Today we’re continuing our discussion of productive disagreements, and we’re joined by Inga Laurent, Professor of Law at Gonzaga who studies, theorizes and helps implement restorative justice practices in court systems and outside of judicial settings like schools.
We talk about a vision for a legal framework that works to heal and restore community, rather than just warehousing people when they do wrong. But what does that have to do with interpersonal disagreements? Dig in and find out:
We discuss...
- Restorative justice a lot: it's an approach where one of the responses to a crime is to organize a meeting between the person harmed and the person who did the harm, sometimes — and maybe ideally — with representatives of the wider community to repair the damage. Luke gives a primer on it at about 2:15.
- That society used to be more interconnected, so the solution to fixing things when someone wronged another person was to repair the relationship, not to exclude the wrong-doer. Inga talks about this at about 22:19.
- Unfolding the stories behind wrongdoings, taking away binaries of crime. Inga introduces the idea that dialogue and talking to each other makes the story much more dynamic at about 24:44.
- The absence of community in the criminal legal system: when something happens in your community, you’re never told what happened, if there was a resolution, if your neighbor needs your support. This lack of information creates distance and takes away the agency of the community to step in. Inga introduces this topic at 27:41.
- The victim's loss of agency when the criminal legal system takes over. Our system operates as if prosecution and punishment is the only way a victim can be served. Luke talks about this at 31:36.
