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Erica Washington — Building Alternatives to Incarceration

Episode 10 • 24th October 2024 • Encounters With Dignity • Catholic Mobilizing Network

Caitlin Morneau

Welcome to Encounters with Dignity, a podcast on restorative justice from Catholic Mobilizing Network. Here, we bear witness to the stories, learnings, and actionable wisdom of people putting restorative justice into practice.

I’m Caitlin Morneau, CMN’s Director of Restorative Justice, and your host.

This season we’re taking a close look at the U.S. criminal legal system through the eyes of those most impacted by it.

…Together, we’ll unpack the connections between Catholic values and responses to crime that allow all those involved to understand the impact of the harm --- and do what is needed to make things right.

May it be so…

Today we’ll talk with Erica Washington, who supports communities across the country as they design and facilitate restorative justice diversion programs. She’ll explain how these programs activate relational healing and relational accountability as alternatives to incarceration.

As you know, Catholic Mobilizing Network’s mission is to end the death penalty, advance justice, and begin healing. So, I just have to say that for this final episode of Season 2, it feels especially fitting that in Erica’s legal career, she also spent three years defending the lives of people on death row. From her experience, she shares what it means to challenge the racialized dehumanization that sustains capital punishment and mass incarceration in the United States.

In this episode, you’ll hear about the role that faith communities played in her own journey, and the invitation to all of us to turn pain into purpose that transforms people, communities, and systems.

Erica Washington is the Senior Restorative Justice Strategist at Equal Justice USA based in Washington, DC. Her team provides training and technical assistance in building pre-charge restorative justice diversion programs that reduce youth criminalization while meeting the needs of people harmed. Erica also spent three years working with the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in North Carolina.

Caitlin Morneau

Erica, it is so good to be talking with you today. Thanks so much for joining us on Encounters with Dignity.

Erica Washington

Absolutely. Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm really looking forward to the conversation.

Caitlin Morneau

All right, well, let's dive in. Before we talk about all of your work around restorative justice diversion, I really wanted to hear about the three years that you spent working as a defense attorney for people on death row in North Carolina. How were you shaped and impacted by your experience with those cases and what did the experience reveal to you about the criminal legal system in the U.S.?

Erica Washington

Yeah, yeah you know it's interesting reflecting on those three years. And my choice to go to law school was one that was deeply informed by this recognition that the criminal legal system is broken or is intentionally created to disadvantage and control certain groups while it is designed to serve those in power, those with wealth, white, middle-aged, you know, cis men, etc. So, in a way, it wasn't necessarily my three years in capital work that led me into that understanding.

What I can say is that, you know, anything that insults the soul is always a matter of life and death. It's a quote that I've kind of held close to heart for quite a while. What the capital work provided for me was stepping out of a much more cerebral academic relationship to the criminal legal system, one that absolutely demonstrated to me the injustice of that system.

It then put it in direct relationship to my body, not a relationship to be compared to the folks on death row or charged with capital murder by any extent. And I believe we have a criminal legal system that harms everyone. I saw that doing the capital work. I saw that with my colleagues. I saw that with correction staff. I saw that with the folks we represented. I saw that with the surviving family members.

sed the Racial Justice Act in: 2009

That law was repealed in: 2013

And so doing the work, you know, I could talk about specific cases, but really kind of getting to sit at this vantage point of how the system is so deeply racialized that we can look across an entire state's capital apparatus and identify such an intense participation that race has played in folks finding themselves on death row. And it led me into so many conversations that I always describe as being the most critical conversations for us as a human race to have, right.

Conversations about deep harm, about race, about organized abandonment, about the loss of relationship, about abuse and neglect, just the things that feel so raw and critical to our understanding of why harm happens and how we address harm and move forward in a different way. And to have those conversations in the criminal legal system, in an adversarial system, that insulted my soul in a way that I could feel. I could feel that every day I walked with this insult in my body and it really was so much a part of what led me into restorative justice.

Caitlin Morneau

Mmmhmm. Yeah, let's continue down that thread. So while you were asking these questions, it's my understanding that you came to learn about some other localized restorative justice efforts in your area. What did those look like and how did they intersect with the work that you were doing around capital punishment?

Erica Washington

So right, so as I am continuing to work for the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, which is based in Durham, North Carolina, I can't recall exactly how I came to know about this organization called the Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham. But I really, at that point, was not connected to the organization.

However, I heard about this group, that after homicides in Durham, they would conduct vigils at the site of the homicide. They would stand with the family members of those who were killed. They would hold them. They would cry with them. They would do ceremony together. They would ask, what do you need? You know, they would anticipate needs and they showed up and they would do these like beautifully relational ritual responses to what is one of the deepest harms that can be suffered. And they would keep showing up and showing up. And there was something for me the first time I showed up to one of those vigils, because the community, the larger community was invited. It was just a space of communal grief.

You know, they say grief demands to be witnessed. And so there was like a space of acknowledgement that like wow like the deep harm of those surviving family members and community naming and acknowledging the harm that we have all suffered. And so it was from attending one of my first vigils along with this friend of mine who had invited me to this vigil, Elizabeth Hamburger, she does restorative justice in North Carolina and is absolutely incredible.

We started conversations with folks out of the Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham. They had already been engaging in conversations and exploration around restorative justice diversion for Durham. Had already demonstrated its success in various ways, but were looking to build out and really create the infrastructure for a robust diversion program in Durham. And they invited me in every way. They taught me. They poured into me. Yeah, it changed the trajectory of my life, certainly.

Caitlin Morneau

Wow, how tremendous that in this place of tragedy, but also prayerful witness, new possibilities were being born. So what energized you about restorative justice diversion and creating alternatives to incarceration? And how did that connect with your faith?

Erica Washington

I can talk about restorative justice in so many ways I think I feel a little bit called to lift up and continue, right, this insulting of my soul that I felt in these criminal legal spaces and these adversarial power over, I win, you lose, you win, I lose, which is such a denial of reality, right? We are deeply interconnected. If you hurt, I hurt. If I aid you, I aid myself.

And then finding myself and restorative justice, it really felt like life. And I think what's interesting about doing capital work, there is something unique about working in a system that, I would say, is so deeply lacking in humanity. And also, when you work in the capital space, you're consistently arguing for the sustained life of your client. But what I consistently observed was a system that numbs you out in a way.

And I think we have a lot of systems like this that are more likely to change you than you are to change them at times, and you find yourself sometimes getting numb to what even feels like life or feels like death. Anyways, I say all that to say, yeah, what made me so excited about restorative justice on some just, like, deep personal level was that it felt like life to me.

In terms of restorative justice and my faith, I personally think of the divine as the deep care for one another, as singing together, investment in one another's life, even kneeling together, praying together. The recognition of that deep interrelationality and interdependence. And I went to a church where that was conveyed to me as the divine. Like the divine is our commitment to one another. And it was a Christian church. It was a black church. It was an activist church. And its activism and so much of the teachings that were highlighted were rooted in this worldview that if I hurt you, I hurt myself. And really rooted in a place that recognizes, yeah, that we're all connected. So restorative justice was such, such a, you know, a remembering more than stepping into newness. It wasn't necessarily as much a learning as a returning.

Caitlin Morneau

Absolutely! I think for many of us restorative justice feels so in line with core values of Christianity - hope, healing, forgiveness, redemption, human dignity - values with which our legal system just doesn't line up. So how does restorative justice diversion help us embrace and embody those values? And practically speaking, how are you working with communities to build its inroads and infrastructure?

Erica Washington

The simplest is to say that it is relational healing and relational accountability. And what that looks like differs. But ultimately for us and my team, our calling is to create opportunities for relational healing and relational accountability instead of the punitive response to harm that we see in the criminal legal system. You know, the criminal legal system operates by asking, you know, three questions. What law was broken? Who broke it? What punishment is deserved?

And for restorative justice and the approach we take, we want to really replace that with quite different questions. And so that can kind of be conveyed through questions such as who was harmed, you know, what are their needs? Whose obligation is it to meet those needs? Who else has been impacted, right? I mean, that's not where those questions stop. Like, we want to know who else has been impacted? What are the root causes? What is the appropriate process recognizing this intention around relational healing and relational accountability?

We are building with communities across the country. Right now building with about 15. You know, we always say dream to demonstration, so what could this look like in our community? Who do we need to know and build relationship with to make this possible? You know, that strategic planning and relationship building then bridges into training everyone for their role in this. So training facilitators, training program managers, training criminal legal system staff who are going to ultimately be referring the cases out of the system.

And even as I say out of the system right there's a big part around building that off ramp out of the system because in some communities we really don't see a built off-ramp or one that isn't built in a way that just has all of these stumbling blocks that could lead you right back into the space you've moved away from.

And while doing that work of support, I also, as I'm building a tool, I have the pleasure of getting to utilize the tool because I myself facilitate what we call restorative community conferencing processes. And so the RCC process, Restorative Community Conferencing Process, is a process that has been adapted from family group conferencing, which is a process from Aotearoa, which is the Maori word for New Zealand. Back in the day, we're trained by Maori elders and practitioners and teachers who taught us the family group conferencing process that then was adapted for the programs here in the United States.

And then we stay in relationship as those programs expand and help them to reach sustainability. And all of that has just seeded so, so many plants that have grown and I've had the pleasure, the honor to see really flourish.

Caitlin Morneau

That's beautiful.

If it's alright, I want to take a brief moment to introduce our listeners to the process of pre-charge restorative justice diversion. As I understand it, a case is referred from a court or a prosecutors office to a community-based organization for a facilitated dialogue process. This dialogue involves the persons harmed, the persons responsible, and their support people. Once a repair of harm agreement is created by the group and upheld, all charges are dropped.

Of course, that’s a very abbreviated procedural explanation. So, Erica, can you take us inside a case that you've facilitated? Help us understand the human dimensions of this experience.

Erica Washington

Sure. I am going to anonymize it as much as possible.

I had a case where it was an assault. The person who was harmed went to the hospital multiple times. So the person who caused this harm mistakenly thought this was someone who had harmed a loved one of themselves. And we went through a restorative community conferencing process with both of them and their loved ones. And what that looked like was preparing each of them as well as their loved ones separately to step into the conference.

We would first move through an understanding of their immediate needs as well as their resources. If you are concerned that you won't have food this evening, you are not able, at least from what I have experienced, to step into a full restorative community conferencing process. So, we're going to explore what needs exist for both of you. And we are going to explore what resources you have, especially relational resources. So, who helps you feel like your best self? Who do you know will pick up the phone when you call? And where folks really don't have many resources, we also invite them to dream into the resources they wish, because we want to work with them to establish those as well.

So from there, we're going to move into a deep conversation about values. I tend to think of that as really sitting with folks in a conversation about their own interests and dreams and curiosities and passions. The world can strip so much from a person, especially folks who engage with the criminal legal system. I think there is empowerment in sitting in those things that remain. And then what I see is it creates a real motivation to address harm because you see who you are and will continue to be on the other side of that harm and the ways that taking the journey towards addressing harm can allow you to realign yourself with your own values, with who you are, and with what you want for your life.

And then we start talking about what happened. We start talking about accountability.

And in this case, right, we learned what was happening for this person who caused the harm earlier that day, what was going through their head and their heart and their body and just really sitting in a deep understanding of what happened.

And then for the person harmed, right, like, enjoying their wife's birthday at a bar when out of nowhere, they are attacked from behind and the deep kind of like rupture in your understanding of, you know, personal sovereignty and agency and predictability and – in as many ways as this process can allow for – take back their agency and take back control over their lives in a way. And so we sit in a conversation about what happened, who was harmed and how, what needs did this harm create, what could be done to address those needs.

And ultimately we arrived at the day of conference and the person who was harmed went first. He spoke exactly about all of the ways in which this event had essentially directed his life in a way that he had never expected and had never wanted and the ripple harm to his wife, to his kids. He was out of work. He had astronomical hospital bills stacking up. He was physically, spiritually, emotionally, relationally harmed. And he sat and he talked about every single piece of that to this man who harmed him.

And the man who harmed him took accountability for every single piece of that. He expressed deep apology. He also told him about what was operating for him when that happened. I always think, like, an explanation is not an excuse, and when done well, it is the offering of a cohesive narrative about what has happened and in a person's life. I think he did a really beautiful job of talking about his own history of harm, the harm to his loved one, how that felt in his body.

Ultimately, everyone was able to share really deeply about what happened and the harm and the needs. And the person who was harmed expressed a deep feeling of, I think he said, “I feel like I can breathe again from this conversation.” There were hugs. There was the exchange of contact information. We created a plan to address the harm that did include some level of financial restitution that could be paid over time.

It was powerful and getting to step and sit in the space of relational healing and relational accountability is magic and it's transformative.

Caitlin Morneau

Thank you so much for allowing us a glimpse into your experience of walking with the people involved in that case. These approaches are, of course, not just beneficial to the people directly involved, but to the community as a whole. So, what do you see as what success looks like for communities that have said yes to this journey of implementing restorative justice diversion opportunities?

Erica Washington

Many things come to mind when I think of success for a community. And it's really exciting to have a job where I get to really facilitate a process whereby communities identify what success is to them and then we co-create a process to get there.

What I always deem as success is when a community has gained these skills of restorative justice facilitation of not just restorative responses to harm, but community building processes, circle processes, peacemaking processes, just so many different kind of restorative practices that can be deeply preventative of harm even happening in communities.

So for me, really, decreasing the reliance on the criminal legal system because a community has gained the skills. And so many of those skills already exist in communities. So sometimes just excavated or remembered but that they are resourced in the ways that they need to heal with one another, to be accountable with one another, to know each other, to have a concept of who they are to one another. What it means to be a neighbor here and how we as a community respond when harm happens in a way that recognizes that we do not gain or lose dignity. We have dignity, and what is a dignity enforcing process that can respond to harm. And they have everything they need to make that real and to really not rely on systems that have only caused such intense harm.

Caitlin Morneau

Right, so with a culture retribution so widespread, it’s going to take more than singular programs to create a shift. So how are you encouraging community groups and agencies to consider their part in creating networks for healing and transformation?

Erica Washington

On the team, we call it a restorative ecosystem of healing.

It is the recognition that what a community needs to heal, especially, but to also keep each other safe preventatively from the physical risks and harms, you know, emotional harm, spiritual harm, relational harm, communal structural harm, right. That is going to require all of us to know, understand and step into our role.

Whether, you know, we're talking about churches, divinity schools. Those are spaces that really attend to those questions I just mentioned, right? Like, who are we to one another? You know, what does it mean to be a neighbor here, right? How do we respond to harm? What are the needs? You know, what need can I meet, right? Because there is this recognition of shared life.

And so, when I have stepped into those spaces, I feel like folks have guards down and can really sit in those really important conversations about who we are how we show up and how we meet needs for one another in this shared life. And an ecosystem of healing is really trying to do that with the folks who move through our restorative justice community conferencing process.

Caitlin Morneau

Yeah, I think about parishes and congregations where there is a diversity of perspectives and experiences present, but also a shared recognition of kinship as children of God. So we know that restorative justice is also about transforming systems. I just want to name for our listeners that there is no federal legislation for restorative justice diversion. These programs and their related policies are really driven at the local level --- city, county, or state.

Erica, I’ve heard you speak about how restorative systemic change is about building people, programs and power. We’ve heard about people and programs. Talk to me about building power that supports and sustains restorative justice diversion?

Erica Washington

Building power is so absolutely critical. Traditionally it has been organizations, these collections of humans coming together with some sense of a shared goal and makes it out to be a matter of personal responsibility. It is something that folks tap into collectively and when they feel like they are held within a community space and that tends to activate people. And so for me, recognizing that I am building relationship with community-based organizations to provide as many resources and skill-building opportunities and really the excavation of all that they already have and can pour into this work. And I see restorative justice as uniquely positioned to kind of bridge us into political activation.

We have to ask, what are the structural conditions that contributed to this harm happening, right? Who or what is responsible for upholding those conditions and how can we as a community transform those conditions permanently?

There are laws, policies, norms, that have created a structurally oppressive environment that then the criminal legal says I'm going to punish you, and you already live a punishing life. And what restorative justice can do, alternatively, is attend to the harm that has been done to another person. And it can build, within attending to that, it can build relationship, build community, build collective power to attend to the structures that serve none of us. And if folks tap into political engagement, then this is an opportunity in our wildly lonely society of bringing folks into relationship around something tragic that we would have never wished for.

Caitlin Morneau

Yeah, so how do we bridge that gap between tragedy and opportunity? What’s the invitation before us?

Erica Washington

You know, something I spoke about recently was the ability of restorative process to metabolize grief. And by that, I mean in the same sense that when I ate my breakfast this morning, my body is breaking down all of the elements in that breakfast and ultimately that becomes nutrients and energy for me to use.

And meaning making has been shown to be absolutely critical to really moving through and processing grief, which of course is not linear. And what I am calling us into as folks who are trying to build a movement for restorative justice, is really to recognize the grand opportunity that this work has to not just attend to interpersonal harm, but attend to where there is an opportunity for us as a community to transform the structural conditions that have contributed to this harm happening in the first place. And I really call on us to step into that opportunity.

Caitlin Morneau

Beautiful. Thank you so much, Erica.

Erica Washington

It was really an honor to get to be in this conversation with you, Caitlin. I really appreciate the invitation.

Caitlin Morneau

Wow, there’s so much to reflect on from our conversation. The recognition that what harms you, harms me. The importance of fighting against that which perpetuates death while building that which creates life. And the opportunities for churches and faith groups to help transform grief into healing for ourselves and others.

As I listened to Erica talk about ecosystems of healing, I couldn’t help but think about how Pope Francis articulates integral ecology in his encyclical Laudato Si’. That we’re all part of an interconnected and interdependent web of relationships which, as he puts it, “invites us to develop a spirituality of that global solidarity which flows from the mystery of the Trinity.”

At CMN, we’ve seen so many examples of Catholics playing their part in ecosystems of healing. If you're feeling called to learn more, I hope you’ll join us for an Intro to restorative justice Workshop, a three hour session, where we explore restorative justice in light of Catholic theology, and how you could bring its principles and practices to your ministry or community.

If you want to learn more about how to build a pre-charge restorative justice diversion program, check out EJUSA’s Diversion Toolkit for Communities, linked in the show notes.

Well folks, that’s a wrap on Season 2 of Encounters with Dignity! Thank you so much for listening and journeying through this season with us. What an honor it’s been to talk with each of our incredible guests, who illuminated the opportunities for restorative justice within and around our criminal legal system.

If you haven’t listened to all of the episodes of this season, or if it’s been awhile since you have, I encourage you to go back and listen to an episode that speaks to you. Maybe you’ll even find one to share with a friend.

To stay connected with Catholic Mobilizing Network and our mission to end the death penalty, advance justice, and begin healing, follow us on social media or sign up for our emails at catholicsmobilizing.org/join.

And now, let us close in prayer…

Good and gracious God, thank you for this opportunity to come together, to be in relationship across time and distance. May this conversation remind us that every person has dignity because we are made in Your image and likeness - cherished and beloved. May we participate with one another in the redemption that you made possible by your suffering, death, and resurrection. And may we bear witness to your healing, restorative, transformative work in the world. We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ, your son. Amen.

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10. Erica Washington — Building Alternatives to Incarceration