May: Week 2
Some moon energy today for us all. Beauty, guidance, support.
Restorative Justice as a Paradigm Shift
I grappled with whether or not this was the right interview with sujata baliga (lowercase name is intentional) for sharing. Thomas Hübl, a trauma-healing expert/thought leader interviews sujatha about her deep commitment to restorative justice and draws her out in very beautiful ways to illuminate principles and pragmatics of being in a restorative justice process and practice. (Hübl is sometimes hard to follow but she’s our focus here.) There are many other interviews with sujatha out there, and they all are a little different, but this is a good place to begin as you learn about her story and how she thinks about and moves within this work. Her book, Angry Long Enough, will be published sometime in 2026. The title comes from a conversation she had a a young woman with none other than His Holiness the Dalai Lama. When he met with her to talk about her pain and healing, he asked her if she felt she had been “angry long enough.” In other words, not a dismissive reproach “aren’t you done being angry now?” but an honoring of anger as a process toward and part of healing. And that compassion stayed with her.
Please take time to process and grapple with ideas in this interview. When you are done, you may want to listen to this interview that she did with Ezra Klein when he was still at Vox Media, which was my second choice for sharing… and then explore two organizations very dear to sujatha’s heart:
The Restorative Justice Project and The CHAT Project.
Her Ezra Klein interview book recommendations (Klein always has a guest recommend three books):
For the Benefit of All Beings by the Dalai Lama
The Structure of Scientific Revolutionsby Thomas Kuhn
The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgivenessby Simon Wiesenthal
About sujatha: from her website
sujatha baliga loves everyone, no exceptions. (Yup, including that person.) Her work is characterized by an equal dedication to crime survivors and people who’ve caused harm. A former victim advocate and public defender, baliga was awarded a Soros Justice Fellowship in 2008 which she used to launch a now nation-wide restorative youth diversion program. For her decades of work in conflict transformation and restorative justice, she was named a 2019 MacArthur Fellow.
During her many years as the Director of the Restorative Justice Project, sujatha helped communities across the nation implement restorative justice alternatives to juvenile detention and zero-tolerance school discipline policies. Today, she's dedicated to using this approach to end child sexual abuse and intimate partner violence. sujatha is a frequent guest lecturer at universities and conferences; she speaks publicly and inside prisons about her own experiences as a survivor of child sexual abuse and her path to forgiveness. She is working on her first book, Angry Long Enough, to be published by One World/Penguin Random House in 2026.
sujatha earned her A.B. from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges, her J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and has held two federal district court clerkships. Her personal and research interests include the forgiveness of seemingly unforgivable acts and Buddhist notions of conflict transformation.
sujatha’s faith journey undergirds her justice work. A long-time Buddhist practitioner, she’s a lay member of the Gyuto Foundation, a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery in Richmond, CA, where she leads meditation on Monday nights. She makes her home in Berkeley, CA, with her partner of 28 years, Jason, and their 19-year-old child, Sathya.