Locked Down, Locked Out (20 page)

With racism entrenched in the punitive framework, that quick reach for the phone sets off a dismal chain—from the decision to call the police, to the police decision to arrest, to the
decisions to charge, to convict, to incarcerate. Another common school punishment of choice, suspension, also fuels incarceration: When kids get stuck in a pattern of suspensions, they’re much more likely to drop out of high school, and if they do, they’re at least eight times more likely to be locked up than kids who graduate.
⁴
Plus, black students are more than three times more likely to be suspended than their white peers, according to the Office for Civil Rights.
⁵
In early 2014, the Obama administration acknowledged in letters to school districts that black students are disciplined more harshly.

A few years back, a student leadership development organization called Umoja set out to confront these issues by establishing a program that carves out a little corner of Manley High School, the “peace room,” as a home base for restorative justice practices. The program revolves around a cluster of missions: to heal from and prevent violence, to forge positive community bonds, and to create a path for teachers, students, and administrators to respond to conflict in a community-based way, as opposed to triggering the sequence of suspension, arrest, juvenile detention, prison, torn-up families, and shattered lives. In many ways, the Umoja folks are struggling against the prison nation with every circle, every circumvented call to police. These are big goals for a small room.

When I arrive at the peace room, Umoja Program Director Ilana Zafran opens the door. Ilana’s enthusiasm is immediately contagious—she is clearly in love with her job—and the aesthetic feel of the room also conveys an instant welcome. The walls here are plastered with brightly colored drawings, collages, huge glossy posters urging us to follow our dreams and embrace the world, to love ourselves and others. A big box in the corner overflows with sticks, balls, and trinkets—“talking pieces,” which are used during
circles to indicate who has the floor. A couple of girls are milling around, munching butter cookies; the space functions as a quiet hangout environment as well as a hub for addressing conflict.

When a fight has happened, or if one’s brewing, the peace room kicks into high gear. In the program’s early days, it was mostly security guards or teachers who would bring kids to the room for a circle. But as restorative justice has integrated into the fabric of the school’s social environment, some kids have begun to view it as a natural intervention step when they see a situation going sour. Nowadays, friends of kids who’ve been harmed or done harm or threatened to hurt someone or talked about fighting may bring them down to the peace room—especially if those friends have experienced healing there themselves. Kids who’ve become entangled in violence or conflict sometimes take the initiative to come in themselves, as they come to better understand what “hurt” and “healing” feel like. As Fania Davis, founder of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth puts it, just as hurt people hurt people, “healed people heal people.”
⁶

Ilana describes an incident that happened at Manley yesterday, in which two girls were about to fight but came to the peace room instead. “Earlier in the year, we would’ve seen them
after
they got in the fight,” she says. Now they’re still mad as hell at each other, but not fighting—and they’ve promised to come back and continue talking later today.

Before I had gotten here, I’d wondered, Why a room? Why not simply train teachers and kids in circles and other techniques, and let them give it a go in the classroom right away (which they’re working to do now, along with the presence of the room)? When I ask, Ilana tells me that if you’re practicing restorative justice in a conscious way, you can’t assume that a cohesive community already exists. “It’s about strengthening and building connections,”
she says, smiling at a kid wandering in from the hallway, his glasses askew. The peace room aims to be a safe community, woven into the fabric of the school, that is building toward a different type of system based around values of anti-violence and justice.

It strikes me as a stark contrast to in-school suspension rooms, where kids are often punished by near-abandonment in a classroom free of teaching and learning, left to drift toward boredom and frustration. In the 2010/11 academic year, the Chicago Public Schools handed 40,662 students out-of-school suspensions and 17,020 kids in-school suspensions.
⁷

I turn to one of a cluster of girls munching cookies nearby—Gloria, she tells me loudly—and ask her why she comes to this room, even when she doesn’t have to? She smiles and glances at a friend. “Well ...” she says, “this room pretty much kept me from getting in fights all the time. So that’s a good thing!” The circles and informal chats that happen here helped her say her feelings out loud, to figure out why fights happen and what she can do to prevent them. “Yeah,” says the friend. “Good because she was getting in fights with
me
! Then our friends started saying, ‘
Go
to the peace room.’”

Ilana jumps in, noting that not all conflicts resolve perfectly. “In some situations, the end resolution would be, I’m not gonna look at you, I’m not gonna talk to you, but we’re not going to fight,’” she says. “It’s about individual transformation, changing behaviors, learning more about what you’re doing when you’re making choices about how you treat people.”

Gloria chimes in, “This room just safens things.”

Crying over Spilled Milk

Before my idealized infatuation with the peace room can settle out to happy pasture, it becomes clear that this haven is not all
laughter and sunny posters. A skinny sixteen-year-old boy plops down in the chair next to me and informs me, “Shit just got real.”

It turns out that during a lunchroom food fight, a freshman boy, Dan,
*
threw a carton of milk at a junior, Johnny (the boy sitting beside me). According to Dan, Johnny proceeded to yell and curse at him, follow him to class, and make mocking faces at him from the doorway. A student teacher talked to them and they agreed to come to the peace room to hold a circle. (The question of what would have happened if they hadn’t come—would they have gone to the security office, or the dean?—is a faint unknown hovering in the background.) The circle that will follow, Ilana explains to me, is not necessarily intended to “resolve the incident,” but to diffuse the tension and make future conflict less likely.

Ilana’s colleague, Kenny, takes Dan, a short, bewildered-looking kid who’s staring at the floor, into another room for a pre-conference. He wants to know not only Dan’s narrative of what happened just now, but also what happened before that—what kinds of interactions have Dan and Johnny had in the past? Do they have friends in common? And, of course, how is he feeling? Then Kenny comes back and Johnny’s “preconference” begins:

Kenny: I’m here to get your side of the story.

Johnny: Well, I wanna hear his side.

Kenny: You do? That’s great. Let’s get your side first.

Johnny: You know, the lunchroom can be rowdy, and people are throwing things. I’m the type of person that, you know, I’m not gonna move just because people are throwing things. But I don’t
throw things myself. It’s childish. So, they’re throwing milk and trays and apples and oranges and pizza, and fighting.... Then that little kid [Dan] come over and he starts throwing things. And then he threw milk! A whole milk at me! And it got all over the table, all over me. Ugh! I can’t wash up here—I don’t want to go around smelling like spoiled milk. So I just got outraged. Because I felt like it was disrespect. Like, you threw the milk at me to get me rowdied up. I’m lookin’ around screaming, “Who did it, who did it??” My girl Lela started calming me down, and then some kid, that kid starts talking. He’s saying, “Over milk?? You gonna get upset over milk?” We said some words. “Over milk?” I said, “Yeah, it’s over milk, but how would you feel if I came and splattered milk all over the table and it got on you? You’d be doing the same thing. You might have even a worse reaction.”

Kenny: You just said those words to him? You said them calmly?

J: Well no, I’m not gonna lie to you. I was yelling them at him. So then Lela calm me down. But then the boy come over there and he threaten to throw another milk at me! And that’s when I really got outraged. But I didn’t follow him. I’m not that type of person. But you know, I’m still not the type of dude that’s gonna let you talk down to me. You gotta talk to me like I got some sense. And I talk to you that way. If he came up after and said, “Hey, I’m sorry about what happened,” I’d say, “Fine.”

K: So, it sounds like there’s a couple pieces here. I’m just going to say it back to you and reframe a little, and you let me know if it sounds correct. It sounds like initially, a lot of things were going on, and you were already starting to feel a little frustrated at that point? When people were throwing things around?

J: Yeah, ’cause things was flying past my head!

K: So, do you have the sense that this boy purposely targeted you? Or could it have been actually an accident?

J: I think he purposely did it, because me and Lela sit there all the time and some people get jealous. You know, every time we hug ... they think, oh I wish I had a relationship like that. You know, when we kiss, they say ... oh, go get a room or something like that. So it could’ve been like that.

K: OK, so there could have been a reason. But could it have been a mistake?

J: OK, it could have been a mistake. But the way he handled it was just to go off at the mouth.

K: So, it was at that point really that you got upset.

J: Yeah.

K: But you were also upset when the milk first splashed you. So one question I have for you is, if you could hit pause at any point—you can’t change anybody else, you can’t change what happened—but if you could hit pause and
you
could have done something different, what would you have done differently?

J: Well, if they would’ve—

K: No, not them. You, you, you. [
They both laugh
.] What could you have done differently?

J: When I first saw the milk. Like if I hit pause, like one of them shows, I’d be like, “Click!”

K: Yeah, what would you have done?

J: I would’ve got up, picked up the milk, and threw it out.

[Laughter]

J: No, but for real, I would’ve just got me and my girl out of the way.

K: So just move off to the side.

J: Yeah, and after that I would press play. And the milk would’ve hit the table. And nothing would happen. And no one would’ve got in a fight at all because ain’t no one sitting there.

K: Which is a big difference from what you said at the beginning, which was, “I won’t move for nobody.” So here’s the conflict then. You didn’t move—because you felt like, I shouldn’t have to move. They should go back to what they were doing. It was about the idea of disrespect. So—but you’re saying now that maybe it wasn’t worth it—that, looking back, if you knew that it was going to escalate how it did, that you would’ve had milk on you, that you might’ve almost gotten into a fight with a bunch of guys, you would’ve gotten out of the way first.

J: Right.

K: So it seems like maybe your actions, yelling out, “Who did it? Who did it?” didn’t really get you what you wanted.

J: Yeah. I wanted to know who did it so I could confront them. See if it was a mistake. If it’s a mistake, it’s easier for me to let go. If you apologize, then OK.

K: So you wanted to know who did it. It wasn’t just outrage? You were hoping to get an apology.

J: Right! That’s it.

K: So do you see how maybe you getting up and shouting “WHO DID IT? WHO DID IT?” wouldn’t make someone want to raise
their hand and say, “Yes, it was me! I’m glad we have an opportunity to have this conversation.”
[Laughter]

K: So let’s do a pause at that point, before you started yelling. What could you have done differently?

J: Well, if they would’ve—

K: No, not them. You, you, you. [
They both laugh.]
What could you have done differently?

J: I could have spoke calmly, calm and collected. Say, “Could someone please tell me who threw that milk, please?”

K: And explain why, right? Say, “Because ...”

J: Because I feel disrespected! I feel disrespected, because how do I know you didn’t do it on purpose?

K: So, to give yourself a little time to think about that, you could’ve maybe walked away at first and then ... got to that point where you realized it wasn’t worth it—that getting outraged wasn’t the answer?

J: Yeah. I could just sit back?

K: Yes. Do you still feel like you need that apology?

J: You know—now I can let it go. It’s over and done with.

K: That’s great! So, that part is done with. But now we’ve got the other person, Dan—I’ll bring him in here in a minute—but he feels like you didn’t let things go, and now he’s upset. He said you were going into his classroom afterwards. Did you go to that classroom? Did you know he was in that class?

J: I went there. I looked at him. I looked him dead in the eyes!

K: Yep, he said you went all the way into the classroom, looked at him, and left. So!

J: I didn’t go in there for him, I went there because my girl’s in there. But then I saw Dan in there, and he was getting up. I looked at him. I thought why’s he getting up? In reality a freshman is not gonna whup a junior.

K: Can you see his perspective, that when you came in, it seemed like you were trying to keep things going?

J: He kept it going! He saw me in the hallways upstairs before class and he bumped me!

K: So, things are continuing to go on, whether we want to let it go or not. The other thing he’s upset about is that he says you called him an “A.” Do you remember calling him an “A”?

J: He said I called him an “A”? I probably did. I was outraged. I could’ve said anything.