The grandmother in the gallery
In 1989, Judge Mick Brown watched a fifteen-year-old Maori boy stand before him for the third time. Same charge, same process, same result....
The backpack
In 2023, a man in Tennessee spent eleven months in pretrial detention. The charge: misdemeanor theft. The item: a forty-dollar backpack. His public defender had 437 other clients....
Ninety minutes in Oakland
In 2016, inside a juvenile facility in Oakland, a fifteen-year-old sat in a circle with the woman whose purse he snatched outside a BART station. He had run. She had fallen. Her wrist broke. The facilitator did not speak for eleven minutes....
The seminary on the tier
Warden Burl Cain arrived at Angola — 18,000 acres of former plantation land, the highest inmate-on-inmate violence rate in the country — in 1995. By 2005, violent incidents had dropped seventy-three percent. He did not hire more guards....
The function was the violence
In 1971, Attica’s prisoners took control of D Yard and issued demands: adequate food, one shower a week not ice-cold. Governor Rockefeller sent state police. Thirty-three prisoners and ten hostages died. Every hostage was killed by state gunfire....
Twenty-eight years for a painting
In 2021, Ndume Olatushani walked out of a Tennessee prison after twenty-eight years on death row for a murder he did not commit. He entered at thirty. He left at fifty-eight....
The question nobody asks
The first mediation I ever facilitated, the victim — a woman whose house had been broken into — looked at the nineteen-year-old kid across the table and said, "I just want to know why my house." He stared at the table for a long time....
The line
I’ve been on the bench twenty-two years. My daughter asks me sometimes how I sleep. I sleep fine. Not because I’m callous. Because I’ve watched what happens when people lose faith that the system will say, clearly, this was wrong....
The forgiveness next door
In 2018, Oshea Israel knocked on Mary Johnson’s door in Minneapolis. Twenty years earlier he had shot her only son Laramiun in the head at a party. He was sixteen. Israel served seventeen years....