Thinking Differently about Harm
Angie Evelina, MS
Integrity and the Victim/Villain Cycle
On December 10th, 2020, a man named Brandon Bernard was killed. If you googled Brandon's name around the time of his death, you would have quickly learned that in 1999, at age 18, he was involved in the murder of two innocent people. You would have learned that he joined a group of friends after they'd initiated a carjacking and robbery, that the ringleader of the crime shot the occupants of the car, and that, at the ringleader's direction, Brandon set fire to the vehicle with the victims' bodies inside.
If you dug a little deeper, you would also learn that Brandon had two daughters, a mother, a sister, and a brother. You would discover that he loved classical music. That he had taken up crochet and had yarn and knitted sweaters strewn around his prison cell. That he didn't have a single write-up in the two decades that he spent in prison, and that he had dedicated his life to mentoring youth and helping anyone he could—despite being confined alone in his cell 23 hours a day for 17 years. Brandon was 18 years old at the time of the murders. Twenty two years later, at age 40, he was executed.
I don't just believe Brandon Bernard should be alive today, I believe he should be free. I believe we needed him.
A little over two months ago, I was invited to come here today to talk about my experience working in criminal justice reform. But instead of sitting down and writing, I ended up spending the first of those two months wrestling with whether or not I should. I was definitely eager to share what I'd learned, and hopeful that I might be able to amplify some important stories and spread some of the wisdom I'd gained from the people I worked with. But I was also concerned. I was concerned about stepping into a space that's not mine to occupy, or speaking to a lived experience or of suffering that's not mine to share. I worried that in taking advantage of a platform to support others' voices, I would in the end, actually just serve to amplify my own. I've learned that there can be a fine line between speaking out, and speaking for. I also understood that in trying to bring to light the insight and joy and beauty of the incarcerated people I'd worked with, it might land as though these were attributes I didn't expect to find. I sensed that there was something subtly supremacist, something patronizing, in the act of advocating for someone's humanity. That in fighting for someone else's humanness, we may actually validate the narratives and forces that dehumanize.
What helped me feel at peace is that the story I'd like to share isn't really about others and their lived experience. It's about all of us, and the things that connect us at our core. It's about our shared humanity. About the beauty and imperfection of every single one of us. About our fear, pain, and capacity to cause harm, our capacity to repair and heal harm, and our capacity to connect to courage, curiosity, humility, love, and light.
When my son was around 5 years old, he started getting into legos. It was around the time that I started working in justice reform, and I remember feeling reluctant to buy him the sets featuring the little “jailbird” minifigures with the black and white striped shirts and burglar eye masks. I was idealistic, and wanted my son to have a more whole and nuanced view of people. I didn't want him to internalize the notion that there were simply good guys and bad guys in the world. So as I sat on the floor playing with him one day, I watched as he gave his plains-clothed lego people roles. I sat and watched as he divided them into good guys and bad guys, into heroes and villains. It was fascinating. My son hadn't been exposed to much media; we purposely didn't talk about good guys or bad guys at home. He had been to work with me and high-fived people who'd been convicted of violent crimes. There was of course some level of influence at school, in the media, subtle messages from teachers, preschool peers, and in our family. But my sense was that his play was instinctive, developmental. He needed to make sense of good and bad through play. Ultimately, he was beginning the process of making sense of himself.
What my young son was doing in his lego world, we all do throughout our lives, and we do it for good reason. Opposites and extremes are important. They help us organize ourselves and navigate our environment. They help us make sense of things and give us bearings in an otherwise unstable and unpredictable world. Night and day, hot and cold, light and dark, safe and dangerous, good and bad, right and wrong. It's the scaffolding that holds it all together, the anchors that orient us. We need these anchors. They provide us with important markers that help us regulate ourselves and help keep us safe. But left unexamined, they also trap us. They lock us into binary thinking that doesn't reflect the capacity for all things to exist or move along a continuum or to change states. If you look closely at opposites, you'll notice that they bleed into one another; that they represent temporary states of the same thing. Day and night are just different levels of sun. Hot and cold are just manifestations of thermal energy. Everything is relative. Everything is fluid. Everything is a potentiality.
To me, this is a beautiful truth. Every moment, in every context, can be new. But we have to choose that, we have to cultivate that, and we have to allow that in ourselves and others.
When I began working with incarcerated teens and twenty-somethings, I didn't see them as villains. I actually saw them as victims. I'd spent a lot of time studying the impact and effects of trauma, and had seen that in the vast majority of cases, people who cause harm have been harmed, often deeply and at a young age. So a punitive approach just didn't resonate. It didn't resonate because of the inhumanity that's often central to a punitive dynamic. It didn't resonate because there's clear data indicating that connection and repair and learning yield better outcomes than separation and deprivation and shame. But it also didn't resonate because I simply couldn't see how we would ever emerge from the neverending cycle of harm, if we continued to respond to harm with more harm.
Trauma that occurs early and often has many names: complex trauma, developmental trauma, adverse childhood experiences, toxic stress, complex PTSD. While any singular traumatic event or series of events can bring deep suffering, childhood trauma is unique in that it can impact every system in the body as it is developing. It can wire a developing child's nervous system and stress response so that they're in a state of near perpetual fight or flight. It can impact neurological, cardiovascular, digestive, hormonal, and immune systems. It can alter the architecture of the brain. It can, quite literally, bind a young person to fear and stress, while disconnecting them from their true self, and the joy and creativity that reside there. When this happens, everything is impacted—learning, behavior, thoughts, feelings, health, relationships, self-worth. And when those things are impacted, it deepens, expands, and compounds the effects of the original wound.
So with our justice system, you could see that a cycle was playing out. A young person experiences trauma—sometimes in the context of relationships with people they love and depend on for survival, sometimes in the context of systemic inequity and oppression, sometimes through the transmission of trauma passed down over generations, and often, because of all of these. The trauma disrupts the things they need most in the world—safety, connection, worth, and belonging—and leads to the development of defense mechanisms and behaviors that ensure their survival as a child, but can be unhealthy and harmful to others later on. We then respond to those behaviors by removing safety, connection, worth and belonging. Sometimes, the person they've hurt then goes on to hurt others as a result of the trauma that they've now endured and the impact it's had on them. As this plays out, there are ever-expanding layers of harm as children, parents, grandparents, siblings, partners, friends, and strangers are folded into the cycle. And the role of victim and villain becomes increasingly difficult to disentangle.
There are obviously a thousand variations to this cycle and endless complexities, but when we lift ourselves up out of the weeds, whether in criminal justice or in global conflicts or in people's homes, what we can see is that over time, no one is made whole. In the absence of healing and repair and learning, there is the continual expansion of trauma and loss, and a difficult context from which to draw light. Difficult, but not impossible.
Some people saw my work with “convicted felons” as brave, some people saw it as savior-y. What few people knew is that I was drawn to the work in part because I identified with it. I identified with the experience of early trauma and the experience of loss, and I identified with how breaches in safety, connection, and worth can lead us to operate and move through the world from a place of fear and survival. I was aware of the ways that I had been voiceless and powerless, and could see how that had at times led me to hurt or miss the voices of others. I saw the cycles and fluidity of it all in and around me, and learned over time that none of it had anything to do with who I really was.
Stopping the cycle of harm isn't easy. It takes courage, humility, curiosity, and a relentless effort to hold empathy and accountability in balance. There's no single path and no clear answers. But that's the thing. The path forward isn't about answers. It's about questions.
It's asking someone: what has your lived experience been? What have you been through and how has it shaped you? What have you lost and what might you be trying to recover? What's being expressed in your choices, behaviors, and reactions? What's being protected? And who are you really? What lights you up, what makes you laugh, what grounds you, what do you want to create? It's asking the question, where have you been, and where would you like to go.
The most valuable lessons I learned in this work, I learned through a combination of proximity, curiosity, and my own journey of humility and integrity. I got close, I asked questions, and I made mistakes.
I learned that what feels safe for me can feel equally unsafe for someone else. Because the rules are different, invisible, or unclear, the threats are less obvious and harder to spot, or because a danger exists for them that doesn't exist for me. A particular neighborhood, a doctor's office, a sidewalk cafe, a classroom, a shopping mall, a job interview. I learned who my students really were in the quiet and boring and lighthearted moments, and who they'd learned to become when a threat was present. I learned by sitting and talking for hours while waiting for dentists, doctors, and haircuts. I learned by watching my students instinctively lower the seat back in the car on the way to those appointments, dropping below the threshold of the window so that they couldn't be seen or shot. I learned by listening, despite my fierce opposition to guns, as a student explained why he would never stop carrying one. And while I remain in fierce opposition, now I understand. I learned through conversations and tears about lost friends, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, uncles, and aunties. I learned by listening to my students' playlists and asking about the lyrics and meaning it held for them. I learned what it might feel like to attend court hearings, PO visits, ankle monitor assessments, and background checks, and how draining and demeaning each of these encounters can feel. I listened to the heartbreaking story of day one of a prison sentence, and learned that day that a strip search is a form of assault, the first of many assaults to come. I learned that a job application and an interview can feel so oppressively intimidating and uncomfortable that you simply can't bear to show up. I learned how quickly progress can be derailed by housing, transportation, or a parking ticket. I learned why my students didn't want their neighborhoods to be revitalized, because they understood that down the road, that would mean they wouldn't be able to afford to live there.
I also learned that things like sunsets and redwood groves and the ocean level us all, stripping away roles and labels and mistakes and achievements, rendering us all basically giddy in the sand. I learned that art and music and hikes and paintball are all equally effective ways to discharge and regulate stress. I learned that seeing someone as a victim is just as dehumanizing as seeing them as a villain, that both demonization and pity obscure who a person really is.
I learned that what we cultivate in ourselves, we can offer to others, and that truth and love and vulnerability and forgiveness and repair aren't the soft skills, they're the hard ones.
The word integrity is often used synonymously with ethics or morality, because integrity is what's at the heart of those things. But on its own, integrity is just a process of recognizing and integrating disparate parts into a whole.
The principle of Yin and Yang is the idea that all things exist as inseparable opposites, where neither pole is superior to the other and where a balance between the two must be reached to achieve harmony. As you can see, there's some light in darkness, and some darkness in light. This is an ancient and powerful concept. Because when we integrate, and can hold light and dark in balance, we make space for something beyond both, and we make space for it in ourselves and in others. What we make space for is humanity. I have found that when a person does the work of facing the hurt they've endured, and taking responsibility for and trying to repair any hurt that they've caused, when they've integrated the capacity for light and dark in themselves, they tap into a level of courage, empathy, humility, and accountability that's very rare. And that is where heart, healing, creativity, and joy can really begin to take hold.
The young men I worked with all had felony records and they all had histories of trauma. They could be aggressive at times, typically when they were scared or stressed, and they could be incredibly gentle, predictably, when they felt safe and relaxed. And they all had extraordinary gifts. They were artists, filmmakers, entrepreneurs, scientists, chefs, writers, developers, musicians, activists, mentors, and fiercely loyal friends and family members. One of them had one of the biggest hearts of possibly anyone I've ever met. Another showed up with more courage and vulnerability and gratitude than most people I know walking free. They all made me laugh and they were all willing to cry. They are, in short, us. And we are them. Talented and flawed and moving every day along a spectrum of choices fueled by stress, fear, and loss at times, and love, connection, and opportunity at others.
When we're disconnected or separated from others, when we don't take the time to step into their worlds or really get to know them, we miss so much. We miss the suffering they've endured and the fears they might have and the experiences they've lived through, and we also miss their insight and wisdom. We miss a connection that we didn't know we needed.
But when we see ourselves in others and others in ourselves, when we see that we're all imperfect, it's easier to engage in repair, and harder to punish or dismiss. It's easier to admit our own mistakes and forgive others for theirs. It's easier to shift our focus to the future, and to wonder if and how we can do things differently. We can become more honest and less fearful. More honest about how we define and respond to and perpetuate harm. We can see how we have criminalized and demonized some harms, while normalizing and justifying others. We can see how harm can be aggressive and loud and physical, or quiet, passive, and polite. And we can explore new ways forward together. We can imagine how we would hope to be met in our own mistakes and journeys of learning. We can see how if it was us, or our son or daughter or mother or father, we would hope that there is a place where empathy and accountability, where imperfection and light, can coexist.
Brandon Bernard managed to connect with a level of peacefulness and humility that was deeper than what we typically find in our noisy and complicated world. He had taken responsibility and was deeply sorry for what he'd done, he was quietly compassionate towards others, and dedicated to preventing more suffering and harm. He never asked to be free, possibly because he knew he could never be, possibly because he already was. He just asked to live. Brandon had two daughters. He died without ever being able to hug them. But in the worst of contexts, a context of violence and dehumanization and disconnection, he found light and he shared it.
It's a tricky thing to talk about criminal justice reform when you haven't been impacted by the justice system. There's a complexity to this topic that's far beyond what I could touch here today. There are conversations about racism, classism, and profit. There are conversations about wrongful convictions and corruption and solitary confinement and the death penalty. There are conversations about systems of power. There are also conversations about those who lack remorse and about the few whose brains or biology preclude collaborative healing and repair. There are conversations about how to rethink accountability entirely.
This is not an easy or simple subject to talk about, and there's a lot I don't know. But what I do know is this. Harm is complex and fluid and multidimensional. A victim can become a victimizer and then a victim again. Harm can be perpetuated, or harm can be repaired. And above all, we are all wired to grow and learn. We are all wired to love. We all have gifts that the world needs.
So my hope is simply this:
As you move through your day, wherever you are, notice the people around you. All of them. Every single person you pass. Think also about the people you don't see. People across borders and people without homes and people behind prison walls. And ask yourself, I wonder what their sadness is? I wonder what they're most afraid of? I wonder what they would wish for if they had just one wish? I wonder what brings them joy? I wonder what their light is. Then ask yourself the same questions.
Thank you.