IN 1974, TWO teenagers went on a vandalism spree in the quiet community of Elmira, Ontario. They slashed car tires, broke store windows, and destroyed a garden gazebo, racking up about $3,000 worth of damage. The pair faced jail time for malicious vandalism. Instead, their parole officer, Mark Yanzi, who was also part of Mennonite Central Committee in Canada, asked the presiding judge if the youths could meet their victims face to face. This, they said, would allow the offenders to apologize directly and pay for damages. The judge agreed—setting legal precedent in Canada.
Though Indigenous and First Nations communities have a long history of similar conflict resolution practices, the Elmira case is seen as a moment when formalized restorative justice models, known at the time as victim-offender reconciliation programs (VORP), entered the Canadian criminal legal system. And Mennonite Christians were integral from the beginning.
In a 1989 handbook, VORP Organizing: A foundation in the church, Ron Claassen, Howard Zehr, and Duane Ruth-Heffelbower further developed the concept of VORP as a program that could work in cooperation with the judicial system but embodied “different assumptions about crime and punishment.”
“True justice requires that things be made right between the one offended and the one who has done the offending. It embodies a concept of restoration—of victim as well as offender. This also implies personal accountability on the part of the offender, who is encouraged to acknowledge his or her responsibility for the harm, participate in deciding what needs to be done, and to take steps to make amends,” they wrote.
By the year 2000, there were more than 1,000 victim-offender reconciliation programs in North America and Europe.
Trying something different in Arizona
THE PHOENIX RESTORATIVE Justice Center is one example of how the field of restorative justice has expanded into different settings.
Will Gonzalez was a frustrated community prosecutor in Phoenix who found himself baffled by the way schools treated students. He had seen firsthand that schools did not have a proper understanding of how to help middle schoolers and junior high students. Because the schools based discipline on a “three-strike” system, they were quick to suspend and expel students, Gonzalez said.
“The only reason we have these laws out there that are three strikes is because somebody has an affinity for baseball,” Gonzalez told Sojourners. “They apply ideas that they borrow from criminal justice to kids, with no science behind it.”
These suspensions and expulsions left kids in Gonzalez’s community vulnerable to participating in gang and criminal activity. The “problem” community in town would remain stuck in a cycle of violence.
Gonzalez began to look for a way to break this cycle in the Phoenix communities where he worked. His research led him to Reedley, Calif., where Mennonite Central Committee had a vibrant restorative justice program. Along with better grades and test scores and reduced suspensions, Gonzalez saw an entirely different mindset and approach to school discipline.
“If you’re a schoolteacher and you’ve got kids who aren’t paying attention to you, or you feel like they’re being disrespectful, it’s really easy to get rid of those kids. Whether it’s conscious or unconscious, you start out with this mindset,” Gonzalez said. “You factor in the unconscious bias, then what do you have? You have a disproportionality of kids who are minorities being suspended, referred, or expelled out of school.”
Eventually, Gonzalez created the Phoenix Restorative Justice Center. The center’s director, Arthur Montoya, was raised in Surprise, Ariz., where his parents were involved with the United Farm Workers union. The Montoya family attended a Hispanic Mennonite church in the area, and Montoya studied at Goshen College, a Mennonite school in Indiana. Montoya’s reconciliation and peace work officially began at Goshen but, he told Sojourners, it was in his DNA to be doing this work.
“In my family we’ve always had that connection to organizing, getting people information and trying to educate people about what’s going on,” Montoya said. His work now involves teaching people how restorative justice “can be incorporated in schools, in the community, and even in people’s homes.” But that education can be an uphill battle with teachers trained to view discipline as punitive. For many teachers, suspending a kid or sending them to the principal’s office feels “easier,” Gonzalez and Montoya said.
“We’re trying to get them to understand that with restorative justice there’s an accountability that happens to truly help resolve whatever the conflict was,” Montoya said.
What’s mediation got to do with it?
AFTER A CONFLICT is identified within a participating school, resolution can go in four possible directions: a participant may rebuff any mediation and choose to accept punishment from an administrator; an administrator may choose how to resolve the conflict; the parties may reach reconciliation without outside intervention; or, most commonly, a trained mediator conducts a mediation session.
When a referral comes to the center, a restorative justice coordinator sets up a mediation with the people in conflict. Mediation brings both parties together for a three-step process. First, harm is acknowledged and recognized. Second, a plan is developed for how to repair the harm. Third, follow-up meetings are planned to ensure success. This process builds trust and strengthens relationships between participants, which helps teachers with classroom management.
But teachers sometimes find it difficult to relinquish their perceived power. “In the mediation process of restorative justice, the power is shared, and it’s equal. The teacher and the student have the same decision-making power in coming up with a solution,” Montoya said.
Brianna Weeks is a health policy specialist who volunteers with the Phoenix Restorative Justice Center. She finds the restorative model’s focus on healing to be pivotal in its appeal. Previously, Weeks worked as a paralegal and served with the U.S. Peace Corps. She became involved in restorative work through Phoenix’s Balsz School District, the center’s first school partner. Afterward, she continued volunteering weekly with Montoya’s team.
“Restorative justice allows for a better understanding of situations that may lead to violence, crime, or misbehavior,” Weeks said. “Not only does it lead to an opportunity to move forward in a healing way—which is what I’ve come to believe justice is about—but it also allows society to learn from the situation and start to grow.”
Traditional student-teacher power dynamics and punitive discipline models often leave students feeling unheard and powerless, according to Weeks. That model is so ingrained in people that even elementary school students come to a mediation with a defensive attitude, fearing it’s just a new way to get them in trouble. In her interviews with students, Weeks finds that the mediation session format makes a positive impression on students.
“The teacher has to repeat back what the student said, in the student’s words, without correction or interfering. That’s extremely powerful for [the students],” Weeks said. “That has been the most transformative part of the process.”
Deep spiritual traditions for mending community
MENNONITE COMMITMENT TO restorative justice is older than the term itself. The discipline has three main roots, according to Carl Stauffer, a professor at Eastern Mennonite University and a restorative justice expert: Restorative justice mirrors values, such as communalism and collectivism, found in Indigenous cultures across the globe. Restorative work includes values found in the Abrahamic faiths and other spiritual traditions. And the modern movement traces itself back to the Elmira case and the Mennonites. These three histories form the root system of restorative justice practitioners today.
The Anabaptist tradition, which maintains a nonviolent approach to theology and people, was perfectly suited for introducing restorative practices in modern contexts. In Anabaptist theology, Jesus being crucified on the cross is not a transaction to appease an angry God but instead is a means of redemption and reconciliation. Historically, Anabaptists practiced nonviolent resistance to injustice.
“Anabaptists have always said, ‘What if we understood the cross as God’s desperate attempt to reconcile with us as human beings and to call us out of violence and into nonviolence?’” Stauffer said.
The role of Christians in this tradition is to heal, to be a source of reconciliation and peace in all areas. This ministry is much broader than simply replacing the punitive legal system; it is about a cultural shift. That shift, in part, requires the humility to give up privilege and control.
“[Teachers say,] ‘I’m losing control, I have no control in my classroom,’ and it turns out the opposite is true because [in mediation] they begin to build that respect and accountability with a student,” Montoya said.
Building resilient communities
MONTOYA AND GONZALEZ both recognize that the goal of changing a school is also about changing a community. Accessing schools and students provides a pathway to changing other environments. “When you look at restorative justice, part of what you’re trying to do is [get] these youth to understand that they have an obligation to the teacher, to a fellow student, to the school community, and to their community,” Gonzalez said. “What you’re really trying to draw out is empathy.”
“The culture changes in that people feel safer. They feel like there’s accountability. The students start to hold each other accountable; they feel more open to say something when they see something happen,” Montoya said.
In the same way that violence begets violence, peacemaking can beget peacemaking. “We get a lot of kids who want to be mediators, who have gone through the process. We had a couple of fifth graders who had been in a conflict, and when they were sixth graders they decided they wanted to be mediators, because they saw the benefit of it,” Montoya said.
Angelina Estrada, a sixth grader at Desert Oasis Elementary School in Phoenix, told Sojourners that her mediation to resolve a conflict with another student helped her contemplate her actions and communicate her feelings. “Understanding the conflict that is actually happening, you feel more at ease,” Estrada said. “Instead of arguing on top of each other, you state your opinion, you let someone else talk, and you really get heard.”
She said her mediation was led by another Desert Oasis student, as well as a Grand Canyon University student trained in mediation. The lessons she learned from the mediation session have helped her solve other conflicts with classmates and even outside of school.
“You get to know what the other person’s point of view is, and I feel like that helps a lot, because you don’t know what’s going on in someone’s mind,” Estrada said. “A lot of problems have stopped since I’ve been at that mediation. It made me take a step back and look at the things that actually mattered.”
The students aren’t the only ones seeing benefits. Lupita Hightower, superintendent for the Tolleson Elementary School District near Phoenix, said teachers and parents are growing to love the mediation practice. “Going through this process, they realize that asking a student to leave may not help them at all, or meet the educational objective in the process, and that this is actually a lot more beneficial for them to be able to resolve conflict and take accountability,” Hightower said.
The Phoenix center’s work has played a vital part in what advocates hope will be a large-scale transformation from a culture that punishes students to one that seeks their wellbeing. Continuing that change will require more people and more willing communities.
Before the pandemic, Hightower had planned for the center to expand to two other schools in her district, something she has now placed on hold until the next school year. Additionally, Hightower and Gonzalez both sit on the board of trustees for Grand Canyon University, where they have developed a partnership between the education college and the restorative justice center to train school administrators and students in mediation.
“People like Arthur [Montoya] have to have the bandwidth to at least get it started, then it has to be sustained and continued,” Hightower said.
Changing notions of justice
IN WESTERN COUNTRIES, “justice” has become synonymous with punitive discipline. The “criminal justice system”—a web of overlapping jurisdictions from policing to incarceration—purports to prevent and respond to harm. But many now recognize that the whole system is plagued by problems and ripe for reform—or even abolition. Unfortunately, other fields, such as education, have adopted a broken system as their own model for dealing with harm. Restorative justice advocates are introducing language of their own, such as the “criminal legal system,” which recognizes that policing and prisons rarely concern themselves with justice or the restoring of right relationship.
But the critical eye toward language can turn inward as well. For example, practitioners began working away from “victim” and “offender” language, as a recognition that even these terms are limited to legal restraints. Only three years into their work, Gonzalez and Montoya are considering renaming the Phoenix center.
“I really believe it is a transformative justice center,” Gonzalez said. “Because when you restore people and relationships, you’re transforming.”
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