October RSJ Spotlight | Inga N. Laurent

Racial & Social Justice Spotlight Series

Each month, our Equity Coordinator sits down with an organization or individual in our community to spotlight the work they do to create real and lasting change for a more equitable Spokane.

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October Spotlight

Inga N. Laurent | Professor of Law, Gonzaga University

I have thought about this conversation with Inga everyday since the recording. Not only was it just a delight to talk with her, but the topic itself seems to keep coming up in my work. Restorative justice is very relevant, not only during Domestic Violence Action Month, but as we keep talking about healing and moving forward from the traumas in our life. It is a conversation I will keep coming back to for a very long time.

I want to thank Inga for sharing her time and expertise with me. Listen or read the transcription below to learn more.

VIEW RECORDING

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Transcript below edited for clarity and length:

Lara: Well, thank you for taking the time to chat with me. I know about you. I think we have mutual friends, but Sally suggested that I chat with you and I was like, Oh, she’s like, famous!ÊWhy don’t we start with first your name, who you are, and a little bit of your background.

Inga: Hi, Inga Nicole Laurent. I like to put the N in there a lot. My mom wanted to name me Nicole, so it really is in honor of her, and I just like the way it sounds.

Lara: That’s my best friend’s name!

Inga: Really? I love that. Yeah, so I like to use the N a lot, just because it reminds me of her. So, that’s the background for why I use Inga N. all the time. So that’s my name. Who am I, where I come from – born in Brooklyn, New York and lived there for about 11 years of my life.

So that shapes a lot of who I am because I grew up with really diverse neighborhoods, lots of good food in a very close radius. I grew up on the ocean. Nobody ever thinks about that when they think about New York, but the ocean was a mile down the street. So oftentimes over the summer I was at the beach, even though it might be the dirtiest beach in the world. Definitely the country, but still it was a beach with an ocean.

Then we moved to Ohio where my mother’s family was from, a small, small town. So it was a very… paradoxical experience, right? Moving to Ohio from a big city to a small, small town. That’s where I stayed through high school before I left for college. So really, sort of half in one place and half in another place and that ultimately sort of shapes my story, I think, because I usually find middle ground a very comfortable place. And that’s often because I feel like so much of my life has been at extremes on either end. So typically, some place like Spokane is really quite wonderful for me.

Before Spokane, I was in Cleveland. And that was also a really good city for me, a mid-sized sort of city that has a community feel, but also has lots to do, enough to get you in trouble. So that’s my background!

Lara: How long have you been in Spokane?

Inga: I’ve been here since 2010. I’m almost to the point where I think I could call myself a Spokanite.

Lara: I’ve been here about a decade. So yeah, it kind of feels it’s weird. It’s not home, but I’ve been here for a while.ÊSo what brought you to Spokane? Did you go to college here?

Inga: No. So I went to school in Northwest Pennsylvania in Cleveland. That’s where I did most of my education, back in the Midwest. And then I came here for a job at Gonzaga. This is my 14th academic year. I’m starting my 14th academic year with Gonzaga. I came here to direct their externship program, which is basically putting law students in the field.

It’s a great job for me because you get to interface with a lot of constituents. I got to talk to judges and lawyers and I got to help transition students into more practice ready professionals, which I think is super important. And I didn’t really have that in law school. I went straight from undergrad to law school right into practice. And that was a rude awakening. I wasn’t reflective about who I was going to be as a professional and how it was going to show up.

And so the externship program, I really loved being a part of because it was a training that I wish I had had and the reflection and the self awareness. I wanted to foster that for students so that they could have easier transitions into practice so that they could have at least thought about how they’re going to show up in the world when all of a sudden you have these very real responsibilities of clientsÕ lives and their well being in your hands.

We’re not doctors, but we really do deal with peoplesÕ mental health and wellness and well being because often when you’re in a dispute, it can be almost all encompassing and it can be about some of the most important issues in people’s lives, like their families.

Lara: And it takes a lot of time, energy, capacity, which a lot of people don’t have. A whole lot of it and there are very real impacts to all of that. So what a great way to address the whole person as they’re trying to navigate all these really difficult things. How long did you do that for? And also, congrats for being at Gonzaga!

Inga: Thanks. Yeah, I did that for about 10 years. So from 2010 to about 2020, and I really liked it. I would still be doing it, honestly, if I didn’t make this transition into more what we call stand up or doctrinal classes, which I’m teaching in the more core curriculum. I really liked the work that I did in that space with externships, because I agree exactly with you – it’s about bringing and integrating your whole self into any work that you do. And that was a really good space for me.

Lara: So now you’re also teaching at Gonzaga. I know very, very little about what you’re teaching. I did want to ask, because your focus is restorative justice. Can you share what that is about for people that, you know, aren’t familiar with the term and then What caused you to kind of switch to make that focus?

Inga: So, back up just a little. Restorative justice is just a sliver of what I get to teach. Which is kind of sad for me because I would teach about it all day long if I could. It would be the only thing I would focus on. But we have other core curricular needs. So I teach criminal law, which is all about substantive law, like what is the definition of an offense? How do you know if you’ve committed burglary or manslaughter? So that’s criminal law.

I also teach criminal procedure, which is all about the fourth amendment, search and seizure, all of the investigative steps up to trial. I teach evidence, which is all about hearsay, objections, things of that matter, and character evidence. And I also get to occasionally teach restorative justice, which is really where my heart is.

But as a professor, you get to research in any area you want. So all of my research is directed at not just restorative justice, but I’ll kind of define a few things: transitional justice, restorative justice, and transformative justice are kind of my wheelhouse and, but it started all with restorative justice so I can start there.

Lara: That would be great because I don’t know a whole lot about it. I think it’s being talked about a lot more, but I think it’s still a new concept for a lot of people.

Inga: So, to start with, I should always acknowledge the roots of restorative justice come from Indigenous folks, people who have lived it. Since time immemorial, finding ways to relate to one another and to keep people in community together, that’s its core roots. And so thatÕs sort of the sticking points with restorative justice today is when you have a paradigm that works with people who are purposely trying to foster community and stay in relationship with one another, it works very well.

But what do you do in societies where we’re more disconnected from each other, where we have more individualized notions of how we exist in the world? That translation is really kind of the rub of restorative justice. How you actually make it stick and how you make it work is where we’re seeing most of the problems that arise in restorative justice.

But the general idea is when you commit a harm or a wrongdoing, you cause a rift in the relationship. And that could be like an actual relationship. Like you have a relationship or more like a societal relationship, in that we’re in relation to one another because we live in the same community together. And so, the idea of our sort of justice saw a resurgence in about the 70s because how we resolved for these wrongdoings was through the criminal legal system, right? Somebody did something wrong or committed a crime and the state would come in and take care of it all for everybody. What we noticed in that process was that a lot of people were either abdicating and giving away their responsibility to be engaged in the process or they were sort of being pushed to the side.

A lot of times folks who have been on the receiving end of crime, who we could say is a survivor/victim, even though they are the primary person that was impacted; if it’s state V. whoever, right? The state actually comes in and takes over the primary role. And so that’s where all the resources are dedicated.

That’s where all the intentionality and the information is dedicated, and so restorative justice practitioners think that that creates a disincentive to being involved and to end to meaningful accountability. Because if the person who caused the harm is actually incentivized to stay silent, for example, the Fifth Amendment, you have the right not to self incriminate, then you create any disincentive for a person who’s caused harm to take stock of what they’ve done, to think about ways to make it better, to think about why they did it.

And how, if situations don’t change, they would probably just do it again. The idea to get people to restorative justice closer to the offenses and the harms that are committed and get people to engage in that explanation of understanding what happened and why it happened and is it going to happen again.

And here’s what happened when you did and to explain the impacts of when somebody caused you harm because that kind of accountability feels like real accountability. To have to sit and look somebody in the eyes as they tell you what the impacts of the harm that you caused to them are, and then to stay in that conversation, to stay in that discomfort, and then to reveal what was going on for you and why you did it. And who you are as a whole person and what conditions made you the way you are, not to excuse your behavior, but to have a fuller picture of why I did what I did. And then to stay in that conversation and try and figure out how you can repair is, I think, the most meaningful form of accountability that there is.

Lara: That seems like a really harsh, uncomfortable examination of yourself, what you’ve done, and a lot of introspection. How would you prepare someone for that?

Inga: We’re kind of talking about the very sort of brass tacks practical approach. I want to back up by saying, it’s not for everybody, it’s not a panacea, it doesn’t solve problems. It’s for a set of folks where the conditions are right. Restorative justice happens for people at all different stages. It can happen for people before the criminal system even kicks in. It can happen in schools and we can do what we call tier one, two, and three. Tier one is just relationship building in circles and having a dialogic process where we get to know one another and get used to using ÔIÕ statements and how we feel, and explaining who we are as an individual and dialoguing with each other.

It can just happen in so many different ways that you can have restorative justice. It can be operational when we’ve seen cases on the other end. Extreme cases where people have lost their lives, right? There was a murder that was committed. And somebody in a prison system who’s already being punished, right? They’re incarcerated. They’re probably not going to be released, but they’ve had the space and time to evaluate what they’ve done. And now the victim and the victim/survivorÕs family want answers that nobody can provide, except for the person who caused the harm. So you see things happen on that end of the spectrum where somebody is ready for that information.

They’ve done their sort of healing; maybe they’re not healed. We don’t like to use those conclusory words. They’ve done a lot of their healing and they’re in space where they’re ready to receive information and they request they want that information, right? And on the other end, you have an offender who has sat with themselves enough to be able and ready to enter that conversation in a way that won’t be damaging.

There’s a whole range, but the key is who facilitates it and good facilitators essentially create a lot of space for assessment of the different parties who want to use restorative justice, assessment of the capacity for parties to use restorative justice, assessment of where people are at with regards to their mental health and their counseling about the incident. How serious is the incident? How long ago was it? How much healing has been done? What needs currently are not met that would need to be met before you try and put two folks together into this conversation, describing the process and all of the possibilities that could result from this process, putting somebody through almost like a scenario where they’re going to be ready for that conversation. What’s it going to feel like if this happens? Making sure people think about the full range of why they’re doing it and what they hope to get out of it and what the process is going to be like, and good facilitators will do that. It can take a few weeks. It can take months, it can take years.

Lara: I don’t have TikTok, but I know there’s trends like, ÔWhat are red flags? What are green flags?Õ As I think from the facilitator perspective, what are some red flags that someone might watch out for to say, maybe you’re not ready to go through this process?

Inga: I should say one other thing I’ve been leaving out all the sort of the linchpin of this too, is community. Community can also be engaged with us. It doesn’t just have to be the person who caused harm and the person who was harmed. It can be both of their supports. And who’s willing to enter into this space additionally to support this conversation and healing for everyone. So I just wanna make sure I put that in there.

But green flags and red flags. We’ll do red flags because they’re more fun. Or they’re more salient. Maybe not Ôfun’ is not the right word, but they’re more interesting. That’s what people want to go, right? Like, Ooh, I want to know. I’m not that type of person. I love hearing about green flags, but yeah people are like, tell me what can go wrong.

It depends on whose perspective we’re talking about, but let’s say we’re talking about it from a person who’s caused harm. A person who is disassociating from that harm in any way is not able to enter into this conversation. And frankly, our criminal legal system is designed to put incarcerated people into scenarios where the likely outcome is disassociation.

They did something. It’s not about me and what I did because there’s no space to have that conversation with yourself, right? Everything is about external and blame and their fault. And if I wouldn’t have to do that ifÉ instead of taking responsibility for the action.

So that’s the first red flag. You cannot enter into space and re-harm someone if the person who caused harm is not ready to sit in an uncomfortable position and hear what they’ve done and take responsibility for what they’ve done. So other things – we have red flags, green flags. So what you would look for conversely, is somebody who is being transparent and honest with themselves and who doesn’t only denigrate themselves, right? ÔI did something. I’m so bad.Õ But who recognizes the fullness of their reality. you know, ÔI really screwed up in that situation and it’s because these things have happened to me in my past and it shaped how I viewed the situation, but I shouldn’t have taken that step and I’m sorry that I did that,Õ right? So somebody who can work with the nuances of what it is to be human, recognizing their good qualities, their bad qualities, and who can enter into a conversation because then we can have a real conversation about what happened, why it happened, and what needs to happen going forward so that it doesn’t happen again.

So that would be like a green flag, a red flag and a green flag on the side of the person who was harmed. This is interesting because it’s okay to be angry, right? It’s not saying that we’re not looking for people who are in touch with their emotions. But if the purpose is to denigrate somebody else’s existence, to only get in that space because you just want to hurt somebody else, then we’re just perpetuating cycles of harm.

Because it’s in that space, somebody hurt you and you’re hurting, you’re wanting to hurt back. And that’s not productive or generative space. There’s a difference between owning and feeling angry about what happened to you, and being in space where you want to harm or where you want to punish.

And so that’s what we would be looking for, kind of on either end. That’s just a really sort of simple one line of red flag, green flag, but those are the types of things that facilitators should be looking for. And surprisingly many facilitators are people who have been through processes themselves and who found it helpful to them. And so those are really some of the best folks to facilitate right because they have been in the shoes. They are aware of the kind of characteristics they should be looking for.

Lara: I imagine kind of fluctuating between okay, well not being okay, but understanding that you’re angry and wanting to maybe cause harm or punish them. I mean, you could go in between those two and you could feel both depending on the day or maybe you’re angry but you don’t want to punish. I feel like that is a really hard place to be with for so many people.

Inga: I think that’s real and that’s why restorative justice is so scary to some people because it’s so fungible. It moves so much. And on the flip side, that’s why it’s so effective. Because it’s individually tailored to meet people exactly sort of where they’re at.

And then so moving through a process with somebody who’s in that space would be what are you going to say? What’s it going to feel like when that person walks into the room? What if they say this, you know? And essentially just being in that space with them and having them anticipate and think about their desires, their wants, their needs, what’s not been met. So many times you find what happens is people who have been harmed are frozen often in that moment of harm. And because of that, all these other needs that they have aren’t being assessed, they’re not being met. There’s no space to meet those other needs, which means they’re operating from a place of deficit. And a lot of times community members are well-intentioned, but are re-inflaming that harm instead of sitting down and saying, ÔWhat do you need? Tell me what I can do. How are you feeling? What scares you now?Õ Where our response is often, ÔDon’t worry. They’ll get what they had coming to them. Don’t worry, it’ll work out the way it’s supposed to work out,Õ right? We unintentionally often do a lot of harm as people who are supportive because we’re afraid to sit in discomfort as supporters.

Oftentimes what you find is people who have been harmed are in a world of trouble because our legal system, our support systems, our social support systems do not know how to adequately sit with pain and discomfort and to really help somebody in the ways that recognizes their autonomy and how they want to be helped. I think that’s why we all have something to learn from restorative justice. Because at its core, it’s really about all of us trying to get to better versions of ourselves by respecting peoplesÕ dignity and autonomy in a meaningful way.

Lara: I think it’s probably secondhand nature to want to fix things right? Like, ÔOh, don’t worry, karma will get him, it’ll, it’ll all work itself out.Õ You want to be the healer and just say, ÔOh, it’s okay,Õ instead of, ÔOh, that really sucks,Õ and, and feeling helpless. No one wants to feel helpless if they’re seeing a friend or a family member suffering. And when you were explaining all of that, I just kept thinking about the approach. When it comes to domestic violence survivors in that, yes, they’re going through so much. They’re in this trauma brain. They can’t think about anything else. And even if you were 100% confident in saying, ÔDon’t worry, it’s gonna be okay,Õ that won’t mean anything. It’s not even about fixing anything at first. It’s like, ÔHere’s some water. Here’s some food. Why don’t you just sit down?

Inga: Yes. Needs based!

Lara: How can you do something so complicated like navigate our legal system and do all this like paperwork and re-traumatize yourself in doing the paperwork if you can’t even calm your brain down? I totally resonate with that and I think there’s also a difference, but I think people confuse being relatable with being empathetic. People are just trying to be nice, but they say things like, ÔOh yeah, that’s happened to me too.Õ That’s not what I’m trying to tell you or, or connect with you. I’m trying to tell you something is hard for me. And it’s great that you feel like you’ve gone through the same thing, but it’s not going to be exactly the same thing.

Inga: I didn’t tell you this part but the start of my career was working with a VAWA grants and providing civil legal services for victims of domestic violence and I credit that with who I am today in the world, because I had many of the things that I’m able to say now, and much of the reflection I have done came from not being a great advocate in the beginning – because of coming from that perspective of wanting to fix for somebody rather than walking along somebody while they tell me what pieces of the puzzle I have and can assist with. Having these questions about why people chose the actions that they did without recognizing the web of the reality that we all live in and the conditions that we live in. I had a lot of learning to do. And so it just makes me feel really good that I’m now coming full circle. I’m finally in alignment with the practices of where I wanted to be when I started.

Lara: That makes me really happy, just because it is such a complex situation, no matter what kind of DV situation you’re in. It is complex. It is not black and white and people think it is. But I have also learned a lot being here, and the complexities. A lot of people don’t want to press charges, they just want it to go away or whatever, just to help that trauma brain. They just don’t want to deal with it. How can I get back to my daily life because this has consequences if I press charges?

Inga: Or what are the consequences if I do press charges? That starts a whole path of consequences and people who are survivors are really, really ingenious. They’re calculating those consequences at a very far level down the road. We don’t give it enough credit, but it’s an academic exercise, right? Their academic experience is lived experience, but that’s what they’re doing. They’re logically charting out all the possibilities and seeing that our systems aren’t really designed to deal with those consequences in a meaningful way. It can’t be responsive to individualized situations. And they recognize that. And that is really smart.

Lara: When did you start incorporating this restorative justice into your curriculum?

Inga: What led me down the path was I think even though I’ve always been doing this, but in different names. So when I was doing it with the externship program it was whole person centered. It was the autonomy to be a whole person in a new work experience. I’ve always come back to this core thread. I’ve just given it different names at times, and that’s how I wound up really falling in deep with restorative justice principles, because so much of it is about respecting the dignity and worth of all individuals, including individuals who have caused harm, which is sometimes the hardest one for us to wrap our brains around, because we want to put them in a box and a literal box. And what does that look like? It’s just such hard questions. And that’s why I love doing what I do. I get a platform to ask critical and hard questions. When I left practice very quickly, after about three and a half years, realizing I wasn’t equipped and didn’t have the tools to see the results that I wanted for my clients, I fell into a profession that allows meÉ scholarship is all about asking hard, critical questions about things that aren’t working and things that could be better. I think itÊwas natural for me to find the space. I didn’t know it and I can look at it in hindsight and see a path, but to me, it felt like I’m doing this, now I’m doing this.

I think you can’t ask questions about our criminal legal system without questioning the premiseÊÊthat it’s effective. We are not seeing the results that we say. It’s designed to produce and that’s scary to me because that means we’re out of alignment with what we think our goals should be.

And whenever I do anything, I want it to be based in reality. I don’t want it to be based inÉ you know, we say the goal is to put people in deterrence. Well, people aren’t being deterred. If that’s not the goal, I think the goal if we’re being very, very honest is we want to harm people because they’ve harmed people. And so we want to show them that harming people is wrong by harming them. I think at its core, that’s retributive, right? That’s the sort of notion of justice that we have, but we know the way that we think about how we educate young people, right? It’s through showing a new possibility, itÕs for giving somebody internal worth and desire not to put themselves in those situations to make different choices.

But what choice do you give folks if you put them into systems that literally strip them of their agency to make choices? – Inga N. Laurent

That is not going to produce, and for 95% of people who will be released, that exacerbates the problem. It doesn’t go to the root cause, and that’s really scary to me. And so that’s why I started looking at, well, what do alternatives or parallel systems look like? Or how have people done justice for most of human history? What else exists as a possibility? Not because I want to condemn something for being wrong, but because when you care about something, you want it to be better. You want to improve it, right? I love America. And because I love America, I’m critical of America because I want it to be better. I want it to live in alignment with its principles that it professes. To me, that’s love.

Lara: That’s really beautiful. And so accurate – yes, things can be better. We’ve seen it in different examples. I think seeing the potential of something and having to, even though you’re working towards it, being a little bit powerless in how to get there and how to reach that potential is often frustrating.

As you were describing that cycle of people wanting to harm the person who’s harmed them, one question that came into my head was like, because we’re taught by seeing, and learn by doing, so we see those examples all the time, one question that I had was how do you show someone that they’ve done something wrong, if they can’t go through that same pain that you went through, how else do you show them, ÔYou hurt me, I want you to feel that, so that you know the extent?Õ But if that in the long term really doesn’t help anyone, how else do you get them to make that connection?

Inga: That’s such a good question because I’ve never actually thought about it in those ways. And I think it’s interesting because it’s causing me to help reframe how I think about this because I think it’s maybe coming from a different place. In that, like, I’m not saying this with my intention being to harm you, but my intention is to stand very firmly on my ground and tell you my truth and my reality and how you created the conditions for this harm. And maybe a byproduct of that is that somebody feels bad about that.

But I think that maybe that goes back to your original question about how I know somebody is ready to engage in restorative justice. I’m not doing this because everything is aimed at revenge. I’m doing this because I know my worth and my worth lies in ventilating, telling about what you caused for me. And part of my healing journey is understanding and speaking my truth about how the harm has impacted my life in negative ways. Because I am a strong person in the way that it’s not just a tragic story. I’m resilient and I found this road as well. It’s telling a story in its fullness. It’s because I have the right to tell it, because it’s mine versus I’m doing this because I want to tell you how crappy of a person you are. It comes from a different place, I think.

So I think there’s a difference about wanting to hurt someone, as opposed to wanting to engage in the process of putting my story out there for you to hear. But I really appreciate your question because I can see how they’re like right next to each other, r