The Center on Halsted and queer direct-action organization Gender JUST are ensnared in a public debate over mediation practices at the Center after Gender JUST launched a petition urging the Center to adopt practices that the facility says it already has in place.
At the heart of the debate is "restorative justice," a practice used by organizations and activists that aims to provide alternatives to punishment when supposed wrongdoing has occurred.
Center on Halsted staff say that the organization practices restorative justice. Gender JUST argues that the Center has not adopted such practices or made current policy public.
The debate comes after an apparent breakdown in communications between the two organizations, which have been meeting almost weekly to work on restorative justice at the Center since summer 2010.
Restorative justice, also sometimes called transformative justice, is an approach to dealing with alleged wrongdoing that takes into account the experiences of both the victim and the person causing harm in a situation. Rather than focusing solely on crime and punishment, restorative justice most often looks at root causes and aims to heal those involved.
"Implementing restorative justice is about a culture shift within a space," said Lewis Wallace, volunteer coordinator at Project NIA, a Chicago-based organization that uses restorative justice to address to violence and crime.
Restorative justice can rely on a variety of tools, according to Wallace, but ideally restorative justice seeks to bring as many people as possible to the table to talk about harm or conflict.
Restorative justice mediations might include the peers of both the person harmed and the person causing harm, in addition to community members who might have a stake in the matter.
According to Center on Halsted staff, the organization has long embraced restorative-justice principles. Additionally, in March, staffers removed an old policy that allowed Center patrons to be banned without recourse.
"We don't even use words like 'banned' anymore," said Tim'm West, the Center's new associate director of the youth program.
Instead, patrons can return to the Center after going through a mediation process with Center staff and victims.
The Center on Halsted defines restorative justice for itself as a practice that "does not seek to deny consequences for misbehavior. Instead, it focuses on helping youth understand the real harm done by their misbehavior, to take responsibility for the behavior, and to commit to positive change. It proposes a continuum of discipline measures, moving away from punishment, to consequences, then solutions, then restoration."
According to Brian Richardson, the Center's director of public affairs, the staff created the definition using frameworks provided by the Chicago Area Project and the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
Gender JUST members allege after more than a year of meetings intended create a restorative justice proposal, the Center has yet to adopt the true spirit of restorative justice, and has stated that it has restorative justice without finishing the work it started with Gender JUST in 2010.
"There is not a comprehensive embrace of its values," said Jason Tompkins, an organizer with Gender JUST. "There's still this punitive attitude that they really want to hold onto."
Tompkins said his group wants to see the creation of a "justice circle" or a jury comprised of youth, Center staff and other community members to help deal with conflict.
Presently, the Center holds weekly meetings with patrons who are accused of wrongdoing. The meetings might include staff members and the person harmed in addition to the alleged offender.
Tompkins said the practice of such meetings "leaves a lot of questions" about transparency and accountability.
But Richardson counters that the closed-door meetings protect the confidentiality and safety of those involved.
"We can and do discuss our mediation process openly with community members and partners, but we do not discuss individual cases or invite outside participants," Richardson said.
Wallace, who declined to comment on the Center on Halsted in particular, said it is possible to have restorative justice in situations where an offender is meeting with an organization's staff.
"It has to be possible because there are always power dynamics," he said. However, he added that the ideal is to have as many different people at the table as possible.
Both Gender JUST and Center on Halsted representatives invested significant time in creating a proposal for restorative justice at the Center. Among them were two Center interns and Center youth representatives. Several Center on Halsted staff members also met with Gender JUST.
The result was a 22-page proposal for restorative justice, completed in late May. Tompkins said that he authored the document in partnership with Center representatives.
But turnover within both organizations has meant that many of those who began talks in 2010 are no longer at the table. Consequently, both groups have had to wade through the confusion of re-educating each other, and each tells a different story of how the two arrived at a point of disagreement.
Tompkins said that the two groups met weekly with the goal of creating a plan for restorative justice at the Center. However, Rayna Moore, youth advocacy manager at the Center, said the conversations were theory-based and did not tackle what restorative justice would look like at the Center, in particular. Tompkins said that the proposal was authored jointly with the Center, while Richardson said that the Center first laid eyes on it when it was released to the larger community.
"It did not come from the Center," Richardson said, but added that those listed on the document did work with Gender JUST on implementing restorative justice.
Of all those who began the conversation with Gender JUST in 2010, no one from the Center is still working on the project. Tompkins also joined the discussion late last year, although other Gender JUST members have been involved from the start.
What both groups do agree on is that in mid-May, the two stopped meeting. The Center wanted to change the meeting format to monthly meetings. The two organizations have yet to set up a time to reconvene.
In late May, after seeing that the Center announced it had restorative justice, Gender JUST launched an online petition alleging that if the Center did have restorative justice, it had not made the policy public.
More than 120 people have signed the petition, Wallace among them.
But after much debate, both groups say they are committed to seeing the process through to the end, and each has said they will resume meetings. Richardson is also quick to add that the Center's policy is constantly evolving.
Tompkins said the petition simply aimed to open up dialogue with the larger community about restorative justice at the Center, not to shut down the talks. "There was just a lack of clarity I think honestly on both sides about how this was going to be implemented," he said.
