Living at Snow Lion

Community Restorative Justice: Our Disciplinary System

CORE Justice Program
phone: 303-245-4614
email: slrestorativejustice@naropa.edu

2010-2011 Staff:

Caitlin Arce, Graduate AssistantCaitlin is a graduate student in the Transpersonal Counseling Psychology: Art Therapy program. She has previously worked in the prison system while pursuing her undergraduate degree at SUNY New Paltz in Painting and Psychology. Seeing the harshness of punitive justice led her to Restorative Justice her at Naropa University. Her main roles in the office are organizational and geared towards understanding how the CORE Office can improve and offer services to a larger population of students. She would like to have more opportunities to interact with students and provide support during the process. She hopes to see restorative justice expand for Naropa University, as well as the greater community.

What is Restorative Justice?

Restorative Justice, or RJ, is a form of community justice. Restorative principles and practices are intrinsic to many indigenous peoples throughout the world. Currently, RJ practices are being re-taught to the industrialized world by the Maori people of New Zealand and many of the First Nations communities in Canada. Restorative practices are currently entering the judicial and social service systems in many cities and counties throughout North America, with Boulder County in the lead, as we now have established programs at the Boulder County Courthouse, Boulder Sheriff ’s office, the cities of Longmont and Lafayette, Colorado University, and most recently, at Naropa University.

Restorative justice is different from punitive justice. Punitive justice is the kind of justice we see in most of the industrialized world. It is a process of punishing people when the law is broken in relationship to the degree to which the particular law was breached. In punitive justice, Lawyers plead the case for their clients and Judges decide on the best way to adequately punish or not. Punishment is considered an adequate strategy to change behaviors through shaming, blaming and dehumanizing in order to deter people from making similar choices in the future. Often jail sentences are used to remove a person from the community a person harmed or impacted with the assumption that serving time will adequately punish and reform the guilty person. In restorative justice practices, the focus begins and ends with an understanding that no one is left out of community. Each time someone or something is harmed there is direct impact to the people involved as well as to the wider circles of community which hold together the fabric of human systems. Instead of asking the main questions of punitive justice, (What laws were broken? Who did it? How will s/he be punished?), different questions are asked throughout a reparative process. The main questions of restorative justice are:

• What happened?
• What is the impact of this event?
• What are the needs of the impacted people/community/systems?, and
• Whose responsibility is it to repair the harm done?        

Reparative agreements are made with the participation of the person of concern whose actions impacted others, with her or his strengths in mind. Punishment is considered to be detrimental to creating real change and a harmful act in and of itself since it focuses on shame, blame and de-humanizing a member of the community. The focus instead is on repairing specific harms and fostering a greater understanding of our inter-connectedness through community participation.The hallmarks of this approach ask the key questions of what do we need to learn, and what do we need to heal, in order for the community to be restored to a sense of balance and integrity following a conflict incident.

How does the View of Restorative Justice relate with Naropa?

We walk the talk at Naropa by implementing a restorative approach to discipline and justice. Restorative justice practices are in line with our overall mission, vision of contemplative education and addresses diversity in a way that is clearly a best practice for Naropa. By emphasizing individual and community accountability in the pilot program at Snow Lion Housing, we are adequately able to address some key student learning outcomes developed by Student Affairs.

The foundation of restorative justice begins with our individual and collective wholeness, similar to our mission which states that, “Naropa recognizes the inherent goodness and wisdom of each human being. It educates the whole person, cultivating academic excellence and contemplative insight in order to infuse knowledge with wisdom.” The vision for this program at Snow Lion is to demonstrate how the restorative justice principles of harm-reduction and repair can be used at Naropa and that the University will eventually utilize this model throughout the university, becoming an institution that uses “best practices” in working with conflict and violations of the prohibited code of conduct, in addition to realigning ourselves with our contemplative orientation. In this case, Naropa University’s contemplative mission is to

• promote and deepen authentic communication,
• repair the harmful interactions inherent in human interaction, and
• use conflict as a tool for uncovering helpful pathways and transformative outcomes in the pursuit of peaceful and creative co-existence.

In essence, this approach to transforming harm and creating community is a deeply contemplative practice. Utilizing this approach places Naropa University on the leading edge of learning institutions that think and work outside the organizational box in an effort to co-create a learning environment of accountability, responsibility, mutuality, and the establishment of peace on intrapersonal, interpersonal, and suprapersonal levels of our being. Establishing a restorative approach to justice at Snow Lion Housing is in line with the Student Learning Outcomes established for incoming first year students by the Office of Student Affairs. Student Affairs learning outcomes are established to initiate a developmental progression of the students’ experience. The progression is set forth to commence a path or a journey that articulates a direction from an introductory phase to an advanced stage with planned learning opportunities along the way. It is with this premise that a restorative community justice program works with conflict to introduce to students a community based model of working with violations of University Housing policies during their first year of college while living at Snow Lion.

Student Affairs firmly believes and espouses learning outcomes that encourage students to recognize the effects and implications of habits within their personal contexts. The introductory phase provides opportunities for students to develop practical skills that will sustain autonomy and interdependence and is in essence the work in a restorative justice program.

Students are asked to repair the impact or the harm caused by their actions while bringing the community closer together through reparative outcomes that hold individuals accountable and responsible for their behavior to the whole. We also believe that a restorative justice program is congruent with our contemplative philosophy in creating learning opportunities that involve both the individual and the community.