As someone who has always admired the results of the restorative justice process, I have seen people take responsibility, heal and find a sense of safety rooted in trust. The horrors of Michigan’s penal system — the isolation, the violence, the way it breaks people instead of rebuilding them – must be re-examined and reformed. I know in my heart that this country’s extrajudicial habit of forced separation of families did not merely begin with ICE. We have been doing this to our own neighbors for generations, locking people away whose only offense came from addiction or a mental health condition and calling it justice. That is not safety. That is abandonment.