`````````````````````` Leftlinkers, Please make your own subscription arrangements. ```````````````````` Original message Date: Sun, 27 Dec 1998 07:31:40 -0800 (PST) From: MichaelP <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Non-member submission from "John V. Wilmerding" =============================== From: "John V. Wilmerding" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Invitation to CERJ List May I tell you what it means to become a 'CERJer'? I an emailing you now to ask if I might have your permission to add you to one of the most influential email bulletin and distribution networks on the Internet today -- the list of the Campaign for Equity-Restorative Justice (CERJ). This manually-maintained international email distribution list (NOT a high-volume discussion forum) is the ONLY justice reform list that is segmented by jurisdiction for organizing purposes. That is, we can 'target' email subscribers in any state or country, or even globally. The CERJ list currently stands at about 500 addresses. The CERJ list sends out 10-15 posts per week, about evenly divided between (1) publicity and events about radical justice reform methods and strategies, and (2) news and alerts about the terrible problems inherent in today's criminal INjustice system. Please visit our web site at <http://www.cerj.org> for more information on who we are and what we're 'up to'! Part of CERJ's mission is to elevate the scholarly, intellectual, and moral levels of the Internet's various public crime and justice policy colloquia -- we are engaged in some very effective Internet-based advocacy for Equity- Restorative Justice. For instance, in our educational efforts, CERJ stresses the fact that vengeful retribution is not justice at all, and is in fact deeply destructive of the 'fabric' of society, and that in order to achieve authentic justice, public policies must instead manifest those noble, humane, and constructive qualities traditionally associated with justice. Specifically, CERJ raises the public's consciousness as to the true status of fairness and equity as a cardinal component of justice, and demonstrates that some community-driven types of justice processes are uniquely suited to the conservation, restoration, and creation of equity and community-interpersonal good will. We believe that since most people are conditioned to look exclusively to governments for justice, a new popular awareness as to the true communitarian nature of justice needs to be developed. While restraining some deeply-disturbed persons from the public continues to be necessary for the prevention of violative behavior (and government can continue to play roles in this respect), CERJ is committed to the precepts that true justice is a function of community, and that for justice processes to be restorative of equity, they must be community-driven -- that is, operated by local non-profit or public sector community groups or authorities -- and must preserve offenders' roles as productive members of their communities whenever this is possible and advisable. Acting as catalysts for changes in public policies, many of CERJ's individual and organizational affiliates advance proposals and resolutions against public policies leading to over-incarceration, and especially against the recent and alarming incursion of large for-profit corporate interests into the justice fields (this trend has created a 'prison- industrial complex' which, by gaining a political back-room (influence-peddling) dominance of public policy-making, is fueling the corrupt and insane trend toward incarcerating larger and larger segments of the United States' population, particularly racial and ethnic minorities). CERJ is also working to derive and put forward a Justice Reform Resolution or 'Full-Stop' Proposal -- our advocacy agenda includes a call for a moratorium on the building of new prisons (the first proposal in a reasonable and 'do-able' four-point criminal justice reform plan proposed in 1991 by the late Vermont Quaker justice reform activist Fay Honey Knopp). In order to more consistently provide rehabilitation opportunities for those currently incarcerated, CERJ also advocates for the placement of incarcerated persons in facilities close to their families and communities of origin. CERJ also advocates for the careful substitution of Vermont-model Reparative Probation for the currently-dominant but ineffective 'casework-oriented' probation methods. However, there are major pitfalls to be avoided if government is to be involved on a limited basis as an organizer or catalyst in the development of Equity-Restorative Justice programming, and CERJ is able to assist agencies in understanding what these kinds of problems are and how to avoid them. At the local level, CERJ activists organize community justice initiatives, engage in local and other public policy debates, and raise the general public's awareness of, and active commitment to, practical Equity- Restorative Justice methods. CERJ activists accomplish these goals through their work for the CERJ initiative itself, or for any of CERJ's component organizational coalition members. There is a long list of things people can do to work for Equity-Restorative Justice; in fact, there is something meaningful for almost everybody to do. Through the work of its individual activists and its coalition member organizations, CERJ promotes Equity-Restorative Justice (ERJ) methods of all kinds, including peer mediation, sentencing circles and conferencing models, VORPs (Victim-Offender Reconciliation Programs), Victim-Offender Mediation (VOM), Court Diversion programs, the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP), Victim Impact and Empathy Panels, and Community Justice Planning (a practice built around the Topsfield Foundation's Justice Study Circles method). Since many of these organizations are almost exclusively volunteer-driven, CERJ is also planning eventual federated annual giving campaigns to solicit charitable support for those organizations which actually propagate and promulgate the actual methods themselves. To support its own organizational mission, CERJ also hopes to mount several signature community-based development and public education initiatives such as walk-a-thons. These will be 'packaged' as events which any CERJ coalition organization can use, with by far the largest share of funds raised going to the coalition participant organizations themselves. If you give your permission for CERJ to communicate with you through this medium, CERJ will share with you (upon request) all of our gathered email addresses for your state or provincial jurisdiction, and will carefully consider requests for access or postings to our entire rapidly-growing international database of addresses, particularly for public education and activism purposes. However, CERJ will never release your email address to anyone outside the dedicated and principled circle of activists that constitutes the CERJ organization, and will never sell your address or knowingly permit it to be used for commercial purposes. So 'CERJers' are mending the fabric of society. Please visit the CERJ web page (see below for the URL address) or write to me if you have any questions. I hope we can work together in the Campaign for Equity-Restorative Justice. By the way, if you decide to write e-mail to me and ask to be included in our future CERJ internet information distribution ('InterNetWorking'), please include your state or province (or country) of residence in your message. You see, our list is broken down into jurisdictions to facilitate correspondence with specific local groups of the Campaign. "What you cannot do is accept injustice -- you must make the injustice visible. The function of a civil resister is to provoke a response, and we will continue to provoke until they respond or they change the laws. It will not be over if they arrest me, or if they arrest a thousand people ... it is not only generals who know how to run campaigns! They are not in control -- we are. That is the strength of civil resistance." -- Mohandas K. 'Mahatma' Gandhi (paraphrased) -- To subscribe to the CERJ E-Mail distribution list, simply send an E-mail message to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. Please include your name and your state, province, or country of residence. Thank you! -------------------------------------------------------------- John Wilmerding, Gen'l Secretary | E-Mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> =================================| Web: http://www.cerj.org *CERJ* International Secretariat | ICQ Number: 18723495 ---------------------------------+============================ Campaign | 217 High Street | For | A for | Brattleboro, VT | Justice | AR Equity- | 05301-3018 USA | that | ART Restorative | Telephone & FAX | Restores | EAR Justice | [802] 254-2826 | Equity | HEAR ================================================= HEART Work together to reinvent justice using methods | EARTH that are fair; which conserve, restore and even | HEARTH create harmony, equity and good will in society | >>>|CERJ|<<< ============================================================== We are the prisoners of the prisoners we have taken - J. 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