Rep Willy Chotzen On Restorative Justice

(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Denver Best Podcast. I am Virginia Stapleton. - And I'm Chris Hoyt. - And today we have a very special guest with us, Representative Willie Totson, who serves and has to stretch 46 in Southeast Portland. Welcome to the pod. - Thank you, love it to be here. - We're so excited to have you. I'm gonna have Chris do your bio real quick and then we'll get right into our questions. - A lifelong advocate for equity and justice, Willie has dedicated his career to uplifting historically marginalized communities. First as a public school teacher and later as a public defender. Born in Ashland, Willie now lives in Southeast Portland with his wife and two toddlers. As a middle school math teacher, he empowered students to use math as a tool for advocacy and change. Motivated by the systemic inequities his students faced, he pursued a law degree at Harvard, where he worked in a legal aid clinic, fighting wage theft, evictions and foreclosures, while also teaching an undergraduate economics course. Later as a chief attorney in Portland's public defender's office, Willie trained and supervised new attorneys, shaped court policy and advocated for his clients both in the courtroom and in the community. His wife is a career educator and currently works for Portland Public Schools. Together they are raising two wonderful children to remind them daily that a better and more equitable future is worth fighting for. And Optimist at Heart, Willie ran for office because he believes that while many of our systems are broken, real solutions are possible when we work together. Rep Chowtson, welcome back to the pod. We're excited to talk about restorative justice today. Thank you so much for having me back. Really, really appreciate it looking forward to being here. I do have to correct one thing in the bio. It's not bad, it's on me, not on you. But if my kids heard them being described as toddlers, they would be very, very mad. They're three and a half and five. And they have explained to me toddlers in that about two to two and a half. So just want to correct that, but thrilled to be back here. That's amazing that they know that. Oh, they have very strong opinions on little kids, medium kids, big kids. There's a whole zero to 18 is broken down in more ways than you could imagine. Yeah, I totally get that as a parent of two kids. Yeah, and those phases go so fast. So I'm really excited to continue to have you back to the pod and hear more about what's going on with you and your wife and your kids. You are a fantastic human. And so love having you in and around the pod. We'd love to talk to you today about restorative justice. This is a big important issue for me personally. But when we hear about it on the doors, people really want to dive into this issue. And so we have some folks who have submitted questions today about restorative justice. So I'm just going to start off with the first question, which is a big one. What does restorative justice mean to you? Great, well, I love the topic. I love hearing that it's coming up on the doors. I think that there's a shared value that everybody wants to be safe in their community. That's the goal. And right now, the main tool we have to try to achieve that goal is our traditional criminal legal system, which is really asking two questions. First, is there enough evidence to prove that you've done whatever the thing is you're accused of doing? And then secondly, if so, how much punishment are we going to throw at you? So I start there because I think it's important to understand what we're currently doing to understand what restorative justice is and how it's different. restorative justice is asking a totally different set of questions. It's saying to the person who's been harmed, what do you need to repair that harm? What do you need to feel better? What do you need to be able to go back to the life you were living before this harm occurred or to be able to restore yourself? And it's asking the person who's done that harm to be accountable, to be actually truly accountable to what they've done. And then for the sake of the community and for the sake of all those people, it's really saying, what do we need to do differently to make sure this doesn't happen again? So I think that's what restorative justice means to me. It's why it's so powerful is because it's asking a different set of questions about how we actually empower the voice of someone who's been harmed, and how we actually hold somebody who's done harm accountable in a true meaningful, authentic way. And when you ask different questions, you get different answers, and that's what restorative justice produces. I couldn't agree more. And in my experience-- and I don't know if you know-- but I was in law enforcement for 30 years. No. I was at a piti sheriff in jail commander in Lincoln County and here in Marion County, and worked in Clackamas County, when I was the end of the sheriff there when I retired. So I have a long history of programs in helping people to make better decisions, make better choices. I implemented a cognitive behavioral program in our jail in the early '90s, which was unheard of in Oregon. So these are things that are really near and dear to my heart. We actually in Clackamas run an inpatient alcohol and dirt treatment program in the sheriff's office. What I found is that people-- they want people held accountable, but they really want the offenders to hold themselves accountable. Absolutely. And usually, when people go into custody, it's not like I tell people, it's not because they're bad people, it's because they made bad choices. And there's a whole variety of reasons that went into that bad choice. It could be an abuse history, could be substance abuse, all those things. So I'm really excited to really dive into this today, as we talk about ways that we can make our system in Oregon better, because locking people up is important in some cases, because some people just need to be out of the community for a while. The question is, what are we going to do with folks when they're there? And right now, we're not doing much. Totally, especially in our prison system, we're really not. And the vast majority of those people-- I mean, way more than 90% of the people in our prisons are coming back to our communities. So it's not a temporary relief of symptoms if that's needed, but they're coming right back, and we equip them to have a different set of tools and skills for things to be different this time around. Absolutely, that's what I say to folks. Like, OK, almost everybody going to prisons, coming back to our county, wherever sent them. Would you want them to be just like or worse than they were when they went in, or do you want them to be better? And just locking people up doesn't make people better. In fact, it probably makes them worse. And I think-- I didn't know that you had that background. That's exciting to learn. And I think it gets at an important point, which is there are amazing people working at all the different parts of our criminal legal system. There are great public defenders, and prosecutors, and judges, and probation officers, and police officers. But they're working upstream against a system that tries to stamp the humanity out of people all the time to try to add these philosophies back in. So you might be talking to somebody on your caseload who wants to be honest with you, but also as afraid, being honest or accountable is going to lead to more punishment. In my public defense experience, the very first time me to client is at a rainment. And a lot of times, they want to immediately take accountability for the thing they've just done. And my job essentially was to shut them up and say, no, no, no, no, don't say anything. That's only going to hurt your case, right? Then make sure they didn't self-incriminate at all. That's me being a good public defender in the system we have. But it's preventing someone from taking accountability that they're actually trying to take. So what are some challenges that you think we are facing within our current criminal justice system? I mean, we talked about this with Representative yesterday about health care. And my question to him was, what's worth keeping, right? And I would love to pose that same question to you. Like, what's working well in the system that we currently have? Is there anything of merit that we should keep? Or are you of the belief that it needs to be a complete tear down and redo? What a great question. I'm going to give you two different answers. The first is a little bit sarcastic. But if it comes to punishment, if the goal is punishment, America is one of the best countries in the world than it. I think my goal and the goal of most of my neighbors is public safety. Is community safety is making sure when they walk their kids to school or when they go to sleep at night, they're safe. That's the more fundamental goal that we all share. But we do a really good job at punishing people in the sense that we spend more money on it and we lock more people up. And we have a bigger prison system than the other country in the world has. I think a more important answer maybe, that there really is what we're getting at a moment to go to, is what's worth keeping as there are some really great people who dedicated their life to try to making community safer. At every corner of our criminal legal system, there are people who have sacrificed and put in long hours and working incredibly hard to try to make community safer, to try to make sure that people who've done wrong are held accountable, to try to make sure that people have been harmed, have an access to healing. I think the people are doing a great job. But we've got a lot of rules and laws in place that in some ways make that more difficult instead of easy. You talk about how America is really good at punishing people. How is Oregon like compared to the rest of America? Somewhere in the middle is the short answer. And there's different ways. We have a pretty strong mandatory minimum system, which a lot of the countries moved away from were becoming more of an outlier there. But in terms of the overall incarceration rate, we are disproportionate when it comes to racial disproportionality of who we incarcerate. We are even worse than national averages. And then it's not great nationally either at people of color getting locked up disproportionately. That's right. But overall incarceration rate, we are somewhere in the middle in the course of United States. If we were our own country doing it this way, we would be the outlier compared to all of Europe, compared to Asia, compared to the countries in other parts of the world that we most often are comparing ourselves to. I want to get back to what we were talking about a second ago. And that's about the whole, what's good, what you asked about Virginia, what's worth keeping. And we spent a lot of times in the 90s, the 2000s, and beyond, it was literally a movement called What Works, What Works and Corrections. I've been to so many different trainings. And we actually participated with Pepperdine and NYU and some other places actually doing studies, doing randomized control trials with probationers and parolees to try to figure out what's an effective sanction and somebody. violates their probation. And we know that it's swift and certain, just enough to be like, hey, wait a minute, that's that behavior is your old behavior. So we actually know, we know incentives that work. We know we've done a lot of actual studies, not just we think this works, or this is what we've always done. And I would like a shot at answering your question for a second about what are some of the things that that aren't working. We have archaic physical structures. Like archaic isn't even, it doesn't even do it justice. Like our state penitentiary, if you haven't been inside it, you would not want anyone living there. It's sold. And the people working there do a great job with what they have. There's no restoration, really, that's possible inside that physical structure. I mean, they're doing their best, but it's a huge challenge. And in our county jails, in some places, it's even worse. Yeah, and I'm sure that the design of the use, the science behind the design of these have changed dramatically since some of our first ones were built. Absolutely. And for the most part, the organ state penitentiary doesn't have elevators. And so you're there, and I'll plug a project I'm working on right now that's a piece to this larger puzzle of what needs change. But that first floor of the organ state penitentiary, you'll see a walker or a wheelchair outside of nearly every single prison cell. Because that's where they're putting the people that don't have mobility anymore. And we've got this big issue where every single year, a bigger and bigger chunk of our Department of Corrections population are old and ill. And they're the most expensive people to incarcerate, and they are the least likely people to reoffend when released. So I'm working on some legislative approaches to address that. But that's a huge issue that we have among so many other issues. So talk to us about how restorative justice is different from traditional criminal justice, and can it work alongside or within the current system that we have? It's a great question. I think going back to something I was talking about earlier, they're asking totally different questions. And one of the things I think is most important that restorative justice does a better job at than the traditional criminal legal system is actually centering the voices of the person who's been harmed. I think back to our traditional criminal legal system. And we have victim rights laws, and there's chances to be heard in hearings and all of that. But even just thinking about the case itself, it's the state of Oregon versus the defendant, right? The person who's been harmed is not a party to the case. They don't automatically have a lawyer representing their interests at that case. They may not want things to go forward the way that they do. And if you backtrack of that because they may not believe in the system, or they may not feel empowered in the system, they may not even bring their case forward to a police officer or want to participate in a prosecution if they're not feeling empowered in that way. Restorative justice, on the other hand, right? It's all about restoring. And so it's empowering the voice of whoever has actually been harmed in the situation to start with their needs and say, what do you need? What has happened to you? What has been the harm? And what is going to make this start feeling better from here? I think there's a lot of other differences, but I think that's a really important difference to highlight. Can you tell me, are there other places in the world that are doing this better than we are? Absolutely. And I think a lot of that comes back to this idea that when we're locking people up, first of all, we should be doing it based on data of how long do we need them to be locked up to ensure our community is safe? And how are we preparing them to be released in a way where our community is going to be safe once that person is released? And so it's really on both ends of it, right? America has much longer and Oregon is right in the middle of this sentences for most crimes than most countries do. And we actually have data that there are times where people in prison so long that at an earlier point in time, they would have been less likely to reaffend. And we've kept them there so long they've lost skillsets that they actually had for coping with the outside world. They've been exposed even more criminality or they've lost touch with loved ones. And it's more likely they will reaffend at these larger prison sentences than if we'd let them out sooner. I know you all were talking about health care. It sounds like yesterday or recently, I mean, I equate it to dosage and medication. I try to imagine if we had a health care system where we knew, and the data was pretty clear, we were giving people so much dosage that they were actually getting sicker, right? If we'd given them, you know, three doses of Tylenol, their headache would have gone away, but we're giving them four and it's causing more problems. If we knew that, I would think that in medicine, we were changed. We actually do know that in the prison system, we have lots of data about how long we keep people incarcerated and how like they ought to reaffend, but because we have this desire for punishment and because the laws we have in place, we are keeping people in prison long enough that it's making our community in some ways less safe. So when I have seen this play out in our community where folks are, you know, trying to re-enter into the community, it almost feels like the community is not ready, and nor were they ever prepared to be ready for that, and it's hard for me to imagine a space in time where we are prepared for that. And I think that that is a huge lack on leadership's part, on planning's part, right? This is, if we are to restore people, then they are to re-enter our community, but yet it almost feels like our community is almost affronted. They're almost affronted with this idea that somebody who was, or who has committed a crime in the past and who was incarcerated is now re-entering the community. And I just wonder, how do we prepare our communities for this kind of change? I think part of it is about the process isn't restorative right now, right? The community isn't ready because restoration hasn't happened. There hasn't been healing to the people that have been harmed. There hasn't been, I mean, one of the very first things that happens in any criminal case is going to be no contact order. Do not have any contact -- and absolutely, there are times where that is completely appropriate or needed for somebody who's just suffered harm to have safety and security, but it means that there's not an apology happening. There's not a back and forth happening, even if the victim or the survivor of a harm wants to be some sort of back and forth. We get in the way of that, and we say, "No, that can't happen. We're not comfortable with that going on at this phase." And so we haven't restored anything. And so then when punishment happens and then punishment ends at some point in time, people don't feel like there's been healing and people haven't seen the accountability take place. I mean, I think that your question gets to the exact heart of what's different about Resort of Justice, which is accountability for the person who's done the thing and people seeing that accountability take place. I would love to pull this down to maybe a little bit more of an approachable level for our communities to maybe achieve. So when I look at harm done or the need for Restort of Justice, it doesn't actually have to be a very serious crime. We could start at something much less serious and start working our muscles as a community on what Restort of Justice looks like. And I will use my personal example here. So a year and a half ago, I was riding my bike, and a guy driving without insurance turned in front of me and caused me to crash. I broke my collarbone into four pieces, snapped a tendon. I was literally out for a year, not able to use my arm fully. So this gentleman, though, was because the cops were not called, was not ticketed for driving without insurance. And since that day, since he helped me up off the pavement, I haven't seen him. I would love to have a conversation with him about the impacts of his choices on my life, right? And I would love our city to be able to facilitate something like that. I would love to have the police officers there and answer to why they didn't come or what they would have done if they did. I would love to have our traffic engineers there to say, yeah, we've re-evaluated this intersection. And this is how we're going to make it safer for people, so it doesn't happen in the future, right? And there we can start to, instead of just being stuck with all of these big feelings that I have about that day, I can actually process them with the people who were there, the people who caused the harm, the person that caused the harm, and the people who failed to show up to help defend me and protect me, or to advocate on my behalf or vulnerable road users behalf in the future. If all those people could come around a table and have that conversation, we might be able to really start working that muscle of restorative justice, and then maybe from there, continue to build it to higher and higher and more serious and more intricate situations that we find ourselves in, living in the human species and in community. Absolutely, absolutely, right? And it's been a year and a half, you still haven't had the closure of hearing that person say they're sorry, your shoulder is going to be screwed up, it sounds like either way, but you have the additional pain of not having a closure on that. But on the other end of it, the person who caused that hasn't heard you say this has been a year and a half and still affecting me. And I don't know what they were doing if they were on the phone, what they were doing, some they shouldn't have been doing while they were driving. But if they were, how does that change behavior to hear, hey, I didn't just do this thing on this one day, a year and a half later, here's how it's still affecting Virginia. Yeah, and I think a lot of people don't realize the pain that comes with being the person who caused the harm. But I can imagine he doesn't feel great about what happened that day, right? And he knows in his mind because we're humans that that wasn't a good situation to see somebody that you caused to hit the pavement going 20 miles an hour to see them leave it in ambulance, right? You know that that that they screwed up, right? And to I could imagine if it was me and the situations were reversed, I would want that opportunity to take responsibility for what happened. Can you talk to us a little bit about the hope you see for the future within the work that you're doing at the Capitol or the folks in the advocacy space? and how we can hopefully transition to a more just system. - Absolutely, there's amazing work being done. I actually think we're talking early about how Oregon lines up with the states, but when it comes to rolling out Resort of Justice, Oregon has been a real leader in a lot of these ways. So the legislature has put some money toward Resort of Justice, the Criminal Justice Commission, which is an agency of the state government, has a whole grant program to help fund these programs. Resort of Justice, Coalition of Oregon, is a kind of umbrella group that has formed to help new Resort of Justice programs around the state figure out what they need, connect them with best practices, connect them with other people around the state that are doing good work. And we've got some amazing examples. So six rivers is a program out in the gorge that has incredible buy-in from the community leaders, the prosecutors are referring to people to that program, people who've gone through that program, both those who've done the harm and those who've been harmed, are reporting amazing outcomes. And the data coming out of there is fantastic that people are staying out of trouble and not committing new harm, in a way that is better for the community and saving so much money in the long run for all of us as taxpayers. So I think we've done an incredible work to not just have these programs pop up in the community, but to actually be investing them at the state level, a fraction of 1% of the money that we're spending on prisons, but a real amount of money that is starting to help these programs get off the ground in different communities. (upbeat music) - Let's talk about violent crime and real serious crimes. Do you think restorative justice is appropriate for those situations? - I do, and let's drill down on that, right? That restorative justice requires buy-in from both parties, assuming there are two, and sometimes there are more than two, but the person who's been harmed and the person who does harm, when there's been a violent crime, the need for that restoration, the need for that repair, the need for your voice to feel at the center of how everything moves forward is even bigger than when it's small. If you're a grocery store and somebody has stolen a pack of gum, I'm not saying that's not real harm, but I don't know how interested in going through a sort of process that grocery store is. But if you've been actually really harmed in a violent way, I think it should be an option. I don't think that this should be pushed on anybody, but if that's the path that you think is gonna get you more repair, if that's what you're looking for to have that accountability, to look the person in the face and make sure they understand how you've been harmed, and then for you to be able to dictate, here's what I'm gonna need for this to start getting better. I think it empowers victims in general, and I think that the bigger the harm, first of all, the more important it is that we're empowering victims, and secondly, the more investment there is in the process and making sure that we actually get it right. Have you seen a program like that that's effective in working well? Absolutely. Six Revers is one of the ones I just named a moment ago, and that is a program that predominately is dealing with more violent harm. And because of that, there's buy-in, right? And there's investment and the folks that want to go through that process and go that route, know that they are gonna commit their time, but they're doing it because they're gonna get something out of it that's different than they would get if they went through the more traditional criminal legal system approach. And I'm sorry, if you mentioned this already, but is that a program that was funded through the Criminal Justice Commission grant program? I believe so. I don't know, all of their funding structures, there might be other funding sources, but yes, I think that that's one of many programs that the CJC grant is able to help fund. That's great. I think a lot of people in our community would say something about restored, like hear about restorative justice and say, is this just about people like avoiding punishment? Or like how are we actually going to have proof that the repair to the harm is happening? And I don't know if you have anything to speak to that on. I think sometimes we hold new ideas to a totally different standard than we hold the status quo. So I will answer the question, but first let's turn around on the current system we have. Is this leading to public safety? We spend more money on locking people up than any other country in the world. We lock more people up, but we're not the safest country. And so drilling down and figuring out, all right, what works? I think it gets the exact question. Punishment is not at the center of restorative justice. That's true, right? But accountability is absolutely the center and ensuring that people have the skills and the services to make sure that the harm they've done is harm they never do again is completely the center of it. So if it works better, if it makes it less likely that we have more violence or more theft or more harm in our community in the future, I think that's what most people want most of the time, right? Is safety more so than punishment? I'm not saying there's not an urge for punishment or something awful has happened. And I don't think that going through restorative process when you've done something awful is easy. I think there's a lot of pain and confronting what you've done and what it's gonna take to make things better. But at the end of the day, I think that if the goal is safety, I think that's what we're centering with restorative justice. I really wish that people had some of the experiences I've had where you're sitting in a program or you're facilitating a program and maybe a person who maybe you've booked into jail a dozen times, you know, maybe more. Maybe their father and maybe their grandfather maybe their son as well, you know. And they're in this program and it's some sort of cognitive behavioral program. And the moment that they realize that they could have made a different choice and not done the harm and that they're responsible, their choices are responsible for the harm for a lot of people. And that might sound really simple, but for a lot of folks who are in a life of crime and we know there's an intergenerational cycle of crime that happens if we don't do something to disrupt, it will repeat and we know that a lot of people that are in that cycle never stop to think, oh, I harmed a real person and I caused that harm and you see the moment and you can just see it come over their face and where they realize that's when you start to make a real difference with people 'cause they realize that their choices have consequences and that they can make different choices. And I know that sounds simple, but for people in that mindset, it's not simple. - I think it's dramatic and you know, we were at different phases of the criminal legal system, right? That was public defense is mostly before someone's been found guilty of a crime. And the current system we have is for the defendant to try to figure out how do I not get as much punishment as possible? Do I have a good case or to win this and to be found out guilty or how are we gonna negotiate less punishment? And the focus is on the person themselves, not the person they've harmed, really fundamentally. Whereas I think that's how the person of justice is flipping the script is it's less about the person that's done the harm and it's more about actually confronting the harm that they've done to the other person and centering their needs. - And I can't let this conversation and without at least saying something about the fact that we're 49th or 50th in the country in behavioral health resources. And if we had adequate treatment resources, we wouldn't even be in the predicament we're in. - Right, and I mean, I've said this, I don't know how many times on this podcast, but you know, housing is public safety. Health care is public safety. You know, making sure that people have food security is safety, right? Like all of those things, if you do not have access to stable housing, food, health care, you become desperate in a way that can create some really not safe conditions for you and for those folks who are around you as well. (upbeat music) - Okay, so we know that culture eats policy for breakfast. What are the primary cultural and social barriers to implementing restorative justice models and what work needs to be done in the community to overcome those so that we can actually begin to pass policy that implements restorative justice? - I think that we all tend to replicate what we've grown up with, right? And we have grown up most of us in a very punitive society. So I think that there's some unlearning to do about what works and what doesn't work and some learning to do, right? About what the best practices are. And that's not just on policymakers, that's for the broader public in terms of what is gonna work and what is our goal? Is our goal punishment in and of itself? And maybe sometimes it is, or is our goal to make sure that this harm doesn't happen again? Is our goal to make sure that our community is safe? I think that's the big one. I also think though that restorative justice is actually really intuitive for a lot of folks, right? I think about, you know, and obviously I've done this and when I was a teacher, we were using restorative just in the classroom, but I don't think this is different from a lot of other families when I'm raising my kids and I've got a five-year-old and three-year-old at home. And, you know, I'm cooking dinner and all of a sudden, they're crying 'cause one of them's hit the other one. I mean, the questions I'm asking is what's happened? What do you need? I'm asking for accountability to be taken right away and we're figuring out what is it gonna look like to fix this, to repair this? So I think in some ways it's very intuitive. We have to lean into that. And in some ways, if we've learned that the solution is punishment and we haven't actually interrogated is that our ultimate goal or is that just a tool to get to the safe communities we wanna live in? - This has been an amazing conversation. We could go on literally all day. - Yes, I love this. And I love imagining my community practicing this in all different levels in the future. That really gives me a lot of hope for the future of humankind, but even in the day and day out of building relationships, I think a lot of us, you know, we grew up, I don't know about you, Rep, but I grew up and, you know, being told don't talk about money or politics or religion. And what are the three things that we go to war about? You know, and I can't help but think that that was really misguided on their part. And I think that we have to do everything we can to change how we teach our kids to have conversations to not avoid those conversations, but to kind of dig into the uncomfortable spaces, which goes against everything it means [BLANK_AUDIO] human, right? Like we're always seeking comfort and control and an understanding outcomes and we're asking our community to step into a space that's a little bit more nuanced. Absolutely. But I think that's how we evolve as humans and become even better. And when we've got the sort of what's happening on the national level, which is the constant barragement, you know, punish punish punish, you have to be hard on crime and you know that's like a mantra that's you know been drilled into people's heads, it's really difficult to dislodge that with logic and with things that you know with facts sometimes. Because it's been going on now for a long time. Absolutely. But the interest that I was an optimistic heart and it's true, right? And so to turn that around, right, we've got community leaders like the folks in this room, I mean it's so fun to spend this time talking to you all because there are people that are willing to ask hard questions and say, well, what is the ultimate goal and how are we going to get there? And Virginia, right, you talking about your parenting, that's not a one off for your family. There's entire shifts happening in culture around what works well and what doesn't work well. And so I think there's a lot of reasons for hoping this as well. Yeah, for sure. And I have hope because I believe that I will win. And I believe that you and I get to work together in the capital and we get to tackle some of these really hard conversations and set a future for our state. That's different than what we've done in the past and really a bright future for our communities for sure. So thank you so much for coming on the pod. I always love having you. You're welcome anytime. And thanks everybody for listening. I hope this was as encouraging as it was for me for you. So thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you all soon. [Music]