Part I: Introduction to ICOPA, Transformative Justice, and This Book

Ray Morris

Part I: Introduction to ICOPA, Transformative Justice, and This Book

Chapter I: Introduction to Transformative Justice and ICOPA IX

Ruth Morris

A recent chapter in my own life has placed me as an out-patient at Princess Margaret Hospital, a superb cancer treatment hospital in Toronto. Week after week I have been stunned by a quality of treatment beyond anything I have met in hardly any setting. An ambience which I like to call "the Caring Community" has infected the entire setting, from the people in the souvenir shops to the nurses and doctors in the many sections. When a patient wants to find some information, you ask anyone, and they are all almost equally committed to do whatever they can to get you nearer to your answer. In the Chemo Daycare Unit, flooded with patients each day, the receptionists know each patient, greet each one like long-lost friends, offer refreshments and encouraging words, provide games for children, magazines and a variety of comfy seating arrangements for adults. Messages abound of grateful patients who have donated everything from blanket warmers to flowers to make it a little better still for patients and staff alike. What should be a trip to Hell becomes an amazing experience in how we are meant to live together in community!

What has all this got to do with ICOPA IX and transformative justice? For one thing, we talk a lot about the caring community as the spirit behind all true alternatives to penality. So it is highly relevant to reflect on one of the few settings where it seems so near to fruition in this world. One of the patients has given a Humanitarian Award for the staff person displaying the most outstanding humanity in any way you choose. After a short debate with myself, I decided to nominate the whole Chemo Daycare Section, because to choose one is impossible: it is the spirit which underlies it all that is the miracle.

However, this brings me to the other relationship between our penal infected world and

Princess Margaret. After shedding tears of joy at the beauty week after week, I was suddenly stung into a sad thought this week. It was the many little gold plates littering the place that did it. There are tiny ones, medium ones, big ones, and very big ones, and they no doubt reflect the size of the donation that wealthy folks have given to the Hospital. For the thing about cancer is this: it is the great leveller. It strikes rich and poor alike, middle class, black, white, immigrants, longtime Canadians, males, females, young, middle-aged and elderly. Cancer is no respecter of categories. And as a society, are we ever respecters of categories! It is our excessive worship of categorical difference that lies behind the need for transformative justice, penal abolition, and ICOPAs I through IX. If there is one message that underlies all of these, it is this: the criminal justice system, so-called (sic), is not about crime. It is almost exclusively about reinforcing social class, racial, and other status barriers.

So what does this mean about Princess Margaret, and how the gold plates for big donors suddenly struck me? I realized, alas, that the most basic rule of our fundamentally classist and racist society is that the service you get always depends on how far the client group served includes the rich. When the airlines served almost exclusively the wealthy, their quality of service was outstanding and astounding. As they began to attract the middle classes and even the working class, the quality of service plummeted. They finally solved their dilemma by emphasizing "business" and "executive" classes, and littering the airports with announcements about super-elite waiting rooms and other perks reserved for those who clearly counted, as the rest of us didn't. Few alleged services are more blatantly, ruthlessly, callously classist in the verbiage and spirit than today's airlines. Even washrooms in airports for those of us not travelling super-elite are now often crowded, dirty, and so limited that the lineups are impossible. Similarly, as long distance busses have tried to attract middle class and other more affluent customers, they have added some of the perks the airlines have lost, though often in a kind of pathetic echo of a class service they can't hope to achieve given the seedy folks they have to contend with. I am reminded of a hilarious announcement we had on an English train afflicted with drunk celebrating French soccer fans, who apologized (in English only, of course) over their public system for the quality of some of their patrons!

It struck me that a part of the magic of Princess Margaret was the same sordid story. Mixed in among solid middle class types like myself, and line workers of colour from St. Mikes alcohol treatment center were society women in thinly disguised elegant dresses that would have done well at the best cocktail parties. Of course, to do Princess Margaret justice, they could easily have distinguished some customers from others. But unlike the airlines, they couldn't establish a tariff system to draw the line, and any system was bound to be subject to error. So they chose the high road, and extended the quality of service the rich get everywhere in our society to all of us, and part of the spiritual high I was on was just getting the up side of our vicious, endemic, dominant classism for a change.

All this is not entirely fair to the Hospital. They still deserve credit for creating an atmosphere of a caring community while serving 90% or more not super elite clients, and for not distinguishing in the least among us in their daily work. They still deserve credit for being a miracle in today's world. But the sad truth that part of the cause was all too familiar struck me as a good way to introduce ICOPA IX. ICOPA IX and ICOPAs in general are about blowing the whistle on a class system which is everything, and a justice system which is nothing if not rank injustice.

At this point, it may be well to explain ICOPA more by sharing the Introduction I gave to ICOPA IX in May, 2000, which in part quoted the Introduction I had given to the very first ICOPA, in spring, 1983, also in Toronto. It was a rare privilege to have this opportunity twice, and I chose my words carefully.

Welcome and Introduction to ICOPA IX

Almost exactly 17 years ago, in May, 1983, I stood on a stage not too far from here, in another part of Toronto, and gave the opening short introduction to the First International Conference on Prison Abolition, On each of these occasions a dedicated team of Toronto visionairies worked for more than a year to bring off a conference on abolition at a time when it seemed the world was turning its back on the marginalization of minorities in our world penal systems. On both occasions, more than 400 people joined us for that momentous occasion. On both of these occasions, we said to those who scoffed that we are spitting in the wind, "No, I think we are the wind of the future."

Our Quaker Committee on Jails and Justice launched the first conference, and has supported every ICOPA since. At that first ICOPA I quoted something I said at the gathering of Canadian Quakers from across Canada, the year we became the first religious body in the world to endorse prison abolition unanimously:

'There's an old story about a little child saying "Someday they're gonna call a war, and nobody will come." When we ask the world to look at prison abolition, all we're saying is this:

"Someday they're going to build a prison

And there won't be anybody to put in it.

There won't be anybody because you and I - you and I -

Will have opened our hearts, our homes, and our communities,

And found better ways of dealing with our social differences

Than by locking and caging our fellow human beings."

That's all penal abolition is about, and when you look at it that way, it's not so frightening. It is a vision of the caring community, the community that in our hearts, we would all like to live in. It's gaining security not by locking doors against the bad people out there, or locking those bad people in prisons; but by making the whole community a safe, caring, positive place for everyone.

As penal abolitionists we're saying: let's not postpone that world forever, by living in the frightened enclaves of the past. Let's move forward in faith toward the caring community of the future, the world where we will be too big in spirit for prisons...."

All that is from that first introduction of the first ICOPA in 1983, and it's fun to speak those words again. But they have a price. One week after I spoke them, I was fired from the Toronto Bail Program I had founded, partly for organizing that Conference, partly for hiring a parolee, and partly for insisting the Toronto Police feed the people in their custody. I was fired from another so-called voluntary agency in the criminal justice system 7 years later, and I learned that the prophetic role has a price to pay - but it's a price well worth paying.

We've called ICOPA IX "A Call to Transformative Justice: New Questions, New Answers." We believe this system is so screwed up, it takes more than reform to fix it. And it takes more than restoring anyone to the unhealthy state they were in before a specific crime occurred. Because the racism and the classism, the growing gap between rich and poor, and the environmental destruction going on around us - these are the big crimes. We don't want to restore a racism, classist, sexist world: we want to transform it. ICOPA IX will be looking at the big picture. We aren't prepared just to prettify the way we pin all the guilt in our world on the young, the poor and the people of colour. We demand justice in our justice system. And justice requires basic social transformation.

What's the difference between transformation and reformation?

1. Transformation rejects revenge unequivocally;

reform accepts the basic assumptions of revenge.

2. Transformation seeks only root changes; reform tries for moderate, incremental gains within the existing system.

3. Transformation focuses on transforming the lives of victims, offenders, and the community; reform prioritizes the state and its power requirements.

4. Transformation has never been adequately tried, though it is prevalent in some aboriginal societies and successful there; reform has failed for over 150 years.

5. Transformation is based on spirituality; reform is fundamentally secular, based on capitalism's worship of money, greed, and power.

6. Transformation sees injustice as the problem, and crime as an opportunity to transform all; reform sees crime as the problem, and seeks to punish and reform the criminal.

What are the qualities of transformative models?

*They are future focussed, not past focussed.

*They see healing as the goal, not retribution or restoration to an unjust state

*They are community bas

ed, not state based

*They recognize both distribute injustice and crime victimization

*They avoid the exclusive focus on "individual responsibility"

In transformative justice, we are looking at new questions, big questions. We don't waste energy on how long the minimum sentences in human cages should be, or how to tinker with court and policing systems designed to protect the rich from the poor. We are looking for questions about fundamental changes, which offer social transformation - changes which challenge the obscene use of the word justice to justify wider and more brutal gaps between rich and poor, white and nonwhite.

The very name and nature of ICOPA allows and inspires us to ask big questions: what is penal abolition, and how can we achieve it? What is keeping in place a system which has failed so miserably ever since its inception? What kind of strategies can we use which will transform the power gaps and even the hearts and minds of those abusing positions of power in our world?

In concluding these brief opening remarks, I want to rephrase the closing of that first introductory ICOPA talk in 1983 once again:

"When I presented prison abolition to Canadian Friends in 1981, I had no serious expectation they would unite that very week in support of prison abolition, but they did.

When I dreamed of the first ICOPA, I could not have envisioned standing there with 400 people from 15 different countries, but it happened.

When we agreed at Rittenhouse to host ICOPA IX, it seemed impossible that we would be able to expand ICOPA to include Asians and Africans, and include all 6 inhabited continents in our circle, but we have. It seemed audacious to believe we could bring together the struggle for penal abolition with the struggle against corporate rule, but we have!

I have seen too many impossible miracles happen when you have the courage to follow your dreams, to call anything impossible. But you can make the future we need impossible by remaining locked in the prison of your own fears of imagining and risking for your dreams. Or you can move forward with us, dream the dream of a future without prisons and without revenge at its heart, and begin to work toward it tonight."

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In recent years I have become increasingly aware that we have two fundamental cultural fallacies that underlie our criminal injustice system:

1) Crime = street crime

2) The only correct response to crime is punishment or revenge

Since the main function of our criminal injustice system is reinforcing the barriers of racism and classism, and a secondary function is reaffirming the cultural myth that revenge is a desirable social practice, my challenge in community education and ours at Rittenhouse, A New Vision (which was the primary organizer of ICOPA IX) is how to puncture both of these myths at once, and often in a short time, against endemic cultural myths bred into the bones of our readers and listeners. I have gotten quite good at getting people riled up toward corporations. There are so many chilling bloodcurdling stories of corporate depravity I have collected from books on corporate crime. But how do I then go on to say, "Yes, their behaviour is hateful, and it is ongoing, and we can't stop it without a massive social movement backing us. Nevertheless, we should not hate them or seek revenge, but rather restraint of wrong behaviour, along with transformation: social transformation, class transformation, and personal transformation." My audiences are so worked up with anger toward a newly discovered culprit, that all they have really partaken of is a new target for a revenge approach.

I can also take the opposite tack, by telling great stories of forgiveness, both individual and collective, and great stories of family group conferences. Then the audience gets excited about healing instead of revenge, but they have no clue that most serious crime is corporate and by the rich. I once answered a question by a woman in New Zealand, who asked if I thought there was a criminal gene, with this spontaneous reply, which I still like very much. "I don't know about a criminal gene, but if there is one, we have to look for it in the rich and powerful, because that is where most crime comes from."

Some of the new questions these two huge truths point us toward are questions like these:

1) Given the size and unrestrained continuity of corporate crime, how can we apply transformative justice to corporate crime?

2) How widely do we have to reach in transformative justice circles to be truly transformative? Who must be included, and how far back in time must we look?

3) How can we deal with the problem of the "power elite," who own most of the media, control many jobs, and by dint of their economic power, in effect own many of our governments?

4) Given the fact that wealthy individuals and corporations which are highly criminal own most media, how can we begin to get a more

balanced understanding of where crime resides, out to the public?

5) How can we overcome the myth that "one family group conference should solve it all," undoing 20 years of abuse and neglect in the life of the "young criminal." How do we measure success realistically?

6) Why do we accept huge casualties in war and a failure rate of 40-85% in prisons, but expect 100% success from healthier approaches like nonviolent resistance and transformative justice? How can we learn to accept that there will always be suffering and failure in any attempt at social healing?

7) What are the false gods we pay tribute to through the existing criminal justice system?

One could go on and on with this list. ICOPA IX opened the door to creativity. We set out with 5 big, concrete goals:

1) To define corporate crime as major crime

2) To bring Africa and Asia into ICOPA

3) To link corporate rule and retributive justice

4) To expand the previous attendance limit beyond the high of 400 in ICOPA I