeah, same thing there then you can't really do anything about it anyway, so don't worry about it. Don't waste time So anyway, it might seem like obvious Knowledge perhaps not the deepest philosophical video ever made but I thought to mention it at least and Again, you know, yeah, I might not grow so much On YouTube now, but again in half a year they might remove all Shadowban things and just I will have access to a great kitchen The one I have now it's not really good. It's not really suited for filming, but maybe it happens Maybe I get gain access to a nice kitchen. I start making gains kitchen videos Two times a week and just explode on YouTube. Who knows? It's not something I count upon and if it doesn't happen. I'm not gonna be bitter.   I'm not sad now as you can see I'm I'm quite happy with with everything. I'm I'm having a lot of good things going for me But if it happens, I will be ready. I have the loyal subscriber base I have all the camera equipment, etc. So if it's an opening presents itself, yeah I'm going full steam ahead if it doesn't happen. Yeah, I'm going full steam ahead with other things such as continuing to develop aesthetic clothing coffee next project Gourmet coffee even it will be absolutely Glorious if anything So anyway, I have rambled on enough Main point approach it in a stoic manner and don't let it get you down So anyway, check out all the links in the description box below and if you haven't read Dauntless you have to do it Thank you for watching XOXO


Good afternoon. Thank you for being here. It's a nice large group. We feel certain that this will be a time Well worth spent here, and we hope you leave inspired those of us who have been Hearing Danielle all day long It's gonna be hard to get even more inspired, but I bet we will be I'm Ruth Schantz. I'm the current convener of Friends of Restorative Justice of Washtenaw County which is one of the Organizers of this day-long event We're a group of citizens local citizens who are deeply persuaded by the research on the efficacy of restorative justice practices and These are practices used in various legal systems in places across this country, but also internationally Friends of restorative justice of Washtenaw County was born in 2012 out of the experiences of Janet and Stan Reedy after their house was broken into by a local teenager and Although the Reedy's felt that they were well Taken care of by our local court system They left with a profound sense that something was missing from this whole Experience and specifically They wanted to have the opportunity to talk with the young man and also to work with him on restitution work together So they and others of us from their church who are aware of the restorative practice of victim offender Conferencing began conversations with our local juvenile justice Office as well as the dispute resolution center, which I'm sure many of you are aware of Following Fred van Luz first visit to Ann Arbor a number of other community members joined us and we formed friends of restorative justice and Since then we have been joined by the healing communities, which is a local group working on prisoner reentry issues Today we are associated with the dispute resolution center and many as of us have been trained to be volunteer mediators and circle keepers our mission is to pursue a balanced and restorative approach to crime and to violence one that promotes justice reparation Resolution to victims and to the community So we welcome you to join us in our monthly meetings and The brochure that you may have seen coming in on restorative justice. I think has our website on it. So we're very Happy to always welcome new members. Hi everyone. Thank you so much for coming. My name is Mary Lynn Stevens. I'm 17 years worth of Work at the U of M and retired from there from here a year ago wonderful awesome years But today I'm here to represent CAPS the other group that was one of the the major leaders in getting Danielle here today and making this quite a spectacular moment for all of you as well I hope so we're thank you for coming There is an enormous list when when the when the biggest text block in a program is all the sponsors It's a great problem to have so we're not going to read them all and but we will be referring to them Please do take a time and and get a sense of that It's a wonderful mix of sort of town and gown if you will as well real non-profit organizations and the University and some others so But anyway CAPS very briefly if you don't know what some of you do We are a non-partisan non-profit policy and advocacy shop unfortunately located in Lansing but not East Lansing and CAPS actually stands for the Citizens Alliance on prisons and public spending It's a it's a mouthful now. You know why we go by the acronym CAPS But it is our work is very straightforward and it's important I want you just very briefly to know about it in the arena of criminal justice reform in Michigan all about state law and State practice we conduct extensive research We then use that research to come up with policy recommendations. What's really strong and solid and not to happen We then do advocacy to Advance those policies and if you want to know more there is some literature in the back And I'll be around as will our director Laura Sager at the at the Reception afterwards so you can do that so we do those three things and we also do lots of education and outreach Statewide so that everybody can learn about all this and that's what brought us here today And we do all this work really in pursuit of really only two Policy goals they connect explicitly to Danielle and they really are our mission. They're what we're about We're about two things one is ending Michigan's overuse of incarceration and Promoting community safety and healing That's it and with that dual Mission in mind more commitment to safety and Less reliance on incarceration who could be better than Danielle to be here somebody who's whose work sort of Screams and validates and celebrates the fact that those two things belong in the same breath So really really so glad to have her here already this morning She headlined a forum in Lansing so that state officials could learn about all of this and really Engage with the idea and I'm very happy. It's our turn now. So really Thanks to all of you for coming. It's really sort of on behalf of all the sponsors that again that big list that I hope you Look at I want to welcome you. Thank you for coming. Thank you. I know a lot of you do this work I'm gonna thank you for that and I'm gonna turn this over to Carolyn who's gonna actually introduce it and we're gonna get to Danielle My name is Carolyn Madden. I'm also from Friends of Restorative Justice of Washington County It's wonderful to be here and as you've heard We are among the many community organizations and University Departments that have brought brought Danielle here to Ann Arbor But before we hear her speak I want to make just a few announcements and make sure that you understand the process We will have Danielle will speak and then we will have time for questions and you should have cards on your table And so please write some questions that you have and we will have people come around sort of after the talk It's halfway through collect the questions and then we have two wonderful representatives from the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy Who will be asking questions of Danielle? We also have a reception in the lobby which maybe some of you have partaken already But please feel free to have more as you leave and stay around in the Lobby out there for discussion and in case you want a bit more of a formal discussion about next steps Please come back in and we have a few people who are willing to sort of run a little bit of a discussion about next steps to take In Washington County Also, we have sign-up sheets as Ruth said if you're interested in working with restorative justice please sign the sheet and We will be in touch with you So, okay Again, thanks to all who made this possible. I just want to mention our other organizing Sponsors where these besides the two of us American Friends Service Committee Michigan Criminal Justice Program University of Michigan Gerald Ford School How could we not thank them for this wonderful venue and Michigan Council on Crime and Delinquency who besides all the wonderful work they did have supplied the food for us outside So we're very grateful to them and all of the sponsors truly it's been a community effort to get this to happen. I Also wanted to give a slight mention to Judy Levy. I don't know if she's here yet She is a the United States District Court judge from the Eastern District of Michigan And she's a faculty member of the University of Michigan Law School She inspired us to bring Daniel Sered here to speak on behalf of restorative justice and Second I wanted to thank Kate McCracken who's there taking pictures. She's the communications director of CAPS and Who not only coordinated all of us and making all of these events run smoothly But did it with thoughtfulness and respect every step of the way and then third I want to thank Ivy whereas Ivy Ivy is back there. She's a graduate student in public policy at Gerald Ford and Applied economics in the economics department. She has waived her magic Organizing wand to get this venue and the Ford school support for this vent. So we're very grateful to everyone Okay, now to our speaker speaker Daniel Sered has spent much of her life By her own words as a student of violence She's worked within the justice system as an innovative seeking alternatives to incarceration and to end violence and mass incarceration incarceration She worked with youth in adolescent reentry initiative for returning young men on Rikers Island and with the Center for Court Innovations Harlem Community Justice Center a little mouthful there She was a Rhodes Scholar And in 2012 she received an award for innovation in victim services from Attorney General Holder remember him and The federal office for victims of crime Most recently she was interviewed by the Atlantic a wonderful interview You could see it online and has published an article by the same title as her talk today She currently teaches restorative justice at City University of New York and is the executive director of common justice It's an organization dedicated to helping victims of violent crime Rehabilitating violent felons and developing alternatives to incarceration Wow So with further ado, please join me and applaud for Daniel Sered Thank you all so much for having me here and welcoming me in the space and thanks to all that many Long list of people who made it possible today I Wanted to talk with you about violence and so I would like to talk about Why we have to take on the question of violence and how I think we should do that I Will start in the middle which is to say that we cannot end mass incarceration Unless we take on the question of violence And there are two main reasons for that the first is the the deeper of the two which is that our Tolerance for incarceration in this country is built on a story about violence It's a story about who commits it about who survives it about what each of them are and what they want It's a story as old as our country and as wrong as the worst parts of our history It's a story about an imagined monstrous other Someone who is somehow fundamentally different from us and the people we know and love Someone from whom we have to be protected from whom we cannot protect ourselves and Who's in humanity makes just about any action? Justifiable and reasonable to keep us protected from that harm That story in this country is also a story of structural racism It's the story we've told about people of color and have told in a particular way about black men in America It's the story that makes it seem reasonable to build a prison instead of a school To build jail beds instead of hospital beds To invest in corrections officers instead of teachers or counselors or roads or any of the other things You wish were a little better in your day-to-day lives And it's a story that we on the side of people who typically advocate for criminal justice reform almost invariably avoid We our opponents say they're all monsters We say well Statistically speaking about 40% of them aren't monsters and another 15% with evidence-based practices could become 10% less monstrous with the right unit like we So we fight an ancient narrative with technocratic nonsense That reveals our unwillingness to say like no actually every single one of them is Human and some of them are humans who have done things That are horrific that none of us have any right to do but they're fully human and we know them and they are ours And so until we take on that story We will continue to build prisons and we'll continue to do it instead of everything else We could do with those resources Because that story is at the centerpiece of mass incarceration No matter what number of people are incarcerated for other kinds of offenses and we have to understand the fight to end mass incarceration at its centerpiece as a fight against that story The second reason we have to take on the question of violence is a little more basic And it's just that we won't reduce incarceration by more than half without doing so Because more than half of people locked up are in for kinds of violence now Like I wouldn't stand a chance in a semester of an applied economics PhD course, but I know that to be true So 53% of people in state prisons are incarcerated for violence We are not getting to a transformative reduction in the system unless we take on those crimes And I said this this morning too, but even when I say 50% and some people are like wow, that's really ambitious Let's be clear the day. I was born there were 443,850 people locked up in the United States I'll ask you not to calculate my age if you're really good at the sort of criminal justice math history 443,850 there more than 2.3 million today Which means even when I say 50% that means conceding a three-fold increase in just my lifetime So a world where we incarcerate only 20% of the people who are currently locked up is not some wild Imagine strange future it's a place many of us were born into and Lived through and lived through often in a greater degree of safety and well-being than we may feel now and so it's important that we Not accept the stories that talk about us as though we are some pie in the sky Fools when we talk about making possible something that has been possible and is possible Everywhere else in this world and all other times in human history Right nowhere else in human history ever has incarcerated such a large portion of his people compared to what we do in this country And so when we say that we can be different what we are saying is that we can be like everyone else everywhere ever That's not a radical notion But the other thing is that we not only can we not end mass incarceration if we don't end violence but we can't end violence if we don't end mass incarceration and We'll talk about this in a little more detail a little later when I talk some about safety But we have to understand mass incarceration Not just as something that fails to deliver on the promise of safety which it does every day over and over But as something that makes us less safe So when we know that inequity drives violence and that incarceration drives inequity it means incarceration puts us in danger When we know that ripping funds from the social service infrastructure makes violence more likely and healing less available It means incarceration drives violence When prisons are demonstrated to be criminogenic meaning people who go can be more likely to commit crimes than people who didn't get caught Incarceration drives violence and so even if we don't care about Incarceration if we care about ending violence we have to lose it We have to stop and we won't be safe until we do a Common justice we believe there are four main principles that should guide our approaches to violence The first of those is that approaches to violence should be survivor centered Seems straightforward that the people whose lives are changed by what has been done Should be at the center of our conversations and questions about what should be done about that pain That their feelings should matter their insights should matter their needs should matter their desires should matter That doesn't mean we're solely driven by them. We live in community with each other We've got a government. We have all sorts of other constraints on what happens But it means we shouldn't get to summarily disregard what they want in the decisions about their cases and about policy generally We live in a country that pretends to regard that highly we enact laws and victims names We do that quite literally we have Marcy's law and Sarah's law and a lot of other white women's names laws and We say that we're doing it on behalf of victims We do that without asking most victims what they want when we do ask We often disregard what they tell us they want because it runs contrary to what we expected to hear or what is useful to the policy We are trying to advance We set a policy goal and then find victims who like it Instead of talking to the full range of survivors and letting their experience guide us in what policy goals We select and identify and we lie about who victims are about what they want About what heals them and what brings them peace and perhaps worst of all we lie to victims about that So we have a national picture of crime victims that they look like me I am a survivor of serious violence. So to some degree that's right But a young man of color is ten and a half times more likely than me to be robbed or assaulted and is virtually Nowhere in our national story about who is hurt That's because in part telling that story would make that original story a little confusing Right, it would be complicated if the imagined monstrous other and the person at greatest risk of victimization were the same person And it would maybe implicate us in that perceived Monstracity because it would ask us where were we when he was hurt So we don't like for those stories They don't coexist comfortably and it's part of why telling that second story is so important about being honest about who is hurt But then the next thing we have to do is be honest about what people want when they're hurt and across ages across Demographics across race people who are hurt tend to want a few things. They want answers They want to know why you chose them. Was it a real gun? Were you going to shoot?  They want in it. They want Closure right so they want a story they can live with in the world of trauma healing We talk about it as a coherent narrative, but it's a story about what happened that describes a world you can choose to continue to live in They want some sense of control relative to the event the fundamental trauma basically distills down into powerlessness Right the basic element of trauma is powerlessness, which means its opposite is power And so victims want some power They want to have a say and what will happen about what happened to them and Most of all at the end of the day They want to know that they and others will not go through that again that that person won't hurt them again That others won't hurt them in the same way and that that person won't hurt others in the way that they were hurt Most of that for victims doesn't mean incarceration So what we know at common justice I The centerpiece of our work is an alternative incarceration for serious and violent felonies Where if and only if the victims of crime consent people who've committed crimes like assaults and robberies so shootings gunpoint robberies stabbings with serious injuries enter into a restorative justice process we're after extensive preparation They enter into dialogue with the people they hurt reach agreements about how to make things as right as possible And if they fulfill those agreements have the felony charges against them dismissed and don't go to prison In the meantime we provide wraparound services to the victims of their crimes to help them come through what happened to them And in their lives generally When I say that we only do this with victims consent it's important to talk about what that means So first of all fewer than half of victims of violence in America called the police in the first place That's a stunning number It means half of people who are rendered unconscious who have to be hospitalized who suffer serious injury Who have lasting physical and psychological impacts prefer nothing to everything we have on offer in our criminal justice system So if the system were as victim-centered as it purports to be and as a lot of people's bumper stickers and other Hostile remarks suggests it is we would understand that as a central moral crisis of our culture And we would be obsessed with correcting that wrong We couldn't be farther from it of those half who call the police fewer than half of those make it to grand jury Sometimes that's because there's not an arrest Sometimes there's not an arrest because the police don't try particularly hard if you're a particular kind of victim Sometimes there is an arrest but the victim decides not to come they called in a moment of crisis And then they divest from the process that follows because they don't believe it will give them what they need So of that small portion of people who make it to grand jury We reach out to the smaller portion of those who've survived violence And we ask them do you want the person who hurt you to be incarcerated or do you want them in common justice When we give them that choice 90 percent choose common justice 90 percent it's a crazy number Right if I was like one thing I want everyone to know about common justice. It's that number and I at first I thought that was because we are genuinely good people like we're Compassionate and we care and we believe in transformation and we know we've made mistakes and so do others and we believe people Change and we say but for the grace of god go I and I think that is sometimes true But the thing that we are more than I gave us credit for is that we are practical And I should have known that about crime survivors as a survivor myself Crime survivors have a reputation for being very emotional and we have very strong feelings Those feelings it turns out do not override or exclude our ability to exercise reason Um, I said this morning. I think it's largely probably sexism that makes us think those two qualities are incompatible with each other Like feeling a feeling and making a choice at the same time. It turns out we can do both Um All of us it means men can start feeling feelings women can be trusted make choices Wherever we are like there's a lot. There's good news in it for everyone. Um and And when I say we're practical, I mean like we of course We feel the things that we feel when we're hurt we feel rage That like shakes us to our core like makes us almost unrecognizable to ourselves Like we feel loss That makes us want to like wring out the marrow of our bones to be rid of it Right, we feel terror In the safest places with the people we know and trust most Like abject terror shaking terror Like unresolvable terror Like we feel confused. We feel furious. We feel angry. We feel betrayed We feel all sorts of things that we are entitled to feel And yet when we are asked what we want Almost every time we will choose the thing that will make us and others safer That the one thing that outranks all of that emotion Is our pragmatism And that pragmatism is rooted in our self-interest and in our care for the people around us And so our emotions sometimes get co-opted And get put to the surface of draconian Sentencing that does not make us safe that does not heal us that does not meet our needs that does not answer our questions That does not give us all the things we deserve But when we are asked and given options We will choose the option that will keep us and others safe almost every time And if we are among the vast majority of crime survivors who live in neighborhoods where violence is prevalent And which are the same neighborhoods where incarceration is present You will have a very hard time persuading us that incarceration will keep us safe That's not because we're liberal. It's not because we're abolitionists. It's not because we're radical It's because we observe what we see In our own homes and our buildings on our blocks in our neighborhoods every day And we see that for the most part prison makes people worse And there are people with the strength of spirit to withstand the onslaught of what happens in prison And so not to be made worse by it. There are people who even become better in prison But they do that not because of prison but despite it But most people who live in neighborhoods where incarceration has promised safety Live day to day with the degree to which that promise is unfulfilled And so when given an option for something that might do better people choose that option Not for innovation and not even usually for compassion, but for pragmatism and safety The second thing that we believe should guide our responses to violence is that we think they should be accountability based It's important to distinguish accountability from punishment Punishment is passive. You don't have to do anything to be punished. Someone else has to do something, but you don't You have to just not escape it Accountability is different accountability requires that you Acknowledge what you've done Acknowledge the impact of those actions express genuine remorse Make things as right as you possibly can And do the extraordinarily hard labor of becoming someone who won't do those things ever again Accountability is some of the hardest work we as people will ever do When we do it, it is transformative to the people to whom we are accountable But maybe even more importantly it is transformative to us And so I'd ask you to take a moment and think about A time that you did something that you know is wrong And you can decide whether you want to think of a little thing or a big thing like check in on how you're doing today Don't go too big just because I asked you to I know I'm at the very official lecture So I can tell you what to do but don't do something that's not good for you um A time that you did something you knew was wrong that you made as right as you could And so think about what the thing was and how you made it as right as possible And take a moment to just pay attention to how it feels to think about that And now take a moment to think about a thing you did that you know was wrong That you didn't make right Because you didn't know how because it was too late because you didn't have access to the person Because by the time you figured it out you couldn't figure your way through because you still don't quite see the way And sit for a moment with how that feels I would venture that the latter is harder Um the first I think probably most of us can think of and still Feel a good amount of self-love A good amount of pride in who we are We can recognize ourselves in it. We could tell someone Just about anyone about it and still feel like we'd be able to be deserving and worthy of their respect That second one a little harder The best word I know for that feeling it's not a perfect word, but it's the best I know and that's shame And shame is probably my least favorite emotion like if we're gonna rank them.  It's my least favorite. Um Shame is known to be core driver of violence Which means feeling ashamed of what we have done put us at risk puts us at risk of hurting people ourselves and others And it's hard to know the pathway out of shame and so when we talk about grief and loss We know we talk about a pathway. We talk about stages of grief We talk about the things you go through In a process that we all sort of know and recognize understand and can talk about That return us to our self-love to our hope to our connection with each other to our dignity I believe accountability Is the corollary to grief for when we do something wrong And that in answering for what we have done we return To our self-love To our hope to our connection to our dignity It's part of why that first example feels different It's part of why like the ancient Hebrew word to shuva, which is sometimes talked about as repentance is also means return Right, it's that it's a return to a place of a particular kind of wholeness And so I believe that holding people accountable is an act of love I am certain people in common justice wish we loved them less Because it's undoubtedly incredibly hard And so when we deny the accountability of people who have committed harm We aren't helping them when we excuse their actions when we talk about The idea that like the horrific thing they did was inevitable because of their terrible childhoods or terrible neighborhoods or terrible families or terrible lives That doesn't mean that we should not acknowledge the way pain generates more pain The way unhealed trauma is one of the surest drivers of future violence The way our indifference to certain people's pain sets us up for a society of violence But it does mean we shouldn't make excuses We shouldn't do it because it's wrong for the people who were hurt They did not hurt less Because of any feature in the person who hurt them their pain is just as real It's unstrategic politically excuse making goes over really poorly in a political context when we're seen as apologizing for the worst things people do But it's also wrong for the people who commit that harm Because it excuses them from an accountability process that is precisely the road out of shame and back to dignity It creates a barrier between them and that transformation and that transformation is one of the most important things Any of us can ever have the gift of undergoing in our lives And so we believe responses to violence should be accountability based And the good news is that when people are accountable when we face what we have done We are very likely to be transformed by it partly because of how hard that is and how much we don't want to do it again And partly because in it we are reconnected to the people with whom we share community The third principle we think should drive our responses to violence is that they should be safety driven That also sounds obvious And yet at the same time nothing of what we do has basically anything to do with generating safety and so That's awesome And so our current approach to violence There's no relationship to everything we know about what causes and what ends violence That seems weird like our approaches to disease Are always rooted in what we know about what causes and what ends disease That seems like a reasonable thing to do And yet in the criminal justice arena our approaches to violence are driven by rhetoric They're driven driven by sort of outdated philosophical notions They're driven by myth And they're driven by vengeance It's my belief they should be driven by safety that when the government intervenes in a situation Where someone is unsafe their intervention should make us all safer But that's what they're there for it's part of why we so joyfully pay our taxes and What we know is that the core drivers of violence For individuals so the biggest drivers of violence are structural their poverty their inequity They are racial inequity. They are unhealed trauma. They're all these things these structural factors They're things like redlining drives of violence on the individual level The core drivers of violence are shame isolation exposure to violence and an inability to meet one's economic needs I would argue the four core features of prison are shame isolation exposure to violence and an inability to meet one's economic needs So it means our core response to violence has as a very central dimensions Precisely the things that generate violence That is not what people who want to end violence do To expect the criminal justice system as we know it to produce safety is totally irrational It's like putting out a fire by throwing a molotov cocktail through the front door of a building It doesn't make sense that it would quell the flames What we know about what ends violence are things like relationship accountability healing Access to supports right all these other things. We know what ends violence Because a ton of those cases that don't make it to the criminal justice system a lot of those actually result Some of them end terribly some of them go on to result in more harm And some of them end in some measure of healing and some measure of reconciliation and some measure of peace Because when we go when we take into our own hands the resolution of violence once in a while we get it right Not always but probably as often as our criminal justice system does And so what we have now in our response to violence has in it none of the core ingredients of safety And so if it does not have the core ingredients, it will not produce it And what we know it come in justice is that there are other pathways And so in the work we do Fewer than seven percent of our participants have been terminated for new crimes on our watch Of the people who started since january 2012 after our first couple years of learning One has been terminated since january 2012 in nearly six years Find me a prison that can say that Not to be sassy A little sassy. I like saying that to people who run correction systems. That's my favorite They secretly like it too They just don't show it We know how to produce safety and it's things that make sense. It's facing what you've done. It's making those things right It's developing the economic means to meet your needs other than through violence It's addressing the underlying pain that drives what you did in the first place. It's being answerable. It's being connected Um, it's Being in community with people who you make a commitment to never hurting again and to doing the work of becoming someone who won't And so we can produce safety if we choose to We cannot produce it through prisons and our ability to produce it in other ways will be dramatically undercut By the scale of our prison system in this country Because the division of families reduces safety Because the investment in prisons at the expense of everything else reduces safety Because the exit and return of people the inconsistency of community and the constant disruption reduces safety And because the violence and trauma people undergo while in prison also reduce safety And so we have a threat to our safety in this country And it is a growing threat It is one that has grown dramatically over the last 30 years And is our system of mass incarceration and unless we make it our business to eradicate that threat We will not be safe with each other The last principle that we think should guide our responses to violence Is that we believe that they should be racially equitable We believe that first for practical reasons, which is that inequity is demonstrated to be a driver of violence So if you know something produces a thing and you want less of the thing you have to do less of the thing that produces the thing Um And and we don't do that. So on the one hand, we know we have to eliminate inequity as A risk factor for our culture But when I talk about racial inequity, I'm not talking only About defendants in the system So it's important to know that there are racial disparities at every Single stage of the criminal justice system at any point where a human can make a decision Or where a risk assessment instrument developed in part by humans is used That inequities persist. So that is at arrest. It's at arraignment and bail. It is at the felony arraignment It is it charging. It is it plea offers. It is it sentencing is that parole And at each of those places the inequities that happened in the previous place are only exacerbated almost every time It's why we understand mass incarceration to be the grandchild of slavery and the child of jim crow It's we why we understand it to be For me the core civil rights question of our day It's why I believe our children's children will ask us what we did about it And we will be faced with ourselves when we answer that question and that at our current moment The answer is not one that will dignify us or will teach a lesson to that generation that we want to teach Um, and it is all of ours to account for and to fix But the inequity doesn't stop with the people who commit harm. It also includes people who are hurt So we devalue certain crime victims. We particularly devalue victims of color We pretend young men of color who were hurt had it coming to them And that young women of color probably don't feel pain quite the same way as white women do because they're so strong Right, so we tell stories that suggest that men of color deserve pain that women of color can't feel pain These are also old stories And when we do that we shouldn't be surprised by the portion of victims who don't call a criminal justice system That treats their pain as their fault or unimportant And we are not a country that fulfills its promise to equity or to safety Or its basic obligations to its citizens to treat them with dignity and equal regard And we know we can do it differently and we know that partly because of how we treat white people I say this is a white person. So I know a lot about being a white person um When I was charged with a bunch of crimes when I was a teenager I was met with mercy The judge saw in me a child who had made a mistake The judge worried about me Thought something must be happening that I made these choices The judge thought I could be something different than those choices that I probably was already more than those choices But certainly could become more than them if I wasn't yet And the judge made a decision to give me my life back.  That's what we are. We're people who got to grow up My co-defendant who's a young man of color was not met with that same mercy by any stretch And it was revelatory to me and it's partly because I think That the central the first promise of privilege the first gift of privilege Is that we don't have to experience it as such The gift of privilege is we experience it as merit We're hard-working We're smart. We're articulate. We're kind We're lucky even But surely we're not the beneficiaries of structures that give us things at the expense of others that take things from people So that we can have them That hurt people so we can feel safe That destroy families so that our family can have just a little bit more It would be hard to know we were that Right and so I had the gift of having that myth ripped from me And so I had to understand my privilege not as merit but as privilege and when that happens You understand that that inequity is a threat to your very soul And you make that inequity your enemy and you spend your life Finding the people to join with to listen to and to follow so that by the end of your days here You will have put up the best possible fight and maybe even taking it down But the other thing that happens when someone does something for you that they don't do for someone else Is that it reveals that that system can do what it wants So prosecutors in america could end mass incarceration tomorrow By exercising discretion differently Judges in the juvenile system could end juvenile incarceration tomorrow By exercising their discretion differently No one has to pass a thing in a state legislature, which i'm sure is a great relief to people who try and pass things in state legislatures For that to be possible Right Because we can choose it differently and so I think part of what our job is as white folks is to be People who testify to that fact That we have been diverted so many times I did a What I will call an experiment with some of the children in my extended family, which is a Like chosen family mixed race. This is not like a statistically significant study We grew up under the vira institute. This does not meet their standards I do not blame them for the inadequacy of this study And I asked the kids in my life what the word detention means The white kids in my life 201 said it was like when you were bad at school and had to stay after Kids of color in my life 201 said it's where kids go to jail We know this is happening No one's surprised And so shame on us For knowing and as white folks the thing we know that cannot be denied to us Is that something else is possible because it's done for us all the time I talk about whiteness as the oldest alternative to incarceration in america It produces great results in terms of like income longevity health outcomes all sorts of things All terms to incarceration work We're diverted all the time we're asked what happened instead of what's wrong with you We're asked what you need instead of what have you done Like we're asked what can we do to help Instead of how dare you right like we are met with that and that doesn't mean we're always met with mercy We're met with rage. We're met with pain. We're hurt in our own families in our own relationships in the streets Like we're not it's not that we are not also exposed to pain We unquestionably are and yet We are also met with mercy We're met with discretion And that's because we're met as though we're people who are more than the worst thing we've ever done We are people who are capable of change. We are people where the exclusion of us from a community would be a loss Where the removal of us from our families would do damage Those things are assumed to be true about us And so part of what we can do is that when systems say they have no way to do a thing We can mine our own experience for evidence that they can do that thing And we can call bs on it And we can insist that the things that are done for us are done for everyone And we can refuse to accept the things that are done for us until they are also done for everyone And so when we think about the work of ending mass incarceration It's vast it has to do with Thinking about electoral politics. It has to do with legislatures and ballot measures and alternatives to incarceration How different parts of the system exercise their discretion and what drives those choices and how we change those drivers Um, but it also has to do with that very fundamental work that I started with which is the work of being at war With the foundational myth of this country With telling true stories in its place With resisting those old stories whenever and wherever they are told And with sitting with the worst things we have done individually and together and believing That if we are accountable for those things if we acknowledge what we have done Acknowledge the impact of those actions Express genuine remorse Make things as right as possible And become people who won't do those things again That we as a country can also lift up out of that shame Back into a place of shared dignity of shared connection and of shared hope And so it's my belief that as we join together in the struggle to end mass incarceration that we are Doing the work of accountability, which I've already told you I think is an act of love And I have no question whatsoever in part based on the results we see in our work That if we do that together we'll succeed. So thank you very much for your time today For coming and thank Danielle again for giving such a wonderful presentation We're going to move into the questions and answer section of our talk You have note cards in front of you. If you have any questions, please write them down and we will be walking around collecting them and um, we will have questions fielded by Two students from the Ford School of Public Policy who I will have introduced themselves Hi, my name is Abby Oric. I'm a first year MPP interested in urban education policy Particularly school culture and socio-emotional curriculums in middle and high schools Hi, I'm Andrea Matei. I'm also a first year MPB student at the Ford School And I'm actually interested in criminal justice policy. So this is directly for me I can do the first question I have a question here that says please describe training for staff in the process In the process of crime and justice in detail I'm like that's either a teacher or it's a student who's like this is how they ask me questions. It's my turn So we do a lot of our training of our staff Um in the job and with us there's sort of aren't training programs that fully prepare people for what we do We don't look for people who have particular degrees We have great regard for what a lot of people learn in school And we don't believe that those lessons are only learnable in school settings And so some of our staff have degrees and Social work and counseling and those things and some of our staff do not Our staff universally come to us with a really sharp racial justice analysis We don't hire people who don't already begin with that But for people who do people go through intensive training and how we think about violence and what undoes it Our curriculum is really methodical So it's not sort of based in the charisma and engagement of our staff like the curriculum is entire Entirely inquiry based meaning it's all questions for 15 months We believe that people know the things they need to know to become the people they should become And so that the best way to bring that about is by asking them questions that help them sort of surface that in themselves So our staff are also trained really deeply in the process of asking questions instead of telling people things that you wish they knew Which is harder than it seems Um And of course we train people in the facilitation of circles We also do a large body of national work that is mostly concentrated in a project called healing works Which is a national learning collaborative for people working with young men of color harmed by crime It's a learning collaborative We are learning in it too not just teaching and we bring together people around the country who are doing the work of tending To the pain and violence young men of color in their community's experience and talking about the kinds of strategies that Work to help people transform it. So we are also very continually A learning organization That's best we can be I hope that was adequately in detail Thank you. So I will give the next question What do you see as the role of restorative practices in interrupting cycles of violence when they're implemented in schools? Totally so we I mean the We talk about the school to prison pipeline a lot, right and the Way we prepare people in their educational settings For a future of incarceration. There's the sort of classic example given that the way States estimate the number of jail beds. They'll need a decade out is by looking at third grade reading scores That it is the most reliable predictor more than any economic measure and certainly any crime measure So we know the relationship between what's happening in schools and what's and what's happening in the criminal justice system is profound We also know that schools Particularly in urban settings are becoming increasingly policed and policed in ways that mirror the very worst kinds of policing That happen in our streets and in our communities And so the introduction of restorative practices in schools is super helpful developmentally, right? It helps young people develop the skills of addressing and transforming conflict It helps them do that themselves to have those skills to bring to bear In their communities and their neighborhoods and conflicts that will never Involve the police because no one will call them But it also creates A real defense against the continued incursion of law enforcement Into educational settings, which without exception happens in ways that are profoundly racially disparate And profoundly damaging to children And the restorative justice for oakland youth, let me just Say their name and fania davis's name if you're interested in these things I think they are hands down the best people their practices have been Systematically integrated into the unified school system in oakland and california They started their work in Like the last step school like where kids were suspended to but the state still had some obligation to educate them That school had the highest expulsion rates and the highest rates of violence anywhere in the district And within the few it's within a few years had one of the single highest graduation rates in the district and the single lowest suspension rate So they just they work like the practices work and there are people who know how to do them And those people are like extraordinary teachers who are lucky for all of us willing to teach Restorative justice for oakland youth fania davis who I am very lucky to consider a teacher of mine Um, so um along with this restorative justice, um, how does it apply to cases of sexual violence, right? So common justice doesn't address um sexual violence We don't do that because we think it's not because we think sexual violence is worse It's because we think sexual violence is different I mean one of the mistakes we make in the way we address Violence is this in this country is we treat all forms of violence like they're the same Like a domestic violence homicide and telsa and a shooting in an open-air drug market in baltimore Are fundamentally the same thing and therefore require the same response. It's a mistake It's wrong and it generates bad outcomes for everyone And so when I say that we don't apply restorative practices to sexual violence I don't mean that they can't be applied. I just mean that we don't In places where people have begun to do that people have seen some really powerful results I think without a question these processes require Adequate preparation of all the parties so everyone has to understand what it is Have accurate expectations of what will come out of it have support going into it and Have the option to stop partway through And similarly we would never put someone in a circle who cannot take full responsibility for what they've done And so until someone who has committed sexual harm Can do the work of acknowledging that they had no right to do it I wouldn't consider a circle in those cases for people who can acknowledge That that they had no right to do what they did and own it. I do believe it's possible to do Thank you Can you speak about the role of capitalism and mass incarceration and how that either And how that either inhibits Restorative justice and how you think that we could overcome that awesome. It's really fun to get these questions and not know who's asking them Really funny and people just like go for it too. I'm like whoever said in detail might not have said that if they had to stand up So Yes So the most proximate relationship is things like private prisons are the obvious thing Though those are by no means the only way people profit off of incarceration I think the biggest growth we will see in private prisons is related to immigrant detention now and so we have to understand the place of We have to understand the detention of immigrants in our country as a dimension of mass incarceration And have to include it in our overall efforts to end it Prisons are profitable in all sorts of other ways too Like the connection fee for most calls from prisons can be as much as $15 for a single call And it's not like you can go to another carrier because those are the only phones that you can use The towns that depend on prisons for their income Depend often very fully on them So when people in those towns fight to keep those prisons open They are not fighting for mass incarceration. That's not the animating factor They are fighting for jobs. They are fighting for income. They are fighting to be able to put a roof over their children's heads I've talked to a lot of corrections officers. I have met very few who believe prisons are great It's hard to spend that much time in a prison and think it's a great idea I have met many corrections officers including ones who work in private prisons Where sometimes they are literally locked in for the course of the day um the people who work there who are whose Job is bondage Right, they are employed in the bondage business And some of them if you put another option on the table where they could make a real living Would crawl across broken glass to reach that option. And so those things are true at the same time The thing I will say To though is that this relationship is very old So when you look at prisons now, we look at their predecessor in what was called convict leasing Right, which is like the leasing of humans, which is a very clear one step removed from the ownership of humans Or the presumed ownership of humans um, and so we have for a long time um had the the sort of Filthy alchemy of this country Is the transformation of freedom into money? Right, that's been our filthy alchemy from the start and so I think it's 80 percent of The value of the stock market when it first began was derived from cotton Right, so when we think about something like reparations forget 40 acres in a mule like we're talking billions right and so I think we have to understand um We have to understand that as a country the thing we have decided to turn into money is freedom And we have to decide if we want to continue to do that or not And separately decide You know what we feel about capitalism overall Whether it's our thing or not So we talked about this in the meet and greet earlier, but um just to the larger audience When you formed common justice you have like a lot of interactions with prosecutors and da's Um How hard was it to get them involved? There's so many politics behind being on crime and and getting reflected on that platform. So was it difficult? Getting them on board in the first place It's good. We did this in the meet and greet because that'll help me not give a 40 minute answer here I like being asked about prosecutors So the narrow answer to your question is that it wasn't terribly hard in part because I Um, I started common justice out of the Vera Institute of Justice and Vera leveraged their nearly 50 year reputation on my little idea Um, and leveraged their relationship with the district attorney at the time to get us into the room and get real consideration for that possibility That helped immensely for it But the reason the district attorney said yes was not just because like a really really smart group of researchers asked him to It's because in brooklyn. We have developed a constituency that expects of their prosecutor To be forward thinking on criminal justice Like you lose in brooklyn for doing regressive things that ruin people's lives and you win in brooklyn for being innovative And I think one of the things when we think about prosecutors, we have to remember. They are elected We have to treat them like elected officials. We have to Take their jobs from them when we don't like how they do them We have to remind them who they're accountable to We have to do base building works in the community's most impacted by violence and incarceration So that the people who put them in office and can take them out are the same people whose lives are at stake in the decisions They make day in and day out which is to say we have to actually be a representative democracy And when we do that we can start to get prosecutors who rather than measuring their success by how many convictions they secure Begin to measure it by the degree to which they produce safety and fairness And we have to hold them to account for that that also means that when they take a risk And put someone in a program and that person commits a new crime. We have to stand with them We have to say we asked them to do this and we're asking them to keep doing this because despite this one failure Overall this choice is a far smarter far more sensible and far safer choice than incarceration And when they incarcerate people who should not have been incarcerated and those people go on to commit more harm We have to ask them why when in the face of all sorts of evidence that incarceration was criminogenic and likely to produce a bad outcome They went ahead and incarcerated that person and say to them that your choice to incarcerate that person The result of that which is more violence like that that blood is on your hands And so we have to invert the things that they get off the hook for and the things they're held accountable to So that we hold them to the standards that we hold most dear and if we do that they're politicians And so they'll do what we say But they are not for the most part we should I should be clear for all my beef with prosecutors Which is a lot of beef They aren't most of the time doing things other than what we ask them to do They're doing what we say They're doing what they think will get them reelected and until we convey different expectations It's unreasonable to expect them to behave any differently So I'll stop it's hard for me to stop talking about prosecutors Next so so this next one is a really wonderful kind of philosophical question Um, what do you think are some of the factors responsible for the desire for vengeance? How can society and politics devalue the need for vengeance? And correct the confusion of justice for vengeance This is a strangely funny format I think partly because when people ask questions in real life, they sort of Build on the one before in a way that's a little less funny. So this is a fun exercise. Um So the desire for vengeance like the feeling Um The feeling of satisfaction and the notion of someone else who hurt us suffering Is real It's almost never permanent It's almost never satisfying when we actually get it It never heals us It never relieves our trauma Like it is not like vengeance is not the opposite of trauma So it doesn't work, but it's it can be very appealing Um for most of us it's A temporary part It's one of the thousand things we feel as we move through the course of a healing trajectory Which is never linear. So we might feel it one time and feel it again later and it'll arise and pass I believe actually pretty fundamentally that um The desire for vengeance isn't actually quite that I think the desire for vengeance is at its most fundamental a desire for recognition It's a desire to have our pain seen and known And that is about as human beings our need to be seen and known It is about the way violence against us feels like an erasure Feels like a threat to our very existence Um And the counterbalance to that is to insist on our existence to insist on being seen and known and felt And so I think very often we need that recognition and the one thing we can think of that would do that Is revenge Like the one thing where we would know That we are seen that we are know that it is felt Is for that other person to see and feel it It's part of why the most important thing we say to victims at common justice when we reach out to them to ask them About whether they want the program or not is that we say what happened to you is wrong We acknowledge it we ask what happened we ask how it felt we say it was wrong And almost every time after we say that people are like, all right, let's do the program right We need to be seen in what's been done to us And so I think while I do believe the human need for recognition is fundamental to our being I believe that the desire for vengeance is largely a Sort of cultural phenomenon mapped on to that fundamental human need and desire the way a lot of these things are I think when individual people who are hurt Or people whose communities have been hurt now and historically want vengeance that that is appropriate to want That makes a lot of sense When systems seek vengeance, I think it's totally inappropriate. It's an irrational emotion Right. Our systems are not supposed they don't have feelings Like they're not supposed to get to do feely things. They're supposed to make sense They're supposed to be bound by reason. They're supposed to be bound by fairness and justice. They're supposed to be bound by what works And so systems shouldn't get to act out of a fleeting and often Changing emotion because part of the problem too is that unlike human beings systems don't change very fast So when you bake one emotion into it Unlike for a person Who when they are well loved or when they are seen or where they get to stand by the ocean for a minute or where they Finally get one night of real sleep since they were hurt that that feeling starts to recede Once you build that feeling into a system the system doesn't have a mechanism to get it out because it's not Alive like it's not a person. It doesn't know how to just feel a new thing. That's not what it is And so when we build whole structures around particular emotions, it means that they have They become rigid and ossified around those emotions because they don't have Kind of the involving nimbleness that we as humans do Um, and at the same time when I say this I want to be really clear that Wanting revenge when you've been hurt Is just it's there's nothing wrong with it There may be something wrong with taking revenge There is definitely something wrong with assuming everyone else wants what you want But like you get to want revenge Just like you get to want to die Right, like you get to want the things that happen when we've been hurt and we're not wrong for wanting them But what we deserve are processes that let us move from those places Into places where we feel things that like make us want to live and that make us want to live right and so And it's really important that we don't Judge people who have been hurt for as though they're somehow worse than victims who can forgive right away It's not about there's not it's not a hierarchy in that it's about which of the thousand things we feel in our pain We want to build into our structures for responding to pain And that's a decision we make collectively and it's a decision we make wisely together All right, so a lot of pressure picking the last one Um Uh, but I guess I'll go with this one Uh, the question is how do you get people who are indifferent about restorative justice slash mass incarceration issues to care about that? Easy last one. Yeah, that's okay. Thanks Um, do you mean how do I or how does one give me clarify? Um So I think um We are There are a couple ways we connect into these issues, right? Like one we connect through our own experience surviving harm or loving people who have survived harm And we're often taught that our experiences somehow don't count Because we didn't call the police because it wasn't as bad as what happened to our neighbor because we were intoxicated at the time or wearing a short skirt or because We were people of color because we had a history of committing a crime or for a thousand reasons or because we think that maybe We had it coming that we did something to contribute to it that even if we didn't in that case We did something bad in another case and we sort of believe and the idea that things come back around Right, so we do all sorts of things to devalue our own experience as being relevant to this conversation When I think we have to stop doing that I think we have to care about what's happened to us What's cared we have to care about what's happened to the people we love and we have to understand that the criminal justice system Is powered by stories about us Like if I asked ever in this room if you or someone you love not someone you've met or saw on tv someone you love Has been impacted by violence raise your hand Like it's all of us. It's not like victims Right, it's all of us And so we have to understand that these are our issues and the degree to which we've been persuaded that they're separate from us Is because of a set of stories That whether they're intentionally or unintentionally designed to do that have the effect Of excluding the vast majority of our shared experience from the policy debates about what should be done about it And then the other part is knowing That this is being done in our name Like if I said to you there's someone out there like Eating babies and he's doing it for you Like you would be like who and you would call him and be like stop Like that's not what I want you to do like I never said to do that. That's not okay Not in my name. And so we also have to Be honest that the things that are Done in our name are ours Like they belong to us um, and we have to own them and we have to Care about them and we have to stop people From doing stuff about us without our permission or consent And I think most of us don't like being talked about behind our backs and most of us don't like being used Most of us don't like being manipulated and all those things are happening to all of us And then I think for some people people care People enter into this through much more pragmatic or seemingly more pragmatic things like economics Like the reality is that it is more important to us to lock up Communities of color in america than just about anything else The one other thing that's more important to us is having a lot of bombs Like if we look at how we spend our money number one is like we want to have just like a lot of bombs Like in different kinds and in different places just like ready to go Little bombs big bombs like that's number one And then number two Is locking up people and especially people of color. That is our second shared priority Right and that everything else that we want and don't get We don't get because of the ways we prioritize those things