Community Chair of Justice
The popular culture ‘template’ about justice, in Canada, is that ‘serving time fixes crime’ and ‘crime plus time equals justice’.
But when the only justice we look for is a number, there are just too many obstacles to getting what we fully need. That is why we at CCJC have come to believe profoundly that Canada’s collective definition of ‘what justice is’ has got to change, especially when we realize that it is based on outdated understandings of ‘crime’ and ‘society’ and ‘how the world works’. It is time for Canada to enter the 21st century in re-membering what justice is about, and CCJC is spearheading a project to help make this happen.
CCJC believes that the prevailing popular culture, which continues to associate the standard for ‘justice’ with punitive prison sentences, is impeding the development of innovation in the field of justice care at the community level. It established a ‘Community Chair of Justice’ position in 2003 to build a major public education initiative that hopes to use innovative multi-media strategies and interactive learning methods to challenge the existing expectations and stimulate the emergence of a new justice agenda for communities.
We hope to generate a new public mindset on justice, particularly by framing a new language and reaching out to new audiences for a conversation on what justice is and what ‘acting justly’ means. A key feature of the initiative is to engage the symbolic dimension of people’s way of seeing different justice experiences and to provide new imagery that can offer more holistic language with which to describe them: through the artistic, the emotional, the spiritual. The aim of the Chair is to facilitate a conversation about justice in order to foster the emergence and desire for new justice approaches that can better meet the long-term safety and healing needs of communities.
Some Chair initiatives
‘Crime on Broadway’, in collaboration with SJ Productions and musical artist Stephanie Coward-Yaskiw, uses music and theatre in the style of ‘Chicago’ to place issues of crime and justice in front of an audience. The show stimulates new ways of thinking about Canada’s criminal justice system; how it affects victims, offenders and the whole of society; and how Canadians both contribute to and respond to crime in their own communities. Click here to read the brochure.
‘As I unravel small maps of my spirit’ – Follow this link to the Quilt page
‘Prison to Prism ~ Art’s Tools for Justice’ is a project in collaboration with interdisciplinary public artist c j fleury to develop a range of artistic media that can engage a variety of audiences in this ‘new public conversation’ about what ‘Justice’ is.
Plato’s shadows – Follow this link to the Plato’s Shadows page
Education in the streets with Martha, Howard and Skippy – Follow this link to the Martha and Howard page