> [!summary] Progressive Summary # Structured Notes ## Definitions ## Chapter Summaries ### Introduction > In all the world and all recorded time, no country has locked up their own people at the rate we do. The United States has nearly 5 percent of the world's population and nearly 25 percent of its incarcerated people. > A black boy born todat has a one-in-three chance of going to prison in his lifetime. Incarceration is not just a dimension of how we punish crime in our country. It exists at such a scale that it is a defining feature of our culture. It is who we are, who we have become. > It is commonly understood that one of the effects of grief is that it can foreclose our ability to imagine. It is as though each of us can look only as far into the future as we can into the past. Healing, therefore, as a process of dealing with what has happened, is at its heart a labor of forming a life-affirming relationship with what is to come. We wrest the future from the grip of the past. We look back so we can look ahead. We grieve so we can imagine. In that sense, this book is an invitation to grief; it is also an invitation to imagination. What is possible and what we deserve will almost surely require both. ### Across the River of Fire > "It is not the unending presence of pain that hurts,” a mother who lost her son once said to me, “it is the unending absence of joy.” > There is no pathway to safety, healing, or justice that does not begin with a deep regard for what has been done and what has been lost. We cannot solve a problem we cannot look at squarely. Envisioning responses to violence therefore requires that we contend honestly and unflinchingly with the lasting impacts of harm, take seriously those consequences and the people who experience them, regard the transformation of the pain violence causes as our collective responsibility, and commit to understanding that pain more fully so that we may help ease it. > Trauma can include the reliving of our pain and terror. When survivors experience flashbacks, it is not simply that we are reminded of a terrible event. Many experience a flashback as though that event is happening *now*. Unlike other experiences, which we successfully organize into memory, traumatic experiences can stay endlessly current. As one Common Justice community member put it, “I don’t remember it happening. It *is* happening.” When we suffer from flashbacks, we experience many of the symptoms that accompanied the original experience—panic, escalated heart rate, fight or flight, difficulty controlling our bowels, cold sweats, abject terror. Our community member continued: “Healing doesn’t mean I get to forget it. Healing means I get to remember it. Right now I don’t remember it. I relive it.” > We wrestle with the force of this distress in a wide variety of ways. We blame ourselves, we rage, we overwork, we drink and self-medicate with legal and illegal drugs, we withdraw, we trust no one, we attach too intensely, we feel everything, we feel nothing, we become intensely cautious, we take unreasonable rissk, we bury our dead, we bury our hearts, we did everything up, we sleep for days, we can never sleep, we make ourselves invisible, we expose ourselves completely, we cannot feel our bodies, we can only view our bodies, we eat, we starve, we weep, we cannot even weep, we forget things, we remember everything, and we heal. We heal. We rise, we wrestle, and we heal. And we bring others along with us when we do. > For many survivors, anger is a central part of their response to the harm they survive. When we reduce survivors’ responses to that anger, though, we miss the other emotions that exist alongside it. If you were to ask most survivors if they could choose only one emotion to describe their feelings, many would indeed choose anger. But if you allowed them, as in multiple-choice tests, to select all of the responses that apply, they would choose more. They would choose anger. But they would also select compassion, grief, loss, fury, and confusion. They would select love, despair, resentment, terror, and hope. They would choose them all, and none would cancel the others out. > > Our criminal justice system does not know how to hold all of these things at once. The only space to hear information about a defendant’s own experience of pain is for the purpose of mitigating their sentence—though of course, the defendant’s pain doesn’t in any way lessen the survivor’s. Most often the only place for a survivor’s pain is in a victim impact statement typically meant to enhance the defendant’s sentence, regardless of what the victim finds healing. In our zero-sum system, complexity is a liability, and survivors are nothing if not complex. > We have to resist the urge to cancel things out, and instead allow them to build, to accumulate, and in their aggregate, to become something different, more honest, and more just than anything we have envisioned as far. We will stand a chance of doing that only if we take seriously the pain of every survivor, every time. Survivors consistently ask for the following in order to heal and recover from violence: - Validation that what happened to them was wrong. For their pain to be taken seriously, and not to be blamed or judged for what happened to them. - Information that can contribute to a coherent narrative of what happened to them and why. The best source of that information is the person who acted violently against them. - The opportunity to speak about their experience, to have their voices heard. > People are built to heal, and when we have information, we are profoundly capable of putting it into the service of our healing. The problem is that survivors rarely have access to such information because every response our systems have created to manage their relationship with the person who hurt them is designed to keep them separate rather than to help them come together productively. > Trauma is fundamentally an experience of powerlessness. Experiences that counterbalance that powerlessness with some degree of power—including over the story and the response to the harm involved—can contribute substantially to a survivor’s healing process. **Every single survivor wants one thing: to know that the person who hurt them would not hurt anyone else.** # Quotes