LermanI’ve been an assistant D.A. for just over 19 years. About 9 years into it, something about the regular prosecutory work was not right. I took a mediation course at Harvard and asked experts about this kind of work in the criminal field. They said it did not exist. While talking with a mentor from Des Moines, Iowa, Dept. D.A. Fred Gay, sitting in an hour long conversation, their restorative justice program made sense. He told me of a story of 2 neo-Nazis youth who had defaced a synagogue. Fred approached the synagogue to see if they would meet with these two kids, who were incapable of generating a mass movements; more naive and disaffected late teens.

The synagogue agreed to meet with them and sent a number of people, including an Israili living in Des Moins, a holocaust survivor, the salt-of-the earth, non-Jewish synagogue custodian, and the rabbi. They reached an agreement that the boyfriend, with a learning or physical disability, had to study Jewish history with the rabbi, do some work around the building, have the nazi tatoos removed from his arm, and some other actions of restitution. He basically was “de-programmed” from his nazi consciousness.

This provoked an intense conversation in the synagogue community about this concept. I have a video of rabbi speaking of it.

Fred Gay became a mentor. I started having conversations with Mike McCann, in the Spring of 1997, who gave me the go-ahead to start trying to build something around this concept. We failed our first grant efforts for a couple of years. It was a development phase, creatiing a network of supporters. How do we build this here? Jack Murtaugh of Interfaith liked the idea but saw not way to get involved. That changed when Allen Newton of Underwood Memorial Baptist Church of Wauwatosa said “Bingo! Cool! I want to do this.” He became point man for Interfath Conference.

That was part of the network building. Dorothy Dean on County Board created the County Task Force on Restorative Justice as an informal board of directors for the effort, with McCann having power of appointment. I have booklet of all of the minutes for a rich source of the history.

Processes and Principles

Crime, harm or wrong doing is an offense against relationships. With this defintion, you start looking at what goes on in school. Break the rules and you go to the principal, get suspended, go to the “expert.” There is little involvement of the people really impacted, e.g. the victim of the crime, or the classmates in the class.

We thus lose a learning opportunity. The process for dealing with this wrong is a traditional rule based approach. I’m going to punish you for what you did. I expect you to learn, based upon the punishment that is invoked. We are relying on a system of inflicting pain and harm, instead of…love, or caring, or change of persuasion, of learning.

A movitivation of fear rather than a motivation of empathy, compassion…love.

We have separated in this system our fundamental religious beliefs of love your neighbor as yourself. We do not act upon that. The golden rule!

The radical right has succeeded in framing the social agenda. There’s more than issues of adulty. Social and economic justice have value witin a religious framework. Religious values, about people being connected with one another.

People want to be in relationships. They want to be connected. So build that. Heal relationships. Hold up those values.

On May 1, 2000 the program opened. There was an internal office memo about the opening. Someone leaked it to Jeff Wagner of WTMJ, so their noon hour program was all about how silly this program was. “Tape of Kum Ba Ya at DA’s office.”
But some citizen called in, regular listener, said “Program sounds good to me.”

Grant that stuck was for $20,000 from the Milwaukee Foundation for a half-time para legal program manager. This freed up l/2 of my time. Jane Moore was program manager or point person for Milwaukee Foundation important. Alan Newton, Paige Styler of Public Defenders, also Kelly Thompson(Tommy’s daughter now in Madison), Doroty Dean, Kip McNally(runs Benedict Center, Joel’s wife), Wisconsin Community Services(was Wisconsin Correctional Services), Rose Lee of NAACP(City not part of this).

No party or ceremony, but volunteer gatherings around May 1. In April of 2000 we had a training grant from National Institute of Corrections, for 3 day training of first 20 facilitators. Roger Brooks succeeded Alan Newton at Interfath Conference. Erin Katzfay, today’s program manager. First was Dawn Drellos. She was great. Now a lawyer. Scott Jensen was big early supporter. but thsi is a different part of the story… as there was a legislative effort that began in the early 2000′s.