Episode 5: The Power of Justice

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Transcript:

This episode's called The Power of Justice, and this is the final episode of our series. If you haven't heard the other four episodes, please go back and check 'em out. We cover a lot of really cool developments in the peace building world. We talk about the history and some of the challenges moving forward, uh, but today we're gonna get into justice.

This is honestly my favorite thing to talk about.

Protest: No justice. No peace. No justice. No peace. No justice. No peace. Justice. No peace. No justice, no peace. No justice, no peace.

David DesRoches: Now you're probably familiar with what you're hearing, that protest phrase, no justice, no peace, which historians say likely originated in New York City after a mob of white teenagers severely beat a group of black men in Howard Beach in 1986.

It's a protest chant that you can still hear today in protests around the country, maybe even the world. And you know, it's an understandable position to take. Justice has to happen if we ever expect to live in peace. And to an extent I agree. I mean, if our society is unjust, being peaceful in that context, it's almost like being complicit.

It's like I'm okay with things being unjust. Whereas if you draw attention to injustice through protests or other forms of civil disobedience, it can force all of us to consider our own position on the state of justice in our society. And I would certainly not be the first person to point out that in America, at least, our system of justice is completely broken

Danielle Bainbridge: today.

The US imprisons more people, both per capita and in terms of number of people incarcerated than any other country in the world. Of approximately

David DesRoches: two. I mean, our system is classist. It's racist. It's pretty much awful for the most part. But today I wanna talk about how peace and justice can coexist. And to do that, I wanna talk about two interrelated concepts, restorative justice and transitional justice.

And to break that down for us, let's turn to the International Center for Transitional Justice.

Anna Myriam Roccatello: Violation of Human Rights. Transitional justice is meant to rebuild. Society institutions trust and the respect of the rights of individuals.

Fernando Travesi: Transitional justice is about victims' rights. It's about how victims can materialize their rights to justice, to truth, to reparation.

Virginie Ladisch: The way I define transitional justice is as creative problem solving. It's never possible to try all the perpetrators or to repair all the harms committed. But how can a nation acknowledge the harm done and take clear steps to redress it and then ensure it doesn't happen again?

David DesRoches: So basically, transitional justice is a process intended to establish a more peaceful society by writing the wrongs of the past.

And the practices include things like truth seeking, holding people accountable, reparations, institutional reforms, public apologies, and memorialization. It approaches justice holistically rather than punitively or selectively. In the US our, our justice system is punitive. You break the law, you get punished, but it's also selective.

You can break the law and not get punished if you have money and you know how to work the system. I mean, think about the insane Jeffrey Epstein plea.

Priya Sridhar: Florida prosecutors knew Epstein had been accused of raping multiple underage girls two years before offering him a plea deal, which prosecutors, critics, and victims panned as a sweetheart deal sentencing him to only a year and a half in jail and allowing him to frequently visit his office while serving time.

Nate The Lawyer: The, so the US government entered into an agreement that it would not prosecute. Any of Jeffrey Epstein's co-conspirators, no matter who they are, no matter where they were, but,

David DesRoches: or think about all the Wall Street people who caused the financial collapse in 2008. Not a single person actually went to prison.

We also know that justice in the United States is inequitable. We know that black people and white people commit crimes at the same rate, but black people are arrested and prosecuted more often and face harsher penalties. In a transitional justice system. However, the very things that make our current justice system ineffective, those negatives are actually acknowledged and incorporated into the process.

The wrongdoers admit their mistakes and the victims and the victimizers collaborate on how to move forward. They work together. The end goals are to restore trust in society, but importantly, it's also to reestablish peace between the victim and the perpetrator. So at the core of all of this is humanizing the parties.

Both victims and victimizers are human beings. They're more than the worst things they do or the terrible things that happen to them. In other words, their identities are complex and are not tied to a single incident, and that recognition is really important for a transitional justice system. Consider what happened in Columbia in 2016.

That year, the Colombian government established a peace deal to end a 50 year war between the government and the Gorilla Army, known as farc. That conflict left over 200,000 people dead and displaced, nearly 6 million others. The peace deal took four years of negotiations and it covered six main areas, a gray in reform, political participation, illegal drugs, victims' rights, ending the conflict and implementation of the peace Accord that year in 2016 after they made that agreement.

Columbia's President Juan Manuel Santos won the Nobel Peace Prize. Here he is talking about his work on transitional justice at NYU in 2020.

Juan Manuel Sanchez: My experience with victims is a very interesting and for me, extraordinary lesson in life. At the very beginning, I thought the victims were going to be one of the, uh, hardest sectors of, of society in.

In the application of transitional justice, uh, I thought the victims, since they're victims, they're going to be, they're going to claim more justice. And, uh, I started with this misconception, but I knew that the victims could, would play a very important role in the negotiation. And I even started to recognize the victims and, um, even repair victims.

In the middle of the negotiations. And so I talk to victims every week to tell me their stories, and I start really, uh, getting more and more committed because of the stories they told me. And the victims, uh, became core of everything we did. They were also, so the, the objective of the negotiations. Um, their rights, their rights to justice, their rights to reparations, their rights to the truth and the rights to non repetition.

That was the center of the negotiations. And everything we did in some way were related to respect those rights. And I think that was also extremely important, uh, as a guide, the stars that guide you. Are the rights of the victims. And that guide was extremely, extremely useful.

David DesRoches: Now this brings us to the other concept I mentioned earlier, restorative justice, where transitional justice focuses more on systemic problems. Restorative justice is more individualized. It's a concept of justice rooted in indigenous practices that actually go back thousands of years. And we're gonna talk more about that later.

When President Santos was talking about his approach to the peace process in Columbia, his work centered around restoring the dignity and rights of the victims of that 50 year conflict. He said that was his guiding star. That's restorative justice at work. It's a process where people take responsibility for the wrongs they've committed and make active steps to repair the damage they caused.

And to illustrate this idea, I wanna share two stories. The first is a story about Dr. Id aal. We talked about this in the last episode, the Woes of War. If you haven't heard it, go check it out. Dr. Aval is a Palestinian who knows suffering. In 2009, his three daughters and the niece were killed by Israeli tank fire that was directed at his home.

Over the years, he's lost a total of 50 family members due to the ongoing violence in his country. So Dr. Aleh was part of a panel discussion at the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates called Focus on Gaza. As he was being announced, his name appeared on this large screen behind the stage along with the flag of Israel.

It was heart wrenching to watch him as he saw his own face next to the flag of a country that is currently committing genocide against his people. But the next day, all 12 Nobel Laureates who were at the summit took to the stage and apologized Laureate. Ash Satya spoke on their behalf.

Kailash Satyarthi : Please come here.

We wanted to invite you with lot of love and compassion and respect. Dear friends, while we stand here as a group of Nobel Laureates with Professor Dr. Ales, we have a deep feeling. We feel like. We are the father of Mothers of three innocent girls, Beson Meyer and Aya. I hope you will join with us in this sentiment that they are our daughters and all the daughters and all the sons who are being killed.

In Gaza or anywhere in the world are like our sons and daughters and Inger sisters and Inger brothers, and for yesterday's episode on behalf of all of us, if you allow, I sincerely apologize, you doctor, we cannot restore your identity, your dignity, your title, but what we can say. That we are one of you.

You are one of us.

David DesRoches: Thank you. After the apology, Dr. Valle gave a rousing speech in which he took this idea of unity even farther.

Izzeldin Abuelaish: The most holy thing in the universe is a human being. And the freedom killing one, as if we killed the world saving one as if we save the world. We need to stand for saving life.

We speak about peace, freedom. Freedom must not stop at the borders of the Palestinians, the Palestinians. Freedom is your freedom. Stand for the freedom of humanity and the Palestinian people and that the peace we are looking for, that's what we want. Peace we are talking about is not just a word. Peace means the freedom.

This means justice means equality and dignity. And that's what we need to act for. I promise you. I promise you I will continue,

David DesRoches: and that's what restorative justice can do. It can eliminate the me versus you or us versus them mentality. That does nobody any good because all that does is create enemies. Punitive justice systems assigns the transgressor, the label of convict or murder or whatever, and the victim is always the victim, helpless and unable to have an identity beyond being a victim.

Restorative justice allows identities to be restored so that the people aren't defined by the transgression alone. Brian Stevenson is a lawyer and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in 2020, Terry Gross interviewed him on fresh air about the concept of restorative justice.

Brian Stevenson: You know, when I give talks about this issue, I, I tell people that I don't believe that any person is their worst act.

I think all of us are more than the worst thing we've done. I think if somebody tells a lie, they're not just a liar. I think if someone steals something, they're not just a thief. I think even if you kill someone, you're not just a killer. And we think we're executing killers and that's all they are. Uh, and when you, uh, surround people who've been condemned with some measure of humanity, some measure of dignity, I think that changes

David DesRoches: this holistic approach is core to restorative Justice generally says lawyer Grace Carson from the Tribal Law and Policy Institute.

Grace Carson : So restorative justice is an approach to justice that attempts to restore harms at its roots. Um, this means that it understands that harm is not done at an isolated event. Nobody wakes up. Well, very deeply. People will wake up and they're like, I'm ready to cause harm to somebody today. You know, it doesn't just happen on its own.

David DesRoches: So when the Peace Summit organizers labeled Dr. Ibel in Israeli, which wasn't all likelihood a mistake, the Nobel Laureates recognized the error, apologized, but also made sure to say that they were also hurt by the mistake. When the incident first happened, Dr. Aal was compelled to address it, but I could hear the event organizers telling him to make it quick.

A lot of the events at the summit ran over time, so they were thinking about logistics. So this added another layer of complexity here because Dr. Aal had to interrupt the flow of the event because someone at the event made a huge error. I talked to Sean Duffy from the Albert Schweitzer Center on this point.

Sean Duffy: And when that happened, I was thinking, oh, this is, this is, we're watching restorative justice. Restorative justice. Yeah. In, in, in practice. Right. It's imperfect, it's, um, improvised. Right, right. Um, but maybe a little hokey, but maybe a little hokey, but it's actually meaningful. Right. Not just meaningful for Aish, but also for everybody in that audience to realize that there was a wrong that was done.

And they actually physically said that. They said, we recognize that we did wrong. We can't take it back, but we want to actually, um, apologize for it and make restoration. Right. And it's, it's almost something that's only possible when you. Have the flaws come to the surface. Mm. Right. And on the one hand, the error, the initial error, that was the assault, that was the affliction.

That was the harm that was done. Um. It was probably a mistake. Um, these summits are so rapidly thrown together. They're pulling together as collaborators, people with very different cultural assumptions. And, and so this is one of the things that I, I tried to tell students weeks before we even went is like, don't expect a flawless, you know, there will be right.

There will be moments when you'll be waiting. There will be moments when things don't work out the way you think they should be be. There's also a great lesson. This is be flexible, roll with it, a wonderful, be flexible roll with it. But this was, you know, it was, none of it was scripted in advance. And, and yet it's probably the best example of how we should be in society with one another.

Um, rather than saying, oh. This, this was imperfect. I'm gonna go home and hate it.

Protest: Right.

Sean Duffy: How do we make it better? How do we actually work in the moment to say, Ooh, that did not go right. Let's see if we can Yeah. Pull it together from here. Yeah. And I

David DesRoches: love that in, so it did so many different things in terms of not just showing what restorative justice can be, not just showing the humility of Nobel Laureates, but it also.

Enabled him to have a platform Yeah. That he otherwise would not have had, because now, now we're gonna listen to him a little bit closer. We're gonna pay a lot more attention to what he's gonna say because clearly everybody was offended on his behalf. And when he spoke at that point, like he did speak, he had spoken before, but you could see, and he really like, spoke with some thunder and you know, the only standing ovation that I saw.

When I, I mean, maybe there were others, but the only one that I saw was when he was speaking after that, that that apology. So, I mean, it gave him a platform. And to your point, it was, you know, only because it was recognized. Yeah. And so it's, it's like when you make the right decision, it leads to other things that.

That it's like a snowball effect of positivity. I, that was wonderful. I just love seeing that

Sean Duffy: you're, you're helping me articulate this in my own mind as to what was so restorative about that moment. So when we think about, you know, like restorative justice, what, what, what, what, what was restored was his dignity, what was restored was his humanity.

Um, the day before when the initial error had been made and he had to make a thing of it, he had to stand up and then say. This is outrageous. I'm, I'm offended. He's the transgressor in that moment, right? Mm-hmm. He is, he is interrupting the normal flow of events. He's, he's interrupting our sense that, oh, what we're about to see is a friendly panel of people talking about X.

It's now about this other thing. So he's, he's in a very tenuous position at that point. I thought about that. Yeah. So then the next day, the gift. That was given to him in restoration and restoration of his dignity was to say, we're gonna give you this stage. Hmm. This is your moment. Hmm. This is, this is the restorative practice here is by actually giving you the permission Now, and, and I don't mean it, that permission had to be granted, but that now he's not the transgressor.

Right. This is his moment, the moment that's been given to him, to restore his dignity, to restore his right to be there and to say whatever he wanted to. And, and maybe that's part of what made that moment so beautiful was that it actually restored him too. Um. That more dignified role of participant in a process as opposed to disruptor of a process.

David DesRoches: And it allowed him to regain it himself. Yeah. Rather than them like benevolently giving it to him. Yeah. They just gave him the stage, gave him the opportunity, and he took the opportunity. Yeah. And built it himself. Yeah, that's, that's, I love that.

What's even more fascinating about this is that Dr. Appalachia's book is called. I shall not hate, and it tells the story of his journey from profound loss to a path of reconciliation. The book's inspired millions worldwide, and he's emerged as a global symbol of peace and forgiveness. The other example of restorative justice is more visceral.

Here's former Columbia President Juan Manuel Santos, telling the story of a woman he met during the peace negotiations whose story has stayed with him for years.

Juan Manuel Sanchez: And I remember one, one experience that really touched my heart that I want to share with you today. I took her to Oslo. She went with me, pastor Ramira, she's from the center of the of the country.

Her father would had been killed, her husband had been killed, her brother had been killed. Her daughter disappeared. And her only son that was left was tortured and killed. And two weeks later, somebody came to her house wounded and asked for help, and she said, okay. Uh, and she put this person in the room of his late son.

He was cured, she cured him. And when he was all leaving, he saw a photograph of her with her son, and he was shocked. He said, is that your son? And she said, yes. Why? And he said. I am deeply sorry. I'm very sorry, but I have to tell you, I cannot not tell you. I was the one who tortured and killed your son, and she was also shocked.

But then she, she did the following thing. She said, thank you, and embraced him and he was. I think there's a word in English called flabbergasted. He was, I mean, he said, why? Why are you saying thank you? And she said, because by you telling me and telling me that you are sorry, you avoided me hating for the rest of my life and the the power of forgiveness.

David DesRoches: And when I told my wife about this story, she was like, why did she forgive him? Did he even apologize? And I didn't really have an answer. I mean, as President Santos tells the story, he kind of glazes over the apology. I mean, nonetheless, the woman forgave him. And that had me thinking about something that Sean Duffy once said to.

Sean Duffy: Our reactions to, um, slights or something like that often turn into resentments or things like that. I'm, I'm thinking this is very similar to what we're taught about the value of forgiveness. For example, you know, like when, when, when you do me a wrong. I, I can carry that resentment around for the rest of my life, and that's just gonna hold me back when I forgive you.

I'm not doing you a favor. I'm doing me a favor, right? It is liberating me from this negative closing of my ability to appreciate and enjoy my life,

David DesRoches: and that that's the important point about forgiveness, right? We don't forgive someone for their sake. We forgive them for our own sake because oftentimes the transgressor never apologizes.

So what then do we just hold onto that hatred forever? What good does that do anyone? Forgiveness is a key pillar of both restorative and transitional justice, but importantly, forgiveness is part of a broader process of reconciliation that involves dialogue and hard truths among other things. Again, president Santos,

Juan Manuel Sanchez: but the responsibles.

People must say they were responsible. That is what really builds the framework for reconciliation. And in my experiences with many of the victims, they didn't want material reparations. They asked me, Mr. President, I don't want, uh, money. Uh, how much is my daughter's life worth? I mean, this is, this is a, I want these people who, who did this to her, who raped her or killed her to come to me and say they're sorry and why they did it.

Uh, that's the type of reparations I want.

David DesRoches: I mean, that surprised me. People in Columbia, those victims of the five decades Civil War, they didn't want money. Which is weird because every time I hear the phrase reparations, I, I don't know about you, but I think about money. I think about monetary compensation.

But that's only part of what a reparation can look like. As it turns out, in many cases, most people who seek reparations aren't actually looking for money. According to Jermaine McKelvin, he's an associate professor at New Jersey City University. Here he is from an interview with NPRs Michelle Martin in 2013,

Jermaine McCalpin: let us first define reparation.

Uh, reparation are measures or a series of acts to make amends. For historical rungs. Now, when we talk about approaches to reparations, again, it depends on who you ask. The last research I've seen indicates that Africans, that is continental Africans, they think debt forgiveness would be the best form of reparation.

African Americans, the report argues seize reparation primarily in the form of educational and social reform. Beyond those, I say we start with an apology. There are also memoirs and commemorations. We also talk about repatriation. That is things that were stolen or taken from these countries to be returned.

But what I want to make clear is that reparation is not only about monetary compensation, so. The question of a dollar value is only part of the issue, and it's not something that needs to forestall reparation.

David DesRoches: The root of the word reparation is repair, of course, and repairing is the whole point of transitional and restorative justice.

But in today's world, in the West, at least these ideas seem almost impossible to implement. As I mentioned earlier, the tension between justice and peace is real, and it's really hard to change anything these days, especially the American justice system, which is propped up by centuries of legal precedent, case law, norms, and procedures.

All these things keep a significant number of people pretty wealthy and powerful, so there's not a lot of incentive to change. President Santos says that each society needs to manage the balance between peace and justice individually.

Juan Manuel Sanchez: The big question is, where do you draw the line between peace and justice?

What did I tell my negotiators? Go seek as much justice as possible that would allow peace that. Where you draw the line differs from country to country, from comfort to conflict, and from society to society. No matter where you draw the line, there will always be people who are not happy. And there are a lot of people in Colombia that are not happy.

You're always going to find difficulties. And one of the great challenges in the application of transitional justice to explain to the people that. A bad piece is always much better than a good war. Sometimes people forget, and there has to be a lot of communication and a lot of explanations for the, for society to, uh, understand and accept transitional justice.

Justice. Now, the Truth Commission, you cannot pretend to, uh, get, uh, the truth. Of 50 years of war, you have to be very selective. Some emblematic, symbolic cases, but it's a very sophisticated process and it's working. I hope

David DesRoches: that now there's a lot to unpack from that statement. I mean, first transitional justice requires constant communication, and second, you need to do a lot of explaining because the concept of transitional justice is a completely different approach from the traditions of the West at least.

Transitional and restorative justice might seem like novel ideas, but in fact, they're the basis of justice for indigenous cultures around the world. From the Navajo concept of K to the Mayoria of New Zealand, these practices have ancient roots. Navajo historian Wally Brown explains how his

Wally Brown: people think about justice.

Anything that, uh, an individual did against another clan family, it made the whole clan, his clan responsible to make all the restitutions and that that would be required. And they call that in Navajo, they call it na. In that sense, the offender wasn't

David DesRoches: responsible for the offense, but their entire family was.

I mean, that's a heck of a deterrent. Another form of indigenous restorative justice is called circle keeping. Here's lawyer Grace Carson from the Tribal Law and Policy Institute.

Grace Carson : Circle keeping is something that often happens in peacemaking. Many traditional tribal practices involve some forms of talking circles as in dispute resolution, but also as a process of, of, you know, being in community with one another.

A talking circle involves individuals sitting in a circle, taking turns, expressing their thoughts on a particular issue. Um, in the circle, everyone has an equal place. There is no hierarchy. That is very important. Another example of peacemaking I like to talk about is circle keeping. In Alaska, they've used it often in place of tribal court, and it, it's used not just as a way of, you know, keeping people safe and, um, defeating conflict, but it's also as a way to share their culture with one another.

Ultimately, restorative justice recognizes that even the perpetrator of harm, even the person who harmed somebody, uh, is, is also harmed in the injury, um, that they caused. So it's not, you know, victim and person who perpetrated the harm. It's this understanding that it's all circle, that even the person who is causing harm is harmed within their, their injury to another person.

David DesRoches: Another thing that's challenging about transitional justice according to prison in Santos is that it's impossible for an entirely clear picture of the truth through merge, especially if you're repairing 50 years of trauma that affected over 6 million people. I mean, he didn't get into why, but my guess is that the truth is often far too complex and confusing and contradictory.

So if you tell the whole truth, it would most likely confuse people rather than bring them together. He talks about being selective with how you present the truth. Now, I'm not so sure I buy this argument. I, I, I think complexity and ambiguity are good things, especially when it comes to the truth. I mean, too often we fight about things because we're forced to pick a side when in reality each side is a little bit right and a little bit wrong.

But still, the basics that President Santos is talking about make a lot of sense. He also said something that I wanna repeat. He said a bad piece is better than a good war. That's something we often forget.

So I've been talking this episode a lot about justice and peace and how they can work together and I've spent a lot of time bringing up conversations from the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates. And I wanna get back to that because divorce, so many inspiring speeches. It made my job of putting it all together for this podcast a little bit hard.

There was one guy I came across whose message really resonated with me personally. His name is Guard Jameson, and he's a philosophy professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and he's co-founder of the Children's Advocacy Alliance.

Gard Jameson: Albert Einstein said, there are three principles that govern the entire universe.

Unity, diversity, and growth. And associated with those three principles are three values, love, compassion, and peace. So love is connected to unity. When we experience love, we connect, we experience our connection to one another. And that comes not from our own egos. It comes from something greater than ourselves, from the one, from the Brahman, from the Tao, from God.

And when we experience that quality of love and we see suffering, as we saw my friend, ab uh, ID abash earlier speak of the suffering of the Palestinians. I don't know how it was for you, but I had tears coming down my cheeks. So when we see suffering, love becomes compassion, and when compassion begins to think.

About that suffering. It becomes wisdom. And when compassion and wisdom come together, it becomes unselfish service. And in unselfish service, we find our true being. Compassion is not just the fabric of our planet, as Einstein said, is the very fabric of the universe. Love is the very fabric of the universe.

Peace is the very fabric of the universe. We've just misinterpreted it. We've allowed small groups of people to override the yearnings of our hearts for love and compassion and peace. And so as the Dalai Lama said, compassion is the revolution. And I encourage you all to be part of the resistance movement.

My friend Valerie Carr, she said, you are the one you've been waiting for. You are the one you have been waiting for. You are the revolutionary. And so it is incumbent upon this generation to go out into the world and to plant the seeds of peace. But in order to do that, we have to first experience the download of love.

And when we experience that, our hearts open up and we allow ourselves to experience compassion for the pain of the world. So I encourage you, wherever you are, within your families, within your communities, to be a revolutionary, to wake up and to appreciate that we all have a gracious opportunity to be in this fight together.

David DesRoches: Maybe this means that justice and peace can coexist if we think about justice, not as something punitive, but as something that can heal wounds and restore people's humanity well, if that's what we're doing, we're being peaceful in the pursuit. Justice by and by doing that, we don't abandon peace, we use it.

Peace is then our main tool for justice, not prison, not fines or something worse. I mean, okay, maybe sometimes people need to be fined or put into prison, but only after there's been at least some attempt at restoring what's been broken. I mean, today. People are fined or imprisoned by default. There's no real attempt to restore the broken pieces.

In the Zen Buddhist tradition, there's a practice called Kintsugi. It involves fixing broken ceramics to emphasize the broken points. And as a philosophy, kintsugi treats broken things as something to be treasured and not disguised. Here's the YouTube channel, the School of Life explaining it.

Alain de Botton: Over the centuries, Zen Masters developed an argument that pots, cups, and bowls that had become damage shouldn't simply be neglected or thrown away.

They should continue to attract our respect and attention and be repaired with enormous care. This process symbolizing a reconciliation with the flaws and accidents of time intended to reinforce some underlying themes in Zen. The word given to this tradition of ceramic repair is kintsugi. It means quite literally to join with gold in zen aesthetics.

The broken pieces of an accidentally smashed pot should be carefully picked up, reassembled, and then glued together with lacquer inflected with the most expensive gold powder. There should be no attempt to disguise the damage. The point is to render the fault lines beautiful and strong. The precious veins of gold are there to emphasize that breaks have a philosophical merit, all of their own.

David DesRoches: To me, this is the artist version of restorative justice. You are taking a broken thing and you're giving it extra care. You're not tossing it away. You're not even just putting it back together, but you're fixing it in a way that emphasizes where it broke. I mean, I mean, I think broken people are the same.

We need extra care if we're supposed to heal. I mean, that's how we think about physical or mental health. Right. We care for people who are sick, we heal them. Right? So why don't we care for people who have broken the law? Why don't we heal them? Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet, he wrote that quote, the wound is the place where the light enters you.

We all have wounds and scars. Maybe it's time we let in a little light.

Thanks for listening to Dismantling the Divide, which is reported, produced, edited, and hosted by me. David De Roche podcast is a production of the Quinnipiac University podcast studio in partnership with the Albert Schweitzer Institute. To learn more about this podcast, you can go to quinnipiac podcasts.com/dismantling the divide.

You can also find us on social media at QU podcasts. Check out all our other podcasts@quinnipiacpodcast.com, or you can learn about all the other cool stuff we do at the university by going to q you.edu/podcast. Our marketing team is Peter Gile. Becky Sp and Kim gt. Special thanks to Sean Duffy, John Thomas, Mohammad Alahi, Mustafa Ana.

Annette Ky Tan, Corina, Jordan, Higgins, Janet, but Danielle, Bernie, Zachary Borden, Renee Scott, Lillian Curtin, Elizabeth Connolly, Cerita, Nazar, and everyone else I met at the World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates. Thanks also to Peter Subby. And Nadine Barnett Cosby for their support. And thank you for listening.