Transcript: 

 

Geraldine  0:12  
Hello, everyone and welcome to the New Earth lawyer podcast where we feature lawyers who are changing the practice of law to change the world. My name is Geraldine Johns-Putra, and I'm your host. I'm speaking to you from Melbourne, in Australia, and I am on Boonwurrung country and I wish to pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging. I'm very pleased to introduce to you today a truly dedicated lawyer. Her name is Sylvia Clute. Like many lawyers, Sylvia is devoted, she has devoted her life to justice. But unlike many, she has really reflected on the meaning of this word justice. She has realised that there are two fundamental models of justice: one that's grounded in fear that seeks retribution and revenge, and one that's grounded in love that seeks healing and transformation, what Sylvia calls unitive justice. Sylvia was a trial attorney for 28 years. But she left trial practice in 2003, to pursue a vision of creating unitive justice as a parallel model operating at the local level, while being part of the worldwide integrative law movement. She now devotes her time to writing about unitive justice and its application in other domains. Welcome, Sylvia.

 

Sylvia  1:35  
Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here.

 

Geraldine  1:37  
It's a pleasure to have you. Let's talk about how you got into this concept of unitive justice in the first place.

 

Sylvia  1:45  
So I entered the legal profession a long time ago in the 1970s. And when I was in law school, I was told that a good attorney went for the jugular and conceded nothing. And I entered law school while there were still quotas in the United States, for women and minorities. So in order to even get there, I had learned that in order to get past those barriers for women, I had to be at least as good as my male peers, you know, better in many cases. And so when I was told to go for the jugular and concede nothing I took it literally. Figured that's what I'm going to have to do to be a successful trial attorney, I was a civil trial attorney. And then, so that was in the late 70s, the mid 70s, I started practising law. And it was 1987 when I was interviewing an associate for our small firm, and she said, she'd been off for three months, reading a book. And I said, what book is that? She said, it's A Course in Miracles. So I was intrigued, of course, I said, well, it's got to be a good book, if you're doing that. So I began reading it. And I didn't understand anything it said, it was talking about a world that was not the one I was in. But at some point in reading it, one thing I saw was that it was totally consistent. There were no inconsistencies in what it was saying. And then something I came across said to me loud and clear: there are two models of justice, vengeance and love. I understood that perfectly. I was in the vengeance model of justice. And I didn't have a clue of what justice as love might look like. But at that point in time, I was committed to find out. And so now it's been, what, 34 years or so that that's what I've been doing. 

 

So I didn't know where to start in justice as love. So I just thought, well, integrative medicine, it was called holistic medicine at the time. I thought, well, that's a traditional profession that's finding some holistic way of doing things. So I read books about that. I thought quantum physics probably has some clues about this. And indeed, I learned a lot from quantum physics, about the system change that we are in. Whether we like it or not, we're in a system change, because our reality is being redefined. As we go from Newtonian physics to quantum physics. And then I continued to read A Course in Miracles. I've read it now, four times going on five. I don't read it all the time. But I found a lot there. So I just looked everywhere that I might find clues. I looked at the Freemasons. Our Founding Fathers, many of them were Freemasons. 

 

Geraldine  4:55  
Yeah.

 

Sylvia  4:55  
And I said, I wonder if there are clues there and there were. I learned from that. So as time went on, I began to realise that in the punitive system, there are certain structures that it has to have. It's hierarchical, it's judgmental, it's punitive. We now have 14 structures that we look at in unitive justice theory. And I realised that what I was looking for, justice as love, would have no punitive elements, none. So when you're looking at hierarchy, as a way to organise, you know, what would be the alternative to that that would serve the same function of enabling you to organise, but that had no punitive elements. So we went from... so eventually, it took time to find the 14 structures, that would be the alternative, the non-punitive alternative to the 14 structures, of unitive justice that we were working with. But anyway, from hierarchy to income equality, not equality on a material plane, but the equality of our inherent worth and our inherent dignity, and inclusion without exception. So that was the process that I went through. But what I was looking for along the way, was always system change, not a bandaid, not a better way to do the old system, not a fix of the old system. I was looking for a new system that could serve the same functions, but in an entirely new way. So that's a brief description of how this all got started.

 

Geraldine  6:49  
Fascinating. Thank you, Sylvia. So what strikes me is that you started on this journey, at a point in time well before the recognition that we were, are entering into a point of evolution or point in which we are evolving quite dramatically, I would say, into another system. And you had to find the resources, you had to connect with people, I'm guessing. Did you do all of this searching while you were carrying on your so called day job as a trial attorney? How did it impact you? 

 

Sylvia  7:30  
Well, I definitely was I definitely was. And I think that was critical. I think that it was important that I was active in the courts, while I was trying to figure this out. Because I would read, I would understand a little more than I'd walk into the courtroom. And that was how I was able to discern structures that hold that system together, although it's actually very dysfunctional. Because as I was learning this new information, I was in it, you know, I was seeing it, experiencing it, seeing how it was working. It became more and more difficult to walk into a courtroom, the more I was understanding justice as love. But that was what the process was. Now I want to say that at the time, originally, it was, I mean, I didn't know other attorneys who are doing this. But in the 1990s, there was a very small group of attorneys called the holistic attorneys. And I joined that group. We were spread across the United States, there was one who had written a small book about how lawyers could practice in a very different way. But it was definitely the beginning. So integrative law, an international movement has progressed out of that original group of holistic lawyers, that original group sort of fell apart, and then it became Renaissance attorneys. And then Kim Wright began to travel around the world and connect those of us. Because I wasn't alone. Other people were asking the same questions, we just didn't know that, where the rest of them were. But Kim made it her mission to go around and connect us. And out of that has come an international movement of many judges, lawyers, and citizens who are determined to transform the justice system. And now we're very connected. So I'm talking to someone who's in Australia, who understands the same thing I'm talking about and knows many other people who are on the same path. And it's a very different world from how it was at the time when I started,

 

Geraldine  9:34  
Thank goodness for that. But what strikes me is that we will all have the similar aspects to our journey. And one of those is realising you're not alone. The realisation first of all, that there's something that needs fixing in the work that we do, which takes us and many people I've spoken to on this podcast to quite a lonely place. Because in in one's immediate surroundings, everybody seems to think that it's all fine. This is just how it's done. And the awakening to the... seeing, as you say, walking into a courtroom and seeing how the hurt that's inflicted, the trauma that's inflicted, in the way that law is carried out or discharged. It really, once you see it, you can't unsee it. And it really makes carrying on within the system very difficult. So there's that deep loneliness that occurs. And then the almost kind of euphoria as you realise, it happened to me, that there are others on the same path. And what I'm really grateful for, for the work that you've done is that by the time I found that path, it was quite well worn, I just had to, I had to make the connections myself. But I'm really fascinated as to how you came upon these 14 systems. And maybe you could talk a bit more about what they are and how we are transforming them or how we can transform them in our current system.

 

Sylvia  11:25  
Yes, so I was just going to get my chart out here. Let me do that. So I came to them over the course of 34 years. So the most recent modification in this, in the structures, was made fairly recently. So we would... of course, hierarchical, judgmental and punitive, I mean, those are sort of obvious, characteristic structures that hold the punitive system together. But as I was working on this, and as I saw some of the holistic aspects of a system that would, you know, serve the same purpose, then that highlighted other areas that, you know, that exist in the punitive system that hold that system together, you know, so that the parallels continued. But it wasn't, I mean, there were a number of times when I could identify a punitive element and I would guess at what the unitive element would be. And we had to work with it. I had to write about it, you know, I had to teach it. And I would feel this isn't right, you know, it's not the right corollary. So then we would adjust it. So I'm comfortable with what it is now after 34 years. But it was not that easy to come to. And a major problem is that in the English language, the language we have to discuss justice, is talking about the punitive system. So language to talk about a system of justice that has no punitive elements, basically does not exist. You know, it's amazing to me, in the English language, so the Eskimos have, I don't know what 100 names or something for snow. And Hindus have hundreds of names for various very detailed states of consciousness. But this is what we do. Hitler was a powerful man, Mahatma Gandhi was a powerful man, we care so little about the difference of the opposite ends of the spectrum of violence, that we will just cast those two men into the same pool and call them powerful. Now, when you've got that, an undiscerning language to talk about justice as love, you know, you got some problems. So there's been a lot of things. So coming up with the terminology, we really need to create a lexicon for talking about justice as love and a major one. So that was a very clear, the one I just described calling Hitler and Mahatma Gandhi, both powerful, was very clear, that isn't going to work. So I struggled with that for a while. But I believe that if we used power to describe Mahatma Gandhi, power being that ability to attract people to you because of your integrity, your honesty, your dependability, that's power, what Hitler had was control. And control is very different. Control is territorial, control is imposed. Control has to be guarded, you know, you always have to be there. Ready to punish those who get out of control. So now in my own head, there is power and there is control. And that works beautifully. That is a very important discernment that we must make. But there are others. And so we need to just create a language that we can use to talk about a model of justice that has no punitive elements. So that's another part of it, I've started a list and but we need to do that, you know, we can't sit down and have a very efficient, you know, nuanced conversation about justice as love because we don't have the language for it.

 

Geraldine  15:45  
It strikes me as possibly being connected to the multi-dimensional nature of who we are, is how I see it. So quite often, when talking about legal systems, or legal disputes, I find myself trying to sort out what level of consciousness or what level of dimensional reality we're talking at. So when we're looking at two adversaries in a courtroom, they're often operating at a very immediate level of you did this, and I want to be remediated for it or made whole or whatever. But there's another level at which they probably agree to have this experience. And then there's another level at which we all have agreed to participate in the experience. And then there's another level at which, you go higher and higher, and it's all just experience for the sake of Source having experience. But justice is so, our system of justice is so poorly equipped to deal with the different levels in which we're talking about. I mean, obviously, there's a wrong that's happened. And we only operate at that level. So I wonder whether your system or your theories, embrace that sort of multi-dimensional reality, and whether that has anything to do with the kind of nuances in language that you were discussing.

 

Sylvia  17:20  
So I would like to share with you the evidence that has come to me about how justice as love is actually who we are. It's inherent in us, we just don't access and this is the way I mean, I was totally convinced of this. So I left my law practice in 2003. Because the more I understood justice as love, it was so painful to walk into a courtroom. Now, there are young attorneys much younger than me, at least, who are practising law, having clients come to their law firm, and doing it in a very spiritual, holistic way. That did not seem to be an option to me. So I just left the practice. So I left in 2003, and continued to work on this theory and what have you. And I was teaching unitive justice at Virginia Union University, which is a historic black university in Richmond, Virginia. And I was teaching this, we have a beautiful circle process that we use. It's based on the work of Dominic Barter, who is in Brazil, I mean, his circle. 

 

Sylvia  18:36  
So what in this journey? I could see the structures, but I could not imagine how do you implement them. So then I heard about restorative justice. So I said, well, maybe they've figured it out. So I went to training at two of the major institutions that are known for teaching restorative justice. I went to their circle process training. I went in and I said, no, this is not what I'm looking for, because it retained punitive elements. Restorative justice grew out of the criminal courts. It was an adaptation. The circle processes are designed to hold the offender accountable. And so there are lots of rules, you know, they have to plead guilty or have to be found guilty before that can happen. And the lawyers, you know, only then you're not worried about due process, all that stuff. 

 

Geraldine  19:27  
Yeah. 

 

Sylvia  19:29  
So that, still I could still see elements of that in the circle processes that people were doing. And so then someone told me, well go see Dominic Barter. He was doing a four day training. So I went to Atlanta, I walked into his training. As soon as he began to describe his process. I knew that was what I was looking for. He was never an attorney. He didn't have any affiliation with the courts. He developed his process working in the favelas and Rio de Janeiro. And there are no punitive elements. It's beautiful. So I said, This is it. Okay, so I was teaching that process at Virginia Union and I wanted to be able to take it to some of the public housing with my students, who are all African Americans. But I was in the Department of Criminology, they were studying to be police officers, many of them are working in other aspects of the criminal justice system. So we had tried to go in and do the circles, but we weren't trusted. I wasn't trusted, because I was white. They weren't trusted, because they were studying to be police officers. So we couldn't get anywhere. I needed someone who could be the door opener. So I was in a meeting in December of 2018. There were two men there who recently were released from prison, where they had each served for over 25 years. And they were now doing amazing work in their community. And I said, okay, I've found them. That's them. So I hooked up with them we met. And at the first meeting, they began to tell me what they did in prison. They were sentenced to life plus, life plus 80 and life plus 26 years. No one expected them to get out. But it was before we abolished parole in the United States as we were being more and more and more punitive. So they had the option of getting parole, and they were determined, they were not going to die in prison. They knew nothing in the punitive system would ever get them out of that. So they knew they had to do something radically different. And in essence, what happened was, they figured out justice as love while they were incarcerated, they transformed the prison culture, they helped Virginia reduce its statewide rate of recidivism, because they were training people who were leaving prison, while they were not able to leave prison. But they were teaching them justice as love basically. So I sat down, and I talked to them, I immediately recognised what they had done, because I understand the structure. And they were working totally within this new structure. So I said, this is not something you have to study for 34 years, if you are in a space where you can turn inward, and you can, you know, go within yourself, you will find justice as love. And they are proof of that. So now I'm connected at the hip with them, we are doing amazing work together on on the transformation of criminal law.

 

Sylvia  22:46  
And so so it's not, you know, it's, many people discover it, because it's not in a book, you know, well, we're trying to, I'm writing a book now going to put as much as I can in a book, but it's who we are, before that is taken away from us before we are taught to be hierarchical, judgmental, and punitive. Justice as love is inherent in our humanity.

 

Geraldine  23:19  
So would you say, so that is an amazing story, would you say Sylvia, that is the, it's actually a piece of inner work, or a deep, deep piece of inner work. And so what those two gentlemen were doing, was transforming themselves and then seeing the effects of that, or were they actually then working on each person around them and transforming them one by one. How does it work?

 

Sylvia  23:53  
It was a process. First of all, they were motivated. They were motivated to give up all the punitive stuff. So they were in a pod with 86 men, and they say they had the gangs from A to Z. You know, we have a lot of gangs in this country, and they ended up in prison. So they had all of these gangs there. And they had people who had been convicted of rape and child sexual abuse and, you know, all kinds of things and they said, they just said, we had to make it work. 

 

Geraldine  24:26  
Yeah. 

 

Sylvia  24:26  
So they created some language. Paul Taylor, the two men are Paul Taylor and Weldon, "Prince" we call him, Bunn. Paul Taylor came up with the term, radical tenderness. He said, when he spoke to the gang members, he spoke to them with radical tenderness. And what that meant is he was fully present to them with no judgment. So what he was doing was non-judgmental. He got rid of all the judgment. There was no judgment and what they were teaching, they were not judging. And so that made it safe. It's very unsafe to be honest, when you're in a judgmental, hierarchical, punitive place, you know, God help our kids who are in zero tolerance schools. You know, where, even when they want to be honest, they've learned it's not safe to be honest. So Paul and Prince created a place in prison where it was safe to be honest, people became connected. And in being connected at the level of our shared humanity, the violence disappeared. And I mean, they just have extraordinary, amazing experiences to tell. And what we're doing now is we are creating a programme called Unity Prison Culture Change training programme for incarcerated men and women. We've been working on it for two years, we hope it'll be done by this year. But it's them teaching what they did in prison, that will then be taught in jails and prisons to people who are incarcerated, about how they can, you know, transform, personally transform the environment that they're in, and then take that learning back to the communities that they came from. And Paul and Prince always say, we're becoming the solution to the problems we used to cause.

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Geraldine  26:32  
So it strikes me that that you're working within the incarceration system, the correction system, so you're working kind of post, post the criminal process, post the sentencing, and people have been judged already. They want to take it back to the communities so they want to actually work in a preventative way, in a sense before people get into the system. What about during the system? And where might victims come in to this process?

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Sylvia  27:09  
So the victims, so I used to try civil, child sexual abuse cases. And what I learned is that a terrible loss like being victimised by sexual abuse where you lose your childhood. I worked with survivors of childhood sexual abuse to change the laws of Virginia relating to sexual abuse, the statute of limitations. That was the big one, we ended up amending the Constitution of Virginia, due process clause to make an exception for sexual abuse cases. So anyway, the people in prison they are victims, you know, they've been victimised themselves. 

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Geraldine  28:07  
Yep. 

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Sylvia  28:07  
But what can happen is being a victim can actually be used in a very powerful way. So those victims, this is what I learned from them, the survivors of child sexual abuse when they went to the legislature, and they testified. They were giving I mean, they were the credible messengers for the change that we needed. And they saw their loss, their childhood loss as being given value, because they could help protect others in the future, from child sexual abuse. So there's no clear line between the victims and the offenders. So the people in prison who are being trained in this, they're all victims, I promise you, they're all victims. And they come to see, they come to see those who they have harmed in a different way. Those who they have harmed become the reason for them to want to be agents of change. You know, they are giving value in a way to the harm that they caused by it being the engine that propels them to be agents of change. So I say it's, and of course some will be able to connect with the victims. And when the victims see the transformation of those people, what has come out of it, you know, it's such a different conversation than it could have ever been before. It's deep, this is all deep. And out of it has come unitive justice criminology theory. And you are talking about these people, you know, they've been through the court process. So what we see is that when we're paying for people to be in jail, in prison, if we offer this training programme that Paul and Prince are putting together, that time in prison can be really valuable, valuable to the individuals, valuable to the punitive system, valuable to society. So, and we don't have to change the criminal justice system to do that. We just have to use this one part of it in a new way. So it makes it a whole lot easier. We don't have to get the Governor on board, you know, the legislators, the citizens, amending the Constitution and all that type of thing. You don't have to do that. You just have to get the policy makers willing to teach unitive justice in prisons. And then it's system change, it's, it's moving into a new paradigm.

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Geraldine  31:14  
And when you take it back out to the communities, then you are you're healing the communities also.

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Sylvia  31:23  
See, this is a thing. So okay, so this is, this goes to criminal justice, unitive justice criminology theory. So a very important element in keeping our criminal law system working, is the scapegoating of those who commit crime. I mean, we scapegoat them. That this system is so broken, because people are committing all this crime, what we need is more incarceration, we need longer sentences. You know, that's the story. So scapegoating those who are in jail, in prison is essential to that system being legitimate. 

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Geraldine  32:09  
Yes. 

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Sylvia  32:10  
And what teaching unitive justice does is those people are not the problem, they become the solution. I mean, I see this, this has the potential of delegitimising the punitive system, because it's like the antidote, the antidote to the fuel for the punitive system, is to show that those people are not inherently worthless, you know, throwaways. They have the potential because of who we are as human beings. And because justice as love is inherent in us, they have the potential of learning this in jail in prison, and coming back to the communities and teaching the rest of us justice as love.

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Geraldine  33:04  
So it's, it is pure unity, because it is continuing to embrace that part of whether you want to call it the criminal justice system, or the community that those we used to eject, as soon as you became convicted of something, you were a criminal and separated from the rest of the community. But you're an integral whole, you remain an integral whole of the community to keep us functioning and to keep or to heal us and to keep us...

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Sylvia  33:33  
Right, I mean, their families become dysfunctional, you know, it's just, it's just perpetuated everywhere. But if we can target this one thing, that the people who commit crime are the cause of all the problems. And instead, we have evidence that the people who commit crime can actually be the people who can solve those problems. That's a paradigm shift. It's, it's operating in a new paradigm.

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Geraldine  34:04  
Well, I'm anticipating people who might be listening to this or watching this, asking tough questions, and I am assuming you've heard these questions before. So one that comes to mind is well, what about the really, really hard cases? Or what about people who can't be rehabilitated? Are they part of the theory? How do they fit in?

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Sylvia  34:29  
So I believe that there are some people who have been so deeply harmed, that during their lifetime, you know, we may not be able to heal that depth of harm, that we might find out. Otherwise, if we transform our jails and prisons, and they have a place to, you know, that's very different. So we have deeply harmed people, we put them in jails and prisons and they become more deeply harmed. And then you know, we think that's just evidence that they were throwaways from the beginning. So, but yeah, so I'm not going to promise that everyone's going to come out and teach justice as love. But I will promise you that some of them will, some of them will. So we start where we can. And you know, that's what we can do.

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Geraldine  35:26  
Thank you, Sylvia. Now, I normally ask guests what they're working on. But I think it's pretty obvious from what you're talking about, that this is really almost a capstone of the work that you've been doing for decades.

 

Sylvia  35:43  
Yeah, so I'm also in unitive justice and education. We call it UJ-Ed. And so I've been teaching it at the VCU, Virginia Commonwealth University School of Education for a number of years. But I would do short classes to people who were in many different schools, and there wasn't the critical mass for them to go back to the school and make this change. So beginning in August, we're going to be in a high school and a middle school, in a school district, that's very troubled. Guns in schools, kids who have killed kids, that type of thing. But we will be there all year long, we will be teaching a leadership team in the school, how to use unitive justice principles to transform the school culture. And by doing it over the course of the school year, as they're actually learning it, they are implementing it, and we're there to provide them support, and mentoring as they go along. We've never done this before, I'm very excited about it, I think that this is the future, your day ed  and education. But we've also I think we're going to have the opportunity to train all of the grade school teachers in a school district, much shorter, not all year long, but like a professional development training for teachers. And so we're going to make that the best we can, giving them some very basic tools that they can apply in their classroom right now, to begin to change the culture. So you know, you just find the doors that are open, you learn from your mistakes. And it takes some courage, you know, to just step into a terrain you've never been in before. And we do have a, we have a PhD dissertation on our school. And we were in a troubled high school before, though. So we have some we have some peer reviewed research, that our system creates culture change. So that was so we're confident we're going do this.

 

Geraldine  37:51  
I'm sure you will. You definitely aren't  at a loose end. So I really want to thank you for sharing your incredible insights with us, and talking about part of the legal system that I don't talk about a lot on this podcast and delving into that with you has been very, very rewarding. Thank you for taking time out of your extremely busy schedule. You're doing incredible work. And I want to thank you for that to Sylvia. It's been an absolute pleasure.

 

Sylvia  38:23  
Well, thank you, Geraldine and I really appreciate this opportunity. You know, I appreciate the opportunity to let people know what we're doing. So thank you so much for making that happen.