Snapshot of Compassionate Listening: Lorenn Walker & Restorative Justice
Despite how dead-tired I may be (did I fail to mention that I was ordered to take a half-hour nap at work yesterday?), I still whole-heartedly believe that I have the most amazing jobs possible.
Case in point: Today most of my activity at TCLP involved a phone interview with Lorenn Walker, an amazing woman stirring up inspiring waves of compassion in the U.S. justice system, who has incorporated the core principles of Compassionate Listening into her work. (A brief tour of her website is enough to get a glimpse of the magnitude of what she’s up to.) The goal is to provide a snapshot in the upcoming print issue of the TCLP newsletter, due out in November. The theme for this issue is, broadly, how individuals who have received CL training have taken CL principles beyond the workshops and delegations, back into their home communities and areas of work. We want to give our subscribers and supporters a sense of how vital and adaptable CL is, beyond its immediate applications.
And, really, once I started to dig into our contacts and research what our training participants have been up to, I was astounded. It wasn’t as though I needed to be convinced at the start that CL is fundamental – maybe one of the most vital things we can give to ourselves and to others – but I suppose I didn’t realize how many different ways people were putting it to use. I most readily think of personal well-being and peacemaking, so my conceptual horizon as far as this work is concerned is without a doubt being broadened.
But now, more on Lorenn, who is far more interesting than anything else I could think of writing about at present…
Before her days working with restorative justice, Lorenn was an Hawai’i state deputy attorney general, as well as general counsel for the state public welfare system (1984-94). In addition, she served as a family court representative for typically underserved cross=sections of the population (1994-99). During this time, she also had a term as president of the Child and Family Advocacy Section of the Hawai’i State Bar Association (1998-99).
Clearly, it’s not as though Lorenn wasn’t fully invested in social justice before her encounter with Compassionate Listening, but it seems that receiving CL training, in conjunction with other contemporaneous and similarly momentous shifts in her life, really did bring her work to a new level.
Beginning around 1996, Lorenn has reoriented her work away from its original legal focus, and now directs her energy toward ways that she can foster social justice as a health educator in the public health sector. Nevertheless, she still draws on her previous experience with law and social service – in addition to core Compassionate Listening principles – to establish evidence-based, measurable, testable programs that aim at achieving reconciliation, preventing violent crime, and promoting restoration of individuals with a criminal past. She works collaboratively with individuals and organizations, wherever there is a need. Impressively, but certainly not surprisingly, her work is international in scope: just recently, she told me, she received an email from someone in Belgium who is interested in integrating her methods into their own social justice programs.
I don’t know when this woman sleeps – she has piloted about a dozen projects in her field, published 25 articles on her work, and trains for triathalons.
Arguably, some of the most interesting aspects of what I learned through my time speaking with Lorenn went deeper, beyond the basic facts of her previous work experience and scope of her current endeavors. What really got me excited was hearing about why she sees restoration as a crucial element of trying to achieve a just and sustainable world. From her perspective, the U.S. justice system is broken – it lays too much emphasis on punishment and retribution, with little to no attention given to rehabilitation. Rehabilitation, however, is vital. Most prisoners will one day be released back into their communities, and the risk of relapse is a well-documented reality. Rather than inadvertently enabling a continuous cycle of criminal behavior and incarceration, we must address criminal behavior at its core and strive to engage individuals with a criminal past on that level.
All of this just made me want to ask: What is restorative justice? In her view, restorative justice is an approach that combines ancient and contemporary concepts in a ground-breaking way. It brings together age-old notions of conflict resolution and more modern ideas about democratic decision-making. Apparently, it’s already known to have applications in criminal cases, but some believe that the full scope of its potential impact is much broader.
A good way to get a sense of how Lorenn is re-thinking widespread assumptions about crime and punishment is to consider her position on substance abuse. At present, the U.S. justice system deems substance abuse a criminal act, but Lorenn argues that this approach misses the point in a crucial way. On her view, substance abuse is more fundamentally a mental health and public health issue and should be addressed accordingly. She argues that substance abuse arises in the first place from pre-existing mental health problems, and will continue to re-emerge until those underlying problems are confronted in healing ways. Lorenn is now attempting to bring this view into practice by working with the state prison department; she hopes that they will come to appreciate the place and value of restorative justice in the prison system. So far, she has encountered opposition to the integration of her approach with the system as it exists now. The implication seems to be that a full-scale paradigm shift is necessary in order for rehabilitation and restoration to have a more prominent place in how the justice system works with criminals.
One of my favorite quotations concerning her work comes from a recent entry in her blog:
Individuals and organizations can learn to be more at peace and happier regardless of life situations. Humans thrive best when using cooperative and peaceful interventions. People suffer from violence and resentment. Not getting what we want, and getting what we don’t want, are inevitable. We learn how to respond to situations. It is never too late to learn new responses, and public health approaches are more effective than many current strategies for learning.
As I mentioned earlier, Lorenn has written a tremendous amount about her work. Go here if you want to learn more.
Journey without Maps 