Guest: Derek Miodownik
Host: Robert Brenneman
Date: 11/5/26
Duration: 46:30
Rob: Alright. Here we go. About 15 years ago, I was living in Vermont teaching at St. Michael’s College, and I wanted someone with experience in restorative justice to come speak to my Crime and Deviance class. Somebody said to me, “You gotta talk to a guy named Derek Miodownik,” to which I, of course, responded, “How do you spell that?”
But we had the first of several really meaningful conversations. I remember being at a little place down in Winooski, and in which you asked me some really good questions. So I feel like it’s payback. It’s time for me to ask you, hopefully, some good questions. But most of our listeners are meeting you for the first time, so before we go any deeper, take a minute or two to introduce yourself.
Who are you? Where do you live? What do you do?
Derek: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for the opportunity, uh, and/or the payback, however we’d like to. And so yeah, my name’s Derek Miodownik. I use he/him pronouns. I have a role within the state of Vermont’s Department of Corrections as the Community and Restorative Justice Executive.
I’m a father of four and live in Richmond, Vermont, town of 4,000 people, beautiful little town, where some of these abstract ideas that we’ll get into, they, they play out. They play out every day. And so that’s me.
Rob: You oversee people doing restorative justice across the state. Is that right?
Derek: That’s right. My main hat is more of an administrator that looks at how programs perform.
I’m accountable to the Vermont taxpaying public about decisions that the Department of Corrections makes about how we’re using our money. And then I also get the pleasure to be an adjunct professor at St. Michael’s College, which I’ve maintained now for 11 years or, or so.
Rob: Wow.
Derek: And that’s a nice space to get into what I like to think of as the praxis, the intersection between theory and practice, and that messy and juicy place where ideas and on-the-ground reality kinda have to figure out how to get along, hopefully.
Rob: Speaking of messiness, that I didn’t know, that we never talked about before, and I’m a little surprised because we both share it in common, is that you spent a lot of time in theater as a young person. Tell me about that. What drew you to theater?
Derek: Yeah. I just instinctively grew up with an interest in theater and performing.
I was fortunate enough to grow up proximate to New York City on Long Island, and had a family that had the interest and the resources to expose me to theater, so we would go into New York City and see shows and not only Broadway shows, but downtown small theater productions. So I was active in theater in high school.
I stayed somewhat active a little bit in college, but then I found myself spending a year in Colorado. They had an improv theater group there called the Aspen Ridiculous Theater Company.
Rob: Oh, that’s great.
Derek: Yeah, and w- I was part of it. One rule of improv is, you know, you need to accept what’s sort of being offered and-
Rob: Right, right
Derek: Then work with it, right? A- and transform it and offer something back. Couple years after having spent a year doing improv, I found myself applying for a job helping to set up peer mediation programs in public middle schools throughout the five boroughs of New York City. And I didn’t have a lot of formal training at that point in conflict resolution, in mediation, alternative dispute resolution, but I made some connections that were instinctive during the interview and found myself saying like, “Look, I kind of think on some level, the job of, of mediator is to try to create the conditions that mirror what makes improv work.”
And that became that magical inflection point for me that tied all my theater training together with the transformational ingredients of conflict resolution, because they require presence, they require a willingness to believe, and a receptivity. And, you know, I kinda just kept cooking with that.
Rob: One of the important early stops in your career was this place called Red Hook, Brooklyn, which probably not that many listeners are familiar with. So, tell us about Red Hook, and what it was like when you were in your 20s not so long ago.
How did it feel? What, what was happening, and how did you get drawn into that?
Derek: Yeah. Uh, you’re taking me back to a time in my late 20s when I was hired by an organization which is now called the Center for Justice Innovation in Red Hook, Brooklyn. I didn’t grow up there, but I can tell you that in part of the history of New York City and how it got developed and how the infrastructure and the city planning, it really cut off Red Hook geographically.
A big highway sort of like intersected the actual community of Red Hook, called the Br- Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and the other neighborhoods in Brooklyn, including the one that I happened to live in called Carroll Gardens. So it was one of these situations, and maybe your listeners can relate to this in their own context, in which sometimes you can be less than a mile away from something, especially in urban settings, and it feels like different worlds.
And so, in its isolation, became predominantly utilized by the city of New York for public housing. I think maybe upwards of 75% of Red Hook residents, at the time that I was working there in the late ’90s, lived in New York City public housing, and that came with a lot of its own kind of challenges and density.
And then a seminal event in the life of Red Hook was that the principal of the middle school, um, maybe Robert Daley Middle School, named after the former principal, he left the building one day in search of a student who had left and was tragically killed in gun crossfire by rival gangs. Uh, my, the youth court office that I operated, my office was in a, uh, a ground floor apartment in one of the public housing buildings at that time had been overrun with narcotic dealing.
And just give you a poignant image of like, I, I, I do remember once flushing the toilet in the bathroom of my office and a hypodermic needle came up through it, you know, through the plumbing. And so this was a community that was really experiencing marginalization, as a whole community, but then individual marginalization and heavily sort of surveilled.
It was a tough place. So many of the folks who lived in Red Hook were somewhat involved with adult criminal court, family court, housing court. Could there be an approach to justice or approaches, could begin to generate a different type of conversation, as opposed to just be kind of consumers of court services?
And so the Red Hook Youth Court was one of those initial expressions of what has become now the Red Hook Community Justice Center.
Rob: So some of our listeners might be familiar with Teen Court, but many of them probably don’t. So, so talk about Youth Court at the Center for Innovation. Like, take us into a youth court. What’s happening? Who’s there?
Derek: Basically the idea, like, it wasn’t intended to prosecute youth, but it did play to the drama and the blocking of what w- what we, collectively in the United States, know to be, like, our court process, right?
the basic idea was that when a young person had police contact for a variety of low-level offenses that, frankly, the system at the time wasn’t about to devote the resources
Rob: So if I bring a knife to school, is that gonna land me in teen court?
Derek: Exactly. Knife, knife to school, tagging up, in other places and cultures referred to as, like, cautioning by a police officer and say, “Hey, Rob, we’d like to give you an opportunity, give you the opportunity to really kind of repair that harm, address it, and become an asset, become an asset in your community.”
We would ask, speak to the parents, make sure that they understood that this is voluntary, If the young person was willing to come down, we’d conduct an intake and a youth court member would be responsible,It’s actually, we called it a youth advocate.
So the youth advocate’s role was to elicit from the young person some more information about who they are, what are their assets?. And conversely, there was a community advocate, another young person, and their role within the youth court was to advocate for the community needing to be, you know, sort of safe and articulate how these behaviors detract. And so then you have a young person experiencing two of their peers. Both sort of holding them up, but also holding up the rights of the community in a really powerful and legitimate way that wasn’t performative.
I mean, there was a performative aspect in that, again, it had this court blocking. And then ultimately, an active jury pool of other youth court members, who would be able to ask questions directly of the young person. And so it was interactive, and then both of those sorta advocates, if you will, would make some, like, closing statements and make some recommendations.
Two cool things I’ll point out is that, one, over 90% of the young people were successful in completing whatever activities. Now, other really cool thing was that on top of the intervention with the young person who did the harm, the youth court members, who got a lot of training that I was able to develop, this became like a youth development program.
The legal community in Brooklyn started opening their doors for internships for the youth court members, and some of the young people who went through it had enough of a positive experience that they actually expressed desire to become part of it. So the youth court became an engine for generating, I would say, professional capital for young people in a marginalized community, and it became a way for young people whose door into it was through, you know, somewhat harming that community to feel sufficiently motivated to now be a standard-bearer for it.
I think a piece that I took away and have continued to take away in my work i- in restorative justice is that if we believe there’s a, a, a sort of a natural impetus to restore and repair a- at, at the deepest level of our, like, consciousness, if and when we can create the conditions that I would say unearth that instinctive desire, that affiliate desire to, to repair, the most powerful thing is to provide actionable opportunities in that moment, that there is a power in the doing
Rob: So, a lot of people, though, see what you saw in Red Hook in the ’90s and become cynical or walk away or, or think about grand projects or something, but you turned what you were experiencing into your life’s work. So i- there’s a question you love to ask your students: Where does justice come from? And, and I wanna turn to that question and ask you for yourself, where does your sense of justice come from?
W- what did it grow out of?
Derek: I appreciate that. Such an evolving and important question. A couple things about me. So my dad was born in Germany in 1935 to a Jewish merchant family that owned a string of, uh, shoe stores. For your listeners, tease out some of the implications of being born in 1935 in Germany and Jewish.
The-
Rob: There were safer places to be born Jewish than Germany in 1935.
Derek: Abso- absolutely. My father, and his father, and his mother, and his sister were all fortunate, through a mixture of resources and courage, to leave Germany. My father lived, had to live in Uruguay for a couple years, um, between the ages six and nine, and then he ultimately, with his parents and sister, emigrated to New York City.
And so that’s a big part of my family history, for sure, and I, I’ve always been somewhat fascinated with how do these things happen? How do everyday citizens and neighbors become socialized to rendered, vulnerable, you know, whatever combination of things allows for those types of atrocities to happen has always fascinated me.
So I think it led me on the path of like, like, yeah, where, where do we derive these things? And, and for me, I think the answer has been in every little interaction, every moment, every passerby exchange, how we all carry ourselves with some sense of obligation to one another and to the broader space.
So somewhere in all of that became, for me, I think a growing belief: the atomic level of justice is in, you know, human relationships. Like, atrocities of that level can’t happen without a multitude of tiny little microaggressions, might not even raise to the level of most of our consciousness, and yet they’re being massaged, right?
If there’s a defense against an atrocity, I think it doesn’t begin at stage two or four or when the Nazi power, party comes into power. It places the notion of justice squarely within each of us to be vigilant and to be aware and to be cognizant that it does not reside inherently in institutions, and that to me is fascinating ’cause there’s so much opportunity, there.
Rob: I mean, it, it’s almost like it starts in those places where I don’t see you as a person to whom I have any obligation whatsoever. And that is the danger and the sinister aspect of othering on a grand scale
So you work for the Vermont Department of Corrections because Vermont is a state that it’s unique in that restorative justice is written right into state policy, funded by the state, and embedded into communities. And a lot of listeners probably didn’t know that there are states where this happens at a state level through, to some degree, the Department of Corrections.
So tell me the story of how this happened?
Derek: I think it’s fair to say that all states in the United States have a Department of Corrections. In many states, there’s actually two different departments, one that just runs correctional facilities and another that supervises people in the community. In Vermont, that’s rolled up into, to one department.
In the mid to late ’80s, there was a whole slew of policies that really tried to use the court as, you know, the sharp kinda tip of the spear for trying to prevent the infiltration of narcotics into our communities by issuing really, you know, long sentences and so on. But… And these things have long tails, right?
We don’t often know the impact of shifts in policy until 15 or 20 years later, and so now it’s years after. And so it, my understanding, it was very clear that the public sentiment around the criminal justice system in Vermont, which includes but is not limited to the Department of Corrections, we were getting bad marks.
Whatever we’re doing, we’re not seeing people get better, and we’re not feeling better about when people come back from prison, and more and more people are going to prison. And so the Department of Corrections at the time had some really thoughtful leaders, so they hired an outside market research firm.
That research firm, you know, engaged the Vermont Department of Corrections in creating, um, some surveying and more in-depth focus groups. They found themselves realizing, like, we kinda have two main things. We’d make, like, a tank and a bicycle. Like, prison is kind of like the tank. It’s, it’s like, it’s good on a couple things, right?
Like, but it is not nimble, and it’s very expensive. And conversely, a bicycle’s great for getting around to some places, but, like, you can’t really commute to a ton of places in Vermont, you know, year-round on a bicycle. They basically said, like, “Yeah, those are our two main products, probation being like the bicycle, incarceration being the tank, and the public is saying that neither are really giving them what they want.
So why don’t we ask them?” And, and, and that is this restorative notion of involving the people most directly impacted. In sort of professional parlance, that’s now called responsive regulation. It’s taking the principles of restorative inquiry, uh, relational legitimacy like you and I were talking about, make centering them in making regulatory decisions with, you know.
And I think that that’s a great example of, of good governance. And so they did focus groups, and they asked Vermonters across section representational, across a bunch of different demographics. Like, okay, the public definitely wanted dangerous people to be temporarily incapacitated, but they wanted them to be better off for their time incarcerated.
They wanted programming. They didn’t simply just want them sidelined. And another theme was, “We want probation. We want that to have some meaning. We want that to tie back to why that behavior impacted us.” It’s not just Section 4A of the Penal Code 122 that you violated. It’s not abstract. And in a state like Vermont, again, I live in Richmond, 4,000 people, this notion of, like, stone in the pond rippling out, the ripple impact, that’s a beautiful analogy, and I think it only gets us so far in some places because it sort of infers this interconnectedness.
I think one of the great things about Vermont is, like, there is usually only two or three degrees at most where an offense really does connect back to somebody in a local community. And so Verm- the Vermont Department of Corrections was keen enough to say, “All right. What if we centered part of the probation experience around community members?”
And so that gave rise to these what, what were called reparative boards, where one of the conditions of probation, in addition to all the standard ones, there are community members who are gonna wanna, like, sit down and talk with you about it, and that gets very personal and intense. And again, I think, and this is a belief thing, but I hold the belief that when people’s moral dignity is appealed to, they are more likely to respond from that place.
Not always, not easily, lots of stuff gets in the way, but that built this notion of reparative boards or reparative boards that then we kinda continued to build off of here in Vermont.
Rob: You’ve described reparative boards a little bit, and I think some of our listeners probably have a sense of what those might be like.What about COSAs? So w- when I f- when we first met, you were heavily involved in kind of designing these and making sure that they were working and finding people to get involved. Describe a COSA, Circle of Support and Accountability, and what that looks like in Vermont today.
Derek: Yeah, so the reparative board experience really became foundational and led to us asking this question, like, “Okay, what would it look like to apply the notion of direct citizen engagement not just with individuals who objectively are presenting less public safety risk, uh, you know, as, as m- for misdemeanors?
But what would it look like to apply these with folks who’ve committed serious offenses, have been incarcerated, and now are returning back to communities in Vermont under supervision?” You know, that sets up this really interesting dynamic tension. And COSAs became an initial, uh, experiment, a thoughtful experiment in what would it mean to form voluntary kind of micro communities, involving three or so volunteers from a local community with a, a coordinator of that COSA, who would work directly for one of what we call com- the community justice centers, these are state-funded agencies around Vermont that, that operate these restorative programs, with an individual who’s coming back into community a- after a significant period of incarceration? Make a commitment, we landed on a year operationally as the, as the initial construct, and basically essentially have another set of people who are definitely not their probation officer, but kind of like guide rails for someone who is going to probably experience some speed bumps coming back into community, and for whom those bumps, if they disregulate that person enough, could potentially result in a new victim, and that the motto for COSA is, you know, “no, no new victims.”
It’s not an attempt to reconcile that victim. It’s an attempt not make a new victim through providing active support, right? And accountability, within that informal authority. And what often happens in my experience, Rob, is that it’s a bit of like a, a graft, like a social grafting process that is a little artificial at first.
Like imagine, these are kind of my new people. I don’t know if they’re just my friends, but they’re, they’re volunteering. They’re showing up once a week. They’re not here to just pepper me with questions a- about, you know, surveil me some more. But what often happens, and many of our COSAs extend well beyond the one-year mark, is that within a couple months, some authenticity starts developing, and a meaningful set of relationships that all share the same starting goal of public safety become infused with actual quality time spent.
Rob: So tell me about the people in these circles. They’re not social workers. They’re not therapists, no professional training. They’re not getting paid for this. Who is signing up for this, and why?
Derek: The COSA project that initiated out of southeast Ontario, Canada rather, it started with a Mennonite community and individuals convicted for sexual offenses, who were leaving prison without any supervision.
And it was the pastor within the correctional facility up in southeast, Ontario. The juror reached out to the Mennonite pastor in that community, and he basically said, like, “Might you have any folks who are just willing to span this?” I mean, it really is a spanning, a bridging, a grafting. And that, that community, at that time, was able to find some people who basically were like, “He’s gonna go somewhere.
I g- he’s coming here. We can kinda be, take the ostrich approach, right? Head in sand or not my responsibility, and I’ll make sure my door’s locked, or maybe we can lean in.” And I think the why in that, uh, initial one that, that carries through, I think it’s different for every individual, for sure, and people come at it from slightly different angles.
And I think one narrative is like, “Ah, here’s an opportunity to, like, actually do something.” So I think some people are just action-oriented, and, you know, it’s not highly fraught for them. I think there are others, who fundamentally have strong beliefs. Everybody needs the opportunity to not just be the worst thing that they’ve ever done, and the notion of opportunity really is a function of connections, right?
Vermont’s motto is, you know, “freedom and unity.” We kinda need to stick together as Vermonters, but we al- we don’t want too much government in our lives. They are not simply left-leaning liberals who just think, “Hey, look, everybody’s a good person at heart.” You know, so I think there’s, like, a civic faith that runs through a lot of our volunteers, the belief that relationships matter, and that it’s not enough to just rest on the regulatory levers of the state to kind of co-create sustainable communities.
Rob: What are people actually talking about in these meetings?
Derek: Yeah. I mean, usually it has a coordinator, and that’s an important position in our model, who is not a state employee, but works as a, a staff member of a justice center through a DOC grant. They are, they are kind of the liaison between the COSA itself and coordinating each weekly COSA meeting, and then the probation and parole officer.
There’s a no-secrets policy. If a core member discloses a behavior that may be, in fact, in violation on some level of their conditions, that will be shared with the probation and parole officer. They’ll usually convene the meeting. It’s usually people are sitting around a circular table. Sometimes opening prompt, right?
Just go around, “Hey, you know, one good thing that happened this week, summer bucket list item”, you name it. You know, there’ll probably be more attention on the core member on how they’re navigating the terms of supervision, on how if they’re making progress: job search, housing, all of these, you know, hard and critical things.
You know, but later on, it begins to really kind of mirror more sharing, more like, “Hey, what’s going on this week?” They also get the experience of not just being under the lens. It’s, you know, it go… You know, the COSA coordinators are incredibly skilled. They kind of have to code switch. They’re, they’re professionally supervised personal relationships that also still have some boundaries.
Even if somebody goes back to prison who’s in a COSA, it actually doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a failure. It often means that they were indicating signs that, if left unchecked, could likely result in a new victim, but they started doing some behaviors that violated their conditions Uh, in the film, once again, a guy drives out of state and, which he’s not allowed to do, drinks, which he’s not allowed to do, is going to confront the spouse of his sister who he has reason to believe is abusing div- physically abusing his sister.
So he’s feeling the need to protect his sister and, and, uh, confront and probably assault her sister’s husband. He commits several violations, drives without a license, leaves the state, doesn’t ultimately confront this guy, um, puts the brakes on. And in the movie, he ends up going back to prison because those are still not acceptable behaviors for him.
Many, including the COSA folks, would argue, “Okay, he didn’t go and beat the, you know, stuff out of this other guy,” and the earlier version of this same core member most definitely would have. So that’s just another way of, like, how I’d say what goes on in a COSA can show up in a lots of different ways.
It’s pretty fluid. It’s organic And then when there’s real stuff going on that’s acute, the other thing I should mention is that the default structure of a COSA is that built-in meeting. But core members are always available, and then they do activities outside of that too. And because of those people allow folks on supervision to sometimes access places and do things that they wouldn’t be allowed to do by themselves.
You need permission to sometimes go fishing, uh, if you’re on furlough in Vermont. You can get it, if you’re going with your COSA, so you get access to humanizing experiences.
Rob: You’ve said there’s a secret story hiding in this model.
Derek: I feel like COSAs start off from that place of like, here’s the plan and here’s the theory, and often, after a little bit, I feel like the core member, that’s the individual for whom or with whom the COSA is developed.
I think that there’s a like, okay, maybe I’m not, I’m not gonna give all these people my trust right off the bat, but a settling in, a sort of like, okay, wait a minute.
I’m, I’m showing up every week and they, they don’t, they’re not getting on top of me about stuff. They seem authentically engaged and maybe I can drop into like a, a different layer of trust. And then, I think the deeper magic, the secret story starts to get revealed, which is the individuals who volunteer who I think generally are motivated by the ability to keep their communities safer.
Something, I think, starts shifting often and the presence and the relationship of the core member begins to be reciprocally beneficial to them. Not just feels like, oh, I can trust these people, but oh my gosh, like I am actually adding value to their lives.
Then we switch the equation, and we have… We see this in their narratives, where there is an equality, if you will. Yeah, we’ve seen that. The film that we had commissioned, there’s a scene in which the core member is out for breakfast and with her couple COSA member or two, and bumps into someone that she knows and, you know, says, “Oh, hi, here’s my, you know, COSA volunteer, you know, so and so.”
And the COSA volunteer is like, “I, I, I don’t want you to introduce me as that. Like, we’re just friends right now, you know, at this point. We’re just two people having breakfast.” You know, as a sociologist, this speaks, as you know, to, like, labeling theory. Like, I mean, in some ways, it’s like the moment when the labels just dissipate.
And that tells to me, you know, it says we’re onto something good there, right?
Rob: And if I’m a core member and one of the hardest things for me is to admit when I’m, when I might be vulnerable or I have a problem or I am tempted to be doing something I know I shouldn’t, if I’m sitting across from a therapist, I may or may not choose to divulge that. But if I’m sitting across from somebody who just shared something deep and personal with me, now I might feel a little more likely to share something with them because what we have is a two-way street, a relational, a, a back and forth that is more natural.
Derek: Many people might say, “Well, why would we front somebody who’s only had a harmful, extractive effect?” You know, that’s a tough question. I think one of the vexing questions that corrections faces, and beyond corrections, humanity, like how do we motivate and invite people into spaces of true accountability?
I, I think about this question all the time and, you know, nobody has to do a COSA. And one of the critiques of restorative justice sometimes, as you well know, is, well, the data generally keys off participants who, on some level, are more likely to succeed because they’ve already chosen. I, in some space, I do think restorative processes expand our collective capacity to wrestle with the inherent messiness, juiciness if you will, as I said before, of what are like naturally co-occurring truth.
I’m not taking away the fact that people in COSAs have done a lot of harm, but that’s not to say that we can’t make space for what does it look like if we actually invest relational capital, uh, in them. We don’t always have to go left or right at every moment. Sometimes we do, but not always
Rob: You’re Jewish, and I know that tradition means a great deal to you. Um, has your faith tradition or your faith heritage been a support in this work, or has it impacted or intersected in any way?
Derek: You know, I, I think it has in the ways that I touched upon in terms of what sort of animated some of, like, what’s become a career around justice.
That notion of repairing the world. It’s called Tikkun Olam. And that, that always resonated for me. I would tell you that personally, my philosophical or moral or socio-judicial kind of, like, identity development process over the arc of 56 years has been more drawn toward, I’d say, a more secular, like, it doesn’t tie back particularly for me to my sense of being Jewish.
I feel like we can come into humanity through many ways and derive our humanity. COSA volunteers, not that you asked, I know, I’m sure, come from multiple faith backgrounds, but there’s definitely training and boundaries about how that gets expressed. It is not a proselytizing opportunity. You know, whatever, whatever faith is bringing people to the table, it’s offered in the sense of like, we want the community to be safe, and we want you to have a life that is productive and that we believe is a ve- you know, both of those things are possible.
So, like, how can we get to it?
Rob: Restorative justice is about repair, fundamentally, right? And I think you and I both appreciate the work of John Braithwaite, who likes to say, “If crime hurts, justice should heal.” And we’ve been talking about repair, in many ways, with or without the context of a victim facing an offender.
But you and I both know some harms can’t be repaired in a literal sense. That principal in Red Hook is never coming back. The years your family lost having been chased out of Germany are not coming back. After 30 years of this work, how have you learned to live with what cannot be repaired?
Derek: Yeah. I, I appreciate that question.
And I just started reading, literally this past weekend, a book, sort of clarifies some of my thoughts. I’m likely mispronouncing the author’s name. I’ve never heard it spoken, but it’s called These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home by Bayo Akomolafe. I thank my wife, Tamara Smith, who’s a children’s book author, about flagging an article and sending me this book.
And the book talks about the notion we’re always in the middle, essentially, of something, that we’ve constructed this notion of a beginning and an end, and then we think that anything in between those is, like, the middle. But his… It is. I’m just gonna read this. L- And th- and this book is letters to this, uh, his daughter, which I just think is incredible. “Let me tell you the little things that I have come to learn while I still can, right here in these middling places, still trying to reach out to you.
Everything begins in the middle. There are no beginnings that appear unperturbed, pristine, and without hauntings. There are no endings that are devoid of traces of the new, spontaneous departures from disclosure and simmering events that are yet to happen. The middle isn’t the space between things. It is the world in its ongoing practices of worlding itself.”
So when I think about your question, is this linear experience of events in which something happened and we can’t go back and undo that thing, and restorative justice, as you rightly mentioned, is so much about repair. I also think restorative justice is not just about the episodic repair of things that can’t be fully repaired, but it’s about interrogating the structural, as many of the possible confluences of things that led to that.
If we understand what did happen from everybody’s perspective and are willing to look at our own culpability, both through omission and commission, I suppose.
Rob: I learned in the process of preparing for this interview that another thing we share in common is that we’re both Leonard Cohen fans.
Derek: I have always loved the line “When Jesus knew for certain only dying men could see him, he said, ‘All men shall be sailors then until the sea shall free them.”
In many ways, I feel like the conversation we’ve had is like the complement to that. Like, what would it look like if we don’t wait for dying men to see justice, right? Like, if it’s like we recognize it’s here, it’s available, we have to construct it right now, not we have to try to reclaim it through procedures.
So yeah.
Rob: Beautiful. Thank you, Derek. we’ve taken a lot of your time, and I, I so appreciate.
Derek: Great. I’ve- I’m, you know, I’m always happy to ramble, so yeah.
Rob: So much more catching up to do, but we will have to do it over a beer one of these times.
You’re listening to Just Stories. I’m Rob Brenneman, and my guest today is Derek Miodownik. Next time, we’re back in Goshen with a local police officer talking about violence, peace, and how the two are connected. Stay tuned.
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 the Lilly Endowment. 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, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen. Or you can visit us at our website, juststoriespodcast.org. I’m gonna say it again, juststoriespodcast.org. So go ahead and hit follow so you never miss an episode.
Want to be the first to hear our latest news, plus bonus content and behind-the-scenes extras you won’t find in the show? Follow us on Facebook and Instagram. Profiles are Just Stories, but to find us, you need to type “podcast Just Stories.” And we’re on LinkedIn as well. And if you have comments, feedback, or a guest you’d love to hear on Just Stories, our contact info is on our website.
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. Our marketing manager is Melissa Troyer, and our audience engagement manager is Courtney Dobrzkowski.
Just Stories is part of More Than Just Stories, directed by Duane Stoltzfus.
Thanks for listening