When Mike Milton was running the Bail Project, a nonprofit which bails people out of jail who cannot afford to do so themselves, he began to notice something: often, those who called the police on someone — their partner or family member, perhaps — were the same people who would then call the Bail Project to get that person out of jail.
They asked the Bail Project if there were alternatives: was there some way to get this person who had done harm into mental health treatment, or de-escalate the situation in some way, without sending that person to jail? And the Bail Project staffers did the best they could, but realized that there was a need for alternatives to incarceration in cases of interpersonal violence that was not being filled by the criminal justice system in St. Louis City.
“We even had someone call us from the hospital like, this person did this harm to me, I don’t want to call the police, can you get him into inpatient treatment?” Milton recalled. “So that was the major shift in my thinking towards this.” In light of that — and given the fact that, with recent bail reform laws, the Bail Project had much less work to do than they once did in St. Louis — the Bail Project branch shut down, and Milton and his team moved on to a new project: titled the Freedom Community Center, it is designed to bring restorative justice to survivors of interpersonal harms in St. Louis and demonstrate an alternative form of justice to incarceration.
“I think that what we often don’t recognize is that those who survive harm, often don’t want what the legal system has to offer,” Milton said. He knows this from personal experience as someone who has spent time in jail. He said that what transformed his manner of interaction with his community away from violence wasn’t jail, but was the restorative justice processes he participated in afterwards. “I know that incarceration, and jail, and prison…what was normal for me…was not effective in transformation. It wasn’t what caused me to change my course of action,” he said.
The statistics state that survivors of interpersonal harm often find the legal process more harmful than beneficial: per a May 2020 study in the journal Policing and Society, for example, over 50% of sexual assault survivors in particular find participation in the criminal justice process to be retraumatizing.
The Freedom Community Center, which opened in April, takes a survivor-centered approach to ending interpersonal violence: according to Milton, the first thing that happens when a survivor connects with the program is that the Center spends up to $5,000 on whatever their immediate safety needs are. Often, this entails a bus or plane ticket to gain physical distance from whoever hurt them, or perhaps a rent payment to allow them to leave a toxic relationship that involves monetary dependence. “We’ve replaced locks, security systems, windows,” Milton said. “Whatever they ask for to be safe, we center that safety and try to meet that safety.”
Then, the FCC assigns each survivor a “healing support specialist,” and asks if they want to engage in a restorative justice process with the person who hurt them. Survivors, Milton says, nearly always say yes.
The nonprofit began their work this April, and have worked with two clients — which is to say, two survivors, two families, two communities, two people who did harm — since then. They hope to scale up to 50 survivors by the end of the year, Milton says.
Each restorative justice process, under the FCC framework, lasts 15 months: first, the survivor is made safe. Then, they are placed in therapy, partnering with UMSL. Then, with the survivor’s consent, the person who harmed them begins an intensive course of therapy: first, restorative-justice circles in which they talk through the harm they have done with 8-10 other people. Survivors are generally included in these circles, or may send a stand-in. Then, the group moves on to PTSD, trauma, and aggression therapy. Then, they move on to an anti-violence curriculum which Milton says they walk through for ‘three to four months.’ The curriculum includes lessons on “What does it mean to choose violence, and why you chose violence. We believe that people who often victimize others are victims themselves, so we help them process what happened to them.”
Once the person who did harm has completed the restorative-justice and therapy phases of FCC’s process, they move on to “graduation”: a moment in which they commit to specific members of their community in order to hold them accountable for hurting others—a neighbor who will come check in on them if they hear the person getting too loud, for example—and finish the program.
The curriculum was developed based on models proven in other cities, such as Common Justice in New York, which is an incarceration-alternative program that has been running for over a decade, as well as similar programs such as Men as Peacemakers in Minnesota, and Men Stopping Violence in Atlanta.
“This is data driven,” Milton said. “Common justice has been in function for 11 years at this point. I think it’s so critical for us to think about alternative solutions, because we see what incarceration is doing. We see what incarceration is doing to our city.” Missouri, according to the Sentencing Project, has the 15th-highest rate of incarceration among the 50 states.
In order to continue developing FCC’s curriculum and strategy, Milton said, the group has put out a survey which survivors of interpersonal violence in St. Louis can fill out to tell the FCC what they need. The results, he says, have been striking: “Oftentimes we don’t consider survivors of harm’s voices when we talk about violence. We mostly consider what the state has to say and what the media has to say. But we don’t really ask survivors what they want. And if we do ask them what they want, we only give them one option, which is incarceration.” On the survey, which is still accepting responses, survivors tell the group what solutions they want to see.
“I’m confident that it works,” Milton said, though he noted that the program will not be able to eliminate systemic or interpersonal violence entirely. “This one program isn’t going to undo the system failures of the world. We don’t expect it to go away with an 8 or 15 month or two year program, but what we do expect is to meaningfully help. We do know that the legal system doesn’t deal with the nuances necessary to break the cycle of violence.”
