Locked Down, Locked Out (21 page)

K: So that’s something you could admit to him. That you called him an A.

J: If I called him an A that’s something I could admit. I could say, yeah, I called you an A! I remember! I said “stupid A.” He threatened to throw another milk. I said, yeah, I want you to, you stupid A. I’ll own up to it.

K: OK. I think that’s one of the main things we want to do. To get to the point that you can own up to what you did. And we want to get you guys to the point where you’re OK, and you can look at each other and say, hey, this is just about a little milk, right?

J: Don’t cry over spilled milk!
[Laughter]

K: Exactly! I’m so glad you said that. So it seems like you’re at the point you could say to him, you know, I was upset when you threatened to throw another one ...

J: Yeah.

K: So I’m gonna bring him in now. And so it’s up to you whether you want to apologize or not.

J: Well, I apologize if I’m wrong. I want him to apologize for the milk, then I could apologize for calling him the name and the following. Hell, I could apologize first.

K: You can apologize? That’s great!

J: Yeah, I can apologize.

K: All right, I’m going to talk quickly with Dan, and then I’ll bring him in. I’ll be right back.

[Kenny goes away and returns with Dan and James, a student teacher who saw the fight.]

K: All right, so things seemed to get out of control after something happened that seems relatively small, right? So we’re coming together here to make sure we’re done crying over spilled milk. Johnny?

J: Dan, I apologize for calling you that name. That was disrespectful towards you so I apologize for that.

[James gives Johnny a high five.]

K: I sense a lot of emotion right there!
[Laughter]

James: That was a good move, man! That’s very grown man!

K: Dan?

D: OK.

K: OK?

D: Me too.
[He pauses, with a frown.]
But why did he come to my class? What was that?

[The bell rings; the school day has ended.]

K: Dan, would you feel better if you had a little more time to think about this? We can pick back up tomorrow morning?

D: Yeah. I would.

K: All right! Let’s pick this back up tomorrow. Think about all this tonight—and I’ll see you at 8 a.m. tomorrow, here.

The kids wave vigorous goodbyes to Kenny, me, James, Ilana. The business of the peace room doesn’t conclude when the bell rings. Dan’s lingering concerns must be addressed; they will be prioritized over homeroom. If necessary, Umoja staff are available to meet with him alone—he can just stop by. That’s why the room needs to be here every day, living inside the body of the school.

For most programs like Umoja, data on “success” is slim. How do you measure changed lifestyles, emotional transformations, strengthened friendships and family bonds? How do you measure the harm that
didn’t
happen, that was prevented by circles like Johnny and Dan’s? But a report from International Institute for Restorative Practices finds that six schools assessed throughout the country saw significant decreases in “disruptive behavior,” reoffending, suspensions, expulsions, and violence after implementing restorative justice programs.
⁸
And in the Denver Public School system, implementing these types of practices yielded a 40
percent reduction in out-of-school suspensions and 68 percent reduction in the number of police tickets given in schools.
⁹

For these programs to stand a chance, though, they need to be taken seriously and valued by everyone involved, including school administrators and other authority figures. They need to be
funded
and integrated into the school environment. Plus, as many schools become increasingly militarized, with metal detectors, police, and security patrolling the hallways, the presence of a peace room or even an infusion of community justice into the curriculum can’t reverse that adversarial dynamic. One room devoted to peace can’t topple a dominant culture based on control and punishment.

“There’s a long way to go,” Ilana tells me, walking me to the door as the kids file out toward the bus. “Ideally, there would be RJ and TJ people in every school—begin making it systematic.... A ‘safe space’ that’s not just about a particular situation.”

“Is Jail a Safe Space?”

“Safe space,” a term that emerged out of the gay liberation and women’s liberation movements,
¹⁰
is often used by groups practicing restorative and transformative justice. It’s also a phrase that’s sometimes been used to justify increased policing and state control to protect feelings of “safety” for certain (usually white, middle-class) groups over others.
¹¹
The space envisioned by Umoja, though, is not a place you lock yourself inside. Rather, the kind of space that Ilana’s talking about is open—it rejects isolation. It’s a place, physical or not, where you can interact with your world and other humans freely, openly, and justly.

Susan Garcia Treischmann, the proprietor of Curt’s Café, a community restaurant/training and support program for “at-risk” youth in Evanston, Illinois, talks about “safety” not as a cut-and-dried
objective reality that “nothing bad will ever happen to you,” but as a feeling of freedom, understanding, and community engagement. She tells me that safety is partly about being cared for—and it’s important for
everyone
to feel it, if it’s going to work. In speaking of youth getting out of prison, Susan says, “You want to make the community feel safe and make the kid feel safe.... Oftentimes, what people don’t realize is the offender is just as freaked out.” When “the offender is freaked out,” Susan continues, they’re less likely to attempt to join with the community in positive ways, more likely to feel defensive, suspicious, and angry, and more likely to act on those feelings.

So, how can we, in the words of Gloria of Manley High School, “safen things”? How can we create an environment that doesn’t just respond effectively to harm once it happens, but also fosters non-harm?

This is one of the largest questions in the universe, and one with which humans have been grappling since well before the rise of the prison-industrial complex. Much, obviously, has already been written about it. (Please check out the Resources section of this book for some great work by folks who have confronted the topic intensively!) However, I want to look at a few cases in which community is nurtured in creative ways, paving the road toward lasting, widespread, collective safety.

One such flashpoint is another incarnation of Umoja: Chicago’s summer Community Builders (CB) program, which trains high school students—mostly poor students of color from neighborhoods with high rates of violence—in community-based justice principles and circle-keeping. In the summer of 2013, their focus is the concept of “safe space” itself: What defines it? What happens in its absence? How can we create it in our environments? At the end of the program, the kids go out into the community,
initiating circles with different groups like park district summer camps and unemployment programs.

In the middle of summer in 2013, I walk over to the school where the CB kids will facilitate circles with groups of fifth-graders attending a summer program that meets at an elementary school in Evanston. The program aims to serve “young people whose needs are not being met by more traditional agencies”—mostly youth of color who come from impoverished backgrounds.

Shortly before the CB leaders, I enter the room where the first circle will convene. It’s rowdy. One fifth-grader is industriously scooping dirt out of a flowerpot and depositing it on a table. Another kicks over a chair, screeching woefully, “She called me a
name
!” As they scramble into their seats, the circle keepers, four CB teens, write the “norms” (ground rules) in large letters on butcher paper taped to the wall. They explain that after someone in the circle has spoken, everyone will say “Ashe”—a Yoruba word often translated as “so be it,” or “so it is.” After a quick chat about the optimal definition of a “safe space”—open, positive, communicative, connection-driven, welcoming, no harm—the question is broached, “What’s your safe space?” One of the teens discloses his (his basement, where he watches movies with his brothers and sister), and the kids simmer down, thinking. Ordinarily in a circle, the talking piece would be passed clockwise from person to person, but this circle’s a little free-form. When a small child near the window frantically waves his hand, the talking piece, a stuffed dolphin, is tossed his way and he catches it. He says, “My safe space is my class at school, because I know everyone there!”

“Ashe!” we all sing.

“Getting to know your community,” softly intones one of the teens, a tall girl of about seventeen. “That’s a way of building safe space. Actually, we’re doing it right now.”

“Quiet places?” a pigtailed fifth-grader asks.

“Or places that are loud, because then you know there are other people around?” someone else wonders aloud, without requesting the talking piece.

Both receive nods and scattered “ashe”s; “safety” is subjective and situation dependent. Sometimes loud works, sometimes quiet works, sometimes it doesn’t matter as long as you trust the people around you.

“OK!” says a tiny, smiling girl with huge glasses and a thin braid running down her back. “Then mine is my block, because the neighbors are friends, even the dogs and cats—if they come up to me, I’m not scared because I know them.”

The frantic hand-waver chimes back in: “My block feels safe because I know a lot of the people—but the next block doesn’t. The cops are always there.”

I think of something Mariame Kaba said when I asked about fostering collective safety: “Get to know your neighbors—that’s an investment.” I think, also, of Todd Clear’s research on how arrest and incarceration rips neighborhoods apart and, conversely, how community and connection-building can work to stem violence.

Then the smiling girl throws the talking piece to a short kid who cranes his head up to the circle-keeper standing next to him. He asks, “Is
jail
a safe space?”

Huh. Kayla has told me that for years she’s seen prison as her only community, a place where she’s formed bonds independent from heroin, despite institutional violence and oppression. I recall that fragment of a letter she sent me last summer: “Some of my best memories stem from inside these walls.” And Jake Donaghy once wrote me about a friend of his who came back to prison on purpose: “‘Freedom’ was overwhelming and often
dangerous. So she came back to what was familiar. What was predictable. Safe.”

The Community Builder teens dart anxious glances at each other across the circle. Some of them have already been to juvenile detention. One offers, “No?” just as another says, “That’s complicated, because you’re not gonna get shot there. But we could talk about it later.”

The first says, “Let’s just say—you don’t wanna go there. I know.”

You’re not gonna get shot there
. The words hang in the air. In neighborhoods wracked by surveillance, racist policing, poverty, homelessness, and corresponding violence, is jail society’s best offer of a means to “safety”—not just for the “public” outside, but for the people who are fed, clothed, housed, and not shot inside its walls, who are nevertheless subject to violence in countless other forms? In a prison nation, where “safety” so often means confinement of one kind or another, is the word even a useful focal point for building community?

A swarm of emotions engulfs the room, and no one says a thing for over a minute. Finally, a serious-looking, soft-spoken fifth-grade boy raises his hand for the talking piece. He catches it and looks around the circle, catching each person’s eyes in turn. “I’m safe in my dreams,” he says, “because there, you can’t get hurt, even if you fall off a building or if somebody shoots you. And you don’t have to be in jail. Just in your head. That’s all.”

The circle-keeper then calls on a tall, slumping girl, who shakes her head; she hasn’t raised her hand. But then she shrugs and reaches for the talking piece. “He’s right,” she says. “I’m safe in my mind, because no one can take it away.”

“Ashe,” a small voice rises from a corner of the circle. “But I have a space to say, too.”

It’s a fifth-grade girl with huge eyes and a bow that might be bigger than her face perched atop her head. Someone rolls her the talking piece.

“I feel safe when I’m singing or dancing,” she says. “When my whole family gets all together, and we can be singing and dancing, and that’s something, you know? That’s something safe.”

As the Community Builders circle nears its end, the teens strike up a concluding activity that invokes that spirit of celebration: One of the teens sets a beat, tapping his foot and clapping, and the others join in, creating different beats with their hands and feet. Soon the kids join in, too. One kid pops in with a little tentative freestyling, which is met with lots of encouragement. As the beat dies down, the tiny smiling girl who mentioned her neighborhood dogs and cats gives the teen seated next to her a spontaneous hug.

The circle wraps up with a few big questions: “Was this circle ‘safe’?” “How did that happen?” “What did we do to make it safe?” “How can you make spaces like this in your communities?”

The ideas these fifth-graders have brought forward represent a more sophisticated framework than many well-versed proponents of restorative justice proffer. The kids aren’t talking about a fixed idea of “restoration.” They’re bringing up important contradictions and exposing assumptions about the concept of “safety,” its uses and misuses. They are inquiring toward freedom, issuing, as Beth Richie put it, “a call to develop something new.”

Of course, there needs to be relentless, ongoing discussion and action for a mentality of collective safety to develop—a safety that is for everybody. As Ilana says, it has got to be an organic part of the community. In fact, there needs to be a near-constant process of sticking-with-it if a movement for healing is going to mount a challenge to the existing criminal punishment template. But as
that prescient seventeen-year-old noted, coming together—talking with each other—isn’t just a precursor; it’s an action, in and of itself.