Restorative Justice – Working for Peace

[Jaunty Guitar Music]

Mike: Welcome, everybody. This is Avoiding the Addiction Affliction, brought to you by Westwords Consulting and the Kenosha County Substance Abuse Coalition. I'm Mike McGowan.

Mike: Peace. We want peace. We hope for it. Wish for it. Some of us pray for it. And some of those among us have spent their lives working for it.

Mike: Well, that would be my guest today, Jill Sternberg. Jill has been working on peace and justice issues for more than 35 years, focused on non violent conflict transformation. She has supported non violent movements in North America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Currently, Jill is a restorative justice coordinator in a New York City high school.

Mike: She is on the board of the Restorative Justice Initiative. And she comes to restorative justice with a deep commitment to ending racism, which is a major cause of violence permeating U. S. society and culture. Welcome, Jill.

Jill: Thank you. It's really nice to be here.

Mike: Well, I'm glad you could be with us today.

Mike: Jill, let's start with your current work. For those that don't know, I know this is a huge topic in itself. Could you give us a thumbnail about what restorative justice is?

Jill: Restorative justice comes to us from indigenous societies, and I would say from societies all over the world. As long as fire has existed, people have been sitting around fires and having that as a focal point for their communities. And so restorative justice is a way of building community. And then when something goes wrong in the community. Working through it, healing the harm that's been caused by that error, mistake, crime, whatever it is. But it's a way of addressing community building and harm that is healing rather than punishing.

Mike: Wow, that's a great thumbnail. So, well, let's get to it then. We're both talking right now in the United States and we have about, I think the last time I looked, about 4 percent of the world's population. But we house 20 percent of the world's prison population. That's a lot. That's a fifth of the people imprisoned are here in this country.

Mike: One of the Restorative Justice Initiative missions is more healing, right? Less punishment. Okay. Big question again. How do we get there?

Jill: Well, I work in schools, so I'm starting with young people. I'm not starting with babies, but I work in high school. And I'd say rather than meting out punishment when kids make mistakes, like, It's their behavior that's a mistake, right?

Jill: They act out in some way usually. So how do you help them correct that? How do you help them see what is wrong with it? Not them, because they're not the problem. It's their behavior that's the problem and they're trying to address something and that's how they know how to do it. So helping people learn how to identify what they're thinking and feeling and how to articulate that.

Jill: In a way that's not harmful to others that's at a young age right. As we get older I mean, I'm so glad we're doing this on Valentine's Day. And I woke up and you know, had Valentine's messages from my family and I said, let's just spread the love around because our world needs love.

Jill: And I think, you know, we live in a world and especially, you know, U. S. is a really dominant part of that world. Where it's about what I can do to get ahead, how to make money. It's not about how do we make sure everybody's taken care of? How do we make sure people have what they need?

Jill: Because when people have what they need, they're much less likely to harm other people. A lot of harm is done to get what we need.

Mike: What do you say to those people, and I know you've run into them many times in your career, who say, well what's the consequence? There's gotta be a consequence.

Jill: Well restorative justice is about accountability.

Jill: It's about working with the person who, or the people who caused harm to look, acknowledge first of all, and it won't work if we don't acknowledge that we've caused harm, to acknowledge that we've caused harm and then to repair that harm. Now you can't bring somebody back who's been murdered.

Jill: You can't correct somebody's life who has a tragic injury that changes their life trajectory. But you can work through it, and people can survive and live through those things, and you can take responsibility for that. However you can and, and also, like, what got us there in the first place?

Jill: And that's what I was talking about before, like, we hurt people a lot of times because we have needs that aren't being met, and we don't know how to meet them in a less harmful way. I mean, our society, as you know, started out, how many people are imprisoned? We're punitive. We're a punitive society.

Jill: And as long as we keep pushing people away, they're going to keep acting out. But when we bring them in and say, okay, how do we fix this together? That's how we make progress.

Mike: Well, right. You know, I worked in corrections for part of my career and just the word corrections. And I always say to people, almost everybody in a facility, is eventually going to get out.

Mike: And so it's more about what they learn about not doing it down the road than something punitive that happens to them to make somebody else feel better.

Jill: And how do we set them up that they don't repeat what they did when they get out? If we just throw you back out on the street and you're just as desperate as you were before you got in there, you're gonna take desperate acts because life is desperate for you.

Mike: Well, and speaking of desperate I was looking at your biography, you've worked all over the world and you spent a decade in Timor Leste in Asia working with the people there. Tell us about their struggle.

Jill: (chuckle)

Mike: I know, there's a, there's a million podcasts right there, right?

Jill: Yeah, it was far from desperate. I mean, it's a beautiful tropical island. So that's really nice if you like tropics. It is one of the poorest countries in the world. And when we lived there, they were on the brink of independence. So for 10 plus years, I was involved in supporting their struggle for self determination.

Jill: So they were militarily occupied by Indonesia from 1975 until 1999. And about a third of the population was killed, mostly with weapons supplied by this country. The invasion into Timor Leste was green lighted by Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford. So we are complicit in the occupation and decimation of a third of that population.

Jill: So we myself, along with activists from all over the world in the U. S. with the East Timor Action Network, supported their struggle for self determination. I was an observer for their referendum for independence, an official observer with the International Federation for East Timor, the largest international observer project in the country at the time. And then the country was destroyed as Indonesia withdrew. I didn't experience, but a fraction of that we were evacuated, but they destroyed three quarters of the buildings and displaced two thirds of the population in two weeks as they left the country, having lost that referendum.

Jill: And so I was asked by José Ramos Huerta, the Nobel Peace Laureate, if I would help set up a peace center there. Looking at how do people who have experienced war and severe trauma change their relationship to conflict. So that's why we went there. And I went there with my husband. And yeah, two years turned into 10 and he still actually works there, works there remotely.

Jill: And it's such an education to be part of a country as it's being born. I mean, imagine if you were alive when the U. S. was created. All the institutions and setting up of the infrastructure and all of that. So it was not a hardship. It was an education and a real blessing to be able to be part of that process.

Mike: Well, that just opens the door. Take us into our own backyard. Then from there across the world you know, there are people that say our culture has never been more divided. We're very now centric, right? But how do we negotiate the backyard and the back fence? I have neighbors that aren't talking to one another anymore.

Mike: And going into to this year, an election year, you can already feel it. How do we navigate our current circumstance in a more peaceful way?

Jill: Listen.

Mike: Ah. (chuckle)

Jill: That's the thing that I would say more than anything. We need to listen to each other and not listen with our ears, but listen with our hearts.

Jill: And yeah, another Valentine's Day theme, right?

Mike: Yeah, but not everybody's good at that, Jill, right?

Jill: We have to learn. We have to learn. I mean, I've been teaching conflict resolution skills and how to navigate conflict for decades and I'm still learning. So, you know, it's just where we want to put our priorities.

Jill: Do we want to put our priorities on being humane, seeing the humanity in each person? Or do we want to, you know, just look at me and me, me, me, me. Because, cause that's really what it's going to take is it's going to take whether we have great differences or we see each other alike, if we can be respectful towards one another, we can probably find solutions.

Mike: That respect is an interesting component and necessary, right?

Jill: Yeah, yeah. And it's not my view of respect. So I I've done this campaign in a high school. I learned it from a former dean of a New York City high school, Matthew Golden. It's called 100 percent respect. And we have the students define actually the whole school community.

Jill: What does respect look like between students? What does respect look between students and teachers? What does respect look like between teachers and students? And what does respect look like among the staff? Because we each have our own definition of what makes us feel respected. And if we care about somebody, whether it's a loved one in our family, a neighbor somebody on the opposite ends of the political spectrum.

Jill: How do I want to treat you? How do I want to engage with you? And how do I want to be treated?

Mike: Do you find that those viewpoints come together like a Venn diagram where we have some things that are common to all the groups?

Jill: Yeah, yeah, I think a lot of it is as we build relationships, we can discover what we have in common. And that's a big part of restorative justice is like, what's having that relationship having that foundation of community so that when something goes wrong. We already know, like, yeah, we can work on this together.

Mike: Give me an example, because you can't be surrounded familially and with contacts with people who agree with you on everything. Give me an example of the language that you use in order to listen or get somebody to listen.

Jill: So I think it's as you hear things like asking questions to follow up that show that you're interested and that you care. There's an exercise I do in schools where I pair people up, pick a topic. I usually pick a topic related to culture or identity because that's something that we're passionate about.

Jill: And then the first round I have people not listen to each other.

Mike: (laugh)

Jill: And then I,elicit from them and list it up on a, you know, so they can see it. What were you feeling? How did that make you feel? And how did you know the person wasn't listening to you? And then we flip it, and you ask them to listen, and you write down the feelings that come from being listened to, and the behaviors, so you know, like, listening feelings and behaviors and not listening feelings and behaviors, and it takes 10 minutes at the top, and you can see and feel the difference in 10 minutes.

Mike: You know, that's so funny, I'm laughing, because I've done a similar exercise when I work with especially high school students, and I ask, who's the best listener in your life? And the most common answer I get is my dog.

Jill: (laugh)

Mike: And, and I had a girl once say, well he looks at me when I talk to him. He doesn't interrupt me. He understands what I feel. He doesn't gossip behind my back, you know, some pretty concrete stuff. So I used to call that second part of the activity, be the dog.

Jill: (chuckle)

Jill: We all need to feel loved and belonged. And that we belong somewhere, that's, that's in our nature as human beings.

Jill: And when those needs are met, then we can grow and we can evolve. But if we don't feel loved and like we belong somewhere, we're going to act out.

Mike: What is the difference that you find in working with adults in some of the places around the world that you've worked and working with teenagers in a high school?

Jill: High school is so rewarding. You can see a difference in a day, in a week and, you know, I mean, I have a million stories, but one story of a bully really kind of a kid who, when I first met him, I was like, I was, she shocked me. He really got to me. I felt like he really had no sense of self regulation or that he needed to self regulate and I laid into him pretty heavily.

Jill: And I got home and I was like, Oh my God, what did I do to that kid? And I went back to school the next day and very early on in the day, I sought him out and I apologized to him. And I said, that was my stuff. And I, you know, I own that. And I apologize for putting that on you. The next thing he said to me, he lied to me.

Jill: I knew he lied to me cause I had just talked to his friends. I was trying to put together a restorative circle for him. I said, listen can I swear on this?

Mike: Oh, sure. It's a podcast. (laugh)

Jill: Okay. (laugh) I said, don't bullshit me. I said, I can take anything and I can own my own stuff, but don't, don't bullshit me.

Jill: Fast forward to the end of the school day, the last period, we did that restorative circle with him. He did a 360. He demonstrated that he could and he knew he needed to self regulate. I see that kid in the hallway. This is like two years ago. He's like, hi, Jill! (chuckle) Yeah, he hasn't been suspended since. He got suspended maybe one or two more times that school year.

Jill: Hasn't been suspended since.

Mike: You know, I think that's an interesting and an important component, isn't it? The circle. It's important to have your peers involved. And not just hop down because then it feels like it's something that's being done to you.

Jill: Oh yeah. No, that's a very old principle of restorative justice.

Jill: It's not, not doing something to someone, not doing something for one, someone, someone not neglecting them. But how do we work together? How do we do it with one another? And yeah, you know, that circle was about how do we support you to be your best in school.

Mike: You spoke at where I spoke at the beginning in your biography about your passion for ending racism. Open ended question, where do you think we are as a culture with that?

Mike: And how do we get to a better place?

Jill: (chuckle) Wow. So I often say that the United States is a country that was born on genocide and slavery. And until we really face that, like until we embrace, that's where we come from as a society. I don't think we're going to advance. We need to be able to see the humanity in everyone and not put ourselves above others.

Jill: And if you look at what we do around the world, we can justify anything for our own ends, our folk defense. The world is not ours. The world's resources are not ours. We can't expect any society who had, you know, millions of people robbed from their society and then just left and, and then our people and resources robbed.

Jill: And then you're just going to be okay. We're responsible for that.

Mike: We seem to be moving in the opposite direction.

Jill: Yeah, yeah. For that I say, you know, it's the relationships again. We have to build those relationships. We have to work, you know, as much as we can to help, especially, you know, people from European ancestry who are all, you know, their ancestors all immigrated here.

Jill: It wasn't like we were born here either. We need to work on stepping out of our privileged shoes and understand that we don't have any more rights than anybody else. And we need to make sure that we're all treated with equity.

Mike: One of my daughter's friends is she got to know her when she came to the United States as an exchange student from Germany, and shamedly, she spoke better English than I do, but brilliant young woman.

Mike: She was stunned. They study in Germany, she said, the Holocaust. They take responsibility. So it doesn't happen again. And she was stunned at what we do with our history.

Jill: Yeah. I mean, if you follow international news, there's been demonstrations, I think the last three weekends, tens of thousands of people in Germany demonstrating against the far right wing, which is gaining political traction right now.

Jill: Yeah, no, we have a lot of work to do. A lot of history to try to correct and we're much better at repeating than correcting, unfortunately.

Mike: Well, speaking of that a little bit, you also speak a lot about women's empowerment. Why is that so important?

Jill: We're half the world's population.

Mike: A little more than that, aren't you? (laugh)

Jill: (laugh) Maybe, but anyway, if you, if you want to relegate, you know, half of your society to being, you know, confined into a certain role, that's half of your society that can't blossom and use their potential and use their skills and use their energy. for helping build that society.

Jill: So if you want to constrain that much of your society, what does that say about you? You're not really embracing everybody.

Mike: You know, one of the other reasons and the reason I contacted you to begin with was you and I share a common friend and mentor that a lot of the people listening won't know until I mention his name and they'll look him up.

Mike: But our friend recently passed, Dr. Ian Harris, and you were the very first, if I'm remembering this right, peace education student in his program of peace studies at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. Is that right?

Jill: I'm the first graduate, Peace Studies graduate, from UWM, yeah.

Mike: Well, and you spent a lot of time with him, and I spent less, but an influential amount of time with him.

Mike: What is the legacy of people like Dr. Harris?

Jill: I mean, yeah, I, I want to tell you a story. I did some work in Nepal with I have a friend and colleague there who runs a periodically Peace camp for, for girls, Asian girls, it's called the girl child peace camp. And it, it is, it's lifting up girls to be stronger as they grow into womanhood.

Jill: And one year there was a peace studies conference following the peace camp. And so I went to the peace conference as well and was talking about peace education and mentioned Ian Harris. And half the people there knew him, knew his work. Not knew him personally, but knew his work. So you know, if you dedicate yourself to something and really, you know, do your best to advance that, and I'd say something good I guess you get known if you do bad things too, but yeah, you can touch people all over the world.

Jill: So I was a lost child when I was at UWM (chuckle) very unlike who I am now. And I took Ian's first peace education course, and it just opened my eyes to a world that I didn't know. And Ian was very supportive and encouraging, and, you know, he helped me create my, the Peace Studies degree.

Jill: And, just all the all along the way was very supportive of me. He's the only friend, non relative, of all the people I know who came to visit, and actually not all the people I know, but of the people in the U. S. that I know who came to visit us in Timor Leste. And I was at his bedside a week before he died.

Mike: Mmm, I didn't know that.

Jill: Yeah. He was not just my mentor, but he became a dear, dear friend.

Mike: Well, he's one of those, and everybody knows somebody like this, and we're fortunate to know people like this, and I can count on one hand. I mean, people who don't just talk it, they live it. Every, so much so that the first time you meet somebody like that, you do a double take.

Mike: Right? Because it's like, is this genuine? This is so, I hope it's genuine, right? Awesome guy. Well, and maybe I just answered my own question, last question, but I'll give you a little walk off. Given everything you've seen and how you're working in the middle of struggles how do you maintain your sense of optimism?

Jill: (chuckle) I'm one of the people who really suffered from the pandemic. I live in New York, so we were very hard hit by the pandemic. And I've been struggling. I still don't feel like I'm totally back, but I say I'm an optimistic person. So I just get up every day and try again. That's what that's how.

Mike: And then you look back and you have 35 years of, Oh my gosh, how nice.

Jill: Yeah. I mean, every day as a gift, let's use it for the best things that we can create.

Mike: That's great.

Mike: Jill, I can't tell you how much I have appreciated you taking a half an hour out of your incredibly busy life and spending it with us today.

Mike: And you all know, if you listened to this once, you probably listened to it more than that. You know that there's links to both the Restorative Justice Initiative and Jill's contact information at the bottom of this website. We invite you all to listen in next time, and until next time, stay safe and work for peace.