Restorative Justice: Behind Bars

What they don't want you to know.

Hi, I’m Ms. V.

My job wasn’t just to “counsel” men facing murder charges. It was to convince them not to be violent—inside a system designed to brutalize them.

With what? Not power. Not threats. Not punishment. Restorative justice—the only tool I knew actually worked.

Most people think they understand violence. They don’t.

I never walked in with a clipboard full of questions. I never sat across from them like, “Tell me your trauma.” That’s not how this works. That’s not how trust is built.

I’d sit down with a deck of cards, a game, a simple “What’s up?” And if they wanted to talk, they did.

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One day, I asked a group of men, “What’s the first act of violence you ever saw?”

I assumed they’d say a fight. A shooting. Maybe something from the streets.

Instead, one of them shrugged and said, “We skipped school, and this lady started talking to us. We thought she was our mom’s friend.”

The room shifted.

They started opening up—not just about fights, but about the things they had never been given permission to name. About the violence that happened to them before they ever picked up a weapon.

Because that’s what people don’t understand: by the time they landed in my unit, violence wasn’t a choice. It was the language they had been taught.

And the system’s answer to that? More violence.

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I saw men locked in tiny cells for years, denied food, water, medical care—stripped of everything, then told to “rehabilitate.” I watched them get cut and stabbed, not just in fights, but sitting behind a desk, stepping into the wrong hallway, or from someone popping out of a cell they didn’t think would open. I saw a man bleed out from a cuff key slipped to the wrong hands. I stood between men armed with machetes. I got locked within a dayroom for two hours while a riot raged, watching an officer get knocked out three times before I made my way through a wall of OC spray to escape.

And yet… it wasn’t the men who made me leave.

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People always ask, “Weren’t you scared?” And my answer is simple:

Of the system? Yes. Of the men? No.

Because the truth is, the men were the easiest part of the job. If you showed up with respect, honesty, and a real desire to help, they met you there. If they lashed out, it was never random. It was survival. Imagine being stripped of food, water, medical care, sunlight… and then being told to sit still and be patient.

The real problem was the people running the system.

I watched officers bribe men with food to keep them from programming. “Say no on camera, and I’ll get you something to eat.” I reported it. But the men? They weren’t mad at the COs—they were mad at me.

“Now we don’t get food.”

Because that’s the kind of control they were under.

I saw counselors lie to them, officers set them up, staff bring in contraband and fuel fights just to “maintain order.”

I sat in meetings where a commissioner fought—yes, fought—to strip incarcerated men of the only light in their cell.

Darkness is a control tactic. Not knowing if it’s day or night? That psychologically destroys you.

And when the real violence came? The captains didn’t step in. They didn’t warn me that a machete fight was about to happen at 6:30 a.m. They didn’t stop the officer from getting assaulted over and over. They stood there. Watching.

And the officers that should have intervened? They ran.

All except one. One officer held it down alone. I saw him later, his entire face red from OC spray, looking at me like, “I felt so bad for you.”

For me??

He was the only one fighting. I was the one giving the emergency response team directions. The actual staff—the people paid to control these situations? They did nothing.

Because they didn’t care.

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Restorative justice isn’t about forgiveness. It’s not about ignoring harm. It’s about asking the real questions:

• What does accountability actually look like?

• What do people need to change—not just in theory, but in practice?

• What would justice look like if it wasn’t just about punishment?

Restorative justice isn’t soft. It demands more from people, not less. It asks people to face the harm they’ve caused head-on instead of hiding behind a legal system that strips away their humanity. And it works.

But most people can’t imagine that.

So let me take you there.

This Substack is a journey—not just through my experience, but through the lives of the men I learned from as much as I taught. It’s about the stories that don’t make it to the news, the conversations that happen when no one is watching, and the possibility of a world where justice doesn’t mean more cages.

Let’s begin.