Latest / Just Stories / Doing Justice, Doing Life: A Conversation with Howard Zehr

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Doing Justice, Doing Life: A Conversation with Howard Zehr · Just Stories

0:11
Howard: I tried throughout my career to do things that other people weren't doing.
0:19
Howard: People are kind of irresponsible to do the things they do,
0:22
Howard: and then we send them to a place where they learn to be even more irresponsible.
0:31
Howard: Some people argue that e-essence of trauma is the destruction of your story and that
0:36
Howard: recovery from trauma is is developing a new story
0:47
Regina: This is the first season of Just Stories.
0:49
Regina: I'm your host today, Regina Shands Stoltzfus. Today's guest is Howard Zehr.
1:02
Regina: And I don't know if you know the last time we were in the same space together.
1:04
Howard: I don't either, but it's been a while.
1:11
Regina: It has been a while. It's been, it's been easily decades, I would say.
1:16
Howard: I would guess so.
1:21
Regina: So you have been called the grandfather of restorative justice.
1:26
Regina: How do you feel about that term?
1:28
Howard: Well, that's okay. It's better than some other ones, but-
1:32
Regina: True that.
1:32
Howard: It was Van Ness, Dan Van Ness and Karen Strong in their book, uh,
1:37
Howard: On Restorative Justice called me that, and I asked Dan one time why, and he said,
1:42
Howard: "Well," he said, "Your relationship's more like a grandfather.
1:47
Howard: A father may be more directive. You tend to sit back and be helpful when you can,
1:51
Howard: and be supportive, but not tell people what to do."
1:54
Howard: Now, I told an Indian friend that, and she said, "Oh,
1:56
Howard: that doesn't work in our culture.
1:58
Howard: Our grandparents are really dictatorial, authoritarian." But anyway.
2:03
Howard: In, in our, in my culture, that makes sense.
2:06
Howard: So it's better than some other things I've been called.
2:09
Regina: So before we start talking very specifically about restorative justice as
2:15
Regina: most people understand it, let's go back a little bit further before that language
2:21
Regina: became more common for at least some of us.
2:25
Regina: So I'm sitting here on the campus of Goshen College.
2:29
Regina: I encounter students, and every student doesn't stay,
2:33
Regina: and that's part of your story as well. Can you say a little bit first about what kind
2:40
Regina: of worldview, if you will, that you had as a young college student coming to this
2:47
Regina: place? What were you looking for? What were you thinking about?
2:51
Howard: Well, yes, I went my first year in Goshen, and then I left after that.
2:55
Howard: I had grown up in the Midwest. My father was a Mennonite minister.
3:00
Howard: I don't know, I was a very thoughtful, kind of philosophic guy, I guess.
3:04
Howard: I am also very, very much of a geek. I mean, I'm very into technology, so I was-
3:09
Regina: Okay
3:10
Howard: working at a TV shop there, fixing TVs and all kinds of things as I grew up.
3:15
Howard: I went to Goshen. I had a, I,
3:16
Howard: there were some professors there that were influential on me.
3:21
Howard: Roy Umble had taken a speech professor. In fact,
3:24
Howard: I started out thinking I was going to be a speech major because I wanted to learn to
3:28
Howard: communicate. And then John Oyer and Mary Oyer,
3:31
Howard: and Mary Oyer really opened my eyes to the artistic and the visual,
3:36
Howard: and I wasn't doing photography then, but I became a very serious photographer, and I,
3:41
Howard: a lot of that, I owe to Mary.
3:44
Regina: Yes. Yes. I hope we come back around to talking about the importance of the arts,
3:50
Regina: as in the work of justice. That's something that I'm really interested in.
3:55
Regina: Yeah, that's one of the things that you and I have in common.
3:58
Regina: We both spent a year here as students and then went somewhere else.
4:02
Regina: You went to study at Morehouse College, of course, a historically Black college.
4:07
Regina: Tell me a little bit about what it was like for you as a young white man in that
4:13
Regina: setting.
4:14
Howard: Well, and I can tell you something about my reasoning if you want to.
4:18
Howard: Vincent Harding was, uh, well, a collaborator with Dr. King.
4:22
Howard: He was a Mennonite minister in the early days.
4:24
Regina: Mm-hmm.
4:25
Howard: And he had stayed in our home a couple days here and there,
4:28
Howard: and I just have this vivid memory of sitting at the dining room table, Dr.
4:33
Howard: Harding helping this innocent, naive white boy begin to understand something about
4:40
Howard: racial justice. Uh, and he became kind of a conscience that sat on my shoulder for
4:46
Howard: the next couple years.
4:48
Regina: Mm-hmm.
4:48
Howard: And then the first year at Goshen, it was '62, '63, there was all this talk.
4:54
Howard: The Civil Rights Movement was heating up. There was all this talk about justice.
4:57
Howard: I thought we had no idea what we were talking about. It was so abstract.
5:02
Howard: And John Howard Yoder did a series of lectures that really impacted me,
5:06
Howard: where he said that we really need to get out of our comfort zone,
5:09
Howard: and we need to be present with people. We need to bump up with people who are
5:12
Howard: different than we are. And he talked about doing things that other people weren't
5:17
Howard: doing. Uh, t- and that became my career that I called the g- the gap principle.
5:23
Howard: I tried throughout my career to do things that other people weren't doing.
5:28
Howard: So some of us went to a conference in Atlanta, 1983?
5:33
Howard: Yeah, 1983, the fall, you know, the year of the March on Washington.
5:39
Howard: Here's the, my friend in his convertible drives me down to Atlanta, drops me off,
5:44
Howard: and heads out, and I met some Morehouse guys.
5:47
Howard: On the way back, we blew up the engine in the car, but, uh- the Goshen College car,
5:51
Howard: 'cause somebody driving wasn't paying attention to the oil light,
5:54
Howard: but that was another story. But I really became convinced that I needed to go to
6:00
Howard: Morehouse.
6:01
[Protesters chanting] No justice! No peace! No justice! No peace!
6:16
Howard: And Goshen was interested in an exchange program, a formal exchange, and I said no.
6:20
Howard: I needed to be there without that kind of mooring, that kind of support,
6:24
Howard: if I was really gonna experience it. And I had a suspicion that I would really be
6:29
Howard: suspect at Morehouse. I, and I wa- it was really true that m- the exchange students
6:35
Howard: there were a real problem. I had to really differentiate myself fast at Morehouse
6:40
Howard: from them. 'Cause they were coming from an elite school for one semester for the,
6:46
Howard: really it felt like a kind of voyeurs looking at civil rights,
6:51
Howard: getting excited by the civil rights movement,
6:53
Howard: not taking their studies seriously. So it was clear.
6:56
Howard: I went to take my studies seriously, but it was clear to me I needed to do that.
6:59
Howard: And I did- I graduated second in my class, so I think I made my point.
7:04
Regina: You did. So you s- you said that, uh, you differentiated yourself from the others.
7:10
Regina: What kinds of things did you involve yourself in,
7:14
Regina: or what kinds of ways did you choose to carry yourself to make that
7:18
Regina: differentiation?
7:20
Howard: Well, for one thing, I didn't hang around with them.
7:22
Howard: While I participated in some civil rights activities, I was selective about it.
7:28
Howard: And I participated in the campus activities more than exchange students
7:32
Howard: often did.
7:33
Regina: Really investing yourself in the community as, as-
7:36
Howard: In the community.
7:37
Regina: part of the community.
7:39
Howard: There were... So on Hunter Street, Paschal's Restaurant,
7:43
Howard: where I got to hang out at Paschal's Restaurant where civil rights leaders were
7:47
Howard: meeting. That was interesting. But there was a place we liked to get chicken on
7:52
Howard: Hunter Street, and you had to go through this iffy community to get them,
7:55
Howard: and for some reason I got to be the chicken runner,
7:59
Howard: and they would send me out to bring chicken back.
8:02
Howard: And sometimes I had to kind of talk myself out of kind of tight situations with some
8:05
Howard: of those town guys. But anyway, I, I'm not sure why that, why that came up,
8:09
Howard: but anyway, that was interesting. I think they thought maybe being white I would get
8:14
Howard: there a little more safely, they would under the circumstances.
8:18
Regina: I was thinking as you were telling that story, I know that dynamic.
8:21
Regina: I know that dynamic very well. So you've, you've mentioned,
8:29
Regina: sort of the foundation of your thinking and living into ideas around justice.
8:36
Regina: Talk to me about specifically entering the world of restorative justice as we
8:43
Regina: understand it, uh, as you understand it. What were the problems with justice,
8:48
Regina: how people understood what justice is, and coming into this idea of restorative
8:56
Regina: justice?
8:57
Howard: Well, after I left grad school, I taught at Talladega College in Alabama,
9:04
Howard: historically Black college, and that's where I got hands-on involved in justice
9:08
Howard: things, supporting prisoners, working with defense teams to pick juries in prison
9:14
Howard: riot, death penalty cases, things like plenty of police brutality cases.
9:19
Howard: And so that's where I got really involved in justice,
9:21
Howard: but it was a very one-sided offender-oriented perspective.
9:25
Howard: I didn't know anything about victims, and I didn't know that I wanted to.
9:29
Howard: I wrote an article for Sojourners magazine back then about how racially unjust and
9:35
Howard: how the system was, but never nothing about victims. Then I moved to...
9:41
Howard: My father had died, and I moved. It was kind of a midlife, early midlife crisis,
9:46
Howard: I guess. We moved back home to Elkhart, where I'd grown up.
9:50
Howard: My mother was living there, and I went part-time to some seminary courses and
9:55
Howard: Notre Dame law classes and was running a halfway house for people coming out of
10:00
Howard: prison that almost immediately burnt down.
10:02
Regina: Mm-hmm.
10:03
Howard: And there was this new idea that mostly, uh,
10:05
Howard: Mennonite probation officers in Elkhart, Steve Miller, Lonnie Bergy,
10:11
Howard: there was another fellow, not Mennonite, that I can't remember his name.
10:14
Howard: They had gotten this idea of bringing victims and offenders together,
10:18
Howard: and they seem to have done that separately from the Kitchener folks who had started
10:23
Howard: this. But then they came together and began to share ideas,
10:27
Howard: and they were trying to do this within the probation department,
10:30
Howard: and it wasn't going very well. And when this transition house burnt down,
10:34
Howard: Marlin Jeschke, who was a Goshen College prof, uh, was head of the board,
10:39
Howard: and he just thought I had to go get involved in this thing called
10:42
Howard: victim-offender reconciliation.
10:43
Regina: Mm-hmm.
10:44
Howard: And I just was really resistant. I mean, that meant working with the system.
10:48
Howard: And anyway, it didn't take long until I was sitting down with victims and
10:54
Howard: offenders and seeing what happened to me, my whole outlook started to shift.
10:59
Howard: And then probation kind of dumped it on me,
11:02
Howard: and I found a non-profit home outside the probation department and took it out.
11:08
Howard: But I soon realized there were much bigger implications to this.
11:12
Howard: Well, I began to evaluate some of the experiences I was having.
11:17
Howard: I began to look at my faith tradition. I began to look at this tradition of
11:22
Howard: community mediation that was popular, and other kinds of movements.
11:27
Howard: I looked at, uh, my own historical background as a European American,
11:32
Howard: and my PhD is in European history. So, um, and I began putting that together.
11:38
Howard: I didn't remember this till years later,
11:40
Howard: where the term restorative justice came from.
11:42
Howard: But Ann Skelton, human rights lawyer in South Africa,
11:45
Howard: was working on a PhD- And she came to my office and started going through my books
11:51
Howard: and files, and she found this article in a book by a fellow named Albert Eglash,
11:56
Howard: in which he had strung together a bunch of names for justice.
12:00
Howard: He thought offenders ought to be more accountable,
12:02
Howard: but he shouldn't have thought victims shouldn't be anywhere near it.
12:04
Howard: But anyway, here was the sta- terms restorative justice,
12:07
Howard: and I had underlined it. And I remember that's where I got the term.
12:11
Howard: I was looking for terms that would communicate.
12:14
Howard: I was talking about retributive justice. I wanted something that alliterated for us
12:17
Howard: to restorative justice. But that's where I found the term.
12:20
Howard: And so I started putting this together, and the first time I did it was for a
12:24
Howard: national gathering of priests and nuns who were doing prison ministry.
12:29
Regina: Mm-hmm.
12:29
Howard: And then I published a little... I did a talk for the group of people doing
12:34
Howard: victim-offender reconciliation, we called it then. And then I published it in 1985,
12:39
Howard: a little booklet. I don't know that I invented it,
12:43
Howard: but I was the one that kind of pulled things together and gave it the term
12:46
Howard: restorative justice. But I was really a work of synthesis, I always say,
12:51
Howard: not creation. I mean, I was really drawing from what,
12:54
Howard: what a lot of people were saying, a lot of experiences.
12:57
Regina: Yeah, and I, I think that often the best work comes from that kind of drawing
13:02
Regina: together on various sources and then thinking about your own context and what
13:06
Regina: you're observing and trying to do in the world.
13:23
Regina: So you mentioned a little bit about, this is my word, I don't think you used this,
13:27
Regina: but that tension or unease of bringing victims and offenders together.
13:32
Regina: Do you remember the first time you sat at a table with a victim and an offender,
13:36
Regina: and what that was like for you?
13:39
Howard: I don't think I specifically remember the first time, but what I remember is, well,
13:45
Howard: we were doing a lot of burglaries in those days,
13:48
Howard: which were really experienced as a violent crime,
13:50
Howard: and the police weren't taking that seriously, and there was,
13:53
Howard: there was physical lo- loss that could be re- repaid.
13:56
Howard: Uh, I mean, one of the big dramatic cases was the Fred Palmer case,
14:01
Howard: and that one made national news, a national story.
14:02
Howard: Fred had done at least fourteen burglaries. I mean, it was a big...
14:06
Howard: he and somebody else had backed a U-Haul up to one newly married family, uh,
14:11
Howard: couple while they were on their honeymoon and took everything.
14:16
Howard: Uh, that ended up in a really good meeting, by the way.
14:19
Howard: Just realizing how helpful it was to somebody who'd been burglarized to hear...
14:26
Howard: You know, they have so many fears. "You're casing my house." You're...
14:29
Howard: Well, no, it's really helpful to know they just knocked on doors and they didn't
14:34
Howard: have... They weren't coming back. They didn't have anything against them.
14:37
Howard: Uh, they could see that these were often just mixed-up kids.
14:42
Howard: It was really, really reassuring often to, to victims.
14:45
Howard: And offenders, you know, had no sense of what, the way they had hurt people.
14:51
Howard: Uh, I remember with the Fred Palmer, we met,
14:53
Howard: the first victim we met with was a deputy sheriff, Randy Yahn,
14:57
Howard: and his wife in their home, and just seeing,
15:01
Howard: hearing what he had done and how frightened the children were and looking
15:06
Howard: at the door he had damaged and so forth was just so powerful for him.
15:09
Howard: So those are the kind of things that just really made me realize there was something
15:13
Howard: here.
15:15
Regina: I feel like I shouldn't be surprised at it anymore,
15:18
Regina: but I am continually surprised at the power of people's stories from both ends
15:24
Regina: of that continuum.
15:25
Howard: Absolutely.
15:25
Regina: On the one hand, it's so simple, but it's not simple. It's complex.
15:30
Howard: It's not simple.
15:30
Regina: But it's very powerful.
15:32
Howard: Yeah.
15:32
Regina: Extremely powerful. And time is a very valuable resource, because those things,
15:38
Regina: of course, take time to do. We will have people listening who don't understand what
15:45
Regina: actually happens when a victim and an offender and a facilitator sit down at a
15:52
Regina: table together, or how they got into the room.
15:56
Regina: Can you sort of walk us through what that,
15:59
Regina: just as an explanation or maybe an example from your own experience of,
16:05
Regina: of how that comes together so that people can understand that?
16:07
Howard: We don't necessarily mean that they will come together and be friends.
16:12
Howard: Uh, we find that the tension level, the hostility reduces, uh,
16:16
Howard: and the fears reduce and all that,
16:18
Howard: but they aren't necessarily gonna be reconciled in that sense.
16:22
Howard: So we usually call, use the term victim-offender conferencing these days.
16:26
Howard: And it depends, like the classical one, there in Elkhart,
16:30
Howard: started with court referrals. It was part of the sentence.
16:33
Howard: And so they would be asked to, whether they're willing,
16:36
Howard: they'd be asked to meet the person who had committed the harm would be asked to meet
16:41
Howard: with the victim. So a facilitator, a trained facilitator,
16:44
Howard: would talk to the person who had committed the harm first to make sure that they're
16:49
Howard: willing and appropriate, and then they would meet with the victim,
16:53
Howard: the person who was victimized, and find out if...
16:54
Howard: And talk to them about the benefits and the drawbacks or the pluses and minus of
17:01
Howard: having a meeting. And then if they're willing to meet,
17:04
Howard: they'd bring them together in the same room with a facilitator,
17:06
Howard: a trained facilitator. They would each have a chance to tell their story of what
17:13
Howard: happened and why they did it. They ask questions of each other,
17:16
Howard: and then they would, uh, be given a chance to talk about their, their feelings,
17:22
Howard: as well as the story. And then they would be a...
17:24
Howard: They would have a chance to talk about what the losses were and what could be
17:29
Howard: done to make that right, whether it's symbolic or actual payment or something.
17:35
Howard: That was the classic form. Some places, uh, when the victim,
17:40
Howard: the person who's victimized, doesn't want to, we'll have somebody else sit in who's
17:44
Howard: done, had similar kind of experience, like surrogate victim, for example.
17:49
Howard: A number of the states, Pennsylvania is the one where I've been involved,
17:52
Howard: has a program that's run by victim services, where victims who have...
17:57
Howard: whose offender, whose person who harmed them, is in prison,
18:01
Howard: can ask to meet with that person, and then a pair of trained facilitators will check
18:07
Howard: with the two of them, get them ready, and bring them together.
18:10
Howard: I've done a few cases like that with the Pennsylvania system.
18:13
Howard: Those are pretty serious cases. They won't affect the outcome of the case.
18:17
Regina: Right.
18:18
Howard: But they certainly affect people's lives. And then there's all kinds of variations
18:23
Howard: on that. Some programs bring the person who caused the harm to meet with a circle
18:28
Howard: from the community who can talk about-
18:30
Regina: Mm-hmm
18:30
Howard: the harm. I knew a big city prosecutor one time who did a drug bust in the inner
18:35
Howard: city, and then had a m- meeting between these drug dealers and people in the
18:43
Howard: community who were being harmed by it. Uh, so there's a lot of creativity involved,
18:48
Howard: but... And it is being done in a lot of very se- murder cases and other kind of
18:51
Howard: cases, uh-
18:52
Regina: Yeah
18:52
Howard: and some cases where it does affect the outcome of the case.
18:55
Regina: Yeah, and I know that some, for some people who are just learning about what
19:03
Regina: this process is and can be, and maybe don't have all of the information,
19:08
Regina: some of the resistance or pushback that can immediately come is because they think
19:14
Regina: it means that people will not have to, uh,
19:17
Regina: be responsible for harms that they have committed.
19:20
Howard: Mm. Yeah.
19:21
Regina: And, and it is that understanding of the nuances of the place and what has happened
19:28
Regina: and, uh, what the expectations are, doesn't mean that the person is not going
19:34
Regina: to be held accountable. In fact, accountability is a really important part
19:38
Regina: of the process.
19:40
Howard: That's part of the reason we're doing it.
19:41
Howard: People were being sentenced for pri- to prison and they didn't understand what
19:44
Howard: they did. They were turning into victims themselves,
19:47
Howard: 'cause they feel victimized by the system. There was no real accountability.
19:51
Howard: Y- you know, it's like one judge used to say,
19:53
Howard: "We- people are kind of irresponsible to do the things they do,
19:56
Howard: and then we send them to a place where they learn to be even more irresponsible."
20:00
Howard: Uh, so it's really a big part of what drove this,
20:04
Howard: is wanting to help people understand what they did and take responsibility for it.
20:08
Regina: Yes.
20:09
Howard: And the research has been very positive on it.
20:11
Howard: One study, England told the British government, "If we,
20:14
Howard: if you adopted this nationwide, we think you'd reduce the cost of healthcare
20:18
Howard: because of all the diseases that go along with trauma."
20:30
Regina: So you have traveled to dozens of countries doing this work,
20:36
Regina: thinking about this work. What is your observation or understanding of how
20:43
Regina: justice is understood and practiced in different contexts?
20:48
Regina: Or is there sort of a universal undergirding of what justice is in your
20:55
Regina: observation?
20:56
Howard: Well, along with colonialism came the Western legal system,
21:00
Howard: not as a secondary thing, but as one of the primary ways of imposing colonial
21:05
Howard: rule. And those vestiges, as John Braithwaite of Australia has said,
21:10
Howard: the legal system repressed functioning, conflict resolution and justice systems
21:16
Howard: all over the world.
21:17
Regina: Mm-hmm.
21:18
Howard: What has been exciting to me is to realize how restorative justice can be used as a
21:23
Howard: catalyst to get people from those traditions to begin thinking about
21:28
Howard: reviving and modernizing their own traditions. This is true of a number of
21:35
Howard: cultures, but so many of my African students would say, "You know,
21:38
Howard: this is what we did, what our elders did." Uh,
21:41
Howard: one of the stories I like to tell is we had a fellow from Rwanda whose family had
21:47
Howard: been killed in the genocide, and he had come here to study, and we refreshed,
21:51
Howard: and he had just married a Rwandan woman, and they were here.
21:55
Howard: And one of my assignments in my class was always at some point to explain
22:00
Howard: restorative justice to somebody who didn't know anything about it and see what
22:03
Howard: happened. And I... We got some really funny stories.
22:06
Howard: But he decided to explain it to his new wife,
22:09
Howard: and he started explaining restorative justice, and she started laughing at him.
22:13
Howard: And she said-- he said, "Why are you laughing?"
22:15
Howard: She said, "You came all the way over here and spent all this money to learn what
22:19
Howard: every African already knows?" So I, I've seen it as a way,
22:24
Howard: as an invitational way for people to think about their own tradition.
22:29
Howard: You know, I did a lot of work in New Zealand over the years,
22:32
Howard: and the first time I went, New Zealand has, in 1989,
22:36
Howard: established really one of the most progressive youth justice systems in the
22:41
Howard: world. It was more or less restorative. As they found out about restorative justice,
22:46
Howard: they made it more restorative. But it really addressed Maori,
22:50
Howard: the indigenous people's concerns about this Western colonial legal system.
22:55
Howard: First, the time I visited was 1994, and I didn't realize at the time,
23:01
Howard: but partly to pay for my visit, they had me all over the island speaking to get
23:05
Howard: money to pay for my costs. So I was on the radio, I was on TV, I was all over.
23:11
Howard: And at the end of the trip, the head youth judge, who was Maori, said to me,
23:16
Howard: "You don't know how good it is to hear you explaining this from a Pakeha or a
23:22
Howard: European perspective, because people want to write it off as Maori."
23:25
Howard: And I think that's really what restorative justice is, is a,
23:29
Howard: is kind of a modernized way of saying what people have been doing for centuries-
23:34
Regina: Yeah
23:35
Howard: the indigenous people have been doing, but combining it with human rights kind of
23:39
Howard: sensibility. The positive thing about it, it suggests to people that you can do
23:43
Howard: something with it. It isn't, it isn't just something that used to be happening,
23:47
Howard: but there are ways in the modern world to do these things.
23:51
Regina: Yeah, I think that's so true. And it, and one of the ways that, uh, when I,
23:56
Regina: for instance, introduce the circle process in classes,
23:59
Regina: one of the things I say is that we do this all the time. We just don't call it this.
24:05
Howard: Yeah.
24:06
Regina: But we sit around the dinner table, we sit around the campfire,
24:10
Regina: we sit around in dorm rooms and take turns telling stories,
24:14
Regina: about how our day was or this thing that happened to me.
24:18
Regina: It's a very human thing that we do. Why wouldn't we-
24:22
Howard: Yeah
24:23
Regina: pull it into, into places where that needs that space, that needs that conversation?
24:41
Regina: So you are a photographer. You mentioned that early in our conversation,
24:46
Regina: and I've seen some of your photography,
24:49
Regina: particularly projects on people serving life sentences, crime victims.
24:55
Regina: Talk a little bit more about the connection for you between that aspect of
25:01
Regina: your work and restorative justice.
25:04
Howard: Sure. I didn't become a photographer until while I was working on my PhD,
25:10
Howard: so it wasn't anything I had in my earlier life.
25:13
Howard: I think communication, the most powerful communication, is visual and verbal.
25:17
Howard: The two should go together. And I'm always trying to f- find a way to use my
25:23
Howard: photography in the interests of justice and to do photography with the principles
25:29
Howard: of restorative justice, of respect and relationship and responsibility.
25:33
Howard: Uh, so it comes together in two different ways. So one of the ways I've done this is
25:42
Howard: to do photo projects or interview projects,
25:46
Howard: portraits and interview projects. My first book was Doing Life-
25:49
Regina: Mm-hmm
25:49
Howard: where I interviewed and photographed, did portraits of 70 some men and women serving
25:55
Howard: life sentences in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania, it is a real life sentence.
26:00
Howard: Uh, I did these portraits, and I did them in a respectful way.
26:05
Howard: That is, I wanted to avoid the stereotypic clues that are...
26:09
Howard: you typically see in prison photography. So instead of the bars and so forth,
26:15
Howard: I used a backdrop, uh, in the way I'd wanna be photographed,
26:18
Howard: and I focused on the faces so that we would have to confront these.
26:21
Howard: And then I interviewed them about what they had learned about life,
26:27
Howard: about how they saw life sentences, and edited that,
26:30
Howard: and it became first an exhibit. And just the other day,
26:34
Howard: I unearthed an award that the lifers in one of the prisons gave me,
26:38
Howard: a pencil set with a clock, thanking me for that, because I...
26:42
Howard: they had participated in it, and I had also given them a form of the exhibit that
26:48
Howard: they put up in the prison for certain events.
26:52
Howard: So an exhibit first, and then a book, and then I wanted to do something with
26:57
Howard: victims. But again, with people in prison, we have all kinds of stereotypes,
27:01
Howard: and we know it. With victims, we have all kinds of stereotypes,
27:04
Howard: and we don't know it. So I was trying to figure out what's gonna be my take.
27:09
Howard: I also think that the general public tend to...
27:13
Howard: don't wanna know really about trauma. They like to hear gory stories,
27:15
Howard: but they don't know... wanna know about trauma. So I was trying to figure out,
27:19
Howard: I want to... engage with these people as people. And so what I would do is I would
27:25
Howard: ask them to describe briefly what happened, and then we would talk about how
27:29
Howard: they put their lives back together again. And I...
27:31
Howard: that was in the US and Canada, people of all kinds of,
27:35
Howard: from sexual violence to families they lost, children to murder, and so forth.
27:41
Howard: The third book was Children Who Have Parents in Prison,
27:45
Howard: which I did with Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz.
27:47
Regina: Mm-hmm.
27:48
Howard: That was aimed at caregiver grandparents who are raising these kids,
27:52
Howard: at school teachers and social workers who had these kids in school and didn't
27:57
Howard: understand why they were acting. Then I did a totally different book called
28:02
Howard: Pickups: A Love Story. People in Virginia and their pickup trucks.
28:06
Howard: I knew I needed a break. And then, to my surprise, thanks to a personal connection,
28:12
Howard: the head of corrections wasn't very excited about this,
28:15
Howard: but I got back in and rephotographed and interviewed,
28:18
Howard: 22 of the lifers that I had in, uh, earlier.
28:24
Howard: And so a new book came out, Still Doing Life: 22 Lifers 25 Years Later,
28:29
Howard: and there's a traveling exhibit. So those are some of the ways that I've done it.
28:35
Howard: One of the things that happened with the victim interviews and pictures is that
28:39
Howard: people would tell me, "You know, you got me...
28:42
Howard: You helped me think about things I had never put together before."
28:45
Regina: Hmm.
28:46
Howard: Or, "Through your editing of my words, you helped me put cohesion to my story."
28:52
Howard: Or there was one woman who had been sexually abused by her father,
28:57
Howard: who was in prison, who every year for a while would write to her facilitator,
29:02
Howard: who helped her meet her father, her therapist, and me, saying,
29:08
Howard: "The three of you changed my life."
29:10
Regina: Mm-hmm.
29:10
Howard: I talked to her for a couple years, and I did her photograph and helped her tell her
29:13
Howard: story, which she had never told to ev- everybody, but that's all I did.
29:18
Howard: But it gets back to the power of story-
29:21
Regina: Yes
29:21
Howard: that you were talking about.
29:22
Regina: And the power of being listened to when you tell your story.
29:26
Howard: Absolutely.
29:27
Regina: Uh, having that story received in a way.
29:30
Howard: Yeah.
29:30
Regina: One of the things that is so true about, um,
29:33
Regina: violence and how it works is dehumanization,
29:39
Regina: and what I hear in that story and other things that we've talked about is that
29:46
Regina: process of humanizing people.
29:48
Howard: Yeah.
29:48
Regina: This is a human being. This is a human being with a story, with thoughts,
29:52
Regina: with dreams, with troubles-
29:53
Howard: Yeah
29:54
Regina: with trauma, all of that. And hey, folks, all of us have pieces of this.
30:00
Regina: How can we begin to humanize those-
30:04
Howard: Yeah
30:04
Regina: Who has been dehumanized? Because that project is active and alive,
30:08
Regina: so we need more people-
30:10
Howard: Well-
30:10
Regina: understanding how this works.
30:13
Howard: One of the things that I liked was when victims would get hold of the life book,
30:17
Howard: and a few contacted me and said things like, "Can't believe I'm saying this,
30:22
Howard: but can I go with you to prison to meet, or can I write to one of these people?"
30:27
Regina: Mm-hmm.
30:27
Howard: And these were victims, uh, so yeah.
30:29
Regina: Yes.
30:29
Howard: Very important.
30:35
Regina: And the societal impact of people on the outside of the prison system knowing these
30:42
Regina: human stories is, has got to be in support of changing the parts of the system that
30:48
Regina: absolutely don't work. It's easier to be invested in that if you are understanding
30:54
Regina: the people that you're thinking about as full human beings.
30:59
Howard: We have such a punitive culture. I mean, Western culture is so punitive.
31:05
Howard: And there's some interesting history about how it got that way.
31:08
Howard: It was kind of a bad mi-, a mix of bad law and bad theology.
31:14
Howard: So we're really working upstream on that. Of course,
31:18
Howard: that also means there are a lot of people concerned about it, uh, when,
31:21
Howard: which is the positive. When I was trying to publish Doing Life,
31:26
Howard: I had an agent and went to a number of big publishers, and they would say, "Well,
31:31
Howard: the editorial people love the book, and the marketing people say we can't sell a
31:35
Howard: book on prisoners." But the publisher that I used, Goods, said, "You know,
31:40
Howard: because there's so many punitive people, we know that there's gonna be a lot of
31:43
Howard: people concerned about that punitiveness, and that that's our market."
31:47
Howard: Uh, and I, I think that's-
31:48
Regina: Yeah
31:48
Howard: that's true.
31:49
Regina: Yeah. Who's hungering for these stories? Who's hungering-
31:50
Howard: Yeah, yeah
31:51
Regina: For this, this, this view of life?
31:52
Howard: One time I got a postcard from a retired judge who was a potter in Texas,
31:58
Howard: I believe, and he, he starts out, he's read Changing Lenses.
32:01
Howard: He says, "This is an evil book." And I'm like, "Where is this going?"
32:05
Howard: Well, it was evil because he couldn't put it down,
32:07
Howard: and he wasn't getting any pottery done. But, uh, one time, when I was teaching,
32:14
Howard: I got an email from a student in Oklahoma City,
32:18
Howard: who was in a restorative justice class, and he had been made to read Changing
32:22
Howard: Lenses, and he was so pissed off. He says, you know, he's taking this course,
32:26
Howard: and he had to buy this dang book, and he has to read this book, and he just had...
32:30
Howard: Well, I engaged him in a conversation, and really he tempered, he calmed down,
32:34
Howard: and we began talking about what, where points that we might agree.
32:38
Howard: I mean, I- it's a, it's an invitation to a conversation.
32:43
Regina: Yeah. What would you say about the connection of your faith,
32:49
Regina: either as a young person being nurtured in a certain faith perspective or as a person
32:56
Regina: at this stage in your life looking back on how faith and justice have intersected for
33:02
Regina: you? What would you say about that?
33:05
Howard: Well, you know, I, it, I don't remember justice being specifically taught in my,
33:10
Howard: in my Mennonite tradition, but it clearly made me ready for it.
33:14
Regina: Mm-hmm.
33:14
Howard: Uh, and, and I was a pretty thoughtful kid. I did a lot of reading and so forth,
33:19
Howard: uh, in those days, and so, um... And then when I did Changing Lenses,
33:24
Howard: I really found the concept of Shalom being really this idea that we should live in
33:29
Howard: the right relationship with each other, the creator,
33:33
Howard: as kind of a foundational thought. Yeah, it was clearly an essential part of it.
33:40
Howard: It wouldn't have happened without... I think my family had...
33:45
Howard: Like, my father had a story when I was a very small kid.
33:48
Howard: The FBI, there was somebody who was trying to be a conscientious objector,
33:52
Howard: and the FBI was somehow investigating it, and the, and the, uh,
33:56
Howard: agent was lying in court. He described the inside of my parents' house and so forth.
34:02
Howard: He'd never been there. Uh, he had apparently looked in the windows.
34:07
Howard: Uh, I remember my father's sense of the injustice of all that.
34:11
Regina: Yes.
34:11
Howard: But, uh, I don't know what that has to do with anything.
34:14
Howard: But anyway, it just came to mind when you talked about that.
34:17
Regina: And that example is another, is another way of pointing out the power of story,
34:21
Regina: because stories are so powerful that in some people's views,
34:28
Regina: they need to be suppressed. Yeah.
34:30
Howard: Well, you know, nar- story is so fundamental to our, our identities.
34:34
Regina: Mm-hmm.
34:34
Howard: I've often... We talk... One of the things with victim r- I've talked about is how
34:39
Howard: you have to re-story your life. You have to,
34:41
Howard: you have to revisit the story of your life to incorporate these terrible things that
34:46
Howard: happened-
34:46
Regina: Mm-hmm
34:47
Howard: and who you are and how you've reacted. And the same thing is true for people
34:51
Howard: coming out of... offenders who have... people who've offended.
34:54
Howard: If they're going to change their lives, they have to also figure out how to
34:59
Howard: implement, how to connect that old self and the new self.
35:04
Howard: So story, story has a lot to do with identity. Yes.
35:07
Howard: Some people argue that the essence of trauma is the destruction of your story,
35:12
Howard: and that recovering from trauma is developing a new story.
35:16
Regina: It makes me think again of the importance of giving time, because it is a process-
35:22
Howard: Mm
35:23
Regina: and the process can be, and it probably should be, a slow one. And we live-
35:29
Howard: Yeah
35:30
Regina: in an age of instant, instant fix. We want the instant fix.
35:34
Regina: We want it to happen right away. And that, too, is a reframing of how things work.
35:40
Regina: If you want it, if you want something sustainable, give it time. Let it unfold.
35:46
Regina: Apply those metaphors. Give it space to grow.
35:49
Howard: Yeah. Well, one of the problems that hurts the people who've been victimized
35:53
Howard: experience is that their loved ones can't stand the way they're behaving,
35:58
Howard: their anger, their-
36:00
Regina: Mm-hmm
36:00
Howard: obsessing, and so they want them to be fixed right away,
36:03
Howard: and then those kind of comments are even more harmful,
36:07
Howard: so then victims feel more isolated.
36:09
Regina: Yeah, and tha- and that makes me think, too, of places where, um, schools,
36:13
Regina: for instance, uh, especially K through 12 schools,
36:17
Regina: and some other institutions have wanted to institute restorative justice programs as
36:23
Regina: part of their life together, without either completely understanding or maybe
36:28
Regina: not having the resources to give it the space and the time that it needs.
36:33
Regina: If we're only doing res- restorative justice when people are in trouble-
36:38
Howard: Yeah
36:38
Regina: and not doing it as part of who we are and how we want to be together,
36:43
Regina: then the chances of getting to the place you want to without any s- any incident is
36:49
Regina: a little harder.
36:50
Howard: Yeah. I'm told by the educators that do it that it really needs to be a whole school-
36:55
Regina: Yes
36:55
Howard: kind of approach. Uh-
36:57
Regina: Yes
36:57
Howard: yeah.
36:58
Regina: It can't just be the thing that people understand that's what happens if you do
37:02
Regina: something bad.
37:04
Howard: I saw restorative justice as a way to address inequalities, including racism,
37:10
Howard: but I was... never found a way to, to address it as explicitly as I thought it
37:16
Howard: ought to be. And so I'm really pleased these days.
37:19
Howard: There's a whole new generation of people, a very diverse generation of people,
37:25
Howard: applying this in all kinds of different ways.
37:27
Howard: You know, when in the early days, some people argued that we ought to try to
37:32
Howard: trademark or copyright victim-offender reconciliation or conferencing,
37:38
Howard: and I was opposed. I said, "You know, we have no idea.
37:40
Howard: There's so many things we don't know that are gonna happen."
37:43
Howard: And sure enough, I mean, all kinds of-
37:45
Regina: Yes
37:46
Howard: variations and applications have come out of it that I just never would've imagined.
37:52
Howard: I mean, until this administration, the, the Smithsonian Museum had a restorative
38:00
Howard: ju- restorative history project-
38:02
Regina: Yes
38:02
Howard: to address the harms of the museums were. Uh, I never would've imagined that.
38:09
Howard: So it's just, it's been really, really very rewarding
38:15
Regina: So let's go back to that 19-year-old kid that left Goshen College.
38:22
Regina: What would you say to that person now at this point in your life about anything?
38:30
Howard: I'm not sure. I mean, I'm sure glad I did it.
38:34
Howard: Uh, it seems like a dream in some ways. Of course, I'm 82, so that's a long time ago.
38:40
Howard: And, and my parents, who were supportive, I mean, uh, I don't remember any flak.
38:44
Howard: My mother I was closest to, and she was usually,
38:47
Howard: as long as I could had a reason for what,
38:49
Howard: if I could think about and articulate what I was doing, she was with me.
38:52
Howard: But yeah, I've been retired for 13 years and deliberately trying to be a has-been,
38:59
Howard: and I am not keeping up. So I'm not sure I have an answer for that.
39:03
Howard: Uh, it's a mixed thing, of course. Uh, there's lots...
39:06
Howard: And I've always said right from the start that this thing,
39:09
Howard: like all social interventions, is gonna be co-opted, it's gonna be diluted,
39:14
Howard: and that has happened, of course. Uh, and then you have a legal system that is,
39:19
Howard: as far as the legal approaches are, it's so entrenched, it's,
39:22
Howard: and it's feeding so many self-interests that a restorative justice is pretty much
39:29
Howard: on the periphery, in most communities. There are some communities in, um...
39:34
Howard: A friend of mine helped pioneer a version of the New Zealand model that actually
39:39
Howard: keeps kids out of the legal system for serious crimes,
39:42
Howard: and they go through a conferencing process with really,
39:45
Howard: really reduced re- recidivism and so forth. One of the surprises for me is
39:50
Howard: people started talking about restorative justice as a way of life, and that's like,
39:56
Howard: what? We were, we, we started this to try to address deficiencies in the legal
40:00
Howard: system. What are they talking about? Uh, until I finally realized it's, you know,
40:05
Howard: the criminal legal system tries to supposedly,
40:08
Howard: is trying to teach us boundaries and good things,
40:11
Howard: except they do it with values that aren't consistent with that.
40:14
Howard: Like, we hurt you, you hurt us, we'll hurt you.
40:16
Howard: Restorative justice, the values are consistent with, with the goals.
40:21
Howard: Uh, and for people who aren't religious or something like that,
40:26
Howard: it's turned out to be kind of a framework.
40:28
Regina: Mm-hmm.
40:28
Howard: A, a moral framework. Well, one of the things, so the,
40:34
Howard: the lifers at Muncy Prison, it's a woman's prison, years ago, uh,
40:38
Howard: they would tell me they're doing, they're, they're doing,
40:40
Howard: they have a group and they're doing restorative justice.
40:44
Howard: And I said, "Well, what's that? How does that work out?"
40:47
Howard: She said, "Well, for one thing," she said, "if someone's doing something,
40:50
Howard: one of our peers is doing something wrong, we tap them on the shoulder and say,
40:53
Howard: 'Is that the RJ way?'" Well, this is cool. But most of the ones are just kind of
41:02
Howard: add-ons. So the real, the most exciting growth, unfortunately,
41:06
Howard: is not in the legal system that I've seen.
41:09
Howard: It's in schools, it's in the workplace, uh,
41:11
Howard: it's in the conversations around repr- reparations for slavery.
41:16
Howard: It's those kinds of things.
41:18
Regina: And I think that the more that that wave can continue in those places,
41:24
Regina: the more people will be equipped to speak to systems that are still-
41:29
Howard: Yeah
41:30
Regina: rather resistant to introducing these ideas and processes and moving towards
41:38
Regina: changing.
41:40
Howard: Yeah.
41:43
Regina: So thank you so much for this conversation.
41:47
Regina: I've appreciated getting to know more stories from you, more connections, um,
41:52
Regina: hearing names of people that I've met or people that I just know about in thinking
41:58
Regina: about your development as a practitioner of human connection, right?
42:06
Regina: It's really a wonderful thing to know that the legacy that you and others,
42:11
Regina: as we've talked about, coming from so many different cultures,
42:15
Regina: this is what we humans do. Why don't we do more of it?
42:18
Howard: So many people have taken it so... All around the world have taken such
42:23
Howard: interesting directions.
42:24
Regina: Yeah.
42:25
Howard: It's very encouraging.
42:27
Regina: Thank you so much. This has been a delightful conversation.
42:30
Regina: I really appreciate it.
42:33
Howard: Yes, I've enjoyed it
42:37
Regina: I'm your host today, Regina Shands Stoltzfus. Today's guest is Howard Zehr.
42:42
Howard: Well, I'm an espresso drinker. So I try to find places that really know how to make
42:48
Howard: it right, it's tricky.
42:52
Regina: Just Stories is a collaboration of the Religion, Justice,
42:55
Regina: and Society Department and the Communication Department at Goshen College
42:59
Regina: in Goshen, Indiana, with funding from Lilly Endowment.
43:03
Regina: Next time on Just Stories, we go to Vermont and find out what restorative
43:08
Regina: justice looks like on the ground. I'm your host today, Regina Shands Stoltzfus.
43:13
Regina: Today's guest is Howard Zehr. This is the first season of Just Stories.
43:18
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44:03
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