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