November 29, 2022 • 40 mins
Danielle Sered is the founder and director of Common Justice, the first alternative-to-incarceration and victim-service program in the United States. She’s also the author of Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair. She speaks with Khalil and Ben about her work to re-envision justice as something that can address the trauma of victims and stop the cycle of punishment and crime.
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Speaker 1 (00:14):
Push it. I'm Khalil Gibran Muhammad. I'm Ben Austin. We're
two best friends, one black, one white. I'm a historian
and I'm a journalist, and this is some of my
best friends are. Before we get started, I just want
(00:35):
to let you know this episode has some strong language,
just a fair warning, but stick around. I am so
excited to have Danielle Sarah, a really wonderful human being
(00:57):
been and someone who you know I've talked to you
about because because you know her work, but you don't
know her no, no, right, I mean I've been reading
all about restorative justice and her organization, Common Justice, But
but you work with her personally, right, Yeah, Yeah, we
know each other from my work at the Very Institute.
And I gotta tell you I've had a dozen conversations
with Danielle. I've broken bread with her. I know her
(01:19):
really well. And she's going to talk about restorative justice
in the context of her nonprofit work, Common Justice. So
let's break down a little bit what restorative justice is. Yeah, So,
in the broadest sense, it is a process whereby two
people come together, a harmed party and the person who's
done harm. So like what many people would say, like
(01:39):
the victim of a crime and the person who did
the crime, the victimizer that's right, the perpetrator of the
fender or the kind of criminal justice terms, but Danielle
refers to them as the responsible party. And restorative justice
has been around from millennia and often associated with Indigenous
communities as a way for people to be restored back
to the community. Something has gone terribly wrong between two
(02:00):
people and they come together and they talk it out,
and usually there's some form of accountability. There's some form
of the person who's done harm doing something to restore
the relationship, hence restorative justice. But you're saying this idea
of like bringing those two people together, that's right and
having them figure out like what accountability is and how
to heal the harm. That's not abnormal. That's like just human.
(02:24):
It's not only human. But it's very old. We've gotten
away from it, and I think for Common Justice, which
has been around for about fifteen years. It is a
Brooklyn based nonprofit. The practitioners work directly with the courts
and even with the prosecutors. Where a young person in
general who has committed an armed robbery or an assault
(02:44):
or some other horrible, violent thing gets brought before the court,
and there's an option in that case, based on the
victim's perspective or the harmed party, to say whether or
not that person should get restorative justice. What's so amazing
about this is that we are talking about people who
did violent crimes. Yes, and often when we think of
(03:06):
like the violent offender, those are the people that we
don't want to deal with it all. That's right. What
Danielle Sarah is doing is actually dealing with people who
are involved in violence, who committed violent crimes, who are
victims of violent crimes, and figuring even those people who
have been dismissed by all the sort of criminal justice
reforms that they could, there's an alternative to prison. Yeah.
(03:27):
I'm not even sure everyone knows what you mean by
dismissed by criminal justice reform. Say a little bit more
about that, I mean, yeah, so like the idea that
most of our reforms for the past dozen years have
been about non violent and mostly non violent drug offenders,
Like that's where we've sort of thought of mercy. Yeah,
And that's why Danielle is so important, because she is
providing the actual evidence and the roadmap to doing alternatives
(03:53):
to violence, meaning that this isn't alternatives to drug offenses,
this is alternatives to violence. We should not simply be
locking people away for violence because we haven't given the
harmed parties what they want. The harmed party wants accountability. Yeah,
it's she said, It's not because of mercy. It's because
the people who were harmed, they want to be restored.
(04:15):
This is for them. Yeah, So let's get to Danielle.
I am so excited to have Danielle Sarah a really
wonderful human being. Some of my best friends are just
(04:35):
really delighted to be able to have an important conversation
with you today. Welcome to the show. Thank you so
much for having me. Awesome and Danielle Khalil and I
were just talking about how back in October, how President
Biden had pardoned all of these people in the federal
system who were convicted of simple marijuana possession or thousands
(04:57):
of people who are convicted for marijuana possession who may
be denied employment, housing, or educational opportunities to the result
of that conviction. My pardon will remove this burden on them.
And I might say, all these people we meet a
few thousand and you know, what we were talking about
is like, you know, maybe since two thousand and nine,
we've been taking these sort of first steps on criminal
(05:18):
justice reform and really just sort of like first steps.
And you know what Biden did is again non violent
drug offenses of seeing some kind of leniency. And the
flip side of that is that we're not really changing
how we think about violence of people who both committed
(05:38):
violent acts and people who suffered from them. And that's
where your work comes in, and that's what we want
to start maybe talking about to really change the criminal
justice system. That's what we have to do, right, We
have to dig into these issues of violence. I think
you're exactly right, And just from a numerical perspective, more
than half of people locked up in the United States
(06:00):
are locked up for crimes of violence, right, And so
if we want to see a transformative reduction in the
number of people locked up, we have to take on
crimes of violence. The math doesn't work out otherwise, and
so be even clearer, even a transformative reduction of fifty
percent doesn't bump us out of our spot as the
nation that is incarcerated more of our own people than
(06:21):
any other in all of human history, right, So it's
a good aspiration to get at least that far, and
we will not get farther without dealing with violence. And
while I celebrate any shrinkage of the criminal legal system,
like I believe every single day of every single person
freedom is a sacred thing. Right, so that means one
person getting free a day earlier is a sacred thing.
(06:42):
At the same time, I know that even trees that
are trimmed at the edges continue to grow, right, Like,
the question is what's happening at the root. And I
believe the root of the criminal legal system in this country,
the place that where it continues to get its nourishment
is our relationship to violence, and that until we upend that,
we'll keep doing the same thing in slightly altering form,
(07:05):
but not much more than just trimming and pruning. You
came on the show just throwing haymakers. You're just like
you got it, you started it. You've brought up this
question of violence, like I was just going to take
that casually. Someone listening to you describe this might still
have a hard time wrapping the head around like the
(07:26):
actual experience is there. I mean, given the hundreds of
cases that you've supervised with your team at Common Justice,
and I've heard you tell stories. You're already one of
my best friends, so I've heard some of these stories.
I think people would really benefit from just hearing, you know,
just a snippet of someone or communities life that have
(07:46):
experienced what you're talking about. So you know, I only
tell stories I've permission to tell, and so this is
one of those, and it's one of our earlier cases.
And the hard party in it was an immigrant to
this country. He was working for cash and a kitchen
and midtown Manhattan. He was on his way home from work,
(08:06):
and on his way from the train to his house,
he was robbed and really brutally assaulted, and he experienced
really standard post traumatics trust symptoms, right, so, he experienced
hyper vigilance, or has he put it, he was whenever
anyone walked up behind him, even quote unquote a little
old lady like, his mind would race, and his heart
(08:28):
would race, and stomach would just fear, just act physical
fear and trauma. And because of that, he was withdrawing
from many things in his life. He withdrew from his
ESL classes, he wouldn't go out anywhere with his partner.
You know, he was exercising all this different kind of
care to try and avoid those circumstances where he felt
so afraid and so activated, and so his life, all
these good things in his life get lost to that experience. Right, So,
(08:50):
just so we're clear, the perpetrator, I'm sorry that the
responsible party. See I'm learning the responsible party is actually apprehended,
arrested process, arrested charged, is facing a significant prison sentence.
And is this person sitting in jail? And how old?
How old are these people? Roughly the sponsible parties twenty
(09:11):
the harm parties twenty four. I would say, okay, okay,
and he consents to him being in the program. We
go through that preparation and we get to the circle process,
and we're going through it and through it, and part
way through, the responsible party says, every man and my
family older than me has served at least a decade
(09:33):
in prison. And he said that, you know, my older
brother served eleven years, and every one of those eleven
years he won the prison Boxing League championship. And my
brothers the one who taught me how to fight. And
that night on the street, I showed you the wrong
end of it. But he's also the one who taught
me to defend myself. And if you wanted, I would
teach you that too. And one important thing about a
(09:54):
circle process is if you don't have the talking stick,
you can't talk. So I can't be like, um, may
I please consult my general counsel before we agree, right,
it's the vision of risk moves before my hours, right,
But I don't have a six, so I just shut up,
like and it goes to the harm party, he says,
I would love that. And so after some time we
set up a training time at a local dojo with
(10:17):
a marshal arts instructor present to watch over it. Because
to be really great at something, you have to know
what you don't know, and we do not know that.
And in that process, the responsible party teaches the harm
party how specifically, how to free himself from certain constraints, right,
And he starts modeling by modeling. This responsible person, right,
(10:39):
the one who did it, is standing as though he's
being restrained, and he's coaching the harm party through the
process of how to break free of that as he
models it. So, just to be clear, because I'm looking
at you, right, we're having this conversation, but I can
actually see you talking, and you're literally saying the person
who gave this twenty four year immortal fear after having
been assaulted and robbed. The responsible party has the victim
(11:01):
in a bear hug, teaching him about to teach him
how to get the harm party has the responsible party
in a bear hug to put it nicely, right, like okay,
And so the harm party is the one doing the
constraining first, right, while the responsible party is demonstrating how
to release from that. And then they switch and this
survivor is being held in the same position by the
(11:24):
same person whose actions are the cause of all that pain,
only this time he's coaching him and how to get
out right, and he's like, okay, a little left, Okay,
that's the spot right, you know, like over and over
and the first he's holding him pretty lightly, but as
the harm party starts to learn it, he's holding him
more and more strongly, until he's holding him with all
his strength as he did that day, and over and
(11:46):
over the harm party is breaking free man. So he
closed the session. After that, we go home. The next day,
the harm party, the survivor calls me on my cell phone,
which is sort of widely understood to be for emergencies.
And he called me and I said hello, and he said, hidan, yelle,
I'm just calling to tell you nothing happened, which didn't
(12:07):
immediately sound like an emergence. And see, but I asked him,
can you say more? It can be a very useful question.
And I said can you say more? And he said,
I just walked by a six foot four man and
nothing happened, right, meaning his mind didn't raise, his heart
didn't raise, his stomach didn't turn, and he had about
half an hour before he went to work, so he
(12:28):
went to Times Square so he could be around as
many people as possible. Actually contend that this is the
only truly positive story about Times Square trone. So see
if you can find another. I don't think you can't.
And he's there on the phone with me and he's
you know, the crowd, and he's like, hold on, I
see a tall one right and you hear him like
crossing the street and he says nothing, nothing, but tell
(12:50):
me he didn't deserve that. I don't know when we
talk about all of the reason we talk about incapacitation
and detance, like what in the whole moral fuck would
give us the authority to say he did not deserve that,
especially if simultaneous to him getting that healing, we could
(13:13):
ensure and we have now insured more than a decade
out from that case that that young man never committed
another act of violence. It's a decade later and the
responsible party has not committed another act of violence. Wow.
So I'm like, if we as a people, right, if
we know a way that we can keep community safe
and heal the pain of survivors, Like, what is the
(13:36):
moral basis for our going up to survivors and tell
them we have made a decision to deny you this
opportunity because of this age old, largely disproven theory called deterrence. Yeah,
absolutely not. I'm hearing that story and I'm like, I'm
having trouble catching my breath. I'm so moved by it,
and I guess I want to hear, which is what
(13:58):
a cynic would say, that that's not a story of
just two incredibly exceptional individuals, like you know the movie,
Like I want to hear that this is Like yeah,
So I'll say two things about it. Like one is,
there are fifty stories like that, right, and they're not all.
This one's a little more dramatic, but there are fifty
stories where the thing somebody wanted they could only get
(14:21):
from the person who hurt them, including when what they
wanted was answers, like as survivors, we want to know
why me? Was it a real gun? Was it something
I said? What would you have done if I fought back?
If I didn't fight back? Did you know what I
was going to use that money for? And the impact
it had when you took it right? There are things
that we can only get from the person who hurt us. Wow,
(14:43):
this is so interesting. We're going to hear more from Danielle.
After the break, we're back with Danielle Sarah of Common Justice.
(15:07):
We are hearing from you, Danie, these amazing stories of
what's happened when people have a chance to come together
to talk about these terrible incidents of violence. So there
are countless stories. There are people who wanted to meet
each other's children after the circle. There are people who
stayed in correspondence, people who worked out together, people who
(15:27):
met at the spot of the incident every day at
the time that happened and shook hands just to overwrite
that person's experience of that place with something positive. Right,
So there are countless things like that really powerful. And
there are these other stories where the agreements are fairly average,
where they aren't like brothers to each other in the end,
(15:49):
where they don't embrace, and where they heal, and where
neither of them hurt anyone ever again, And I actually
believe those are just as beautiful, Like restorative justice isn't
actually like a matchmaking service, like like our aspirations, isn't
like how many brother like friendships have reformed, right, And
(16:09):
sometimes I struggle telling these stories because there's too beautiful
and we're so used to these. These are the stories
we tell, right. We either tell of someone who wants
the death penalty or someone who forgave the person who
kills her child, and now that person has Thanksgiving at
her house, and like most of us aren't that person.
But I think about like one of our harm parties,
(16:29):
who in that outreach conversation elected to have the person
take part in common justice, like the way he described
it as he said, fuck him, but fuck jail. I've
thought about writing an essay where that's the whole content
of the essay, and then it's like eighty pages of
footnotes that support the legitimacy of both those claims. But
(16:49):
actually it's incredible. Like, as a survivor myself, I have
worked arduous decades to not think often about the person
who hurt me, right, And so for someone to be
like I don't really think about it much is extraordinary, right.
And not because they've oppressed it, not because they've numbed it,
(17:11):
but because it no longer constrains and shapes. They are
daily choices from when they wake up in the morning
to when they go to sleep, and whatever comes to
them in those dreams is night. Yeah. Part of the
choice that survivors are making is not just what you've
described so beautifully and compellingly, but it is also the
practical reality that people come back home. That's right. Like
(17:35):
one of the first cases we had that this young
man robbed and assaulted a fourteen year old boy, and
so his mom was the one who got to consent
because he was underage, right, And at that point in
the process, the person who did it was facing three
years in prison that had been negotiated down from much
higher offer at the beginning. And when I reached out
(17:55):
to her to see what she wanted to have happened.
She said, you know, when this young man, she did
not call him a young man. I will not use
the words she used when this young man first hurt
my child. First I wanted him to drowned to death,
and then I wanted him to burn to death. But
then I realized, as a mother, I don't want either
of those things. I want him to drown in a
(18:17):
river of fire, so I don't have to choose. And
then she said, but three years from now, my nine
year old child is going to be twelve, and he's
going to be coming to and from school and tow
and from his aunt's house and tune from the corner
store alone, and one of those days he's going to
walk by this young man, and I have to ask
myself on that day, do I want that man to
(18:39):
have been upstate? Or do I want him to have
been with y'all. And so what she's doing is exactly
what you describe Khalio, right. She is prioritizing her son's
safety and the safety of kids like him over her
emotional desire for revenge. Now, like as a mother myself,
I don't know that I could do that, and I
don't know that I actually should have to. I don't
(19:00):
know that it's a parent's responsibility to be able to
make such a practical choice, But I do believe it's
the criminal legal system's responsibility. I don't believe a system
has the right to choose some conceptual feeling of revenge
over all the practical evidence of what actually produces safety.
(19:21):
That's right. I've heard you as a friend, as a colleague,
as a public scholar around these issues and educating the
public around this. I've heard you lean into the reality
that violence is everywhere, and Yelle, I want you to
correct me if I'm wrong, Like, how many times have
you heard someone say we never talk about the violence
(19:41):
in the community, And I'm like, you haven't been listening
to people like Danielle or once for myself. You know, here,
I am at the Schaumberg Center working late one night
and Al Sharpton has a bullhorn outside my office window
talking about stop the violence, and it is literally engaging
in a public rally around this issue. What's the expression
(20:03):
when you say you are in the business of ending violence? Right?
That's right? Well, and I think you're right, and I
think people who live in communities or families where violence
is common are talking about it one way or another
all the time, like all of us want to be safe.
We want our children to be safe, we want our
loved ones to be safe. When that isn't present for us,
(20:24):
there is not a day we're not considering what we
could possibly do to secure that safety for the people
we care about. And I think at the same time,
part of what happens is that people in communities racked
by violence, they consider what would keep me safe, and
their answers are things like, we need early childhood education,
(20:45):
we need decent schools, we need clean water, we need
mental health care, we need hospitals, we need educators to
be paid a living wage, we need to be paid
a living wage, and all the service industries we work in.
And when people say all of that, they are talking
about violence, right it doesn't register in the public discourses
that because we refuse to think about violence as something
(21:08):
that's produced systemic factors. And on top of that, people
are also talking about violence in the narrowest sense, and
very often they are solving it fully apart from the
criminal legal system. Fewer than half of victims called the
police in the first place. Fewer than half the people
who are the victims of violent crimes they don't even
go to the police. That is straight from the Department
(21:30):
of Justice. From the Department of Justice's own statistics. When
I was in school, fifty percent was in half, Right,
that's the starting point. Yeah, another half of those drop
off before a grand jury or the first evidentiary hearing
in whatever jurisdictions. One statistic use site a lot is
it's seventy five percent of people don't call the police
to report when a crime happens to them. Is that
(21:51):
because they actually don't believe the system can deliver what
they want. Yes, survivors, And I say this as a
survivor myself. I've survived rape, I've survived assault, I've lost
loved ones to murder. I've loved many people who've gone
through this kind of pain. Right, so this is not
theoretical for me. And we are of course deeply emotional,
like we feel at the best way I even described it.
(22:13):
We feel lost, like so profound we'd like ring out
our bones to be free of it from the marrow there.
And we feel fear so all consuming that at night,
in the safety of our beds, and the arms of
the people we trust most. We can't fall asleep, and
when exhaustion finally takes us, we wake from it with nightmares.
We feel rage so all consuming it makes us unrecognizable
(22:36):
even to ourselves. But at the end of the day,
we're pragmatic, and there's two things we can't stand. We
can't stand the idea of going through it again, and
we can't stand the idea of someone else going through it.
Those things are intolerable to us as survivors, and so
if we're presented with options, we will always choose the
option that's can prevent those things we don't stand. So
(22:57):
seventy five percent of victims opt out of that system entirely.
They're like, the police will not believe me, and they
will not be able to protect me from that violence.
And I know that because I've seen a thousand times
their failure to do that. Seventy five don't call that
remainder or the group of people we reach out to
a common justice. And even of those people who elected
(23:19):
to participate in the criminal legal system, nine percent of
them say yes to us. It's not mercy. It's not
because they want to shrink the footprint of mass incarceration.
It's because they want to survive. Wow, we're going to
take a quick break, but when we come back, we're
going to talk to Danielle about her own personal journey
(23:41):
into this work. Welcome back to some of my best
(24:04):
friends are and so, Danielle, you and I have talked
about how this works very personal to you as well
as obviously very political. But your own experience as a
victim of violence is something that I asked you, was
it okay for us to talk about on this show,
because I think it's an important way for listeners to
understand how you yourself, even as a young adult, committed
(24:25):
grand theft auto. That's right. I also committed some violence
that I didn't get caught for, which is also typical.
I mean, I was an adolescent. I was an adolescent
who had experienced traumatic things, and so I was both
foolish and dealing with the reverberations of trauma and so
and in the most extreme version, you know, I was
brought up on multiple serious charges in the criminal legal
(24:50):
system in Chicago, and I and how old were you
at the time, fifteen? And I was given a slap
on the wrist. It included community service cleaning fire trucks
like it definitely didn't like heal my underlying trauma or
shape my consequential decision making. And I don't have criminal record, right.
(25:10):
And at the same time, the people, the young black
people I knew in love, who are engaged in exactly
the same behaviors as me, face very serious sentences, like
some sentences that rolled up into their entire lives, right,
And so I came to understand the racism of the
criminal legal system as someone who benefited from it, And
(25:32):
so I understood that it was then it was my
job to make that inequity my enemy and to find
people who were fighting that inequity and to fight alongside
them until we won or I died, whichever came first.
So Danielle Khalil mentioned to me that you have a
three year old son. That's great, congratulations. How do you
(25:53):
talk to him about restorative justice. I'm really interested to
know how you're raising him with these values. And so
there are a few things, like one is that we've
been doing the restorative justice steps in my house since
he was like a year and a half, you know,
and those steps are you acknowledge what you did acknowledge
it's impact, express remorse, make things as right as possible,
(26:17):
ideally in a way defined by those harmed, and commit
to not doing it again. And so when he's tiny,
it's like he throws a cheery up my head. I'm like,
that made me sad because I asked you not to
do that. He said, you're sad. I say yeah, he says,
I'm sorry. I say, give me a kiss on my forehead.
He kisses me. He said, I'll try not to do
it again. Done right. It's an eight second process. I mean,
(26:37):
one of the things I love about restorative justice is
it's just fiercely proportionate, right. And so he does this
all the time and is used to it. He has
come to expect it from his three year old peers
who are not all used to it. And then we also,
you know, he talked to him about my work is
getting people free, and what does that mean two or
(26:59):
three year old? How are you explaining it with So
for a while we talked about freedom as people being
able to be with the people they loved, right, drawing
again on Andrea James's wisdom that freedom is mostly about connection,
not about getting to do stuff, and for a while
for I would say, you know, six months or a
year of him being able to talk about getting people
free in some vague way. He never asked this question
(27:21):
that he finally asked maybe a month ago, where he said, Mamma,
where people when they're not free? Interesting? And I said,
in jail? And we had had someone we know and
love who was recently incarcerated, and he'd heard us talking
about it. I think that's part of what brought this
into focus for him. And he said, you know, did
(27:42):
the police take him from his home? And I said yeah.
And he said how do people get to jail? And
I said usually they drive people there in a bus.
And he said could he get off the bus and
I said no. And he said his jail inside or outside?
And I said it's inside, babe. It's like a lot
of rooms and people are in that either by themselves
(28:04):
or with some other people. And they locked the doors.
And he said do they lock the doors from the
inside the outside? And I said from the outside And
he said is there a window in that room? And
I said sometimes there's a window and he said, well,
if there's a window, even if he can't see, he
could call out and say I love you, and they
(28:25):
could yell I love you, popa wow. And you know, first,
I'm like, there's something about his instinct to find like
the place, the crack in the structure where love can
get through. Right, He's like, it's not gonna be the bus,
it's not the lock it. Oh no, He's like, the
window is going to be the thing. Right, There's something
in us I think as people. It's so literal, right,
(28:48):
it's such it's such a crystal clear expression of like
hope and light and connection as you describe. And none
of what I described about prison is disputable. Like I
didn't say, baby, it's the grandchild of slavery, it's white
supremacy culture writ large. You know. I'm just like it
was just it was just literal stuff. And to him
(29:09):
it's horrifying because it's not been normalized yet, right, And
just the logistics of it I think remind us of
like who we've allowed ourselves to become. That anybody who
is not raising their child to fight this has to
raise their child to accept this, Like those are the
(29:32):
choices and to become a people where mostly what we
have to do is raise our children to accept this.
I think is devastating for all of us. So, Danielle,
I'm writing a book in a way about the parole system.
It's called Correction, and it's about parole boards. It's about
people who come up for parole, it's about people who
got out on parole. And you know, I mean, in
(29:56):
a way, it's an advertisement for restorative justice. You know,
I've been going to these parole hearings, and I mean
I see families who are victims who have been coming
to parole hearings for forty years, and forty years of
punishment have happened. Somebody has been in prison for fifty years,
and they still feel as unsatisfied and hurt and traumatize
(30:17):
as they did at the beginning, that the prison system
has given them nothing. In writing my book, I looked
at a ton of victim impact statements to for role boards.
Right to your point, right, the number of them that say,
I feel exactly the same way I did on that day,
exactly the same way, and that is not how healed
and healing people feel. And what they ask for is
(30:39):
more punishment, because that's the only option that's an offer
to them. As you put it, that's right, And imagine
if you had been on the same meds for forty years,
and your pain was unrelenting, undiminished, and you went to
your doctor and they just wrote you a refill. Like
eventually you would be like, this doctor is trash. These
meds are trash, right, And I think shame on all
(31:02):
of us for not having considered, in the face of
what you're describing, this question of like, what we be
doing instead for these people who have suffered such horrible harm.
What should we be doing for them instead of this
punishment of this person that is accruing as absolutely nothing
to them in the end, as absolutely nothing of worth.
(31:23):
And it's much easier to get stories to break through
than to fully change everybody's minds. And so in part
that makes me very hopeful about our chances to really
up end this culturally. Danielle, you and I've talked about this,
and I've talked to Ben separately. I mean, I'm you know,
I'm honored to be in this conversation with the two
of you, who have spent a ton of time up
(31:45):
close and personal with people. I mean, the kind of
work I do is, you know, it's like book research,
so I'm not as close to the actual lives that
you all touch anyway. So my question is, like, I
also know that each of you at times expresses deep
(32:07):
pessimism or may be, to say, skepticism about what white
Americans are capable of when it comes to achieving change
at scale. And I've heard you, Danielle, talk about guilt
and how it shows up in this mass incarceration crisis. Yeah.
So I think we've seen extraordinary pushback to the built
(32:31):
power of especially black and brown communities, resisting the permanence,
dominance expansion of mass incarceration in America. Right, And I
think we see a deep protection of a status quo
that some white people will shift, Right, some white people
will come to understand that if, even though it may
(32:53):
not be in our material interest, it's in the interest
of our humanity to live in a world that is
more equitable, and we will choose that, right, We will
choose those values over particular material game. Right. Like that
will happen, and some will not, partly because white supremacy culture,
like white culture is so retributive and so narrow and
(33:16):
so transactional in so many ways that our own cultural
framework doesn't allow for a pathway of repair. Right, we
only know a pathway of punishment. The catch twenty two
in it for me is that, as someone who does
work on shame all the time, the only pathway I've
ever found out of shame as accountability, the only one,
(33:39):
you know, just like when we're on the receiving end
of you know, when we lose somebody, we know there's
a process, there's like a grieving process and stages of grief,
and those things are are the things that restore us
to our connection with one another, to our sense of
self love, to our sense of dignity, right like we
get through those We do those things through our grief work.
(34:00):
And I really I think accountability is the corollary to
grief for those of us who have caused harm. That
it's in the process us of acknowledgement and repair that
we regain our dignity, our connection, our self worth. I
think white people are ashamed of what we have done,
and we are terrified at the prospect of being ashamed
(34:23):
of our own children, being ashamed of us, right, and
that we do what ashamed people do, which is we
commit violence. We do it interpersonally, we do it and
as white people, because we have access to systems and
structure as we do it systematically too, Yeah, and we
do it by erasure. Yeah. For my part, I am
definitely full of my pessimism. And I mean especially seeing
(34:44):
these last couple of years. You know, first we have
George Floyd and this promise, and then all of the
retrenchment on crime, all the tough on crime stuff that
has happened since. But listening to you, Danielle, the reason
when you were talking about the doing restorative justice practices
with your child, with your son, there's something so natural
(35:05):
about that and so normal that as long as you
don't think of another person as an abstraction, as some
scary other like that, that that idea, even the analogy
of how we hold our own children, our own families accountable,
just makes so much sense. And I think about what
you do and how how that idea could spread, And
(35:28):
at least I'm hearing it sounds like, even in this
moment of retrenchment and backlash, it sounds like you're expanding
from Brooklyn to other boroughs. Correct, that's right, and we're
starting to support more and more groups doing aligned things Nationally.
I think the range of possibilities in this country is
rapidly and vastly widening, like the best and worst are
(35:50):
most as far apart as they've been in a historical
moment that I know. But I'm with Khalil Muhammado's historians.
I'm cautious about making too broad acclaim about the past
in this person's presence. Well you have. You have totally
inspired me and and anyone listening to this zation knows
that that's not easily done in light of how I
(36:13):
do think about the past and how sticky it is.
But Danielle, just so happy that you are able to
be with us today and to share your work, your vision,
your experiences. Your little guy is going to be something
special just like his mommy. And if we could just
clone both of you, the world would be a better place.
(36:36):
Thank you so much for all of us, for all
of your really incredible one. Thank you, Thank you, Danielle. Yeah,
this conversation just I think is so valuable. It reminds
me why it's so important to be hopeful, because just
reading the newspapers and listening to politicians isn't really the
(36:59):
best way to know what's going on in this big, big,
big country. And in light of what we talked about
last season about our experiences in Europe and seeing how
people are treated with dignity, how they treated as individuals
in prisons in other countries. Yeah, that's right. The whole
purpose of restoring them to humanity, even though that's happening
inside of the bars. Kind of the point is that
(37:21):
people have dignity at all times and it's inviolable, and
so much of what Danielle sarahad is about is that. Yeah,
I'll just sort of even repeat what we sit at
the beginning, is that, you know, the work that she's
doing is talking about people who committed violent crimes and
people who suffered from violent crimes, and that's where we
as a country, we haven't worked in that space. We're
(37:42):
not doing it enough. And we just had a long
ass conversation about how you actually can. And then on
both sides of that, people are better by coming together
and not relying on prisons. Yeah, like literally, in the
kind of language of economists, better outcomes on both sides
of the equation. It's a total win win, and so
(38:04):
beautifully she put it. I mean, you know, just like,
don't people deserve that? Yeah, Thanky, she's not an economist. Yeah, well,
Khalil love you, love you too, man. All right, all right.
Some of My Best Friends Are is a production of
(38:24):
Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted by me Khalil,
Gibron Muhammed, and my best friend Ben Austin. It's produced
by John Asante and Lucy Sullivan. Our editor is Jasmine Morris,
our engineer is Amanda ka Wang, and our executive producer
is Mia LaBelle. At Pushkin thanks to Leita Mullad, Julia Barton,
(38:45):
Heather Faine, Carly Migliori, John Schnars, Gretta Kone, and Jacob Weissberg.
Our theme song, Little Lily, is by fellow chicagoan the
Brilliant Avery R. Young, from his album Tubman. You definitely
want to check out his music at his website Avery R.
Young dot com. You can find Pushkin on all social
(39:05):
platforms at pushkin pods, and you can sign up for
our newsletter at pushkin dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts,
listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
like to listen. J Danielle, I didn't hear your response
(39:37):
to the question I'm embarrassed, but is it Sarada. It's
Sarah nobody knows, Sarah. It's never been the fight I've
decided to pick because the things I want to get
right in this country. Pronunciation my name never rose. In
seventh grade, I learned I had to fight because my
seventh grade yearbook listed me as Khalua Muhammad. Yes. No,
(40:03):
not even close. And it's not because you had a
reputation for like drinking kind of weird coffee type booze
in class note in seventh grade
Push it. I'm Khalil Gibran Muhammad. I'm Ben Austin. We're
two best friends, one black, one white. I'm a historian
and I'm a journalist, and this is some of my
best friends are. Before we get started, I just want
(00:35):
to let you know this episode has some strong language,
just a fair warning, but stick around. I am so
excited to have Danielle Sarah, a really wonderful human being
(00:57):
been and someone who you know I've talked to you
about because because you know her work, but you don't
know her no, no, right, I mean I've been reading
all about restorative justice and her organization, Common Justice, But
but you work with her personally, right, Yeah, Yeah, we
know each other from my work at the Very Institute.
And I gotta tell you I've had a dozen conversations
with Danielle. I've broken bread with her. I know her
(01:19):
really well. And she's going to talk about restorative justice
in the context of her nonprofit work, Common Justice. So
let's break down a little bit what restorative justice is. Yeah, So,
in the broadest sense, it is a process whereby two
people come together, a harmed party and the person who's
done harm. So like what many people would say, like
(01:39):
the victim of a crime and the person who did
the crime, the victimizer that's right, the perpetrator of the
fender or the kind of criminal justice terms, but Danielle
refers to them as the responsible party. And restorative justice
has been around from millennia and often associated with Indigenous
communities as a way for people to be restored back
to the community. Something has gone terribly wrong between two
(02:00):
people and they come together and they talk it out,
and usually there's some form of accountability. There's some form
of the person who's done harm doing something to restore
the relationship, hence restorative justice. But you're saying this idea
of like bringing those two people together, that's right and
having them figure out like what accountability is and how
to heal the harm. That's not abnormal. That's like just human.
(02:24):
It's not only human. But it's very old. We've gotten
away from it, and I think for Common Justice, which
has been around for about fifteen years. It is a
Brooklyn based nonprofit. The practitioners work directly with the courts
and even with the prosecutors. Where a young person in
general who has committed an armed robbery or an assault
(02:44):
or some other horrible, violent thing gets brought before the court,
and there's an option in that case, based on the
victim's perspective or the harmed party, to say whether or
not that person should get restorative justice. What's so amazing
about this is that we are talking about people who
did violent crimes. Yes, and often when we think of
(03:06):
like the violent offender, those are the people that we
don't want to deal with it all. That's right. What
Danielle Sarah is doing is actually dealing with people who
are involved in violence, who committed violent crimes, who are
victims of violent crimes, and figuring even those people who
have been dismissed by all the sort of criminal justice
reforms that they could, there's an alternative to prison. Yeah.
(03:27):
I'm not even sure everyone knows what you mean by
dismissed by criminal justice reform. Say a little bit more
about that, I mean, yeah, so like the idea that
most of our reforms for the past dozen years have
been about non violent and mostly non violent drug offenders,
Like that's where we've sort of thought of mercy. Yeah,
And that's why Danielle is so important, because she is
providing the actual evidence and the roadmap to doing alternatives
(03:53):
to violence, meaning that this isn't alternatives to drug offenses,
this is alternatives to violence. We should not simply be
locking people away for violence because we haven't given the
harmed parties what they want. The harmed party wants accountability. Yeah,
it's she said, It's not because of mercy. It's because
the people who were harmed, they want to be restored.
(04:15):
This is for them. Yeah, So let's get to Danielle.
I am so excited to have Danielle Sarah a really
wonderful human being. Some of my best friends are just
(04:35):
really delighted to be able to have an important conversation
with you today. Welcome to the show. Thank you so
much for having me. Awesome and Danielle Khalil and I
were just talking about how back in October, how President
Biden had pardoned all of these people in the federal
system who were convicted of simple marijuana possession or thousands
(04:57):
of people who are convicted for marijuana possession who may
be denied employment, housing, or educational opportunities to the result
of that conviction. My pardon will remove this burden on them.
And I might say, all these people we meet a
few thousand and you know, what we were talking about
is like, you know, maybe since two thousand and nine,
we've been taking these sort of first steps on criminal
(05:18):
justice reform and really just sort of like first steps.
And you know what Biden did is again non violent
drug offenses of seeing some kind of leniency. And the
flip side of that is that we're not really changing
how we think about violence of people who both committed
(05:38):
violent acts and people who suffered from them. And that's
where your work comes in, and that's what we want
to start maybe talking about to really change the criminal
justice system. That's what we have to do, right, We
have to dig into these issues of violence. I think
you're exactly right, And just from a numerical perspective, more
than half of people locked up in the United States
(06:00):
are locked up for crimes of violence, right, And so
if we want to see a transformative reduction in the
number of people locked up, we have to take on
crimes of violence. The math doesn't work out otherwise, and
so be even clearer, even a transformative reduction of fifty
percent doesn't bump us out of our spot as the
nation that is incarcerated more of our own people than
(06:21):
any other in all of human history, right, So it's
a good aspiration to get at least that far, and
we will not get farther without dealing with violence. And
while I celebrate any shrinkage of the criminal legal system,
like I believe every single day of every single person
freedom is a sacred thing. Right, so that means one
person getting free a day earlier is a sacred thing.
(06:42):
At the same time, I know that even trees that
are trimmed at the edges continue to grow, right, Like,
the question is what's happening at the root. And I
believe the root of the criminal legal system in this country,
the place that where it continues to get its nourishment
is our relationship to violence, and that until we upend that,
we'll keep doing the same thing in slightly altering form,
(07:05):
but not much more than just trimming and pruning. You
came on the show just throwing haymakers. You're just like
you got it, you started it. You've brought up this
question of violence, like I was just going to take
that casually. Someone listening to you describe this might still
have a hard time wrapping the head around like the
(07:26):
actual experience is there. I mean, given the hundreds of
cases that you've supervised with your team at Common Justice,
and I've heard you tell stories. You're already one of
my best friends, so I've heard some of these stories.
I think people would really benefit from just hearing, you know,
just a snippet of someone or communities life that have
(07:46):
experienced what you're talking about. So you know, I only
tell stories I've permission to tell, and so this is
one of those, and it's one of our earlier cases.
And the hard party in it was an immigrant to
this country. He was working for cash and a kitchen
and midtown Manhattan. He was on his way home from work,
(08:06):
and on his way from the train to his house,
he was robbed and really brutally assaulted, and he experienced
really standard post traumatics trust symptoms, right, so, he experienced
hyper vigilance, or has he put it, he was whenever
anyone walked up behind him, even quote unquote a little
old lady like, his mind would race, and his heart
(08:28):
would race, and stomach would just fear, just act physical
fear and trauma. And because of that, he was withdrawing
from many things in his life. He withdrew from his
ESL classes, he wouldn't go out anywhere with his partner.
You know, he was exercising all this different kind of
care to try and avoid those circumstances where he felt
so afraid and so activated, and so his life, all
these good things in his life get lost to that experience. Right, So,
(08:50):
just so we're clear, the perpetrator, I'm sorry that the
responsible party. See I'm learning the responsible party is actually apprehended,
arrested process, arrested charged, is facing a significant prison sentence.
And is this person sitting in jail? And how old?
How old are these people? Roughly the sponsible parties twenty
(09:11):
the harm parties twenty four. I would say, okay, okay,
and he consents to him being in the program. We
go through that preparation and we get to the circle process,
and we're going through it and through it, and part
way through, the responsible party says, every man and my
family older than me has served at least a decade
(09:33):
in prison. And he said that, you know, my older
brother served eleven years, and every one of those eleven
years he won the prison Boxing League championship. And my
brothers the one who taught me how to fight. And
that night on the street, I showed you the wrong
end of it. But he's also the one who taught
me to defend myself. And if you wanted, I would
teach you that too. And one important thing about a
(09:54):
circle process is if you don't have the talking stick,
you can't talk. So I can't be like, um, may
I please consult my general counsel before we agree, right,
it's the vision of risk moves before my hours, right,
But I don't have a six, so I just shut up,
like and it goes to the harm party, he says,
I would love that. And so after some time we
set up a training time at a local dojo with
(10:17):
a marshal arts instructor present to watch over it. Because
to be really great at something, you have to know
what you don't know, and we do not know that.
And in that process, the responsible party teaches the harm
party how specifically, how to free himself from certain constraints, right,
And he starts modeling by modeling. This responsible person, right,
(10:39):
the one who did it, is standing as though he's
being restrained, and he's coaching the harm party through the
process of how to break free of that as he
models it. So, just to be clear, because I'm looking
at you, right, we're having this conversation, but I can
actually see you talking, and you're literally saying the person
who gave this twenty four year immortal fear after having
been assaulted and robbed. The responsible party has the victim
(11:01):
in a bear hug, teaching him about to teach him
how to get the harm party has the responsible party
in a bear hug to put it nicely, right, like okay,
And so the harm party is the one doing the
constraining first, right, while the responsible party is demonstrating how
to release from that. And then they switch and this
survivor is being held in the same position by the
(11:24):
same person whose actions are the cause of all that pain,
only this time he's coaching him and how to get
out right, and he's like, okay, a little left, Okay,
that's the spot right, you know, like over and over
and the first he's holding him pretty lightly, but as
the harm party starts to learn it, he's holding him
more and more strongly, until he's holding him with all
his strength as he did that day, and over and
(11:46):
over the harm party is breaking free man. So he
closed the session. After that, we go home. The next day,
the harm party, the survivor calls me on my cell phone,
which is sort of widely understood to be for emergencies.
And he called me and I said hello, and he said, hidan, yelle,
I'm just calling to tell you nothing happened, which didn't
(12:07):
immediately sound like an emergence. And see, but I asked him,
can you say more? It can be a very useful question.
And I said can you say more? And he said,
I just walked by a six foot four man and
nothing happened, right, meaning his mind didn't raise, his heart
didn't raise, his stomach didn't turn, and he had about
half an hour before he went to work, so he
(12:28):
went to Times Square so he could be around as
many people as possible. Actually contend that this is the
only truly positive story about Times Square trone. So see
if you can find another. I don't think you can't.
And he's there on the phone with me and he's
you know, the crowd, and he's like, hold on, I
see a tall one right and you hear him like
crossing the street and he says nothing, nothing, but tell
(12:50):
me he didn't deserve that. I don't know when we
talk about all of the reason we talk about incapacitation
and detance, like what in the whole moral fuck would
give us the authority to say he did not deserve that,
especially if simultaneous to him getting that healing, we could
(13:13):
ensure and we have now insured more than a decade
out from that case that that young man never committed
another act of violence. It's a decade later and the
responsible party has not committed another act of violence. Wow.
So I'm like, if we as a people, right, if
we know a way that we can keep community safe
and heal the pain of survivors, Like, what is the
(13:36):
moral basis for our going up to survivors and tell
them we have made a decision to deny you this
opportunity because of this age old, largely disproven theory called deterrence. Yeah,
absolutely not. I'm hearing that story and I'm like, I'm
having trouble catching my breath. I'm so moved by it,
and I guess I want to hear, which is what
(13:58):
a cynic would say, that that's not a story of
just two incredibly exceptional individuals, like you know the movie,
Like I want to hear that this is Like yeah,
So I'll say two things about it. Like one is,
there are fifty stories like that, right, and they're not all.
This one's a little more dramatic, but there are fifty
stories where the thing somebody wanted they could only get
(14:21):
from the person who hurt them, including when what they
wanted was answers, like as survivors, we want to know
why me? Was it a real gun? Was it something
I said? What would you have done if I fought back?
If I didn't fight back? Did you know what I
was going to use that money for? And the impact
it had when you took it right? There are things
that we can only get from the person who hurt us. Wow,
(14:43):
this is so interesting. We're going to hear more from Danielle.
After the break, we're back with Danielle Sarah of Common Justice.
(15:07):
We are hearing from you, Danie, these amazing stories of
what's happened when people have a chance to come together
to talk about these terrible incidents of violence. So there
are countless stories. There are people who wanted to meet
each other's children after the circle. There are people who
stayed in correspondence, people who worked out together, people who
(15:27):
met at the spot of the incident every day at
the time that happened and shook hands just to overwrite
that person's experience of that place with something positive. Right,
So there are countless things like that really powerful. And
there are these other stories where the agreements are fairly average,
where they aren't like brothers to each other in the end,
(15:49):
where they don't embrace, and where they heal, and where
neither of them hurt anyone ever again, And I actually
believe those are just as beautiful, Like restorative justice isn't
actually like a matchmaking service, like like our aspirations, isn't
like how many brother like friendships have reformed, right, And
(16:09):
sometimes I struggle telling these stories because there's too beautiful
and we're so used to these. These are the stories
we tell, right. We either tell of someone who wants
the death penalty or someone who forgave the person who
kills her child, and now that person has Thanksgiving at
her house, and like most of us aren't that person.
But I think about like one of our harm parties,
(16:29):
who in that outreach conversation elected to have the person
take part in common justice, like the way he described
it as he said, fuck him, but fuck jail. I've
thought about writing an essay where that's the whole content
of the essay, and then it's like eighty pages of
footnotes that support the legitimacy of both those claims. But
(16:49):
actually it's incredible. Like, as a survivor myself, I have
worked arduous decades to not think often about the person
who hurt me, right, And so for someone to be
like I don't really think about it much is extraordinary, right.
And not because they've oppressed it, not because they've numbed it,
(17:11):
but because it no longer constrains and shapes. They are
daily choices from when they wake up in the morning
to when they go to sleep, and whatever comes to
them in those dreams is night. Yeah. Part of the
choice that survivors are making is not just what you've
described so beautifully and compellingly, but it is also the
practical reality that people come back home. That's right. Like
(17:35):
one of the first cases we had that this young
man robbed and assaulted a fourteen year old boy, and
so his mom was the one who got to consent
because he was underage, right, And at that point in
the process, the person who did it was facing three
years in prison that had been negotiated down from much
higher offer at the beginning. And when I reached out
(17:55):
to her to see what she wanted to have happened.
She said, you know, when this young man, she did
not call him a young man. I will not use
the words she used when this young man first hurt
my child. First I wanted him to drowned to death,
and then I wanted him to burn to death. But
then I realized, as a mother, I don't want either
of those things. I want him to drown in a
(18:17):
river of fire, so I don't have to choose. And
then she said, but three years from now, my nine
year old child is going to be twelve, and he's
going to be coming to and from school and tow
and from his aunt's house and tune from the corner
store alone, and one of those days he's going to
walk by this young man, and I have to ask
myself on that day, do I want that man to
(18:39):
have been upstate? Or do I want him to have
been with y'all. And so what she's doing is exactly
what you describe Khalio, right. She is prioritizing her son's
safety and the safety of kids like him over her
emotional desire for revenge. Now, like as a mother myself,
I don't know that I could do that, and I
don't know that I actually should have to. I don't
(19:00):
know that it's a parent's responsibility to be able to
make such a practical choice, But I do believe it's
the criminal legal system's responsibility. I don't believe a system
has the right to choose some conceptual feeling of revenge
over all the practical evidence of what actually produces safety.
(19:21):
That's right. I've heard you as a friend, as a colleague,
as a public scholar around these issues and educating the
public around this. I've heard you lean into the reality
that violence is everywhere, and Yelle, I want you to
correct me if I'm wrong, Like, how many times have
you heard someone say we never talk about the violence
(19:41):
in the community, And I'm like, you haven't been listening
to people like Danielle or once for myself. You know, here,
I am at the Schaumberg Center working late one night
and Al Sharpton has a bullhorn outside my office window
talking about stop the violence, and it is literally engaging
in a public rally around this issue. What's the expression
(20:03):
when you say you are in the business of ending violence? Right?
That's right? Well, and I think you're right, and I
think people who live in communities or families where violence
is common are talking about it one way or another
all the time, like all of us want to be safe.
We want our children to be safe, we want our
loved ones to be safe. When that isn't present for us,
(20:24):
there is not a day we're not considering what we
could possibly do to secure that safety for the people
we care about. And I think at the same time,
part of what happens is that people in communities racked
by violence, they consider what would keep me safe, and
their answers are things like, we need early childhood education,
(20:45):
we need decent schools, we need clean water, we need
mental health care, we need hospitals, we need educators to
be paid a living wage, we need to be paid
a living wage, and all the service industries we work in.
And when people say all of that, they are talking
about violence, right it doesn't register in the public discourses
that because we refuse to think about violence as something
(21:08):
that's produced systemic factors. And on top of that, people
are also talking about violence in the narrowest sense, and
very often they are solving it fully apart from the
criminal legal system. Fewer than half of victims called the
police in the first place. Fewer than half the people
who are the victims of violent crimes they don't even
go to the police. That is straight from the Department
(21:30):
of Justice. From the Department of Justice's own statistics. When
I was in school, fifty percent was in half, Right,
that's the starting point. Yeah, another half of those drop
off before a grand jury or the first evidentiary hearing
in whatever jurisdictions. One statistic use site a lot is
it's seventy five percent of people don't call the police
to report when a crime happens to them. Is that
(21:51):
because they actually don't believe the system can deliver what
they want. Yes, survivors, And I say this as a
survivor myself. I've survived rape, I've survived assault, I've lost
loved ones to murder. I've loved many people who've gone
through this kind of pain. Right, so this is not
theoretical for me. And we are of course deeply emotional,
like we feel at the best way I even described it.
(22:13):
We feel lost, like so profound we'd like ring out
our bones to be free of it from the marrow there.
And we feel fear so all consuming that at night,
in the safety of our beds, and the arms of
the people we trust most. We can't fall asleep, and
when exhaustion finally takes us, we wake from it with nightmares.
We feel rage so all consuming it makes us unrecognizable
(22:36):
even to ourselves. But at the end of the day,
we're pragmatic, and there's two things we can't stand. We
can't stand the idea of going through it again, and
we can't stand the idea of someone else going through it.
Those things are intolerable to us as survivors, and so
if we're presented with options, we will always choose the
option that's can prevent those things we don't stand. So
(22:57):
seventy five percent of victims opt out of that system entirely.
They're like, the police will not believe me, and they
will not be able to protect me from that violence.
And I know that because I've seen a thousand times
their failure to do that. Seventy five don't call that
remainder or the group of people we reach out to
a common justice. And even of those people who elected
(23:19):
to participate in the criminal legal system, nine percent of
them say yes to us. It's not mercy. It's not
because they want to shrink the footprint of mass incarceration.
It's because they want to survive. Wow, we're going to
take a quick break, but when we come back, we're
going to talk to Danielle about her own personal journey
(23:41):
into this work. Welcome back to some of my best
(24:04):
friends are and so, Danielle, you and I have talked
about how this works very personal to you as well
as obviously very political. But your own experience as a
victim of violence is something that I asked you, was
it okay for us to talk about on this show,
because I think it's an important way for listeners to
understand how you yourself, even as a young adult, committed
(24:25):
grand theft auto. That's right. I also committed some violence
that I didn't get caught for, which is also typical.
I mean, I was an adolescent. I was an adolescent
who had experienced traumatic things, and so I was both
foolish and dealing with the reverberations of trauma and so
and in the most extreme version, you know, I was
brought up on multiple serious charges in the criminal legal
(24:50):
system in Chicago, and I and how old were you
at the time, fifteen? And I was given a slap
on the wrist. It included community service cleaning fire trucks
like it definitely didn't like heal my underlying trauma or
shape my consequential decision making. And I don't have criminal record, right.
(25:10):
And at the same time, the people, the young black
people I knew in love, who are engaged in exactly
the same behaviors as me, face very serious sentences, like
some sentences that rolled up into their entire lives, right,
And so I came to understand the racism of the
criminal legal system as someone who benefited from it, And
(25:32):
so I understood that it was then it was my
job to make that inequity my enemy and to find
people who were fighting that inequity and to fight alongside
them until we won or I died, whichever came first.
So Danielle Khalil mentioned to me that you have a
three year old son. That's great, congratulations. How do you
(25:53):
talk to him about restorative justice. I'm really interested to
know how you're raising him with these values. And so
there are a few things, like one is that we've
been doing the restorative justice steps in my house since
he was like a year and a half, you know,
and those steps are you acknowledge what you did acknowledge
it's impact, express remorse, make things as right as possible,
(26:17):
ideally in a way defined by those harmed, and commit
to not doing it again. And so when he's tiny,
it's like he throws a cheery up my head. I'm like,
that made me sad because I asked you not to
do that. He said, you're sad. I say yeah, he says,
I'm sorry. I say, give me a kiss on my forehead.
He kisses me. He said, I'll try not to do
it again. Done right. It's an eight second process. I mean,
(26:37):
one of the things I love about restorative justice is
it's just fiercely proportionate, right. And so he does this
all the time and is used to it. He has
come to expect it from his three year old peers
who are not all used to it. And then we also,
you know, he talked to him about my work is
getting people free, and what does that mean two or
(26:59):
three year old? How are you explaining it with So
for a while we talked about freedom as people being
able to be with the people they loved, right, drawing
again on Andrea James's wisdom that freedom is mostly about connection,
not about getting to do stuff, and for a while
for I would say, you know, six months or a
year of him being able to talk about getting people
free in some vague way. He never asked this question
(27:21):
that he finally asked maybe a month ago, where he said, Mamma,
where people when they're not free? Interesting? And I said,
in jail? And we had had someone we know and
love who was recently incarcerated, and he'd heard us talking
about it. I think that's part of what brought this
into focus for him. And he said, you know, did
(27:42):
the police take him from his home? And I said yeah.
And he said how do people get to jail? And
I said usually they drive people there in a bus.
And he said could he get off the bus and
I said no. And he said his jail inside or outside?
And I said it's inside, babe. It's like a lot
of rooms and people are in that either by themselves
(28:04):
or with some other people. And they locked the doors.
And he said do they lock the doors from the
inside the outside? And I said from the outside And
he said is there a window in that room? And
I said sometimes there's a window and he said, well,
if there's a window, even if he can't see, he
could call out and say I love you, and they
(28:25):
could yell I love you, popa wow. And you know, first,
I'm like, there's something about his instinct to find like
the place, the crack in the structure where love can
get through. Right, He's like, it's not gonna be the bus,
it's not the lock it. Oh no, He's like, the
window is going to be the thing. Right, There's something
in us I think as people. It's so literal, right,
(28:48):
it's such it's such a crystal clear expression of like
hope and light and connection as you describe. And none
of what I described about prison is disputable. Like I
didn't say, baby, it's the grandchild of slavery, it's white
supremacy culture writ large. You know. I'm just like it
was just it was just literal stuff. And to him
(29:09):
it's horrifying because it's not been normalized yet, right, And
just the logistics of it I think remind us of
like who we've allowed ourselves to become. That anybody who
is not raising their child to fight this has to
raise their child to accept this, Like those are the
(29:32):
choices and to become a people where mostly what we
have to do is raise our children to accept this.
I think is devastating for all of us. So, Danielle,
I'm writing a book in a way about the parole system.
It's called Correction, and it's about parole boards. It's about
people who come up for parole, it's about people who
got out on parole. And you know, I mean, in
(29:56):
a way, it's an advertisement for restorative justice. You know,
I've been going to these parole hearings, and I mean
I see families who are victims who have been coming
to parole hearings for forty years, and forty years of
punishment have happened. Somebody has been in prison for fifty years,
and they still feel as unsatisfied and hurt and traumatize
(30:17):
as they did at the beginning, that the prison system
has given them nothing. In writing my book, I looked
at a ton of victim impact statements to for role boards.
Right to your point, right, the number of them that say,
I feel exactly the same way I did on that day,
exactly the same way, and that is not how healed
and healing people feel. And what they ask for is
(30:39):
more punishment, because that's the only option that's an offer
to them. As you put it, that's right, And imagine
if you had been on the same meds for forty years,
and your pain was unrelenting, undiminished, and you went to
your doctor and they just wrote you a refill. Like
eventually you would be like, this doctor is trash. These
meds are trash, right, And I think shame on all
(31:02):
of us for not having considered, in the face of
what you're describing, this question of like, what we be
doing instead for these people who have suffered such horrible harm.
What should we be doing for them instead of this
punishment of this person that is accruing as absolutely nothing
to them in the end, as absolutely nothing of worth.
(31:23):
And it's much easier to get stories to break through
than to fully change everybody's minds. And so in part
that makes me very hopeful about our chances to really
up end this culturally. Danielle, you and I've talked about this,
and I've talked to Ben separately. I mean, I'm you know,
I'm honored to be in this conversation with the two
of you, who have spent a ton of time up
(31:45):
close and personal with people. I mean, the kind of
work I do is, you know, it's like book research,
so I'm not as close to the actual lives that
you all touch anyway. So my question is, like, I
also know that each of you at times expresses deep
(32:07):
pessimism or may be, to say, skepticism about what white
Americans are capable of when it comes to achieving change
at scale. And I've heard you, Danielle, talk about guilt
and how it shows up in this mass incarceration crisis. Yeah.
So I think we've seen extraordinary pushback to the built
(32:31):
power of especially black and brown communities, resisting the permanence,
dominance expansion of mass incarceration in America. Right, And I
think we see a deep protection of a status quo
that some white people will shift, Right, some white people
will come to understand that if, even though it may
(32:53):
not be in our material interest, it's in the interest
of our humanity to live in a world that is
more equitable, and we will choose that, right, We will
choose those values over particular material game. Right. Like that
will happen, and some will not, partly because white supremacy culture,
like white culture is so retributive and so narrow and
(33:16):
so transactional in so many ways that our own cultural
framework doesn't allow for a pathway of repair. Right, we
only know a pathway of punishment. The catch twenty two
in it for me is that, as someone who does
work on shame all the time, the only pathway I've
ever found out of shame as accountability, the only one,
(33:39):
you know, just like when we're on the receiving end
of you know, when we lose somebody, we know there's
a process, there's like a grieving process and stages of grief,
and those things are are the things that restore us
to our connection with one another, to our sense of
self love, to our sense of dignity, right like we
get through those We do those things through our grief work.
(34:00):
And I really I think accountability is the corollary to
grief for those of us who have caused harm. That
it's in the process us of acknowledgement and repair that
we regain our dignity, our connection, our self worth. I
think white people are ashamed of what we have done,
and we are terrified at the prospect of being ashamed
(34:23):
of our own children, being ashamed of us, right, and
that we do what ashamed people do, which is we
commit violence. We do it interpersonally, we do it and
as white people, because we have access to systems and
structure as we do it systematically too, Yeah, and we
do it by erasure. Yeah. For my part, I am
definitely full of my pessimism. And I mean especially seeing
(34:44):
these last couple of years. You know, first we have
George Floyd and this promise, and then all of the
retrenchment on crime, all the tough on crime stuff that
has happened since. But listening to you, Danielle, the reason
when you were talking about the doing restorative justice practices
with your child, with your son, there's something so natural
(35:05):
about that and so normal that as long as you
don't think of another person as an abstraction, as some
scary other like that, that that idea, even the analogy
of how we hold our own children, our own families accountable,
just makes so much sense. And I think about what
you do and how how that idea could spread, And
(35:28):
at least I'm hearing it sounds like, even in this
moment of retrenchment and backlash, it sounds like you're expanding
from Brooklyn to other boroughs. Correct, that's right, and we're
starting to support more and more groups doing aligned things Nationally.
I think the range of possibilities in this country is
rapidly and vastly widening, like the best and worst are
(35:50):
most as far apart as they've been in a historical
moment that I know. But I'm with Khalil Muhammado's historians.
I'm cautious about making too broad acclaim about the past
in this person's presence. Well you have. You have totally
inspired me and and anyone listening to this zation knows
that that's not easily done in light of how I
(36:13):
do think about the past and how sticky it is.
But Danielle, just so happy that you are able to
be with us today and to share your work, your vision,
your experiences. Your little guy is going to be something
special just like his mommy. And if we could just
clone both of you, the world would be a better place.
(36:36):
Thank you so much for all of us, for all
of your really incredible one. Thank you, Thank you, Danielle. Yeah,
this conversation just I think is so valuable. It reminds
me why it's so important to be hopeful, because just
reading the newspapers and listening to politicians isn't really the
(36:59):
best way to know what's going on in this big, big,
big country. And in light of what we talked about
last season about our experiences in Europe and seeing how
people are treated with dignity, how they treated as individuals
in prisons in other countries. Yeah, that's right. The whole
purpose of restoring them to humanity, even though that's happening
inside of the bars. Kind of the point is that
(37:21):
people have dignity at all times and it's inviolable, and
so much of what Danielle sarahad is about is that. Yeah,
I'll just sort of even repeat what we sit at
the beginning, is that, you know, the work that she's
doing is talking about people who committed violent crimes and
people who suffered from violent crimes, and that's where we
as a country, we haven't worked in that space. We're
(37:42):
not doing it enough. And we just had a long
ass conversation about how you actually can. And then on
both sides of that, people are better by coming together
and not relying on prisons. Yeah, like literally, in the
kind of language of economists, better outcomes on both sides
of the equation. It's a total win win, and so
(38:04):
beautifully she put it. I mean, you know, just like,
don't people deserve that? Yeah, Thanky, she's not an economist. Yeah, well,
Khalil love you, love you too, man. All right, all right.
Some of My Best Friends Are is a production of
(38:24):
Pushkin Industries. The show is written and hosted by me Khalil,
Gibron Muhammed, and my best friend Ben Austin. It's produced
by John Asante and Lucy Sullivan. Our editor is Jasmine Morris,
our engineer is Amanda ka Wang, and our executive producer
is Mia LaBelle. At Pushkin thanks to Leita Mullad, Julia Barton,
(38:45):
Heather Faine, Carly Migliori, John Schnars, Gretta Kone, and Jacob Weissberg.
Our theme song, Little Lily, is by fellow chicagoan the
Brilliant Avery R. Young, from his album Tubman. You definitely
want to check out his music at his website Avery R.
Young dot com. You can find Pushkin on all social
(39:05):
platforms at pushkin pods, and you can sign up for
our newsletter at pushkin dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts,
listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
like to listen. J Danielle, I didn't hear your response
(39:37):
to the question I'm embarrassed, but is it Sarada. It's
Sarah nobody knows, Sarah. It's never been the fight I've
decided to pick because the things I want to get
right in this country. Pronunciation my name never rose. In
seventh grade, I learned I had to fight because my
seventh grade yearbook listed me as Khalua Muhammad. Yes. No,
(40:03):
not even close. And it's not because you had a
reputation for like drinking kind of weird coffee type booze
in class note in seventh grade
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