Prisons provide different things to different people. For some, they ensure a far-away place to send people who have done harm to someone you love. For others, they offer jobs and a way to put food on the table. And for others still, they are simply warehouses, where loved ones, neighbors, and friends are sent in historically unprecedented numbers.

What’s clear is that prisons have become an immense part of the US political economy, incapacitating over 2 million Americans every year, at an annual cost of $50 to $60 billion. With only 5% of the world’s population, the land of the free has roughly 25% of the world’s prison population.

So what sustains our prison system? What beliefs and messages are used to justify such an enormous financial and human expense? More than anything, prisons are said to make us safer. They are the foundation of America’s current public safety paradigm, and have been since the early 1980s when the great prison expansion began.

Yet how often do we ask if prisons actually make us safer? More often than not, we simply assume that the answer is yes. However, a vast body of research has started to challenge this fundamental assumption. Taking in this growing evidence requires that we look beneath the popular “tough on crime” narratives that have helped to elect so many politicians, and that we honestly assess the condition of our neighborhoods and towns. Read More…

From the moment I step out of my front door in the morning to the moment I come home at night, around 300 surveillance cameras record my every move. When I get on the bus, five cameras monitor people on the inside, while several others film cars on the outside of the bus. In libraries, on street corners, in parks or stores, I am Constantly. Being. Watched.

A typical CCTV warning sign in Croydon, London. Signs like these are strewn around the city.

Image by le Korrigan – Flickr

This is the story of what it’s like to live in the UK today. London has the “greatest density of surveillance cameras on earth” (Luksch & Patel, 2008), a fact that one becomes used to at an alarming speed when one lives here. There are so many cameras in this city, their abundance becomes normalized. Strolling around on a Sunday afternoon, you almost forget about them, really.

“CCTV panopticon” by nicolasnova – Flickr

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I was once asked by a book editor to come up with an outline for a novel set in a slightly futurized Los Angeles.  It was obvious to me that any novel I’d outline about a future L.A. would naturally be set after the Big One hit.  As an L.A. native I’ve come through several earthquakes.  In the ‘70s in high school I even stayed in bed half dozing as one rocked our house in South Central.  In ‘94, Dr. Pop and I rushed out of bed to grab our then small children and get downstairs under an archway during the Northridge quake.  So I was somewhat blasé about earthquakes as I suppose many Californians get.

I’d seen the ‘70s disaster film Earthquake all about a cast of stars led by Charlton Heston (before he was president of the National Rifle Association) who cope before and after a huge quake destroys L.A.  There was the film Escape from Los Angeles where a devastating earthquake had separated a large swath of the Southland from the mainland, and Los Angeles Island is a massive prison.  In 2012, the 2009 movie, the Mayan calendar is realized – or maybe it has something to do with the Earth’s core melting — and pretty much the world is destroyed yet somehow John Cusack drives through the mother of all earthquakes in L.A. in the limousine he drives for a living with his family.  There’s also the science fiction novel Lucifer’s Hammer where a massive tsunami wipes out parts of the Southland after chunks of a comet strike the Earth.

But this was before Haiti and Japan and the point reiterated that earthquakes are not a plot device, but have real and fatal impacts.

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Everyone agrees that Chicago Public Schools have to change. Yet there are fierce disagreements over what kinds of changes must be made, who should lead that change, and how it should be administered. At the helm of the warring parties are Karen Lewis, the new president of the Chicago Teacher’s Union, and Ron Huberman, the CEO of CPS installed by Chicago’s Mayor Daley.

These two opposing leaders are fighting a serious battle, one that will determine the extent to which public schools remain publicly owned and operated. It is a fight with tremendous implications, ranging from the future of charter schools in the City of Chicago, to how success is defined and evaluated.

In the backdrop of this battle, there is another struggle going on in Chicago Public Schools. This is the fight to protect the life of Chicago Public School students. As a recent New York Times article identified, 218 CPS students were shot in the last school year, and 258 the year before. The article, provocatively titled “Graduation Is the Goal, Staying Alive Is the Prize,” highlights efforts to improve the safety of simply attending public school. They focus on an unfolding intervention strategy which targets the most “at-risk” students and connects them with adult mentors and support services. Created by CEO Huberman, a former police officer, this $60 million intervention is also geared to strengthening communications between the police and school administrators. While this intervention brings in deeply needed resources, the police dimension of the program strengthens a disciplinary approach that relies heavily on law enforcement to run daily operations at schools.

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For a general introduction to the theory and practice of restorative justice, check out:
Restorative Justice online.

I sat next to an astrophysicist on the flight to South Africa, one who was on a mission to observe the first stars as they formed. How does one look back millions of years to the moments when stars were first coming into being? Well, apparently you just need a very sophisticated radiotelescope in an area with very little interference. My neighbor in the aisle seat, a scientist and professor at Berkeley, was taking advantage of a much larger project called the Square Kilometer Array. By tuning into certain frequencies, this man and his colleagues would be able to gain key insights not just on how stars form, but on the dawn of the universe itself.

In order to understand this project at all, I had to change the way I understand time and space. Here is the thought exercise I was given on that flight: Think of the universe as a balloon. As more air goes into the balloon, it expands. What we experience as time is the expansion of the balloon, moving everything outwards as it goes. Earlier moments in history, like when stars first formed, are really just points that are further out on the balloon. By looking outwards towards those points scientists can capture information that has taken millions of years to travel back to us. This information can then be analyzed, put into equations, and used to fill out our contemporary understanding of the expanding universe, its origins, and perhaps even its future directions.

The balloon metaphor is an imperfect one, but it’s a start. I like it because it challenges me to think about my travels, and my life, in a totally different way. I am not growing older. Time, at least in the traditional sense, is not passing by me. Rather I am moving outwards, with a first-class seat in an expanding universe. Of course, none of us is on this journey alone. All of existence is in it together, at different phases and stages of becoming. Once I landed in Johannesburg I began to enter a new phase in my own unfolding life, one marked by political education and peer learning, by the fruits of other people’s struggles and by my own bonds with a group of trouble makers who call Chicago home.

I was heading to South Africa as part of a restorative justice delegation from the Windy City. Our group brought with it a diverse history of activism, action, and hustling for change. Some of the delegates were working to transform the disciplinary culture of the public school system, others were community leaders deeply rooted in neighborhood life, several had been working for decades to reform the ways our society responds to domestic violence, and many in the group had dedicated their lives to working with young people to shift power in their communities. All of us were practitioners of conflict resolution methods like peace circles, and all of us shared a basic belief in the power of groups to come together to address difficult issues, to deal with the conflicting forces in our lives.

For 2 weeks we meet with like-minded folks in Capetown and Johannesburg, interacting with an incredible array of people, places and projects. We connected with students, principals, teachers turned into police, preachers turned into organizers, community groups, and a whole host of amazing folks. We were there for the 20th anniversary of the release of political prisoners during apartheid (February, 2nd 1990). We were there as South African cities scrambled to ready themselves for the FIFA World Cup. We were there as much of the world heard about the marital and extra-marital exploits of the current ANC leader. We were there to listen to the Soweto Youth Choir, and to hear Hugh Masekela and Sibongele Khumalo perform together live at the Market Theater. But mostly we were just there, riding the balloon together, taking things one van ride and one conversation at a time. Read More…

In US cities today, our public safety officials typically respond to violence by locking people up, by moving the offender far away from their families and their communities. This process of removal is almost always handled by the police, the only government officials that many US residents will ever see. And whether the people involved in the incident are youth or adults, the official response is roughly the same.

Alternatively, there may be no real response to violence at all. This is especially common in cases where weapons are not involved. Neither of these two extremes –police-led removal and inaction – does anything to address the underlying causes of violence. Neither accounts for the pain, neglect, or stress that can drive people to harm one another. Moreover, neither extreme deals with the hurt caused to others by an act of violence, the survivors, victims, witnesses, and loved one whose lives are forever changed by the event .

This begs the question, what is so public about public safety? Is it just that criminal justice employees are paid with tax payer dollars? Can real public safety be achieved without meaningful public involvement? Restorative justice is a philosophy that emphasizes the critical importance of involving parents, brothers, sisters, lovers, friends, children and other community members in the peacemaking process following a violent incident. It focuses on repairing the harm caused by crime and conflict, healing broken relationships, and addressing the underlying reasons for any offense.

A common saying in restorative justice circles is that “hurt people, hurt people.” This phrase suggests that healing is, in and of itself, an act of violence prevention.  Like a wild fire that can only spread when surrounded by dry conditions, violence can only thrive when hurts go unhealed. Extending this belief, restorative justice supporters argue that our streets can be made safer simply by creating community spaces to lovingly confront past pains. For restorative justice folks, healing is prevention.

It was precisely this understanding that guided Chicago’s first “Day of Healing” on December 8^th of 2009. Called by the Community Justice for Youth Institute, the day was initiated as a response to the more than 50 youth killings that happened between January and November of 2009 (see map below).  Thanks to the work of over 30 community organizations and schools, the day was organized in a matter of weeks. All across the city, from the South Side to the Wild West to the North Pole, these groups brought together youth and adults whose lives have been seriously impacted by violence.

Map by Andrew Greenlee

More than 40 peace circles  were successfully organized on that day, each one providing a safe space where people volunteered to sit down with one another and to share whatever was in their heart. Some circles explored the root causes of school fights, some provided a safe place for people returning from prison to share about their personal journey, while others brought together community leaders to reflect on the peacemaking work they’ve been doing for years.  Since that day, all of the circle organizers have met again and are planning to coordinate similar days of healing on a regular basis throughout 2010.

Chicago’s “Day of Healing” model offers a prime example of what peace and safety can look like when neighborhood leaders take charge. Whether you are a high school student, a teacher, a grandparent, or a non-profit worker, you have the ability to organize and facilitate peacemaking circles. You have the power to change the culture of justice at your school, on your block, and in your neighborhood. It is not enough to outsource safety to the police, or to simply ignore violence when it occurs. Real public safety requires the regular involvement of the real public. And that means us.

To learn more about peacemaking circles, restorative justice, and Chicago’s “Day of Healing,” go to:

http://cjyi.org/

http://healingchicago.wordpress.com/

http://www.livingjusticepress.org/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-koehler/power-with-power-over_b_312935.html