how did i can restore to jess's as catherine indicated i have a long history of working in the criminal justice field i've done just about everything from working with incarcerated juveniles to work ing with death row inmates on their appeals it's hard to talk about where or how i came to be restored to justice without giving a little bit of the foundation of who i am so as she said i grew up in a family law enforcement my dad was a police officer for thirty eight years my uncle forty years the police officer he was the chief of police my stepfather was the probation officer my step mom was an investigator for the district attorney's office and i decided that i wanted to work with the car's rate of population so you can imagine how well that went over in my family but i knew from a young age that i was interested in the criminal  justice system or the criminal and justice system and so i did i majored in college i behave in investigator for the public defender's office i worked on my first death penalty case i'm going to age myself but that's ok to my first death penalty case in one nine hundred eighty seven and so over the course of thirty some odd years i've seen a lot change in the criminal justice system but none of it for the good so was seven years ago so i've been working hard to decrease the incarceration rates for years and i jokingly say that i have been yelling and screaming about mass incarceration for years and everybody else just got to the party and so with this movement of you know mass incarceration or trying to in mass incarceration continuing the work i came to the work of restorative justice about seven and a half years ago when my life was disrupted by trauma and a tragedy ny in two thousand and nine my oldest son was the victim of a violent crime he survived twenty seventeen gunshot wounds and that night one of his best friends was and that experience of not just my son being shot in everything that that entailed but the way in which we were treated by law enforcement the way in which we were treated by the hospitals that were supposed to be providing a service for him just really left a negative impact in that different pressure on me and i knew that something different had to happen so at the time i was working i was working full time in our church but i was working part time as an investigator and i was in trial on a homicide case and just the intersection of those worlds were here i am literally working to save this young man's life while my son was fighting for his life fifteen months after my son and my oldest s and survive seventeen gunshot wounds my middle son who was nineteen years old was murdered on mother's day of two thousand and ten and at the time of to sean's murder i was actually working in san francisco county jails in one of the programs and you know i was thinking about how i have spent my entire career working for the very population that has now caused my family so much harm and it wasn't it was over a period of time that i realized that i had a choice you know for a moment i bought i would do something else i don't want to do this work anymore but one of my girlfriends just kind of off the cuff matter of fact lee said well what else are you going to do and i had to really think about that because this work in the criminal justice system was really all i had done it was all i knew it was all i was passionate about and i made a decision why i knew that when trauma and tragedy strikes a life you're not the same and you have to make a choice to be bitter or better because you're just not the same and so i chose to be better and in being better i made the decision to work harder and what can i get involved with so that another mom doesn't have to bury her side or another son doesn't pull the trigger and i came to this work is in restored of just is really to decide or what i said on a focus group talking about the services that didn't happen for my family when we experienced the trauma and the tragedy of gunshot wounds and murder and i was introduced to the work at i p p executive director billy mysel and i have worked together back in early two thousand and from back to the one to two thousand and five we did death penalty work together and billy was the acting executive director of i p p and she asked me she tricked me he asked me can i help at the fall fundraiser i said yes and that was in october and then in one december she says well can you kind of be my informal part of my informal advisory board and then i said yes and then she said well can you speak on our survivor panel and then i said yes and the next thing i know i had a job another job  as a survivor and community outreach specialist i i believe in restored of justice i believe in the redemption of people i believe that nobody should be known by the worst thing that they've ever and i believe that part of my healing journey is helping others who have been where i used to be but also in speaking with those who have harmed others so they see firsthand what that pain this life or family because often times and i've been working with offenders for this is my very second year working with the incarcerated population and oftentimes we are it's not a real person and when we do the restored of just his work and we sit in circles and i tell the story i tell the stories about my boys it becomes real to them and as catherine talked about the number of african american males that are incarcerated it becomes even more real for them when they hear me speak because my sons are the sons that they have harmed that i'm the mom that had to so i want to as you guys just a quick question real quick if i can if you just had a look at me how would you think i came to this work just a quick guess no wrong answers i'm just curious about what people with the ideas he asked a question because i mean you know and i talk in a lot of different universities i even talk in front of a police academy before and in the normal response that i get is football coach right a lot of people think i look like a football coach somebody say yes please but october twenty ninth be the second year that i've been home two years ago i was serving a life sentence and sankoh in state prison i came to this work  you know and many of you were kind of on point but i wanted to see if people were actually going to make that association with me actually being on the other side so i was all the way on the other side i grew up gang banging i did were gang bangers do i grew up in the of compton area right i did i was then it i was in it in the thick of it nearly forty days after i committed the crime they gave me a life sentence i woke up in the middle of the night in a county jail and i don't know why but i had these deep feelings about my older brother i don't know what was going on but i knew something was wrong to the point where my whole like  crying like i'm having just a real deep physical reaction and i can't stop it i don't know what i don't have any information or anything but i know something's going on with my older brother i spent all night  i'm trying to talk myself i'm trying to calm myself down i'm saying like i don't even know anything like why am i crying like i don't i don't even know anything long story short the guard and his guard was not a nice guy but i don't know if he saw the look on my face or what but i asked him to turn the phones on and he did i get on the phone i call my sister and the first words are my sister's mof was your brother was murdered last night so i was forced to sit there and deal with a whole lot of pain i was forced to watch what my mother was going through and truthfully fortunately for me and for other people as well that i was actually in a place where i couldn't lash out because truth be told had i been on the street in that moment somebody was going to pay the price for my brother's life and that's typically a life or a life right so being forced to sit there and deal with all of that pain and watch what my mother was going through need is c n n was one son to the street and was about to lose another son to the penitentiary i made a commitment to change i made a commitment to do something different with my life but he said big is the difference between want to do something and actually having to choose to do it with the right so it wouldn't be actually in two and it's a lot of pieces to my story but he wouldn't be actually into the ten years into my prison sentence and you can imagine how hard it is to change especially in the back and in a day in a california prison a level four which is a maximum prison where my first thirty minutes on the yard i watched the guy get staff from ear to the back of the room and the guy hit the guy so hard that he almost cut his own thumb off so imagine being around that kind of a region that kind of aggression and you trying to shoot i got out the hole i went to san quentin and it was all of these programs right there's all these people running around and i'm like well this is where they put me and like where am i i'm like i'm like in a foreign land because i'm used to waking up in baghdad i'm used to waking up feeling like every time every time that cell door open i'm used to waking up feeling that like i'm walking through a portal in feeling i don't have a vocabulary for emotions and that's not to say i was ignorant i was very well read i guess i could argue and debate it with the best professor in town but i did not have a vocabulary for my emotional state and it was the original way to actually heard about restored of justice was through a guy named  actually on a board of inside prison project now then and one of the programs that it created inside was the interface restoring justice roundtable and that was the first time i've heard about this concept of justice versus criminal justice and i caught the book i started taking groups and programs and it it made me to the inside prison project a let me to vote program which originally i went there for kind of the wrong reasons i went there because i was looking for some language to take into the boardroom and yet when i got there i found something a lot deeper i found something that actually gave me a language for what i intuitively knew all my life and would probably get into that a little bit more as we go along but that is my introduction to your stor bull program is will evoke program is a we say it's a one year program with another trait i haven't seen and enjoyed can speak to this i have seen a vote group we ask the men for fifty two week or commitment and it's one and two hour class a week for fifty two weeks but i haven't seen a vocal group go under eighteen and they often go two years because it's in those groups that and choice can speak more to it from the man's perspective is in those groups where admin not only become accountable for their crimes of commitment but also learned how how they became who they were at the time they committed the crime and i have sat on survivor panels and what survivor panels are is i represent their surrogate victim i represent the mom as i said earlier of the person they days and not all of them make it to the inn for a variety of reasons but we set in circle and there's usually two survivors who share their stories and part of the process is the men also reading their words say in their prime impact statements where they we can recount in very detailed form the crime that led to incarceration and theoretically the cost the survivor panels are are for the men to understand the harm that they cause and to see it in real life in real time but in reality for me the first crime the first survivor panel that i sat on and i had i had to share my story many times in different settings including the crime the county jail where i work but when i sat on the survivor panel as san quentin when we start the day all the men introduce themselves by their name their crime of commitment and the let the time that they've been incarcerated and the very first time that i sat on survivor panel and i heard the number of years that sat in that circle i heard eighteen years twenty one years twenty two years twenty five years thirty years thirty six years and i was speechless and i thought to myself america what are we doing what kind of country do we live in we incarcerate people for thirty six years what kind of country do we live in where we take juveniles fourteen fifteen sixteen years old and give them life sentences and i was supposed to be share my story after they finished their introductions and i literally had to get myself together because my heart was broken and so when you asked me why the walk continue doing the work because we incarcerate too many people and if i can forgive and if i can see everybody's humanity and even before what happened with my boys i have worked with some people who have done some very horrible things but like i said before no one should be known or remembered by the worst thing they've ever done because who was that person before and who is that person today and one thing that i've learned in my thirty two years in this system is not everybody's guilty not everybody is innocent but everybody has a story that lead to when our pass cross and so i continue doing this work so that i can continue my healing journey so that the men can continue their work on themselves and their healing journeys and that really so i can be a voice that says that changes the narratives  survivors want i never there's a difference be one wanting to help somebody hold account being held accountable and wanting somebody locked up forever you know i remember i mean sharing this earlier today when i got the call that my son had been shot i'm driving to the hospital and i'm praying and i'm praying for my son and god spoke to my spirit and told me that my son wasn't go died and after i felt after i knew that's what god spoke to me i began to pray for the shooter and at that time and to this day i have no idea who shot my son and it turns out that there were three shooters and but i remember praying for them and i remember thinking what happened in this person's life that they because there's somebody is baby and then there are  times and in their school days what happened to them that they now became a shooter and that's what we need to start looking at and that's why i continue to do break even that that means that i would have spent an equal amount of years in prison as i have said in the free world i do this work because i want people to know that transformation is possible like i had to answer that question like are you a put i have to answer the question how did i go from being innocent child that had so much reverence for life that i literally would not step on a act if i saw an i wouldn't kill and how did i go from being that child to be in a gun toting gang banging fel willing to put a gun to somebody's head and robert how does that happen right and into we as a society start to really take a look at that then we're going to keep being a john to figure out how to solve something that well you get what i'm saying  i realize how much of my life that i wasted and i realize how that little child made that journey and i do his work because i want to i feel that the more people who we can wake up to this journey in the better it will be for some other sound like i can't go back in time and say myself but what i can do is pay it forward in hopes that what information is passed on will be there to help some other child who decides to join a game or involve himself or some criminal all because he or she  looking for somebody to love right i was there i was able my fourth time going back and saying point i went in last night  we went inside saying quinten and the look on the man's face when they saw us walking three of us walk back in on the look on a face when they saw us walk back in and he guys say man like we glad that you don't know what you're doing i picked up a guy from prison who spent forty two years in prison he was seventeen years old when he le that's not the same do as not the same do are wasting too many lives because too many people are concerned with the dollar then they are with human lives and i got a problem with that so i'm like all the energy that up put when i was in to and to bang in and trust me i was a force to be reckoned with i will put the energy in is positive and i plan on being a force to be reckoned with period time so i had the privilege of being trained by both of these folks last year couple of different times and restarted just practicing and so they're both they both came to this work through their personal experiences but are also both powerful and credible advocates and facilitators and so i'm wondering if we can switch gears a little mass for you guys to speak about some of your thoughts around how this work fits into the current criminal justice system and president i've heard you say before is that restart of justice is powerful not just for broken people but also for broken systems and so i'm wondering if you can speak to some of the tension in resort of justice and the difference with a sort of practices versus restart of justice and how that fits both into the current prison system which is not restart of a nature into the current criminal process which is not restored of the nature and maybe some lessons learned and thoughts going forward if you have them there's not a consistent or definitive  methodology with restored justice and i can speak to that restored it just is that work that we do in the bay area and throughout california as martina indicated the criminal justice system is you're at san quentin or it's some long no or a couple of other prisons out of the thirty three that are in california there are no programs restorative or otherwise so there's there's a disconnect a huge disconnect even within the you know the community about restorative justice what restored of justice is restored of justice is the of the opportunity to allow people to heal to be accountable and to heal and to understand their own path knowledge ease and i i believe that one of the misnomers about restor justice is that it's not about holding people accountable but it is it's exactly about holding people accountable accountable and but with a different outcome nobody benefits by incarceration and we cannot incarcerate our way to public safety  like to tell stories of the men that i work with because choice spoke to a man who spent forty one years in prison and i out work on the day to day basis with the population that are facing prison and for long periods of time i'm working currently with a young man who is nineteen years old he has two he has one gun conviction as a juvenile he has one gun conviction as an adult he has to open cases one is a robbery one is a burglary and he's nineteen years old and he's facing prison time at eleven years old he witnessed a murder he was looking out his window and he saw a man kill another man against what his family wanted him to do he wanted to testify he wanted to help put this person in prison and by the time the trial came around he was thirteen years old and he testified and the district attorney's office got a conviction and the person went off to prison but that kid never received any help he never received any services he witnessed a murder and then he testified and he have any help he didn't receive any services and shortly after that trial at the age of thirteen he began using drugs and he began getting in fights and he began school cutting school and he got justice involved with the juvenile justice system and now the same district attorney's office that he helped garner a conviction for was to send him the prison and that's the criminal justice system that we have and there's nothing restorative about that and i it took everything within me when i had a meeting with the alternative sit ins plan or from the district attorney's office to stay professional and to not as i like to say give him the business because how dare you how dare you want to see in this kid a prison when you didn't help him when he needed you most so we could have  restorative practices that's a perfect example of what we can do to restore this care and not send in a president hold him accountable for his behavior hold him accountable for his actions but help him to understand what led to this behavior and as i'm pointing this out to the sentencing plan and he's saying oh i look at it like that i said well clearly you didn't and neither did the d a who's prosecuting him and apparently think the defense attorney didn't either from the first one bringing it out that's ridiculous but we have to have a story the system keep locking kid up an adult and then they come home if they haven't been i think witnessed a lot of one of the other pupils in california where these programs they're going to come home even more broken in more harm than they were they when they went to prison did this system has to be held accountable for the wrongs that is done how many people are familiar with the school to prison pipeline right so we know this exists right this is not if we know that what's being done see there was a lot that happened in my life when once again i say that i say this and i don't want to diminish any of my own responsibility for choices that i made in my life so i want that to be very clear and let's look at all the environmental failures that happened in my life i had a system that was telling me don't be violent when i could walk outside my front door without seeing violence i can walk outside my front door without the cops being violent i couldn't turn on the t v without seeing violence on a t v right and a system that would see me to war to go fight for another country for freedoms in democracy there but yet i'm afraid of the police where i live it right we really have to take a look at what's happening  this may seem strange to some people but as a gangbanger i didn't see myself any different than what an american soldier saw itself violence is violence no matter what we call it in the name a country or in the name of cr but seriously i don't want to take away from this is see is from the seriousness of it there were a lot of contradictions that happen in life even from opening the school book right this is going to sound really and i'm putting my stuff out there i was seventeen years old before i found out egypt was an african every time it was talked about in the school book it was associated with you were in greece right whenever they talked about african culture it was backward it was bush it was it was it was ancient it was something bad when you hear the word black in the dictionary what does this say son and this male write everything bad so the world is telling me i am bad the world is disrespecting me because of the color of my skin see i mean i don't understand i don't have a vocabulary for language but don't misunderstand this my life has been depended on me walking into a room and knowing the motions that exist in that room is a friend a phone is if i had a flight right mot my life has been dependent on their own so many occasions day it's instinctual for me to walk into the room and know the heartbeat in the room i can look at so face and look at the twinkle in your cheek right and him in my prime if it meant some bad we've got a problem but i know it is there but what did that do to my spirit what does it do to my spirit when i walking down the street and  white person is walking by and they cross the street they pull up beside me and they see a black person and they lock the door they get in the elevator they see me an elevated make clips they purse oh open a book the i'm bad i walk down the street you don't have to say it the attitudes tell me i'm different so i'm rejected and dejected by the world even coming home and i'm appreciative that the inside prison project had enough foresight that when i did come home because of the work that i did inside i was a facilitator inside facilitator early on one of the first round of facilitators inside the aft it actually gave me a position with the organization to continue this facilitation work out here but in most cases i show up in places and people are actually in the room creating policy talking about restored of justice and i ask who has been formerly incarcerated and people say nobody and i see how do you do a restart of justice if all the stakeholders are at the table occupy came up to san quentin they blocked off all the saying quit as a result we were on lockdown i asked everybody only yar that i ran into and i asked maybe three hundred people who knew about this who how did why did they come up here and everybody said i don't know i don't know we found out what to do that was on death row and you know no offense to him or anything right but that he caught at the overwhelming majority of us our attitude was you don't have to occupy sequent from the outside if you want to help us come in and i meet people they can be a web site they can help us get our voices out they can actually do something constructive for us other than come up demonstrate for day leave and now we are locked down right and you feel good because you think you did something without even talking to me and asking me when i mean right so  another group of kids that were going off to this place i don't want to put it up to too much because i don't want to embarrass anybody but i asked him they say we're going to talk about these issues and i say do you have how you talking about issues in america and you don't have any black people which you may say well we can tell their stories no you can't you can never g much more dignity to my story didn't meet haven't the ability to tell my own story if you really want to give me dignity past the microphone right so we got it and i could go on but we got a whole entire system that is conditioned to look at us with disrespect right to look at us differently to a smile is a smile but somehow when i'm smiling and laughing that means something different because i'm black we've got to take a look at that and as everybody moves on into you r careers right and we've got the buddies that make the jokes and do things right and if you not sometimes you can be a lonely road i'm tell you my first years when i was trying to change inside the prison system it was a lonely road doesn't get talked about enough is the foster care system to prison pipeline and that's another pipeline that needs to be interrupted and so many clients that i've worked with have been in foster care and once you age out of foster here or you had you get in contact with the juvenile justice system now you're on your way to prison and so we every time you mention the school to prison pipeline please mention the foster care system to prison pipeline as well it's interesting that she was that she used that word hope because one of the things that i tell the man that i work with you know i'm in the middle solve work with the men and women in the state prison and down and getting ready to go into the federal system which i may i do want to say that we are going to do both in the federal penitentiary in dublin and california which is a women's prison because a judge a federal judge asked us to that's hope right there we' the beggin borden's can we please bring the program in and so for a federal judge to ask us to bring the program in is is a big deal is exciting and it if it continues to give me hope at things can be different but our i'm in the middle because on and my dated on my every day job i'm in the county jails and these are being and who are fighting their cases who facing ever out of time one of my guys was getting sentenced today and he's twenty seven years old and he he only knows that there's going to be a l at the into his set and he thinks it's going to be he hopes it's going to be twenty five years but it's more likely going to be around fifty or fifty two years to life and the one thing that i told him because he's done tremendous work in program in the county john sample cisco is to not give up hope and i can never give up hope you know thirty two years in and i'm still hopeful that the system can change and i'm still just crazy enough to believe that i can change the world me and all the people who are oh so whole hope is that hope is an important thing advice and the issue of race came up and the issue of race comes up in all of the trains but in this particular train in the issue of race came up and even within the training it was very polarizing and my advice to anybody who is everybody you go to work in this field you want to do r j work you want to do social justice work you want to be an attorney whatever it is that you want to do do your work do your work and be honest with yourself about your biases and be honest with yourself about your stereotypes and the example that i give is when i talk about my voice when i talk about my son my son being shot how many times i've asked well what was he doing while he was getting shot is my i'm right and i say you know people are willing to accept ok her son got shot he wasn't doing anything blah blah blah but she had one shot the son the cash out and then another son they got so my advice is to go all personal one be be willing to be honest about your biases be willing to be honest about your privilege and be willing to to have those hard conversations which are friends because it's not my responsibility to educate you about your own privilege in your home racism in your home guys right it's not my responsibility and frankly it's exhausting right so again and i'll end with this for those of you who caught a feeling because of what i here and one homie had to drugs the other only had to jailhouse wide and he was like we all lean like what and i looked and i was like  to distinguish the voices right like when something happens like i when i first started to change i had to really figure out which voice was i hand  right was i hearing the same old rhetoric a condition from my past or was it that deep something deep in the spirit or dislike talking to you that's like telling you like this not good just not the way to go you're feeling what i'm saying is that making sense to people right distinguish the voice and listen to that the spiritual part is telling you that this is not like the way to go or stay on this course right hold on hold on to that because that will be your guide right that will be  guide i know even for me there are certain people in my life that i truly love and yet i know that i came to get information from them even if they the closest people to me even if they related to me write i'm no debt only i can go talk to you about finances you go with finances you go with  i'm not going to talk to you by relationships because you haven't had a good win in a long time right so i will get good advice from good people right and our i really want to you know nevertheless ministers say a lot of times people get what i call the jesus complex and they want to say to me right they want to single what do we need to do what should we be doing how do we support and my response is you've got to work at home to do right so before you come to my community and try to save my community you've got to go to your community and you've got to say your community because you you can't have somebody on the bottom without that's going to mental issues and it all over stuff about being at the bottom of power without somebody going through these superiority complex issues about feeling why they should be on the top right so that's worked their restart of justice and it goes back because all the stakeholders have to be at the table so we just on one side of the checks try to work on repairing th the tracks and nobody is on us out of the tracks trying to work on what's happening on that side of the tracks then we got a lopsided vehicle right so work needs to be done right and in we can come together and we can do stuff we can have the really difficult conversations a lot of hope i see i've been in a lot of circles right and i've got a lot of friends all over you know i've got a lot of friends and we have some really difficult conversations right and people sometimes tell me man i get this when i think i would rather have me it was hard for me to really look in the mirror and ask myself sincerely what happened and what do i need to work on so  become a better human being and drop all of this white versus black versus brown versus yellow versus all this other stuff that's and in hinted that is designed to keep us apart from each other we got to get past that that's an invention that was designed so the one percent can stay the one percent because we are fighting for crimes at the bottom i don't care who you or i don't care what religion you are i don't care with sex i don't care about none of that can you stay can we live next though to each other in peace can we can we live in peace can i live my life the way i want to live it so long as i'm not home or you are harming anybody else and you not harming me oh i mean anybody else can we live like that like that's what we need to work toward and this has to start with systems we have to take a look at systems do not let people turn the conversation to being about individuals every time you see them start to talk about structures and you see even in the news if you start to watch news programs and you see them and they start to talk about structures and institutionalized racism they point to individual that's a way of escaping the argument it from happening we've got to go upstream in what's upstream are institutionalized structures systematic structures that are put in place so that we stay at odds with each other because we think one pole is better or fear or whatever and the bottom line we all in some type of way slaves to the system don't go to work tomorrow and prove me wrong honest with their perception and their beliefs one of our colleagues we were at we went to a town hall meeting and it was in east oakland and east oakland is black they say oakland it hasn't got to east oakland yet and we were talking about law enforcement in this town hall me and our colleague was very upset and offended about the conversation about a lot of force me and she and i had to actually leave early because i had another commitment but she called me and she said you know and people were so angry and people were so  they were saying some really harsh and really mean things and she just went on and on and i let her finish and she talked about how uncomfortable she felt and i said  so your experience with law enforcement is different than my community's experience with law enforcement and law enforcement as an occupying force in communities of color particularly in east oakland and when law enforcement is c somebody is definitely going to jail and that's the best case scenario right and you can't be afraid and uncomfortable with the very population that you're seeing and you want to work with you don't get to do that and if that's how you feeling then perhaps you need to fall back and i said that was one experience to to have next by the most black people you've ever been  except for when you were in the prisons doing the work right because i'm a keep it real and i'ma give it to you run cut and i told her just think about it like this i always have to navigate your world you never have to navigate mine unless you choose to so just think about that thinking about the number of times you've had to navigate a a colorful world people of color as well my community on a consistent basis and yet and still continuously i have to navigate places and spaces and people who doesn't look like me and then i'm judged by how i show up and how many times have i heard people say wow you're so articulate like that's reality right that's reality people say you are so articulate and i'm thinking wow you're so smart how do you know all that i don't yeah so just think about those things don't say that i'm sure nobody in here has said that i'm sure nobody has but just think about the