A Different Way of Thinking About Justice

2006 Community of Christ International
Peace Award Recipient Howard Zehr

A conversation between Howard Zehr and Community of Christ Peace and Justice Ministries coordinator Andrew Bolton, January 12, 2006:

A: Tell us about the family in which you grew up. How did that shape you?

H: I grew up Mennonite. My father was a pastor and church leader. I don’t know quite where I got the commitment to justice, but it came pretty early. I don’t remember my family specifically talking about it, but I’m sure that’s where the value came from.

I was born in Illinois and lived there until junior high, and then I was in northern Indiana until my second year of college.

A: You went to Morehouse College, from which Martin Luther King Jr. graduated, to do your undergraduate degree and were the first white person to graduate from there. What was that like?

H: I started at Goshen College in Indiana, which is a historically Mennonite school. Then I left and went to Morehouse, and then I went to Bethel in Kansas, and then I went back to Morehouse. It was probably one of the most formative experiences of my life—one I really wouldn’t trade. It wasn’t that it was easy.

I’d gone there for several reasons. One of them was that I became convinced that we as Christians need to be really adaptable. And the other was that if we as Christians were going to do all this talk about justice—and at Goshen College in the early 1960s there was a lot of talk about justice—we’ve got to get out of these little enclaves and go where it’s really at and be there.

One of the most influential Mennonites in my life, John Howard Yoder the theologian, did a series of lectures at Goshen College. He was saying a number of these things. He looked at Paul and looked at how Paul had put himself into difficult situations, learned to be adaptable, went out on the front lines of things. I know that his thinking there really got me thinking and probably led me to Morehouse.

In the 70s I taught at a black college in Alabama. Again it was John Howard Yoder’s thinking that brought me back—the Mennonite community, his work in The Politics of Jesus, but particularly his little book The Original Revolution that argued that our witness as a Christian means to come and live in this community where we live differently [as followers of Jesus]. I realized that I didn’t have that and I needed to reconnect with that. So that’s partly what led me to leave that environment and go back to a Mennonite community for a while.

A: There is a sense of being a 60s child and the civil rights movement being so exciting and also related to Mennonite values because it was the transformation of evil by nonviolence.

H: The comment about the civil rights movement as exciting is an interesting one. I didn’t really go there for the excitement of the civil rights movement. [Morehouse] hadn’t had any white graduates, but they had a few white students from time to time that were exchange students…and they were very skeptical of these students because, from what they could tell, they were elitist students who were coming down just kind of voyeuristically to get in on the excitement of the civil rights movement. Morehouse students felt really kind of disrespected by that. I caught on pretty soon that my mission was to dig in and take my education seriously, and be there, so people got used to me and I got used to them.

I had many challenges. That first year was a real challenge for all of us because Brown v. Board of Education that desegregated schools was only in 1954. This was less than 10 years later. They had not had many positive experiences, certainly hadn’t lived with white students before. I didn’t have that many experiences with black students. So there was some real testing of me, who I was, and why I was there, and so forth before I came to be accepted.

A: Tell us something about your degrees and interests in college.

H: I graduated with a major in history with a minor in philosophy. I went for a PhD. When I left Morehouse I went to University of Chicago and I was there two years. My interest that emerged was social history and that’s sort of a sociological look at history. Peter Stearns there was one of the leaders in this new field and he became my mentor. He moved to Rutgers and took me with him.

So I went to Rutgers and finished my PhD at Rutgers in social history and history of crime was my research area. That’s where I began to get into crime. The dissertation was eventually published and is considered sort of a classic in the history of crime genre, although I’ve left that all behind now.

A: When did you get married?

H: In ’66 with 40 years coming up in June [to Ruby Friesen Zehr]. We have two children. One of them lives here in town. The other one is in New York City as an artist. [Ruby] works for the church part time and she has a small garden design business.

A: What drew you to criminal justice?

H: Between my background and what I was seeing there in the early 70s in Alabama kept that in the forefront and I began to get involved with prisoners and defendants. For one thing, I began to visit some prisoners and became their advocate. The other thing that happened is that a colleague and I put together a team—two of us plus students that we called the Social Science and Research Project. We did jury research for federal trials where we believed they had political dimensions—where race was involved, or prison riots, or police brutality.

We would go into communities, often very segregated communities, and do research on the jury pool to help the defense lawyers pick their jury. That kind of work began to really suck me in. Then I moved to Indiana where I was taking a few seminary and law courses and running a halfway house for ex-offenders, which burnt down within six months of me picking that job up. We decided not to rebuild it and instead I should get involved in this new idea of victim-offender reconciliations. Kind of reluctantly I got involved in that, and that’s the stream that then led me to this restorative justice field. By ’79 we had a small program in the community [in Indiana] and then it began to take off further in the early ’80s.

A: So you were first of all a practitioner?

H: First a practitioner, and that was what really changed my lens. Before that I had this real critical perspective on criminal justice, but it was a conventional critique. The system was adversarial. It made so many mistakes. But I knew nothing about victims. I didn’t want to know about victims. Like a lot of advocates I felt like they would somehow get in the way of justice. And I liked the moral certainty of knowing the good guys and the bad guys—the prosecutor is a bad guy.

And then I get involved in this thing and it all shakes it up. I start hearing these victims. Suddenly something clicks. I began to realize how much they’re part of the equation. I began to see what was happening with offenders. It really led me to reevaluate my concept of justice and then, eventually, to restorative justice.

A: Community of Christ is a restorationist, restitutionist tradition. We began with the idea that the primitive church should be normative, which is not too dissimilar to the Mennonites. So restorative justice must sound right for our people.

H: The term is so interesting. When I and others [talked about] what should the language be, I was thinking, “What would connect with people?” So I was looking for a term that would connect and it does. But that’s a mixed blessing. I found that a lot of people think they know what restorative justice is because of the intuitiveness of it. The other big problem is that the “restore” suggests going back, and of course you’re not going back. You’re going forward. So it has its downside, but it still is a term that really does resonate.

A: You grew up a Mennonite. You’re a preacher’s kid. You went to two colleges that were Mennonite. Do you want to say any more about how your Mennonite faith continues to inform your work?

H: Well, obviously the emphasis on peace and justice theme is a very strong one in Mennonite circles. In addition a lot about the Anabaptist tradition has really affected my work. Our whole program here is shaped in a lot of ways by that in the way we understand mission and presence in the world.

One of the tenets of Anabaptism as I understand it is this idea of the priesthood of all believers. And that means that we’re accountable to each other in some way. We need to find ways to be accountable. I know when I was a practitioner I felt very strongly that I needed a group around me to hold me accountable because I could tell I had power over people’s lives. I could say, this person isn’t working out and they’d end up going back to jail. So, I feel like one of the things Anabaptism taught me is that we need to be accountable, particularly when we’re in positions of power. We need to find ways to be accountable. That, I think, plays into my idea of accountability in restorative justice.

A: Did the punitive experience of early Anabaptism sensitize conscience for you as well?

H: I think it did indirectly, because I think it has shaped our tradition. We haven’t chosen to see ourselves as victims like some groups might. It may have shaped the way we tend to be the “quiet in the land,” that quiet witness and so forth. It’s an interesting thing to think about anyhow.

A: What has been the most satisfying work that you have done and why?

H: Well that’s hard to answer. One of the things, at least currently, that is really satisfying is watching other people take the ideas and run with them. One of the rewarding things of being in the position I am now, near the end of my career, is being able to pass the torch to other people who just go places I never imagined. I have students I’ve worked with that are doing stuff with restorative justice that are just beyond anything I ever imagined or could have done. I find that tremendously satisfying.

I like to do the kind of books I’ve done—visuals are important to me and working with photography and words is really important to me. I’ve really enjoyed these kinds of projects like the Doing Life book and the Transcending book where I can work with people to get their stories and their reflections out.

A: You have made a very significant impact in the field of restorative justice. Summarize in a few lines what restorative justice is.

H: Well I think restorative justice is ultimately a different way of thinking about justice. It’s one that puts emphasis on harm, the needs that come out of the harms we experience, and the obligations for meeting these needs. That combined with the need that we have to be involved in solving things when wrongdoing or conflicts occur.

For the first time in my life I facilitated a wedding here three months ago. These people had a restorative justice background. They wanted a “circle” wedding. The first person to speak in the circle said, “I’d like you to have a restorative marriage.” He said, “That means when we do wrong we acknowledge it and we try to make it right.” And I thought, “There it is, right there. That’s just about right.”

When we do wrong, we acknowledge it, and we try to make it right. So, it’s ultimately about addressing the needs of those who’ve been harmed, sorting out the information about whose responsibility it is to address those needs, and then involving the people in trying to work their way through it.

The judicial idea of justice is encapsulated in three questions. What laws have been broken? Who did it? What do they deserve? Restorative justice starts with three different questions: Who’s been hurt? What are their needs? Whose obligations are they?

A: Some countries have really embraced restorative justice. Which ones have really gone down this road?

H: New Zealand is one. That’s probably the first and maybe only complete Western legal system that institutionalized restorative justice at its core for juveniles. It’s not perfect, but in its intent, in its design, the center of the whole thing is a restorative justice conference. The court’s the backup. Usually it’s the other way around. In [the U.S.] if you have a restorative justice program, the court is the center and restorative approaches are just kind of an alternative possibility sitting off to the side. New Zealand reversed that.

Canada has had a national debate on this and has worked on it nationally more than many countries have.

A: What is your vision for justice in the United States—this place with 8 million prisoners in the world and 2 million are here?

H: Well it’s kind of discouraging in a lot of ways. At the end of Changing Lenses I say, “If all that comes out of this is that we have a bad conscience about punishing people, we’ll have come a long way.”

I have not been very fast to advocate system-wide movement toward restorative justice in the U.S. because I’m skeptical about our ability to do that with integrity at this time. Probably it’s my Anabaptist, minority perspective, but also I’m just so cynical about what happens in the political process to these things—and feeling like we still have so much to learn. I sometimes say I wish we had another 10 years before Oprah discovered us.

I’d love to see a day when we have something like New Zealand where it informs the whole system. I think we need the legal system, but I’d like to see it more restoratively oriented and I’d like more restorative options. My dream would be that kind of emphasis where we try restorative options first. There are some people that would be incarcerated. There are some kinds of offenses where deterrents work, but let’s reserve it for those that need it.

Most of my career has been working with grassroots people seeking to do justice from the bottom up. I really believe that justice needs to be done from the bottom up and that the best thing about restorative justice is that it creates a dialogue about what we need, and what we believe, and what our values are.

A: It’s taking justice back to the people but in a different way, isn’t it?

H: Exactly, exactly. The framework of restorative justice gives people an opening to start thinking about these things. I don’t think it’s going to look the same in all communities because of that. I think it needs to be to some extent community-specific. My vision would include this kind of dialogue at a community level about what the community needs and what we want for our community.

A: From a denominational point of view we are trying to inform members to be involved at the grassroots.

H: I think the church has a huge role and a huge contribution to make in this field. You don’t have to be a legal expert to get into this work, whether it’s in the legal system or not. Most of the people who’ve gotten into it didn’t start as legal experts. It’s a place where we can practice peacemaking in a very practical way.

Many people who get tired of talking about peace in an abstract way: here’s a way that we can all get involved. Church members can mediate cases. There are all kinds of ways to get involved.

I spend a lot of my time thinking and worrying about all the ways things can go wrong—and part of the reason it goes wrong is because the values of restoration and those kind of things, reconciliation, are rather foreign words in secular society. But the church ought to understand that. They can bring an alternative value system to the work.

I’ve often thought it’s really important that the church be involved in running these programs, even if they are small programs, because they become a kind of conscience and a demonstration. I think it’s very important the church keep doing it.

Our faith communities talk about peace a lot, but we often don’t do it very well among ourselves. Mennonites are certainly that way. But it’s interesting that restorative justice originally began in the criminal justice field and is now coming back to the church.

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Anabaptism The concept of Priesthood of All Believers grows out of 1 Peter 2:9. At the Protestant Reformation the priesthood of all believers was developed to say that all believers had ministry to give, not just ordained clergy. The Anabaptist movement, from which the Mennonites later developed, specifically affirmed the ministry of all who believed and were baptized. In the Community of Christ, the priesthood of all believers finds expression in a priesthood where people are called and serve whilst earning their living from other sources. Indeed there is a priesthood office of member (Doctrine and Covenants 104:5). Doctrine and Covenants 119:8b, which states “All are called according to the gifts of God unto them...” affirms the priesthood of all believers in our tradition. Anabaptist means re-baptizer. Anabaptism began in 1525 in Geneva, Switzerland at the time of the Protestant Reformation when George Blaurock and Conrad Grebel baptized each other as adults. The Anabaptists thus began believing in adult baptism. At this time nearly all Christians, both Catholic and Protestants, believed only in infant baptism and so this was a revolutionary act and subject to the death penalty. The Anabaptists were severely persecuted and burned at the stake, drowned, and hung. Jesus was the center of their biblical faith; they emphasized a new birth, established congregations free from state control, believed in economic sharing, abandoned the sword and violence, and had a vision of restoring New Testament Christianity. Menno Simons was an early Anabaptist in Holland who founded what has become the Mennonite church. Other Anabaptist descendents include the Amish and the communal Hutterites.    return to interview