Inga N. Laurent, J.D. Photo via the Gonzaga University, School of Law

If you’ve read Chuck Marohn’s new book, Strong Towns, or been to one of his Strong America Tour events, you know that the Strong Towns movement draws inspiration from a variety of sources. Not just the fields you’d expect: urban design, architecture, economics, public policy, etc. But also cognitive psychology, biology, anthropology, and ecology, to name just a few.

One of the most interesting — not to mention, rewarding — benefits of this holistic, interdisciplinary approach, is the opportunity we have to meet fascinating and dynamic people from other disciplines who happen to be exploring this same intersectional space. The conversations that result are informative and invigorating. For me, the effect is what I imagine of those old French salons, which gathered together eminent people from different spheres (artists, scientists, and so forth) for the sake of enlightenment and entertainment. In our case, it’s impossible to gather all these people into a single drawing room (or Taco John’s). But it could be said that we try to use our articles and podcasts as a kind of digital parlor, curating conversations online that we hope spurs in-person, local conversations in towns and cities around North America.

One of these serendipitous meetings happened in September, when Chuck and I were in Spokane, Washington for the very first event of the Strong America tour. The event took place in the moot courtroom at Gonzaga University’s School of Law. After the event, we met a Gonzaga law professor named Inga Laurent. Laurent is an internationally-recognized expert in restorative justice. She had been invited to the event by a friend, and, from the very first slide in Chuck’s presentation (the slide was about how humans have co-evolved with their complex human habitats), Laurent saw exciting parallels with her own work in restorative justice.

We had too little time with Laurent that evening. The co-organizer of the Spokane event, Spencer Gardner, encouraged us at Strong Towns to reach out to her. And I’m so happy we did. Because the resonance between the Strong Towns approach to building more resilient and connected cities, and her restorative approach to criminal justice, turns out to be thrilling. Laurent’s work in restorative justice, and our work at Strong Towns, had been running parallel to one another. Now they are converging.

Laurent didn’t grow up in Spokane. Half her family is Haitian and the other half is German and Czechoslovakian. She lived for the first 11 years of her life in Brooklyn, then moved to Cambridge, Ohio, a town of just 11,000 people. That experience, going from a big city to a small town, has shaped her adult life. “I often find myself in places that represent the middle,” she says, “like Spokane, Washington, and Cleveland, where I did my law degree [at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law].” Laurent is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Externship Program at the law school. In 2016 and 2017, she spent nine months researching restorative justice in Kingston, Jamaica as a Fulbright scholar.

I interviewed Inga Laurent on the phone in late September. In Part One of our conversation (Part Two will be published tomorrow), we talk about the intuitive wisdom of restorative justice; how human societies evolved an approach to criminal justice very different from the one that dominates now; and the sometimes conflicting priorities of the State, on the hand, and the needs and values of victims, offenders, and communities on the other.

JOHN PATTISON

How would you describe restorative justice?

INGA LAURENT

Restorative justice gets at that core of what was important and how we solved problems in the past. As we were evolving, for most of human history, we were extremely interdependent on one another. If a conflict popped off between you and me, we needed to stay in community. Imagine that you're the strong hunter and I'm a good gatherer. We can't sacrifice our core relationship because we need one another. And so, when a conflict happened, the primary purpose was not vengeance or retribution. The primary purpose was to repair the harm and bring people back into the fold of community.

You probably already hear a lot of the linkages to the Strong Town ethos: the struggle to stay in community and the importance of that struggle.

PATTISON

Yes!

LAURENT

For most of human history, for most of the world's people, restorative justice was the way we solved problems. And yet today what feels so innate in us is a retributive notion of justice — an eye for an eye, just deserts. That model of justice feels very natural to us because it's what we've operated under since the Middle Ages, the rise of the feudal aristocracy and the nation-state. But, really, for much more time than that, we were under a restorative way of being with one another.

So there's a transition that happened — and this is another huge link to Strong Towns — in which the State became the primary actor in conflict. Christopher Bright does a beautiful job explaining this, how we moved from hunter-gatherers into more organized societies and how the State decided it was in its best interest to be the mediator between conflicts. The State took responsibility and subsumed the conflict. Imagine a conflict between me and you; well now the conflict is no longer between us, the conflict is between you and the State. This is the model we are under today. If you assault me, it's not Laurent vs. Pattison. It's State vs. Pattison.

Because the State has assumed that role, they've moved me as the victim to the side. I'm automatically on the periphery of the problem. It started well-intentioned enough for the State — it wanted consistency, efficiency, a predictable system, and fairness — but what it did was take away our personal stake in the relationship.

The State is also going to collect a fee for taking over that problem. Being the arbiter, investigator, and prosecutor of a conflict requires resources. Now fast-forward to today, where in Spokane County (and many others) we're spending about 70% of our budget on criminal justice. The State takes the fee, which means restitution to the victim gets smaller.

And I as the victim have abdicated most of my responsibility to the State. I have become passive in the conflict. The State's role is adjudication and punishment, even though its values may not align with my values or my needs. What has happened is that the conflict is no longer between the victim and the offender. Niles Christie, who was one of the writers in this area, says the State actually steals the conflict. In stealing the conflict, the State usurps the rights and the responsibilities of the parties to come to an understanding of what happened, to work together to formulate a solution and to re-engage the community.

And, in fact, conflict is never really just between two people. It's between the two people and all the people around them. But all of these folks have abdicated responsibility too. The offender no longer really takes responsibility, because their job is to stay silent, to not assume culpability, right? The victim is moved off to the side, because it's no longer defendant versus victim, it's defendant versus State. My needs as a victim are not central. And then the community is often completely absent in a criminal proceeding today. The whole community is moved off to the side, as the State says, “We don't have the time to deal with you, your needs, your need for information and knowledge, your need to know why this happened.”

It's laudable to want to have a consistent system, to have predictability and fairness. But by making those values the primary values, it took away the other values we had, which were relationship repair, interdependence, and community engagement and involvement. A value like individualization can be just as important as consistency, maybe more important at different times, depending on circumstances, right?

We have shifting needs but we also have a system that doesn’t really allow for much flexibility.

PATTISON

And there’s another parallel to the Strong Towns approach. Building stronger cities means making communities more resilient, more responsive, and more adaptable to changing conditions.

One of the questions I had going in to this interview was how far back restorative justice goes. When I think of restorative justice, I think of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. And I’m Quaker and so I thought of the Quaker history of prison reform, though I see now that that is different. And yet you’re going back even further. Chuck talks about the “spooky wisdom” that developed as humans co-evolved with complex human habitats. You seem to be saying something similar here — that we’ve evolved a kind of “spooky wisdom” about restorative justice…but we’ve shoved a lot of that best wisdom off to the side.

LAURENT

We knew how to take care of ourselves. We knew how to deal with problems and conflicts. But it takes a lot of brainpower and energy to be involved in conflict, and so we outsourced it to the State. The question is: Was that actually good for us?

It’s the same with our cities. Our city and state governments, they decide how we should live in community. Is it good for us? In many ways, probably not, because we’re less engaged with the process and our real needs may not get met. I was listening to one of the Strong Towns podcasts the other day and they talked about "front row people.” Well now we have front row people, with best intentions, making decisions not based on our actual needs. That gets dangerous. We’re missing the real needs in our community. We don't know what they are, we don't know how to assess them, and we're missing the mark.

PATTISON

I want to be careful with my language here. Is it accurate to assume that there are times when a victim wouldn’t want to take a restorative justice approach? But when they do, and when they’re not shoved to the side, is it possible that it actually empowers the victims in a way?

LAURENT

You've got it. You've hit the nail right on the head. Intuitively, you already understand this. Because it's "spooky knowledge.”

Slide from the Strong America Tour presentation in Spokane. Human communities, not just human habitats, evolved as complex, adaptive systems. This includes how we learned over millennia to relate to one another around issues of crime, justice, and rehabilitation.

There are some people who think restorative justice should be our primary mode of criminal justice. I think that's a dangerous approach. I think restorative justice is a complementary system that walks alongside our current iteration. Because we’re just in that place.

You will have many victims who, frankly, don't want to engage in this process, who aren't interested in getting more information, and who just want somebody punished. That's a completely valid, autonomous decision that every victim should have. On the flip-side of the coin, you're going to have offenders who aren’t ready or don’t have the capacity to engage in the accountability mechanisms that need to be present to put them together with the victim. If you don't have somebody who is willing to look at their life, wanting to be truly accountable, then a restorative process should never go forward. This is a huge mistake we can make in restorative justice programs.

I'll bring in Jamaica as an example. Jamaica is gung-ho. They're behind restorative justice, but they're behind it in part because they want to move cases out of their backlogged system. So the impetus is on moving cases, just move it, move it, move it. And that can be too much pressure. Restorative justice is an incremental approach. It works to repair relationships, but in a very specific, voluntary context, where you have a willing victim and a willing offender. Without those two pieces, it should never proceed, because you're not going to have a generative result.

For victims, there are lots of needs that go unmet in the current system. Right? The victims need information. There was a documentary, Meeting with a Killer, which really exemplified this. There was woman who was killed. The victim’s brother was convinced the reason his sister was killed was that something had gone wrong with her car. For twenty years, he harbored this guilt inside himself, “If only I had fixed her car, she would have never been in that situation.” But it turns out, when there was a meeting with the killer, the brother didn't want to participate. Even though he wanted to know the answer to this question.

But other relatives did want to participate in a restorative process, including the victim’s mother and the victim’s daughter. They got to ask, "What happened?" In this case, the only person who knew the answer to that question was the murderer. They wanted to know what her last words were, they wanted to know if it was a car issue. He was the only person who had that information. It turned out that she stopped to help them not because there was an issue with her car. Our modern-day system is not set up to give us the answers to our questions. Even if a case goes to trial, the questions are very limited. A victim rarely gets to the bottom of the circumstances. One of the primary needs for victims is information, and we neglect that today.

Another need for the victim is their own empowerment, their own ability to retell the story and to tell the offender directly the harm of the actions they caused. Without that, you can't have true accountability. A lot of times offenders go into a space where they're pulling back from the circumstances of what happened. They're making justifications. They're telling themselves stories. They're not dealing with the actual effects of what happened. That’s not true accountability. And it’s not real punishment, in my opinion. Real punishment is facing up to what you did in the most personal way possible, then finding out if there's a way you can help restore somewhat. It will never be like it was before, but you're going to put your best effort in. It may take a lifetime to create the circumstances that heal the people you've harmed.

PATTISON

How is this being integrated into the criminal justice system? Is it being handled primarily on a case-by-case basis?

LAURENT

That is an excellent question with no real answer.

In New Zealand, they have restorative justice in their juvenile justice system. There's a whole system supported by the government. But a lot of what you have in the United States are what I think of “pop-up shops.”

PATTISON

There’s some Strong Towns language!

LAURENT

Logo of Jamaica’s National Restorative Justice Programme.

These pop-up shops are the community driven responses of people who are dissatisfied with the state of criminal justice, going back to Howard Zehr, known as the grandfather of modern-day restorative justice. It started in places where people were suggesting alternatives to the criminal justice system, and that’s still how it's operating today: piecemeal, county-by-county, community-by-community. School districts are starting to use it. There are restorative justice non-profits doing this work. A lot of victim-centered organizations, or states that have victim funds, have victim-offender mediation programs.

Then you have the opposite end of the spectrum, which is Jamaica. Jamaica is very interesting, because they're one of the only nations trying to implement a full-scale restorative justice program. Which is ambitious and amazing, and has the support of a lot of NGOs. But it also creates a bunch of questions. Because these are complex systems that derive from the bottom-up and adjust slowly and adapt to the context. You can end up having problems. Maybe “problems” is too strong of a word, but the nationwide, top-down approach creates issues.

Similarly, you face problems on the other end if it is totally unregulated and there are no governing principles. The Department of Justice just put out a grant for the establishment of a national restorative justice center. We don’t currently have one. They’re hoping this unites best practices, how we train, how we hire facilitators.

This is a unique situation because of its flexibility and complex adaptability. But it also raises issues, especially in the legal realm, where you have a bunch of Type A personalities who really want control. So you have two major forces crashing with each other and it creates tension. It's very emergent. There's lots of questions out there. We learning how to do it. We're shooting from the hip but we know we've got millennia of wisdom underneath us. How that wisdom gets operationalized is what’s really in flux right now.

Note: Thank you for reading Part One of our conversation with Inga Laurent. In Part Two, to be published tomorrow, we will look at the importance of measuring the right things, the definition of true efficiency (hint: it doesn’t mean faster or easier), and how one-size-fits-all retributive justice resembles conventional approaches to auto-oriented development.

In Conversation: Strong Towns and Restorative Justice (Part One)

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