Rethinking the Impact of Traditional Justice: Natalie DeFreitas at TEDxVancouver

hello I have to say I am so excited and humbled and incredibly anxious and nervous to be here I am Natalie de Freitas I am a mental health counselor and I'm also a restorative justice advocate and a justice consultant and I'm here to talk with you all about the crisis in our justice system and I want to share a little bit about how I believe restorative justice to offer a solution to this crisis so I was preparing for this talk and I was reading some headlines and I came across one that said that right now in Canada the crime rate is the lowest it's been in 40 years and I've got to tell you that I was baffled by this because doing the work that I do I've never believed that our system has been more failed so I started to think okay maybe the statistic is a little bit skewed how did we get to this lowest crime rate in 40 years and in short we've done this by locking everyone up we have locked up everyone despite their age or whether or not it's their first time committing an offense and I started thinking well is this statistic sustainable I mean what happens when all of these people that were locking up are released will our communities still be safe while they reoffending that I see centers around mass incarceration so a little bit about myself when I was 18 I started working and about six different jails when I was doing my undergraduate degree in Kingston Ontario my mom likes to joke that I've done time but I've I really had some powerful conversations there and I realized that there was a better way to do justice so I want to share three things with you all today the first is I want to give you just a brief overview of some of the current problems in our system the second is I want to share an extreme example sort of a case study of some of the problems that I'm illustrating and then finally I want to talk to you about my passion restorative justice and why I believe that this is a solution so when we think about where we're at today what is our current approach to justice well in short life doesn't mean life so this means that the majority of offenses that are committed in Canada receive relatively short jail terms and moreover the ones that do get longer sentences and even life terms are eligible for parole after serving only a portion of that time and something even more powerful is that 70% of people reoffending one year after being released from jail I want you to think about that how effective is our system of justice if 70% of people are reoffending after jail so the problem with this as I see it is that people are sent back in to the exact same negative social circumstances that influenced crime in the first place and you know the stories things like racism illiteracy poverty addictions but our current answer has just been to build bigger and better prisons to lock up more people and I think and this is my perspective that this is dealing with the symptoms of crime and not the causes so prisons have become revolving doors and our communities remain unsafe so I wanted to provide you with a case study and sort of an extreme example of of harsh on crime approaches to justice at its best so let's talk about Texas for a second y'all well we all know we all know what Texas is known for right they do everything big in Texas and this includes their approach to justice so some of you may have even heard the nicknames they are the shoot-'em-up state Huntsville Texas is the death-penalty capital of the world or execution city some pretty powerful nicknames but what started happening was after decades of using these harsh on crime approaches and mass incarceration in the 90s crime rate started to skyrocket and not only that but prisons were overcrowded and overpopulated it was standing room only seriously and state officials took notice of this because really when you're locking everyone and everyone up shouldn't crime rates be going down so they started thinking that something new needed to be done and they started developing alternative programs so these were things that focused more on some of the influencers of crime things like addictions workshops and other social programming and judges started handing out parole instead of jail time and what they noticed between the years 2005 and 2012 was a dramatic reduction in crime rates and not only that but there were less people actually in prison and even better than that it cost about a tenth of what it cost to imprison one inmate to run these alternative programs so I share this example with you because Texas has actually been instrumental in using themselves as an example we've been there we've done that it doesn't work and they have been calling out governments all over the world to re-examine the ways that they're doing justice including our own government and I share this with you just to show an example that there are alternatives to the way justice is being done in North America but I'm here to talk to you about restorative justice and this is something I'm very passionate about but I have to admit it's a very difficult concept to define it's experiential so I thought well some of my favorite TEDTalks share stories and so I'm gonna share a story with you all about one of my experiences working with a former offender in restorative justice and I hope that you'll have a little bit of a feel for what this process is and so the story centers around someone that I'll called John and when John was 18 years old he was arrested for dealing drugs and this is around the time that I met him and something really really cool happened when he was at trial he was met with a judge that saw an opportunity and that judge was an advocate for restorative justice processes and he gave John a choice he said he could either go through a restorative justice program and if he was successful he could potentially have his charges dropped his record cleared or he could go through a traditional court trial process which was his right but if he was found guilty there was a potential for facing jail time so John obviously chose restorative justice not fully well knowing what he was getting himself into but this process was multifaceted for him as part of it he had to meet in a group a circle and he met with stakeholders in this circle process over the course of a couple of months every week and these people included community members teachers police officers his family members people that were impacted by his actions and he had to sit there and he had to talk about why he did what he did he had to take accountability for what he had done and this might seem simple but it's really complex and so he was resistant at first he found it difficult he thought it was all silly he didn't really get the point but as the week's went on he'd started developing a rapport with the people in the group and he started opening up so he shared a little bit of his story he spoke about what it was like for him to grow up in an inner-city neighborhood where there was zero access to positive social role models he was witnessing crime and violence every day as if they were commonplace and at a young age he witnessed his best friend shot and killed in front of him he spoke about his difficulties in the education system he talked about how he was basically functionally illiterate and how this caused him so much shame that he dropped out of school he spoke about racism and poverty he spoke about growing up in a single-parent family he talked about his mom being so ill that she couldn't financially provide for the family and left him to be the sole financial provider at a very and he spoke about this with anger and frustration but he also talked about love and he talked about his desire to protect his family and his desire to be part of a community in which he felt no place and so something really significant came out of this as he shared those deep wounds that had influenced John to make the decisions that he had made began to be sutured up and the reason this happened was because he was able to share in an environment that was supportive without guilting or shaming him now he said that one of the most important things he took from this was that for the first time in his life he had a voice so he was able to share his story people cared they listened and not only did he had did he have to share his voice but he had to listen to others voices - so he directly saw the impact of what he had done and how it affected others around him now I want you to think about how different this is from our traditional form of justice in a court the people who are actually impacted by the crime their voices are silenced and professionals people that are educated that often come from very different class structures they do the talking for them and so there's no opportunity for this healing to happen now John also had to be part of a sentencing circle and this is really a pinnacle of restorative justice as people have to take appropriate accountability for what they've done and so as part of this the group decided that what would be in John's best interest and the community's best interest was to have John develop a comprehensive plan for how he was going to avoid criminal behavior in the future so as part of this John had to re-enroll back in school something that was incredibly difficult for him considering his struggles in the education system he had to take resume building workshops and he had to find a job and eventually he even applied for college after he obtained his GED now what was significant about this to John was that it directly related to the causes of crime in his life so things like not having a job being unable to provide financially for a family having no education led for him to resort to dealing drugs to make a quick buck and so he had an opportunity here to transform a part of himself that he'd never tapped into and the point is here that that John identified for the remainder or for the duration of his life that he had been labeled a criminal by those around him so that became ingrained in his identity it became very difficult to extricate himself from that if I'm a criminal I might as well keep acting like one this is something I hear all the time and what this did was it allowed John to transform a negative self-identity and reinvest in social connection reinvest in his own choices to reconnect with the community to make positive and social decisions and he wouldn't have had this opportunity had it not been for this process so where is John today well John is crime-free he's a college student and he's got a bright future ahead of him but I I can't help but wonder where the justice is in this case what would have happened if he had chosen to go to jail would John have reoffended would he have changed and I think the problem here actually lies with us with all of us here because we as a society equate justice with punishment so when something awful happens in a community you often hear about a cry out for justice and what we think this means is revenge stigma and jail but what we know is that our current system of punishment is not working remember back to that 70% re offense rate so how can punishment alone be real justice there's no incentive for an offender to want to change only by sitting locked up in a Cell there's no way for them to see the impact of the actions by being locked up in a cell so the focus of restorative justice centers around reconnection now often times people ask how I can work with those that have done some pretty horrible things and a mentor explained this to me in the best way and she said Natalie imagine that the worst thing you've ever done was on display for the world to see and I'd like you to take a second and think about that imagine the thing that you are most ashamed of the worst thing that you've ever done was on display for the world to see now restorative justice centers on a really important principle that people are worth more than the worst thing that they've ever done and you know this really resonated for me because as a counselor often times I hear about people's darkest or most vulnerable or shameful States and I think that it's these moments that connect us as humans so I wanted to talk about the bottom line as well it costs in Canada about a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars a year to put one person in jail and a restorative justice program costs about ten thousand dollars if 70% of people riaf end after jail time alone 15% of people reoffended a restorative justice so restorative justice is evidence-based it's being used internationally and with and with in Canada with great success it's being used preventive ly in schools something really cool it's also been used in First Nations communities for centuries and centuries and I have to say because I've got a lot of lawyer and judge friends and they'd probably kick me if I didn't say this that it is not mutually exclusive with our current system so like in John's case it can actually be used by courts lawyers judges that support it and that will offer better outcomes for their clients so I wanted to leave you with a few final thoughts so I have a prediction that if we continue with tough-on-crime approaches and if we continue with mass incarceration we will see a dramatic increase in our crime rates over the long term and we will see unsafe communities for our future generations I also believe that tough-on-crime actually does the opposite it promotes crime and if we're serious about reducing crime rates we need restorative justice programs that focus on healing transforming negative self identities and taking appropriate accountability and I want to leave you with the final thought that justice is not something that happens to you justice is something that we build thank you very much you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 52,840

Rating: 4.8663697 out of 5

Keywords: Canada, tedx talks, Psychology, tedx talk, TEDxVancouver, Activism, ted talks, Community, \restorative justice\, tedx, English, \global issues\, ted x, \tough on crime\, justice, ted talk, \social change\, ted

Id: Jx4ExrPT8Wg

Length: 16min 20sec (980 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 13 2012