Restorative Justice practices are an alternative form of justice that’s a victim-centered that creates a space for offenders to own the harm done, and for victims to tell the story of their experiences of that harm directly to the offender. It’s a set of indigenous restorative practices that try to restore a sense of balance into the entire community, and it can be used as an complete alternative to existing retributive justice systems or as a supplement. Tyler Musgrave has worked with the organization of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, and then participated in Mozilla’s XR Studio to learn more about how she can bring some of these restorative practices within the context of VR in her Restorative VR project.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. So back in 2000, I was at Sundance and I had a chance to see a documentary called Long Night's Journey Into Day. It was about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was in South Africa, where People who had suffered from different injustices under apartheid had an opportunity to speak the truth of their direct experiences and have an opportunity for the offender to make an authentic apology to the victims and to own the harm that had been done to them. And so it was a fascinating look at a completely different model of justice that was trying to actually really think about what is the ecosystem here? What is the community? How is the victim's perspective going to be included into some sort of justice process? So restorative justice is an indigenous practice that has been around for a long time, but it's also making a bit of a comeback right now. I think especially in the context of all the harms that are being done in our culture, what are alternative methods that we can start to address those harms that are done and to maybe use the criminal justice system when we need to, but to use the restorative practices as a supplement and maybe even a complete replacement from existing practices of retributive justice. So Tyler Musgrave is somebody who got into virtual reality through the XR studio sponsored by Mozilla. And she was actually sponsored to make a trip to Sundance in order to participate and network and connect to the larger XR community. So I had a chance to talk to her at Sundance and to dive a lot deeper into these concepts and principles of restorative practices. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Tyler happened on Monday, January 28th, 2019 at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:02.624] Tyler Musgrave: Yeah, hi, I'm Tyler Musgrave and I was most recently an XR Studio participant and that was my first entrance into the VR XR space. And during my time there, I've met so many amazing women and men too and different creatives and I was even able to start the creation of my own project. called Restorative VR. Before XR Studio, or even actually during it, I was doing restorative justice circles within the Bay Area for young people who had committed crimes. And I was really inspired by the stories of these young people and the intimacy of restorative justice that applying to XR Studio and doing my quick research before applying and trying to think of a project, I was like, oh my God, like VR is a great medium to be able to kind of share these stories and people to learn about restorative practices. And I was dabbling on the idea of how we could take restorative practices. I love how, even in my own personal life, restorative practices has helped me really be a better person in better relations with other people. But how can VR be used as a tool to help evangelize restorative practices? so that other people can also learn and be in better community with one another, particularly when it comes to addressing harm.
[00:03:25.584] Kent Bye: Maybe you could start by just describing what is restorative justice?
[00:03:29.789] Tyler Musgrave: Yeah, yeah. So what is restorative justice? So I'm going to talk about my personal definition of restorative justice. So restorative justice, it's a practice, it's a philosophy, it's a model that addresses harm, particularly done in communities or between people not using the criminal justice system, for example, or our formal institutions that, of course, I mean, I hope we know that have been incredibly unfair for particularly people of color, particularly black men and females. in a way where we can sit in circle and we can talk about the harm that was caused with the victim, with the offender, the family and the community, and we can come up with a plan for those individuals to do to repay back the harm to each of those components, the victim and the family members in the community. Restorative justice has taken off in a really positive way, particularly when it comes to the criminal justice system, particularly for youth. And particularly in Oakland, you know, it's been used widely in ways that have really transformed young people's lives. And, you know, we believe, particularly in the community that I'm a part of in Oakland, that young people shouldn't be incarcerated at all. Or even the fact that we should be taking a look at how harm is caused not only to the victim, but also to the offender as well. And so, yeah, that's a really strong outlong definition of restorative justice. But it's, again, like a way for us to be in better community with each other and addressing harms without using formal criminal justice systems that have, you know, proportionately incarcerated black men and females.
[00:05:07.712] Kent Bye: Yeah, I actually did an interview with Van Jones, I think back in like 2004 about restorative justice. And my impression was that the current criminal justice system is that there's a victim and then the offender and then the state kind of steps on behalf of the victim to put them into exile, take them outside of the community. And so it seems like there is a mindset that if you put someone away and exile them into jail, that's justice, but yet that may not actually be addressing the underlying harms that have been done. And so it seems like there's a reorientation where maybe there's an existing criminal justice system where we always will need that, but maybe this is a separate process by which if it's trying to maintain an integrity within the context of a community, That once someone comes out of prison and is labeled a felon for the rest of their lives That essentially means that it's actually hard for them to reintegrate into that community And so then they become almost like a second-class citizen in that way They don't have all their full rights, but they're not also like fully integrated into that community So it seems like restorative justice is trying to look at things from this ecosystem perspective of maintaining the integrity of the relationships within that community, but to find practices by which the offender and the victim can find ways amongst themselves to be able to speak the truth, to have the truth heard, and to have the harm that was done be owned and described. And that's how I kind of think of it.
[00:06:29.129] Tyler Musgrave: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I love the fact that you brought up the victim. I should have definitely talked about that. The thing about restorative justice is that it's sincerely victim-centered. Again, like what you were just talking about, is that in our criminal justice system in America, when someone commits a crime towards another person, towards the victim, all of a sudden it becomes the offender versus the state, or the offender versus the county, or whoever, or that institution, the correctional institution. And so that also leaves the victim out of being able to share their truth or even be able to represent themselves towards the offender, which actually is an interesting thing because we have found in restorative justice, right, when an offender is sat in front of their victim and they're forced to hear the victim's side and their story and how the harm that was done to them has impacted them, there's a sincerity between that, right, that human connection that the criminal justice system takes away. And it allows for that victim to be able to stand strong. And of course, restorative justice recognizes that when people aren't ready to be able to have those conversations right, nobody's being forced to do those things. If a victim, for example, doesn't feel comfortable in talking face-to-face with their offender, they have the ability to have a family member or someone represent them in that conversation so at least that their perspective is being heard. But there's a way that the behavior as well as the mind changes when you are sat in front of a person who you've done harm to that has been proven to have more reconciliation and more impact of change of behavior when it comes to criminal activity than just putting someone in jail for long periods of time and just having them sit to think. about what they've done. And then also to add on to that, restorative justice is an indigenous practice. And I think that is very important for as this movement comes and people are getting more in tuned in the know of the practice, that this is something that has been done for a very, very long time. And it started with Native Americans in America. and they still use it today. I have a really interesting story. Actually, the way that I got into restorative justice was during my Peace Corps service in Cameroon. In Cameroon right now, there's a civil war happening right now, and in the community that I was living in is like ground zero. And so I had amazing counterparts that I was working with there who, you know, they saw that there needed to be an alternative way for their communities to be able to share their griefs because the military was occupying the community in Cameroon and causing all these harms and atrocities. But, you know, when they would report them to the government, like the government wasn't doing anything. And so the mayor of my village that I was working in, he came together like healers, mothers. He came together like the head posts of the police who were outsiders, the military leadership in our community, as well as those who have been harmed. And they sat in a circle and they talked about their experience of violence during that time. And I was so lucky, even though they've only known me for a year, to be able to be present for that and hear them talk about it and just kind of see how the community was so interactive. And it took about three days to actually have this conversation, and everybody was in it. Everybody was about how can we make our community, Fundong, it was called Fundong, you know, a safer place. Unfortunately, I mean, the Civil War is still happening now, but there was efforts like that within my community that were making a change, a restorative change, right, and helping people become safer. And after that, we were seeing, for example, the police that were occupying the space, they were coming from a different community, have better interactions with their community members because now they've talked to the mothers who had seen that their sons were being incarcerated in that community. And instead of being so quick to like arrest them, it was like, I know your mother, you know. in their pigeon, because I talk pigeon there. And so restorative justice, it's not a new thing. And I think it's really important when we talk about it, that we definitely pay homage to the indigenous roots that it has.
[00:10:37.505] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I know that there's certainly a lot of harm that's being done in our culture today on many different dimensions. And if we look just as an example of the Me Too campaign, there's been a dynamic of naming the harm that's been done. And then sometimes there's an opportunity for the offender to own the harm that was done or to perhaps make some sort of apology towards some sort of reconciliation. But it's really hard to make a good apology. And so, but it's also what I found in sort of covering this issue is that if there is any culpability that's admitted to, then there may be legal implications that are splitting this into more of a legal issue where you're not actually able to speak the full truth of what happened because there's fear that you're going to be criminally liable to then perhaps go to jail. So there's this question of how you create a safe space. And how do you allow that container for the harm to be owned? But then there's another question of accountability of depending on how severe of a transgression that was made, like, how do you deal with, does this actually require some more aggressive criminal justice process? It seems like these are two completely different contexts. One is which a legal context where you get the lawyers involved, where it's essentially a strategy of denying anything that even happened. And it's basically a denial of the truth. versus more of a community-based restorative justice practice, which is more of a container where you feel like you can actually have those processes that are happening. But I've also just heard from survivors of sexual assault that if you get somebody into that situation who just continues to deny or gaslight you, then it's going to actually potentially cause even more harm. So there's a lot of really complicated dynamics within that system. But one is creating a safe container for that to even happen. And then either apologies, what are the key components of a good apology? And then in a failure of that, what are the other options for accountability?
[00:12:28.312] Tyler Musgrave: Yeah, so restorative justice is a process, right? It's not an instantaneous thing. We just don't bring people who, you know, have done harm or who've been harmed into a circle right away. It takes actually a lot of preparation. And that preparation is very important into facilitating a circle. And so, like I was saying before, I was doing the facilitation within the Oakland area for an organization called Community Works, where we were working with just youth, right? And in our process, it took about two or three months to prepare the young person to be able to apologize. And part of that preparation, right, is me trying to ask the right questions, which are restorative questions, me trying to engage this person in conversation, to talk to them about, you know, the harm and who did this impact? How did it impact your mother? How have you seen this has impacted your mother? So I can even identify for myself if this person is ready to sit in this circle and be able to apologize. And so when we're talking about the development of an apology, for example, that's not an instantaneous thing. That's something that actually takes a long time. Even if the offender is ready to make an apology, we still need to prepare you on how do you actually make an apology. And there's no special formula on how to make an apology as long as it's authentic and it's genuine, right? And you're speaking from your personal experiences. And that's what restorative justice is about, right? You want it to be authentic, you want it to be a genuine, you want it to be accountable, very accountable, right? To the harm that you caused. You're apologizing for what you did, right? And for example, like, there was times where a young person would apologize, they were being accountable for their actions. But the victim, because it's a dialogue, right? It's not just someone sitting in circle and just apologizing and then hearing what the harm has done to them. The victim has an opportunity to be able to conversate and let them know, like, this is actually what you've done to me. This is how this has actually impacted me. And maybe you haven't been able to see that because you have your own experiences of the harm you did to me, and I have my own, but it allows for us to all have that conversation. you know, restorative justice isn't, in my opinion, it can't be its own standalone process, right? It won't be able to replace the justice system, right? Not yet, because although it is in a very indigenous process, you know, these modern day legalities that we have to go through to be able to protect people, right? And so what I think is powerful is that RJ can be used to accentuate the criminal justice system. Yeah, there are some people who, In my opinion, they need to be incarcerated, right? Like they need to go to jail. But if they're serving a life sentence, and there's a lot of programs going on right now in jails with inmates, having them sit in circles and talking about their crimes they have done. the process that they're going through right now and healing themselves and talking about the harms that were done to them to make them do this harm to another person, you know, say like in five years, right, maybe that person in their life sentence would be able to be like, hey, like, although I'm still incarcerated, the criminal justice system has decided to go that way for me. I feel ready to apologize. I feel ready to be accountable for my mistakes. The way that I've been seeing it, particularly in California, is that it's been able to help shorten people's sentences, not necessarily just saying, like, because you've committed a murder, we're going to do an R.J. process with you and you can just walk free. No, you're going to go to jail, but we're going to use this as a tool to help you rehabilitate yourself, but as well as shorten your sentence because You know, incarcerating people, we've seen it, right? It's not a good tool at all, in my opinion, and the way that it has been capitalized on, the way that it has pinpointed on certain communities, there needs to be something else to accentuate that process, and I think RJ is best. But, you know, when you're talking about low-level crimes, right? We're talking about youth, right? Restorative justice can actually be used in that sense as a standalone process. I mean, I know in Oakland, and I'm talking about Oakland because that's where I live, that's where I learned the restorative justice practices. And there's a couple of great organizations like Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, Our Joy, who work specifically with youth in schools to help youth who maybe have caused harm in schools and are in the midst of being expelled, right, how we can use the circle process, restorative justice process, to help them repay back the harm without getting kicked out. And we know that the school industrial complex, that kids who are expelled from schools, they have a higher proportionate rate of going to jail. And so how RJ can be used in that sense. And even like talking about incarceration, right, like the thing I love about RJ is that it's a communication tool, it's a sharing space, it's a safe space for people to be vulnerable and I love the way I've seen it in ways of creativity, like how can we use restorative practices to help build communities, how we can build sustainable models. A really good friend of mine, she's a lawyer, her name is Ioana, she made this beautiful paper about restorative cities and what that would look like, administrating restorative practices within different levels of our economics, for example, within our school structures, for example, within our family structures, within our social work structures. I mean, restorative economics has been written about for a while, but how can we inspire people to be financially free, right? To have our communities and our social structures be built to uplift people financially, right? In a way where they don't have to worry about poverty. If, for example, I guess you would say more like in a European context of like socialism, right? But it's not, you know, recognizing that there's needs in communities and how are we going to meet those needs? Yeah, so I took that.
[00:18:18.156] Kent Bye: Oh, that's great. And I'm really curious to hear from you about how you see the medium of virtual reality interfacing with something like a practice of restorative justice and how the medium of VR could facilitate some levels of restorative justice type of processes.
[00:18:33.993] Tyler Musgrave: Yeah, so, wow. So for me, VR is really great because since I've been using VR, which is like less than a year, to be honest, I've learned so much. The company that I'm working for right now, they're called Immersion, and they use VR to help people train for leadership development, workforce skills, and that's kind of how I see the greatness of VR and how it can actually be intertwined within restorative justice, right, as a soft skills training tool. The experience that I'm building and I'm still in the midst of building it because again I'm starting from ground zero and I'm trying to learn as I do this project and you know I want people to be able to experience restorative practices but be able to when they're out of the experience take away ways that restorative practices can be used in their own lives. And so, of course, with the help of Mozilla, I think it was like back in August, I went to XOXO Fest, and that was when I really debuted my restorative VR. I had like my first little pitch deck and stuff like that. I didn't have an experience built, but I got a lot of great feedback from individuals at that conference about how this tool could be used. And a lot of them were like, this could definitely be a soft skills training tool, but people don't know how to listen. People don't know how to listen. I know you're a really good listening cat because that's what you do. But like, you know, we all can be better listeners to one another. And the way that restorative justice does that is having people sit in circle, right? With all the elements of restorative justice, we have talking stick and whoever has a talking stick, they have sole attention on them. We have our centerpiece in the middle where people can bring things to add and The centerpiece is supposed to represent our homage to our ancestors and to pay homage to the elements of the earth. And I mean, with our planet right now going through the climate changes, it's great to have that visual of water, fire, and earth right there in the circle. Even with the ability of what plans and actions are coming out of RJ. So restorative justice is an active experience. It's not just you're just sitting in a circle and talking. After your experience, the whole point of it is to come out with a plan. What is the point? What are we trying to do? Are we trying to heal? Are we trying to create? Are we trying to build community? And I see VR being the way to help people, you know, sit in those experiences, learn those types of tools, and come out of it in a way where like, okay, I think I can actually do this in my own life, in my own experience. Like, I think I can do this in my workspace. You know, I feel like my department, we're having a hard time with communication. We have new members in our team. Let's sit in a circle and get to know each other and have conversations and introduce each other and introduce ourselves and build one another and build our community. So VR is definitely, I see it as a great tool for restorative justice and it's great to hear people like Van Jones with his project Empathies. You know, he's done a great job in that sense of like showing the impact of incarceration to the masses, right? It's showing people like, maybe people who never really would have known, but using VR and its abilities to kind of show everything, right? 360 because it was a 360 video, you know, just be a way of to like to advocate. And yeah, I guess that's the second part. So not only just soft skills training, but the way of advocacy, how VR can be used as a tool to advocate for communities who are generally not noticed or who have had more hardships than others. How can we take storytellers from those communities and be able to use VR to share their stories to the masses so we can better advocate for better laws for incarceration of youth, for example, or even with my organization I was working with in the past for community works, victims who had harm done to them, they were able to opt into doing restorative justice circles. And how would they know about that? VR would be the best way to be like, okay, educate. Let's put on a headset, right? And you can see how our J-Circle is done. And then if you want to have the choice to be able to sit in a courtroom, you can, but now you've seen this alternative method, like, what do you think about it, right? So, yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things, a lot of ways that VR can accentuate the restorative justice movement and I'm really excited about, like, just seeing a lot of other artists taking advantage of the practices of restorative justice and even not even like just the practices but the philosophy of restorative justice of being inclusive and diverse and safe and making sure that within the processes of being in community with each other that we have foolproof well thought out plans. So yeah.
[00:23:12.327] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality and restorative justice together might be and what they might be able to enable?
[00:23:23.085] Tyler Musgrave: Yeah, again with what I was saying, I think VR is a great mobilizer of the movement of restorative justice. I mean, I've seen already with like Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, they've talked numerous times about restorative justice and what it's doing right now, what they plan on being done within the decriminalization of marijuana, particularly for those who have been previously incarcerated from the marijuana laws before and been in jail all this time, particularly those individuals who are black and brown, and how we can use RJ to help rehabilitate them back into society. We pay back their harms. We've seen Van Jones do a great job. And all these people are doing these great things with restorative justice to help build a movement. And VR, because of the way that it helps build empathy, the way that you can even embody, like my project is like you're going to be embodying a young man in Oakland. You're going to go through his decision making that he has to go through every day and then see how his decisions has caused him to create a crime that makes him sit in the circle. Like, that's what the basis of my project is about. And it's interesting because a lot of people, when they see people who do crimes, right, who commit crimes, who hurt people, they only see the crime. They don't see the decision-making that leads up to that crime. But VR has the ability to create that empathy, that embodiment, that exposure that other people who might not be able to see it can be able to finally see it. And so, yeah, I think VR would be a great tool for building this restorative justice movement and even helping people to imagine how we can actually bring restorative practices within our daily lives, not just within the criminal justice system, but as we build, for example, our community in VR, How can we address within the VR community the harms that were done without exiling people, right? How can we do that in a way without calling out people? I mean, that's kind of like the negative things about me too, that people are criticizing about the call-out culture, right? But we can use restorative practices to help people find accountability without making them feel bad about it, right? And we can't continue a culture of exiling and calling out because everyone should be invited to the table because of their skills and their experiences and the things that they've already done. You know, a lot of times the people who have caused harm, at least from what I've noticed or what I've been told in the VR community, and actually I was taught this by the AR VR women, co-founders Eva and Susiana, who actually are probably one of the first individuals who I've met within the VR community who've actually used restorative justice practices to help them reconcile with an issue that they were having with a couple of men in the space. I mean, unfortunately, that didn't go through all the way, but they got the important training needed to actually be able to even help them with their own healing and processes. But that's what it's all about. It's not just about calling out people, making people feel bad, but how can we use restorative practices within the VR community to help heal ourselves so we can go to this future that we all want, like inclusive, safe, economical, like we all want to have a seat at the table, but we really need to be intentional about how we're creating that community. and restorative practices helps us, gives us tangible tools on how we can actually do that. Yeah.
[00:26:41.203] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the Emerson community?
[00:26:45.444] Tyler Musgrave: Yeah, I just, I mean, there's been so many people who've uplifted me, and so in a restorative way, I have to pay homage to the people who've definitely helped me get to this spot. First of all, I'm gonna be super cliche, Kent, you were like one of the first people I was listening to to get educated in the VR space, so, and I loved your thoughtfulness, and you have great questions, and the way that you're really able to dive deep into issues and uplift people from diverse backgrounds, so thank you. Eva Sicliana from ARVR Women Allies. Since day one that I've met them, they've always been like my biggest advocate. They made me residency lead for their Futurist program and even the folks at Mozilla, Sandra, as well as Miriam, who were able to cultivate a space in XR Studio that was so inviting for me, particularly someone who's not coming from that background. I come from a health background and a restorative background. The fact that they were even creating the XR Studio space for individuals who not only have been pioneers within the space, but also new people, like, oh, so amazing. I want to thank my new colleagues at Mersion. They literally made up a position for me because I was really enthusiastic about their tool and the way that they were using avatars to help train teachers and make people better at their jobs. And they've been so inviting and helping of me. but give me a space within the VR to actually even like live off of, you know, not just like a creative, but now I get paid now to work in VR and support their company. And yeah, there's a lot of people who really have elevated me to this space. So I'm really thankful for that.
[00:28:20.149] Kent Bye: Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much.
[00:28:21.669] Tyler Musgrave: Yeah. Thank you, Kent.
[00:28:24.217] Kent Bye: So that was Tyler Musgrave. She's a participant of Mozilla's XR Studio and the creator of Restorative VR. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, well, I think as a culture as a whole, there's been all sorts of people who have caused harm either to individuals or to groups of people and there's an existing process of social shaming and exile, which I think, to a certain extent, that's a good, healthy indicator whenever there's a lack of justice that's coming from other means. But in the long run, we have to find some ways to adopt these different restorative practices. And it can't be just an inauthentic mimicking of the words that are supposed to be said and to expect to get off the hook of any sort of deeper levels of accountability. but to really see that there's been a clear owning of the harm that has been done. And I think from what I see in the larger culture, there's just a lot of people who may have caused harm, but they're not necessarily owning the harm that they've done. And it's difficult to have any path of redemption and to restore balance within the community when the victims don't hear the truth of those harms that have been done. And at more of a corporate level, I feel like there's a lot of that that has been happening. There is a documentary about this company called Theranos, which had done all sorts of ethical transgressions in terms of just doing things and propagating the story about what they were creating that goes way beyond what they were actually doing. I think they just caused a lot of harm within the startup community. But from their mind, the vision of a larger goal of trying to do a larger good within society, there's all these rationalizations that can justify these ethical and moral transgressions that end up adding up to these huge cases of fraud. So I think in our culture right now, we just need a lot more of people speaking the authentic truth of what they see is happening. And for people who are causing harm in these different ways to authentically own the harm that they're doing. I don't know how we're going to actually get to that point, but I feel like restorative practices and to start to maybe have a direct experience of what that might feel like of having a circle and seeing some examples of restorative practice, then I think that may be able to give us some insight for what it's going to take to start to recreate that within our own communities. I think the Traveling While Black experience by Roger Ross Williams and Felix and Paul and Ayesha Nadarajah, I think it starts to create a little bit of that where you feel like you're in this restaurant and you have created this circle where you have the mother of Tamir Rice who's sharing the experience of what she went through through the death of her son in Ohio. And there's something about just hearing the truth of her own direct experience that allows you to connect to the deeper context of those shared experiences. So I'm excited to see where the future of these types of restorative practices are going to head and that I do think that there's going to be a tricky balance of how to blend in these type of community-based restorative practices versus something that has to go through the state and the existing legal systems. it feels like a little bit of a yang and the yang where there's a little bit more of a let somebody speak on behalf of you which is the state rather than the victim speaking on their own behalf and to you know have these court cases in that if they're not willing to on the harm but they've actually have committed these different transgressions and actually exile them into these prisons, but there's going to be other issues that are different matters of the heart or other ways that maybe it would be better for the victims to have this more community-based process that is a little bit more of the yin expression of this justice that is allowing the truth of what actually happened and those shared experiences to be shared and those stories to be heard. And I think there's great healing power to that. And I think there's a lot to be taken from these indigenous practices, but the challenge is how to blend these two processes that sometimes can be completely opposite to each other in terms of the different interests. Like if there's different transgressions that were made and you want to see accountability, then once you slip into that legal context, then it's really hard to authentically own all the harm that had been done because then all of a sudden you're liable either financially or going into prison. While if there's a safe context, it's a little bit more of a private scenario where you have a closed container where maybe everything's completely off the record, but to have that off-the-record dialogue, then maybe you're able to actually speak some deeper truths that would be more difficult if there's different levels of accountability that are online there. So I feel like there's a whole spectrum of accountability. What's the best way to restore balance within the ecosystem? And from the restorative justice practice, it's really looking at not just the how to take someone who's had some harm that they've caused within a community to just take them and put them away and to extract them. Restorative justice has, in some ways, a philosophy around there's something that the community may be losing by permanently exiling that person from that community. you have this vision that people can be rehabilitated and to return back into that community, to contribute to that community, and that there's also an opportunity for the victims to have their voice heard because of the existing processes that's completely eliminated from any existing criminal justice practices. So I think there's a deep healing quality to restore that sense of balance and connectivity from that community perspective. So I expect to see a lot more of these types of restorative practices start to be cultivated and developed. I think we could use a lot of it right now in our world. And to see what the limits of this are, because I do think there are some different limits where it breaks down. It's a little bit of like trying to decide which process is going to work the best in specific contexts and maybe have a blend of things. If it actually already has gone through the existing criminal justice process, then you can still use these restorative practices. So that's all that I have for today. And first of all, I just wanted to thank my listeners of my Patreon to donate and to have this monthly subscription month after month. It really enables me to do this type of coverage. I wouldn't be able to do it without that. And if you'd like to help support and sustain this type of independent media that's really focused on trying to cultivate and promote these types of restorative practices, then Please do consider becoming a member of my Patreon. Just $5 a month makes a huge difference and will allow me to continue to bring you this type of coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
