our history.
Excerpt from Felix Rosado, Justice from the Inside Up: A Restorative Justice Education Facilitator's Manual (Living Justice Press, 2024)
Though Let’s Circle Up (LCU) began in 2007, the roots of restorative justice (RJ) at Graterford Prison go back to the early 1990s when Howard Zehr, Julia Hall, and others developed and facilitated VORP (Victim Offender Reconciliation Program) at Graterford. According to a 1992 report, 100 percent of the participants expressed satisfaction with the program, including those from the outside who came in to share about their victimization. After only a few years, though, the political climate of the 1990s led to VORP’s end and its eventual replacement by a non-restorative Department of Corrections program solely focused on the impact of crime on “victims” they deemed worthy of the label.
RJ returned to Graterford in 2001 through a seminar sponsored by the Pennsylvania Prison Society (PPS), which was coordinated and facilitated by Barb Toews and others. Through their participation, Charles Boyd and several other incarcerated men became inspired to use the RJ philosophy to turn Graterford into a center for change. They formed a collective and began holding weekly meetings. Countless hours of discussion and debate took place on how prisons, communities, and society could look if driven by RJ values and principles. The agenda soon turned to creating, planning, and implementing programming and other activities using an RJ framework.
The collective named itself the Restorative Justice Initiative (RJI) and went on to produce a number of RJ-based programs. The PPS, through Barb and others, sponsored and supported the work of RJI and soon developed program curricula. In 2006, however, the PPS cut its Restorative Justice Department, leaving RJI without the external sponsorship required for a non-staff-led program to function in the prison. Soon after, RJI dissolved.
A year later, in 2007, Charles, still believing in RJ’s transformative power, met with Pastor Michael Meneses and others from Wellspring Church of Skippack to discuss the possibility of starting up a new RJ program at Graterford. After a few months of planning, they launched a pilot run of the “Wellspring & Friends Restorative Justice Workshop,” which planted the seed that would blossom into LCU. The workshop’s ten weekly ninety-minute sessions focused on topics including victimization, causes and effects of harm, empathy, accountability, community, and RJ values, principles, and practices. Howard Zehr’s books and other writings provided the foundation and understanding of RJ used to build the curriculum. Wellspring Church provided the necessary external sponsorship and material resources, while Charles handled the initial development, internal coordination, and facilitation of the workshop. Two pilot runs of the workshop were completed in 2007.
The story of the initial Wellspring Workshop is steeped in irony. When Graterford Prison was erected in 1929, the state, by eminent domain, took over much of the farmland that once belonged to the later-named Wellspring Church of Skippack, which sits right outside the border of what became Graterford property. Resentment of the prison grew and resonated for years among many Skippack residents. Eight decades later, Pastor Mike, seeking new ways to spread Mennonite core values of peace and justice, found a home inside Graterford’s infamous fortress-like concrete wall. A relationship, once defined by ill feelings, began developing between a church and prison. RJ is essentially about putting things right to the extent possible—putting things “more right.” On a community level, the formation of the Wellspring Workshop put into practice the core RJ tenets of repairing harm and building or rebuilding relationships—the very thing from the outset we hoped the workshop would move each participant to do.
In 2008, after being introduced to RJ through Howard’s book Transcending: Reflections of Crime Victims and then meeting Charles, I joined in further developing the Wellspring Workshop. Between sessions, Charles and I started meeting to discuss ways to refine the curriculum. Those discussions evolved into ideas about how to increase RJ’s overall impact at Graterford. Charles and I cofacilitated the next several workshops, as each became an improved version of the previous one. We held three workshops in 2008, then four in 2009. About a dozen participants completed each ten-week series with at least two outside team members from Wellspring Church joining. The workshop was quickly blooming into a project.
Also in 2009, Charles, Marco “Mu” Maldonado, who had recently completed the workshop, and I formed the Steering Committee (SC) to guide the direction and expansion of the Restorative Justice Project (RJP)—the name we began using in anticipation of growth beyond the Wellspring Workshop. The Steering Committee included other alumni as well. At first, it was made up of inside members only.
By 2010, demand for the workshop through word of mouth was climbing. Charles and I could not go anywhere in the prison without being approached by people asking how they could participate. Interest in RJP skyrocketed that year, requiring us to double our number of Wellspring Workshops to eight by running two at a time in separate rooms. We could then train new facilitators and increase our number of outside team members. Pastor Mike began reaching beyond Wellspring Church to bring in new members to the outside team. Meanwhile, the Steering Committee was building relationships with other outside RJ practitioners. We connected with Barb Toews at the Graterford screening of Concrete, Steel & Paint, an encounter that led to her eventually joining RJP and bringing with her faculty and students from the Haverford College Center for Peace and Global Citizenship (CPGC). Around the same time, Joyce Zavarich, then professor at the Villanova University Center for Peace and Justice Education, also began working with us. Barb and others from CPGC joined the Steering Committee, while Joyce and some of her students began supporting us in developing a second-level workshop. Barb would soon become the first external coordinator of RJP.
That summer, almost all workshop graduates wanted to know what was next. Since our second level was not yet complete, we created the RJ Alumni Project. At first, the effort consisted of alternating monthly book and video discussions, using donated RJ-themed materials. In the fall, we piloted our Advanced RJ Workshop, which is also ten sessions. This next level, offered once or twice a year, explored topics such as: labeling, closure, forgiveness, and leadership; the practice of RJ in other countries; and how to move the conversation from theory to practice through group projects. After a year, however, Villanova—which had been involved in several endeavors at Graterford, including a full bachelor’s degree program—was unable to continue sponsoring the workshop. So, Haverford’s CPGC stepped in.
In 2011, a shortage of room space forced us to revert to offering only four of the Wellspring Workshops a year. However, we continued to develop our project. Over the next few years, we diversified RJP by injecting variety into the Alumni Project and increasing our SC’s activity. For the alumni, we added daylong workshops with groups of outside college students studying RJ, article discussions on current events, and one-part, special-topic workshops. Steering Committee members created and facilitated these workshops, which focused on themes such as transitioning home, communication, dignity, values, and legacy. Our Steering Committee also engaged in a range of activities. We read and discussed books, such as Critical Issues in RJ, to deepen our knowledge base; contributed to a Contemporary Justice Review article written by Barb on why we believe RJ education is a significant and even essential RJ practice; received training in grant writing, strategic planning, and program evaluation; studied RJ research from the US and other countries; and worked on special projects, such as collaborating to create a mural for an art exhibit on mass incarceration.
In early 2013, we moved to a bigger room and overhauled the entire Intro RJ (formerly Wellspring) Workshop curriculum to include movement and more creative experiences. Later that year, because of a drastic increase in the prison’s transient population, we developed a two-day (ten hour) version of the Intro Workshop and would hold one a month, each serving twelve to twenty participants. Haverford’s CPGC began sponsoring this workshop. For the first time in the project, outside team members began cofacilitating. We even reunited with Joyce, who participated in, then cofacilitated, a few of these “mini" workshops, as we began calling them.
In 2014, the SC met with the leadership of Pennsylvania’s Office of the Victim Advocate (OVA) and began building a relationship that resulted in our first collaboration a year later. In 2015—and for the first time at Graterford—National Crime Victims’ Rights Week (NCVRW) was recognized by a number of activities. We posted crime statistics around the entire prison, aired documentaries and movies with victimization and RJ themes on the in-house channel, and developed and facilitated a daylong workshop entitled A Call to End Harm. The first A Call to End Harm included fifty inside alumni and several of our outside team, prison staff, and representatives of OVA and Philadelphia-based community organizations. The seventy-person Circle in the chapel annex was, we believe, the largest ever formed at Graterford. This workshop is now an annual event designed around each year’s NCVRW theme.
The relationships we have built with each other, prison staff, outside churches, schools, and organizations, and every participant who has sat in one of our circles have contributed to this project’s rapid growth. Haverford’s CPGC has provided the external support for the Steering Committee and the Advanced and Mini Intro Workshops, while Wellspring Church, until 2015, supported the Extended Intro RJ Workshop. In 2015, Pastor Leslie Mamas of Olivet-Schwenkfelder United Church of Christ (UCC) and UCC PA Southeast Conference Justice & Witness Team took over Pastor Mike’s role of externally supporting the Extended Intro Workshop. After Barb’s departure to the University of Washington-Tacoma that same year, Emily Bock, one of our original outside team members from Haverford, took over as RJP external coordinator. When Emily graduated from Temple Law and began a clerkship, she had to resign from the position. Margo Campbell, Associate Professor and PhD Program Director of the Center of Social Work Education at Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania, then became our third and current external coordinator.
From the summer of 2007 until today, minus a three-year brutal lockdown disguised as COVID-19 intervention from 2020–2023, not a week has gone by without a facilitator in a room somewhere inside Graterford’s wall or Phoenix’s fences saying the words “Let’s circle up.” We say it when we first get together for any of our gatherings and when coming back from small-group work or other breakout activities in our workshops. When we finally came around to naming ourselves, after years of the default title Restorative Justice Project, it only took a couple of meetings to decide. The Circle represents interconnectedness, unity, inclusiveness, equal voice, care, patience, and respect, among other values we hold dear. Every LCU activity—whether a workshop session, alumni gathering, Steering Committee meeting, or historic event—happens in a circle. To us, ‘circle’ is not only a noun but also a verb. Circling up—a lot—is what we do. After sixteen years, what began as a workshop, then a project, is now a movement we invite all to join. Our name is that invitation.
In 2016, members of our outside team, including former inside Steering Committee members, started coordinating and facilitated the Mini Intro RJ Workshop outside of prison on Haverford’s campus. Around that time, the Steering Committee developed several subcommittees that focused on evaluating the project, empowering alumni to successfully transition home (called Restorative Integration), and inviting prospective participants to LCU in an organized yet organic way. During the years-long shutdown of Graterford and looming move to the new facility SCI-Phoenix, our attention turned to solidifying our relationships and preparing for what we knew would be an agonizing transition.
At the end of 2017, we handed a certificate to our one-thousandth Graterford alum.
In the summer of 2018, over the course of five days, we finally suffered the dreaded move that had hounded us for years. Once at Phoenix prison, we spent months struggling to get our legs under us. We had to form ways to connect as we found ourselves suddenly spread out across a dozen smaller units as opposed to four huge cellblocks. We had to search for and find some of our transferred materials, fight for limited room space, and develop new ways to recruit and get LCU running again. By the end of the year, we were operating most of our workshops and getting stronger by the day.
In April 2019, we had our fifth annual A Call to End Harm workshop, this time a 90-person circle. The circle included over fifty inside alumni, some outside alumni, members of several Philadelphia service organizations for people harmed, and agents from the Pennsylvania Department of Parole and Probation. It marked our return to full strength.
Then came COVID-19.
For the next three years, we would have only a handful of workshops, all at Haverford College. In July 2022, I escaped my death-by-incarceration sentence and have so far facilitated half a dozen LCU workshops on this side of the steel gates, including one at a communist bookstore in West Philly on Baltimore Ave.
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In 2023, inside workshops resumed at Phoenix on an extremely limited basis, now under Charles’ solo coordination (until we bring him home). Despite that long pause of inside workshops, we have so far climbed to over 1,500 inside alumni.
And in 2024, I began teaching two RJ courses at Chestnut Hill College here in Philadelphia using the LCU Extended Intro RJ Workshop curriculum alongside some added readings and essay assignments. It continues to hold true that RJ education using this pedagogy and LCU curricula bears the same fruit everywhere it is seeded.
Our hope with the long-overdue release of this manual, is for people to form new circles in prisons, schools, churches, communities, and homes everywhere. We will not rest until the entire world is “circled up.” We imagine and work toward a world where people can come together beyond all walls, fences, and differences to explore the impact of harm and learn to live in more right relationship with one another. We have been conditioned to see justice as synonymous with revenge, with punishment, with prison. To break free from these cycles of violence we must transform our views of harm, justice, accountability, of each other, and of ourselves. And we believe we are doing it—one workshop, one circle, at a time.