(soft music) - We live in a relatively low crime area and our incarceration rate in local jails is double the national average.

- When you crowd people in, tempers will flare and discipline will occur.

It's absolutely unconscionable to expect us to continue to operate at 200% capacity.

- Big picture, what are we thinking incarceration is doing for us?

- This idea of building more jail isn't really going to solve the problem.

- The harm that happens in relationship to the criminal legal system is, in my opinion, never ending.

- Just because you make a mistake doesn't mean that's who you're gonna be for the rest of your life.

- What does justice mean, in my context?

- We should be fixing the system instead of steadily building jails.

- So much of this is not political.

Everybody wants to reduce jail overcrowding.

You wanna live in a safe community.

- Communities used to happen because people lived next to each other and the more mobile people have become, the more difficult it is to name sort of what's community to me.

- Seeing incarceration, not as a solution, but as a problem.

As a problem that needs to be solved.

- Start with the question, what is justice?

♪ Who belongs ♪ ♪ Is it just the brave and free ♪ ♪ Or is more?

♪ ♪ The meek, the mild, the caged ♪ (soft country music) - [Narrator] Production funding for this program is made possible by... - The jail was built with a capacity to house 396 offenders.

Since 2015, we've been operating at about 200 to 220% of that capacity.

- [Officer] Hey, don't let anybody up the hallway.

- Hey y'all, shut your hallway down.

We've got a group of film crew coming through.

- We were established and open for operation, 2006.

Our original three members were the county of Augusta, the cities of Waynesboro, and Staunton.

In 2015, the county of Rockingham and the city of Harrisonburg joined.

We didn't add any toilets, we didn't add any showers.

That means we're putting two, sometimes three offenders in space that was designed for one.

- This is a regional jail, so there are people in there who have just been arrested, who might be in there for 20 minutes before they're bonded out.

And there are people in there who have gone to a hearing and been sentenced.

If it's two years or less, then they'll stay at Middle River.

- Jail is hard.

Jail is stressful.

You don't want to increase and elevate that stress by the living conditions.

- It has gone up to a thousand, now it's averaging about 770, population a day.

And it was not built to manage that and it needs to be expanded.

- I retired from the Army in 1996, went into the jail business.

I find it fascinating.

I've also worked in a prison, but I like working in a local jail because it provides you an opportunity to engage individuals that have run afoul of the criminal justice system and provide them an opportunity to change.

- Everything is monitored right here.

- [Jeff] It's like running a small city.

- [Jeff] So, smile.

[Officer] Yes, sir.

- So, this what we call master control.

This is where the staff control movement throughout the facility.

I don't think the general public really understands the role of the jail.

We don't get to say "we don't have enough staff today, so we're not taking anybody."

We take into our custody anybody that the court orders into our custody.

- Sometimes, we have to deal with a lot of mental health issues.

We also have substance abuse concerns that we need to manage on a daily basis.

- People with a serious mental illness are statistically much more likely to be the victims of crime, of violence, than the perpetrators of it.

But sometimes because of the mental illness, they've lost resources.

Law enforcement quite often in the field has to interact with someone in crisis.

- 18 to 20% of my population have a diagnosed, serious mental illness.

We are a de facto mental health facility, and that's not what we're designed to be.

- In the jail, things are just gonna get worse.

- New inmates, they're generally here 24 hours and then they go to a pre-classification dorm.

This is not a housing unit.

- [Guard] They don't live here.

- The processing provides an opportunity to see the medical staff.

All right, so that's gonna be the last of your pictures.

- Ladies and gentlemen, we're in a carceral state crisis.

- This expansion says we're expecting that we're not gonna do any better.

In fact, we're expecting things to get worse.

- Superintendent Newton likes to say that it's been operating at over 200% capacity for the last several years.

In fact, it's been operating at well over its capacity for its entire existence.

- The jail was built for an occupancy of like 300 people.

The day they opened, they were told by DOC to double it.

- The percentage of stays at Middle River that are over 90 days have about doubled.

- The number of folks coming to jail is dropping, but the length they're staying with us is increasing.

May be because of what the commonwealth attorney is doing.

It may be what the court is doing.

- Why don't we reimagine doing a comprehensive plan about incarceration in this area?

- We citizens do not want more people to be incarcerated.

- We have more than enough jail beds.

We are just incarcerating far too many people.

(twangy country music) - Portions of the community objected strenuously to the prospect of a jail expansion and object to the number of folks that are being incarcerated in the region.

- [Speaker] We're not for expansion of the jail, but we're also not for warehousing people and letting them live in poor conditions.

So, we need to do something to the facility that we have.

- The board feels pressure because of the population at the facility.

- We have heard many stories of abuse, mistreatment at Middle River.

- The jail has been severely understaffed.

As of last week, no one in Middle River jail had been outside in over three months.

They continually put the inmates on lockdown.

- If we're going to spend taxpayer dollars, there are far better places to put it.

- We can do better to serve our people.

- The people who are well-intentioned are feeling like we need to not expand the jail, 'cause they wanted to provide resources and monies to provide alternatives to jail.

- The frustration for us is: opponents, you don't wanna build a jail, then you need to deal with the underlying causes of why people come to jail.

- This is my lovely makeshift green screen.

When we started working from home, of course, at that time, I was still actually working at the commonwealth's attorney's office.

(chuckles) My lovely space.

(twangy country music) Hey Steve, how's it going, man?

You're sounding serious, man, what's going on?

The issue really isn't about whether or not we have enough beds or we need to take beds away.

The issue really is about what is it that we need to be doing in order to prevent people from interfacing with the jail in the first place.

- Since the '80s, with the war on drugs, many, many more people are being incarcerated because of drugs.

More people of brown and Black skin are there than white people.

Those are all structural problems that need to be addressed.

And so one of the ways of saying, "Let's address this," is to say, "Stop.

Let's not build this building.

Let's look at what's causing more people to come."

And at the same time, we don't wanna increase suffering, right?

So, like is overcrowding causing suffering?

- We're a country built on citizen legislatures and our world has gotten so complex that citizens have to be patient and graceful enough to kind of hear both sides of an issue.

- Should we rehabilitate or should we punish?

You have these two sides that line up just the way we seem to now, as if every question is binary and there's no nuance.

But then the real answer to that is yes.

We don't want them to be worse when they come back out.

- Even a jail stay as short as two days can cause someone to lose their job, lose their housing.

It's extremely destabilizing, even for very short periods of time.

- We think that our response to crime, of putting people in jail, is like the way that it's always been done, but it's actually a really new response to crime.

The history of responding to harm in society is so much longer than the response of American incarceration.

- Historically, in certain African societies, there was no such thing as a jail and the way that we dealt with issues didn't require isolating the person and then robbing them of their humanity.

(soft music) (coins clanging) - When I was 16, my brother was robbed and shot in the head.

His girlfriend was executed in that robbery.

I watched as the people were arrested ultimately some months later and then prosecuted and convicted and ultimately, they were executed by the Commonwealth of Virginia and the person who prosecuted the case, I had a great deal of admiration for.

And so, I went into this line of work.

A commonwealth's attorney is the chief law enforcement officer for that jurisdiction.

We don't charge each and everything that we possibly could.

So it's a matter of exercising that discretion on the front end.

And then that, of course, has a huge impact on what the jail population is in any jurisdiction.

- A lot of times it is generation to generation to generation.

I am all about breaking the cycle.

Gosh, I've sat down with folks that started using at the age of seven, seven years old.

Over the years we have developed a drug court, a therapeutic docket.

I feel we are very progressive to be such a rural community.

- We can't arrest our way out of the methamphetamine problem in the Valley.

We can't.

I believe that the jail should expand and should expand in a way that allows for real serious rehabilitation.

- There's huge energy put towards "did what happened fit this standard or that standard where we can call it this kind of crime or that kind of crime."

One of the signposts of restorative justice that Howard Zehr talked about is focus on harm.

Focus on harm rather than on crime.

- You forget that there was war here, right?

This is gorgeous and there's farming, it's prosperous and people aren't killing each other.

But there was war here.

One of the stories that family have told me is that when the burning of the Shenandoah Valley happened, like the Union troops came, they wanted to destroy food.

They would burn barns.

And so you could stand here and you could see smoke from mountain to mountain, like, all the barns were burning all the way across.

Even though slavery was clearly wrong, the South suffered.

So, there's some harms like that that are passed down and those are harms that we have to address too, right?

Mennonites were pacifists and so they didn't wanna fight anybody, and they weren't gonna go fight for the Confederacy.

If they didn't go and become a soldier, then they were taken to prison.

And so lots of people spent the Civil War in Richmond in jail.

In '95, I was recruited back to EMU.

It was then called the Conflict Transformation Program.

So, conflict transformation wasn't enough to take care of the question of, "Well, what do you do when somebody breaks the rules?"

Or "What do you do when somebody breaks laws?"

Or "What do you do when somebody kills somebody?"

It just felt like there was a realm of things that conflict transformation wasn't big enough to handle.

- Restorative justice is at its heart a relational response to harm.

- What we call restorative in and of itself has often been a part of different indigenous communities throughout the planet.

- Indigenous processes arose from people who were in community together.

One of the things we are trying to do here is to say, "Okay, well, what's part of our Mennonite tradition?

What's part of our Anabaptist tradition?"

And drawing on that.

- What we call circle processes in a modern context of really germane to some of those same societies.

So, the community would come together to be able to deal with an issue, quite literally sitting in a circle fashion.

- As you know, everything here that's said is confidential.

Any questions or concerns before we get started?

- The commonwealth's attorney's offices, both for Albemarle County and the city of Charlottesville have initiated a restorative justice diversion program.

Here, we have an alternative to prosecution.

- Welcome again to all of you here.

Now, we've gotten to talk one-on-one with each of you leading up to this and we know that you're here 'cause you wanna make things better.

- So, today community members have come for a training to be restorative justice facilitators.

- Okay, so you said you pushed me, I don't know, I hit the ground, my head hit the ground and then the car was gone.

- I have been thinking nonstop.

I have cried every day, multiple times a day.

I feel so embarrassed.

- It means kind of having some trust in letting go of the typical response, that it means that we're not going to prosecute it.

It means that the person isn't going to be convicted and they're not going to go to jail.

And that can be a really hard and sensitive conversation to have with a victim in a way that empowers them, the way that it's intended to.

- The discussion is about healing and the discussion is about you have been wronged and you have been harmed and you have suffered.

Now, how can we make this better?

Not how can we punish this person 'til you feel like, you know, it's to the equal of your suffering, which I think some people think is gonna make them feel better, but often doesn't.

- Do you have any other resources?

You know, I know you're going through financial aid... - I could empty my savings account, that would leave me with no safety net without a job.

But that's where you are right now.

- This is nowhere close to solving the problem, right?

Okay, but step one is the car.

- And cut.

(group chuckling) - Apparently Fritz didn't go to any of the pre-meetings.

Yeah, there's plenty of food if you want any.

Just experiencing that, in the role play, I'm wondering like when slash if would you step in and be - and how, to change the tone?

- [Fritz] I wanted to find out who enforces the rules.

- [Erin] Yeah, when, if, and how.

When, if, and how.

- My calculation was like, "Okay, there's a very, there's a obvious tension here, but for the moment it's being held."

And it's actually really important, I think for Fritz, to be able to get this stuff out.

Even when he was questioning them, right?

You noticed there was this sort of back and forth happening.

It's like, "Well, how much money do you have?

Do you have your -" - I was getting angry, like I was sitting here getting really mad and I was like, "No, I can't be mad.

I did something wrong."

- What we're trying to do in our job, right, is make a safer community to reduce recidivism, right?

And we know that incarceration is criminogenic.

So again, like we've been given the wrong tools for our job and I know that to some of my colleagues at the public defender's office, then that means like, "Well, maybe you shouldn't do that job."

But Joe and I obviously feel differently, right?

And we still need a criminal justice response to harm in our community.

- A core tenant of restorative justice is that relationships are central.

Well, what do we do when harm happens within a community?

What if the option doesn't exist to ship 'em off to jail?

What if we actually have to figure out ways that we can get to accountability?

I would tend now to more use the language of criminal legal system rather than criminal justice.

Is that actually what is being done?

- I grew up right north of Charlottesville.

I grew up in a very rural area with some very kind of country ideas and I grew up with, you know, saying, "Yes sir," and "Yes, ma'am."

And at 17 I found cocaine and it was this like turbocharger for my life and I went from a kid taking a year off from college, who had, you know, made some dumb mistakes to just completely out of my mind.

I was arrested for a shooting and a robbery that I had committed and it was, it really was the thing that saved me, because I don't think I would've made it much longer living the life that I was living.

When I pleaded guilty to the things that I had done, I was sentenced to 32 years in prison and I kind of collapsed.

I just didn't know what to do with, you know, the idea that more than the life I'd lived, almost two times the life I'd already lived would be spent in prison.

- There is a certain harshness in the American justice system that is widely accepted.

In some European countries, they'd be shocked to hear that you could get 20 years for anything.

- I needed that immediate incapacitation, like I needed to be stopped and sobered up and then what I needed was the things that I got that were not provided by the state.

They were the love and the support and the guidance and the encouragement.

It's all the people I used to get high with and get in trouble with, didn't take the time to write me.

And all the people who loved me and actually wanted what was best for me wrote me and accepted my phone calls and wanted to come see me.

That was what I needed to become a different person.

And the Department of Corrections didn't teach me that.

- Incarceration only creates an animal.

If you don't have a family that loves you and visits you regularly and encourages you and helps you, then all they're doing is creating an animal.

- It's not based on any desire to make people change.

It's based on shame.

Like, "There's something wrong with you, you're a bad person.

Like you deserve to be there."

And that's a powerful thing.

Even understanding that, I struggle with that.

- A felony follows you forever.

And that's exactly the opposite of what we want.

(church crowd singing) Mighty are the works of your hands Mighty are the works of your hands Holy, holy, holy, holy Sing, Brandon Holy, holy, holy, holy Your name is above all names - John 19:17, this is where Jesus carries his own cross.

To me, the weight signifies our sin.

A innocent man carrying a cross for sin he did not commit.

And it's true with all of us.

All of us will be found in situations where people have misled things about us and we have been convicted falsely and find ourself in prison unfairly.

Out of Golgotha came the greatest two gifts known to men.

Grace and mercy.

Grace and mercy.

All of my sons have been stopped by police here.

I've been racially profiled here.

There are days and times where I'm terrified if they'll make it home alive.

Brandon, he has a Master's degree, has a great job, owns his own house, has a vehicle, very productive young man.

Will he be harassed simply because of the color of his skin and the dreads in his hair?

- We still have laws that are exercised in a particular way that they target very specific groups.

- 6% of the population is Black and 22% of the population in the jail is Black.

- When I started in Richmond, you know Richmond is unbelievably humid and super hot.

You know, there were like 80 guys in here, in this 130 degree brick oven, all African-American, all in white jail issued boxers and nothing else.

And I walked through there and I'm like, "This is just not right."

It was really unpleasant.

And to be honest, this whole job is unpleasant.

- African-American women are having to step up, 'cause our men are incarcerated.

We're having to lead the way because if we don't, who is?

- I don't know, kind of what your plans are to, you know, be out in the community.

Just like you guys have said that you guys haven't always gotten it right.

Acknowledging to the community like, "Hey, we have not always gotten this right.

- Things are the way they are.

Like, we have prisons that have been the way they are for so long, we don't wanna admit that, "Hey, maybe this isn't a good idea" or "This doesn't work."

It's really easy to say "I'm a good person and they're bad people" and then we put them away and we don't have to think about them.

I think it's a lot harder to look at morality as saying, "Okay, what am I doing or what am I not helping in this community to make sure that it's equitable?

That people have the same chances that I have?"

- I think that rural people really have built into their worldview a natural sense of like, how to make things right, how to help your neighbor out.

- I think the biggest thing is there's gotta definitely be buy-in from the harmed party, but also that the harming individual wants to, you know, participate.

You're trying to break the norm and you're trying to do something different.

- When I was in private practice, I always saw my role as to work myself out of a job and ultimately that's all our jobs.

That'd be wonderful.

It ain't happening.

- I don't see an opportunity in the future for jails to go away.

There are just going to be some members of our community that need to be separated from other members of the community.

- Do some people need to be kept away from the population?

Yeah, like people who've experienced harm so intensely that they themselves can't keep from harming people.

Can we incarcerate fewer people?

Yeah.

Yeah.

- There's no real satisfaction from spending money on incarceration.

The dollars spent at the jail compete with dollars that would be available for public education or libraries or roads or public safety.

- While this may be what the society looks like today, it doesn't rob us of what it has been historically and what it can be again.

♪ Let us pause in life's pleasures ♪ ♪ And count as many tears ♪ - I think the pause by the authority is a healthy thing.

I think it demonstrates that we're listening to the community.

- Change doesn't happen without conflict.

There has to be some kind of friction.

Something that gets us to see something new.

- I live in a neighborhood of about 1200 homes.

The majority of these people are retired.

These people have rich experiences, rich lives that they could share their experience, strength, and hope with an inmate.

It would save their life.

- Most of the time when you look at restorative justice, all the people making the decisions are still Caucasian-American.

If you're gonna have true restorative justice, then have some people that look like all of America in the seat of making decisions.

If you would empower the people, you might be surprised at the result, if they were given a fair chance.

- The first and foremost change would be focused on rehabilitation rather than punishment.

Until we provide access to those resources, we'll never know who is capable of change and who isn't.

You can only do the next right thing that's in front of you.

You're not gonna get any benefit from fighting against where you are.

So, what's the next right thing in front of you?

- [Jonathan] Justice is both an end goal and justice can maybe be our experience along the way.

- As a mother of African-American males, it is my job to leave a legacy for them, so that they can contribute to this kingdom and see mercy keep showing up and say, "Nah, we not gonna punish you this way today.

You just hold still and when you hold still, I'm gonna open up some doors that no man can shut."

- [Narrator] Production funding for this program is made possible by... (twangy country music) ♪ Hard times come ♪ ♪ To us all ♪ ♪ When someone stumbles ♪ ♪ When someone falls ♪ ♪ When someone has no place to turn ♪ ♪ We learn to listen ♪ ♪ We listen to learn ♪ ♪ In the heartland, we rely on ourselves ♪ ♪ And one another ♪ ♪ In the heartland, dirt, clay, and stone ♪ ♪ And cared for by each other ♪ (light jingle)