From Reform to Reimagining: Lessons and Reflections on the Journey to Transformation
I’ve had the privilege of leading EJUSA through two major transitions – a spinoff from our parent organization to become an independent organization in 2008 and a 10-year process to remake our mission and vision from reforming the justice system to building a new one.
Along the way we have:
- achieved groundbreaking victories state by state that ended the death penalty;
- expanded violence prevention and access to healing;
- built national coalitions of survivors, Latinx advocates, conservatives, and evangelicals;
- developed a groundbreaking program to heal the trauma caused by over-policing in communities of color;
- trained and supported hundreds of organizers; and
- developed an affirmative, holistic vision for addressing violence without prisons and police.
As I get ready to pass the baton to our next Executive Director, I’ve looked back at some of the things I’ve learned in this messy business of making change and fighting for justice. Here are a few of them.
- We have to focus more on what we’re building than on what we’re taking away
People don’t like to give things up – even things we don’t like very much. Losing things provokes anxiety and defensiveness. We may hold on or try to recreate the thing we gave up with something only nominally different. (Some of us spend years in therapy learning that we’ve done this.)
Imagine taking a toy away from a child – not fun. But give the child a toy they like better, and the old toy quickly becomes obsolete.
That is our job as changemakers. To dream into being the new and better thing. To paint the picture, build the proof of concept, and let the world see, touch, and experience that there is something so much better.
Yet some movements spend enormous amounts of time and energy focusing on what we don’t want – the things we want to take away – and not nearly as much time and energy advocating for what we want in their place.
I spent more than 10 years redesigning EJUSA’s mission, vision, and scope with this in mind, shifting from a criminal legal reform organization to a truly transformational justice organization. We are building affirmative solutions to violence that create safe, thriving, equitable communities, and we have never looked back. The shift has deepened our racial equity practices, enlivened our supporters, expanded and diversified our staff and partnerships, and aligned our values with our strategy.
Now we don’t just work to make things a little less terrible. We get to imagine something really great – and make it a reality.
- Reforms often prop up the systems we’re trying to change
This is true across issues, and it’s clear in criminal justice reform. The justice system, which is really a legal system, can be boiled down to basically one question: what do we do to a person who caused harm? Should we punish them a little or a lot?
Lost in that narrow focus are the questions vital to actual justice: What caused this harm? How could it have been prevented? How can it be repaired? What does the survivor need to heal? To feel safe? What does the community need to heal? To feel safe? How do we support the person who harmed to take responsibility for what they did? To make things right? To heal so the harm isn’t repeated? How do we do all of this equitably, so that the burden of harm stops falling on Black and Brown people?
This is a fundamental paradigm shift, from the idea that justice is punishment to the idea that justice is the presence – for everyone – of safety, healing, and accountability that repairs.
But a lot of justice reform efforts replicate the old paradigm. They too, focus on what should be done to the person who caused harm (arguing for less or no punishment). They don’t challenge the unspoken premise that justice is a legal process in which we determine whether someone did it and how they should pay. A focus on changing one sentence obscures the depth of racism and harm embedded in the entire enterprise.
This has even been true for EJUSA when we work on reforms like ending the death penalty. Don’t get me wrong – reforms are important. Harm is happening right now and we should stop the bleeding. Some of my proudest moments of the last 20 years come from leading successful campaigns to end the death penalty in the years before anyone thought it was possible. This remains vitally important work and EJUSA will continue to do it.
But how we do it matters. Too many reform efforts make future change harder. I remember as a young organizer learning the tried and true basics of Strategy 101: take the issue you want to change, slice off a piece that seems winnable, and develop a persuasive campaign around that piece. (And a “persuasive” campaign usually means persuasive to white people.)
That strategy means that campaigns hold out their slice as uniquely wrong – an exception – which implies that the rest of the system is ok. This is true when we say that death is different, that young people are different, that drug crimes are different. The death penalty, the juvenile justice system, and harsh penalties for drug crimes aren’t different at all. They are emblematic, not exceptional. Each of these policies is a window into just how harmful the rest of the system is. We need care not to lean on arguments that say otherwise.
It’s harder to change a paradigm than a policy. Let’s do both.
- The world we want is already here
Imagining something new is so much harder than opposing what’s wrong. The good news is that we don’t need to conjure a transformed justice system from scratch. People have been finding ways to keep each other safe and heal each other for centuries.
Many of these strategies were built by Black and Brown people over generations with little funding or recognition, because system harm and neglect gave them no choice but to figure out better alternatives.
Formerly incarcerated people have been at the vanguard of designing and implementing programs to mediate disputes and de-escalate conflicts. These community-based violence intervention programs have seen reductions in violence anywhere from 30-70% in neighborhoods where they are adequately resourced.
Restorative practices have a centuries-long tradition in indigenous communities. Research has found that crime survivors who participate in restorative justice gain much greater satisfaction than what comes from the punitive legal process. And people who committed harm are much less likely to do it again when they go through a restorative justice process.
Black women have founded hundreds of local healing and anti-violence organizations. Many of these services are the only source of trauma care and grief support available in their neighborhoods.
We have far more understanding of trauma today than we did even a few decades ago. We now understand how deeply trauma can affect every aspect of people’s lives – leading to health conditions, depression, unemployment, difficulty in school, difficulty forming healthy relationships, and in some cases, leading to future violence. And we know that trauma can be passed down through generations, creating ongoing challenges for entire communities that have experienced genocide, slavery, or other forms of violence and oppression.
Some of the simplest ideas are often the most profound. Healing trauma can reduce violence, break intergenerational cycles of violence, and reduce barriers to equity. And we know how to do it.
None of these strategies has the funding, visibility, or cultural prominence to compete with policing and incarceration – yet. Our punitive system devours our tax dollars, dominates our imagination, and undermines the effectiveness of community-based solutions.
But the solutions are here. We need to make them the norm.
- Wherever you see a binary, there’s probably a narrative that needs shifting
I recently read an article where the author was lamenting that last summer’s racial justice uprisings have led to no transformative change. Police are still killing Black people (true), and police departments remain largely intact (true), he wrote, so the hope of paradigm-shifting change has fallen flat.
Change is slow and often invisible up until the end, so it didn’t surprise me that this author didn’t see the any. But I’ve seen dramatic shifts since last summer – including new investments in non-police violence prevention strategies in cities like Newark and Baton Rouge and billions of federal dollars made available to scale community-based safety strategies for the first time. These strategies are the new paradigm in action – the solutions that we’re imagining, building, and scaling on the way to a new vision of justice (see #1).
It occurred to me as I read this article that the author was stuck in a binary – either everything has changed, or nothing has.
Binaries define our justice system. Good guys and bad guys (hurt people hurt people – more on that in a second). Winning and losing (as though justice is a zero-sum game). Victims and offenders (even though so many people experience both sides). A new paradigm asks that we see through these false dichotomies and look with new eyes. This is justice reimagined.
And the building blocks to a new, reimagined justice system, won’t be readily apparent to most folks until we’re almost there. But people need to know about these solutions, so they know how to imagine them in their own community, see them working, and ask for more.
“Narrative shifting” has become a hot term inside the nonprofit sector, but any one of us can do it. Every one of us can paint the picture for our family, friends, and neighbors – the picture of what’s possible, what’s out there, what justice can be beyond retribution that inflicts more suffering and hurts us all.
This is the work of EJUSA, and you can join us right now. Because every one of us has the power to shift a narrative, just by seeing through the false binaries all around us and telling a different story.
- Do your healing work
This last lesson is a little more personal than the rest, but I believe it makes all the rest of this work possible. If we walk around with our own unhealed traumas, we will hurt people – which undermines the very work we’re trying to do.
EJUSA’s work really opened my eyes to the reality of the pain all around us. We all experience pain. And our society doesn’t have a strong culture or support systems for healing and processing pain, so many of push it down and move on. But that pain builds up inside of us.
This is true for pain of every magnitude – violence, child abuse, racism, chronic poverty, a fraught relationship with a parent, a friend who puts you down, a boss who disregards your ideas. It all hurts.
Many of the survivors of violence that I work with use the phrase “hurt people hurt people,” and I have found that to be profoundly true. So many people who commit violence have previously experienced violence or some other kind of trauma. But this isn’t just about significant harm like violence.
In my own life, every time I snap or lash out at someone, I can always trace my behavior back to something that hurt me first, fears that stem from my past. My unhealed parts make it harder for me to hear criticism, harder for me to offer grace when someone makes a mistake, harder for me to slow down and be present for someone else’s struggles.
The vast majority of us go through our days giving and receiving these kinds of emotional paper cuts all day long. We are an unhealed nation full of unhealed people who just keep hurting each other in ways big and small.
And if our unhealed parts are the parts that hurt other people, what happens when we have power or privilege? As the Executive Director of EJUSA, I’ve learned that my impatience or defensiveness on a rough day has a big impact on the staff. And as the white Executive Director of EJUSA, my impatience or defensiveness can be experienced as racism by staff of color, who already have a lifetime of past experiences being discounted or rebuffed by white people in power. When white people are in pain, people of color bear more of the brunt of it.
I’ve come to believe that white people healing our own trauma and pain is an essential part of our work to be effective allies and co-conspirators in the fight for racial justice. We all deserve to heal because we’re human. But we also have a responsibility to heal, so that we can be our best selves in the urgent work of dismantling the systems of oppression that benefit us. My journey to healing allows me to access humility, acknowledge my blind spots, receive feedback without defensiveness, and provide support instead of needing it – all core ingredients for white people working for racial justice.
Healing is resistance to a culture that says you’re not enough. It creates access to the joy, confidence, and freedom that everyone deserves. It allows us to survive in a painful world. And it gives us the strength we need to keep fighting for a better one.
