| The Reentry National Media Outreach Campaign offers media tools and resources to support informed discussion, decision making, and action about solution-based reentry programs that foster public safety and support healthy communities. We encourage you to review the diverse materials and consider how you may be able to use them effectively. |
| The Reentry National Media Outreach Campaign acts as a catalyst to encourage solution-based reentry activities. Review this chronicle of public television and community events/actions to gain ideas on what may work in your arena. |
|
A JUSTICE THAT HEALS Addresses AECF’s Core Results Launched in March 2001, the Making Connections Media Outreach Initiative (MCMOI), funded by The Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF) offers vital media-based resources and strategies to the Making Connections Network. Outreach Extensions will assist public television stations and their partners by identifying relevant content within MCMOI productions and by creating outreach materials that can be used as resources to address AECF’s Core Results. This will enable stations to collaborate with the Casey site teams to help them reach their goals – and link their efforts to the long-term development of neighborhoods and families. Core Results AECF hopes that children will be healthier and do better in school; that more parents will be working and have good jobs; that more families will be able to save for the future; that more residents will be involved in community groups and activities. It also hopes people will feel safer and more connected, and as importantly, have a voice in decisions that affect their families and communities. To achieve these kinds of results, the local Casey sites are moving toward specific, measurable results for children, families, and neighborhoods. The following information suggests “matches” for A JUSTICE THAT HEALS that can assist stations/sites in discussing and achieving specific Core Results related to Economic Opportunity, Social Networks, and Quality Services and Supports. This compelling documentary was produced by Jay Shefsky for WTTW, the public television station in Chicago. Primary film subjects Ramos Family:
Young Family:
Other:
Narrator: After Andrew’s death, Steve left his career as a piano tuner to become director of the Chicago chapter of the Bell Campaign, an organization founded by victims’ families and dedicated to handgun law reform. Sam Young: It kind of put us at a standstill for several months. My dad couldn’t work.
Mario Ramos: I didn’t want to be locked up; I’m too young to be locked up. I wasn’t thinking about the family. I think about more … myself, most likely myself, and saying, I don’t want to be here. I want to get married. I want to have kids. Mario Ramos [talking about meeting with Deacon DeRose]: I was just crying, you know, like sobbing all the way down, and he just laid his hands on my head and just prayed for me. When you, when you open yourself up to somebody like that, and you feel so filthy and just like, and exposing myself, what is he gonna say? I feel so embarrassed. I didn’t even want to be around him, you know. I’m not even worthy of being around you. Stephen Young: When you experience a tragedy like this, the hardest part for me was not … well, my own grief was tough enough to deal with. I mean I was extremely depressed. But trying to take care of the rest of my family, that was extremely difficult.
Father Oldershaw [speaking at the sentencing of Mario Ramos]: I am here because of two families and two sons. The Ramos family are members of my parish. The Young family are members of my community. Even as I grieve the devastating loss of Andrew Young, I firmly believe that Mario Ramos’ life need not be lost. It can be saved; it is being saved. Christian faith calls me to hate the sin but love the sinner. I can’t imagine anything worse that taking someone’s life, but I still love Mario. Faith asks more. That we believe that redemption is possible, that a person can change, and that there is a justice that heals. Maurine Young: I saw them all huddled and crying; and Steven said that Andrew [her son] was gone. My immediate reaction was to say to those boys, to ask how it happened, and then to say there will be no retaliation. Okay, that was the first thing I thought of because I know boys. I know men. Men want revenge, usually immediately. It’s their … their nature. Mario Ramos: I told my Celly [cellmate] about it [talking to Father Oldershaw]. He’s an older person in the gang that I used to be in. And he started telling me, you know, “I could see a change in you; you’re not gonna stay in this for too long.” And at that time, I like, “You’re crazy, you know, I’m gonna be in this gang forever. This is my life, this is what I be about.” And, ah, he like, “Okay, you’ll see.” Father Oldershaw: There’s no way he [Mario] can restore someone’s life, the life that he’s taken. But do we serve justice by destroying another person and taking another person’s humanity away? Don’t we serve justice better if we, you know, renew or try to rehabilitate and bring someone, you know, back to a fuller humanity. Mario Ramos [talking about writing a letter to Maurine Young]: Well, I just, mostly what I wrote was, I’m sorry for what I did, you know. Things can’t change, you know, I can’t change the past. You can’t either. And I’m just hoping the best of something good will come out of it. I don’t know if you can ever find it in your heart to forgive me. And I just hope in some way you can forgive me even though I could never bring back your son. Mario Ramos: I – I don’t know, I was just all dazed, like 40 years [prison sentence]….I was hoping they’d give me less, but I guess they have to do what they have to do. I deserved the time I got and I’m not going to cry about it. I’m not going to be happy about it. I’m just going to think about what actually happened. And that’s the way it worked out. Maurine Young: So I began to understand a little more about what justice is. What is just, what is good, what is the right thing to do? Well, the right thing is to love someone and forgive them, but to have consequences to … to bring them to a turning point in their life so they can be restored. And so, the whole sense of there needs to be loving punishment that him being in jail is a loving thing to do for him to bring him to his senses. Maurine Young [to Mario Ramos while visiting him in jail for the first time]: I told him some of the things that are going on with my family that were hard to hear, I’m sure. But, I looked at him squarely and I said, “You caused this mess, okay, so now you have a responsibility to hold us up in prayer. You’re part of this family, whether you wanted to be or not, you are, okay. You’re like my own son.” …He needed to hear the consequences of what he had done. Narrator: What’s the right thing to do when one person kills another? We ask our justice system to determine guilt and innocence, and then to punish the guilty. But in the process, maybe we’ve lost sight of our own power to find justice and healing…like the power of a community that refuses to stop caring and the power of individuals who dare to reach out through their pain.
Father Oldershaw: I didn’t know what to do, but I knew we had to do something. And I knew I had to do something….I told them that a tragic thing had happened…in our parish. And it was one of our children who had taken the life of another boy in the community. Manuel Ramos: When I’d go to church, people would stare at me, like they were asking, what are you doing here? I don’t know what they saw different in me or why they had that reaction toward me, like I was guilty. I don’t know. I don’t know how to put it. Father Oldershaw [talking about Maria and Manuel Ramos]: They were so totaled by this [feeling accused by other parishioners], and embarrassed, and they didn’t know what to do. And so, anyway, I went to see them and just sat there with them for a while and listened and I just held them. Mario Ramos: He [Father Oldershaw] embraced me [in the chapel at the jail] and I embraced him, too. He didn’t really talk too much. He was just more like one of those people that just wants to rap and just doesn’t want to let go. And you wish he never would leave….Then and there, I like cried in myself. He said, don’t worry about it. Everything’s gonna be okay. I’ll take care of it. Father Oldershaw [meeting Maurine Young for the first time]: And we talked for a few moments and I just told her if I can do anything or be there for them in any way, please know that I’m there, that our parish is there. The parish is very distraught and we would, you know, like to be there for them in any way that we could be. Father Oldershaw: Well, what’s really important is that, is to hold Mario through this and hold the Youngs through it, and hold the Ramoses through it and just be, let them know they’re all supported. Arlene Bozek: There was an article in a [church] bulletin and it said, you know, anyone interested in writing to Mario Ramos, here is the address. So I thought, well, I could do that. So, I wrote Mario a letter and he wrote back. Narrator: Pretty soon, Arlene Bozek and other parishioners were writing and visiting Mario regularly. Narrator: Meanwhile, the people who were helping Mario were seeing what seemed to be a genuine transformation. As his cellmate had predicted, he did leave the gang and, instead, affiliated himself with other Christians in the jail. Stephen: We all spent time in a room [at the hospital] they had set aside for us with Andrew’s body. It was still warm. And, it was very important that we got to spend that time with him. Because it was, it was our opportunity to say our last good-byes to him. Deacon DeRose: Coming onto the living unit [at the jail], I spotted Mario being a little bit separated from the rest of the group….I noticed something was going on with his head down, a sense of being troubled. Not knowing exactly what it was and looking at this as an opportunity to meet him, I eventually moved towards him and invited him to sit down at the table and talk. You couldn’t talk to Mario and not recognize that this man was in a crisis. Narrator: While they still belonged to a protestant church nearby, the Youngs began to attend mass at St. Nick’s. Slowly but surely, the murder of Andrew Young was becoming not only a matter of criminal justice, but a matter of community. Stephen Young [talking about the Bell Campaign, which is dedicated to handgun law reform]: We’re trying to educate the public and eventually put pressure on the politicians so they understand that we have a gun policy that’s basically making guns available to kids who don’t know any better and they are using them to settle schoolyard fights. That’s why we’re losing 15 kids a day in this country.
Mario Ramos: In about the sixth grade, I met a friend of mine whose name was Manuel just like my Dad, and he started telling me about certain gang-related gangs, which I never knew about. And then, eventually, they said, these guys are after you guys, you know, you guys gotta turn a Latino gang. It’s all about a Latino thing and they’re about blacks and whites. And I was like, I got confused. I didn’t know about it, but ever since that day, um, my attitude towards seeing ah, black people or anything affiliated with – anything that wasn’t Latino, started changing. Maria Ramos: It was when he started high school that he began to feel fear. It was about a half-year after he started that I could tell he was sad. I don’t know what kids were saying or what they were doing to him. Mario Ramos: In my senior year, that’s when I finally just said it’s over with, you know. I’ve got to take another step and I started gang banging, you know. My family and friends of theirs didn’t know about it. They never really knew what we did. They just knew if we were going to church. We had to go to church. It was like an image we had to keep with them so they wouldn’t suspect us over here. Manuel Ramos: Recently, he [Mario] did confess one thing to me when he said, “I really wanted to tell you what was happening, but I was afraid. I wanted to break down and cry with you, but I was afraid of what you would say.” Stephen Young: Andrew had a nickname for Clinton. He called him “Toothy” because he was, you know, some of his teeth were there and some weren’t. He was almost like a second dad to him. He was – he was just that nuts about his little brother. Clinton couldn’t read, write, or draw for six months after Andrew had died. He’d start fires in the kitchen on the stove. He’d stand out in the street and wait for cars to hit him because he wanted to be with Andrew. That’s what he told us. He just, he didn’t want to live. Maurine Young [talking about Mario Ramos after visiting him in
jail]: I see a lot of potential. I see a good student. I see someone
with a lot of time on their hands who is wanting to turn his life
around, and I don’t want to waste that.
|
