www.usfca.edu/Magazine/Summer_2013/features/Restorative_Justice -> www.usfca.edu/Magazine/Summer_2013/features/Restorative_Justice/
Watch Aouie and Leonard answer additional questions On a late summer afternoon in 1986, 18-year-old Leonard Rubio '13 took his father's gun, rode his bicycle to his girlfriend's high school, and shot her dead. Leonard Rubio committed a heinous crime, and he went to prison, as he should have. But it is a story of transformation and the tremendous capacity we all have to change. It's also the unlikely love story of Leonard and his future wife, Aouie '11, who was in the crowd of shocked students on that tragic day. The murder unleashed a poisonous mixture of fear, anger, and heartbreak in the close-knit community of Benicia, about 35 miles northeast of San Francisco. Security guards started patrolling the high school, and Aouie's family started locking their front door for the first time. "There was a lot of pain that was uncovered by him, by his act of killing her. Leonard's mother, Juanita, even stopped celebrating Mass because parishioners refused to shake her hand. But through a deeply instilled sense of Catholic duty, Leonard knew he could do more. Opposites Attract Leonard and Aouie couldn't be more different: a man capable of uncontrollable, violent rage, and a happy-go-lucky freshman who got along with everyone. Both had attended Benicia's only high school, four years apart, and were members of the same Catholic parish. So when the youth minister announced that one of their members was in jail and needed support, it wasn't surprising that Aouie and Leonard became pen pals. When Aouie's father found out that she and Leonard had been exchanging letters, he was furious and forbade it. Broken People in a Broken System The US has the largest prison population per capita in the world, more than two million prisoners and another 49 million on parole or probation. According to the National Institute of Justice, people who were abused or neglected as children are 30 percent more likely to commit a violent crime. In San Quentin State Prison, that pattern was clear: victims victimize. During his time as chaplain there, USF's Matthew Motyka, SJ, assistant professor of French and Italian, saw this cycle of violence, a cycle without end, and a criminal justice system doling out sentences without addressing the underlying conditions that led to the crime. "They were beaten, battered by their fathers, initiated into drug dealing at a young age," Fr. He thought of his father, who had a violent streak and once beat him with an extension cord. "After he got done whipping me," Leonard says, "he told me if I ever hit him, I'd better kill him because if I didn't, he was going to kill me." Leonard's mother Juanita confirms the worst: "We were children from violent families, raising children in a violent family." o o Leonard's San Quentin Graduation Leonard graduates with his machinist apprentice certificate while at San Quentin State Prison. Leonard watched handcuffed from the back of a police car as the paramedics worked on his girlfriend's lifeless body. He had been violent toward her in the past and admits he was "a very jealous person." He spent his days in the county jail grappling with the magnitude of what he had done and how he had gotten there. He began reading about the dynamics of abusive families, and when he got to prison, he took a domestic violence prevention workshop. "I was trying to get a better understanding of what brought me to the point of being capable of taking another life, because I didn't ever want to do that again," he says. But accepting blame doesn't come easy to many prisoners. "No one wants to admit their guilt and deal with the garbage that comes with it," Leonard says. "You've got somebody that's committed a murder and says, Oh, I caught a body. Restorative justice treats a crime as a violation against an individual and a community, not as an abstract offense against the state. It asks: what harm was created, and how can we repair it--or, if it can't be repaired, what can we do to prevent it from happening again? Although its emphasis is restorative more than punitive, restorative justice is not soft on crime, nor does it shorten the sentences. One of the best examples of what it looks like is Leonard Rubio. o o In 2005, Leonard organized San Quentin's first Interfaith Restorative Justice Roundtable and, later that year, enrolled in the Victim Offender Education Group (VOEG), a 5-1/2 month (now eight-month) intensive program in which inmates explore key questions that help them understand what led them to commit their crimes. Leonard and the others could see the positive effect it was having. "There was a lot of guilt, a lot of shame, a lot of hurt, a lot of sadness. Almost every week there would be a lot of tears," he says. "You're unloading those burdens that you've been carrying with you, for some of those guys two or three decades." At the end of the program, inmates participate in victim-offender dialogues. The inmates and surrogate victims (who experienced crimes similar to those committed by the inmates) share their stories. "You have a woman who was raped at gunpoint, beaten, tell the story of what happened, and then you see the man that did something comparable stand up. You see a human being, and as you talk you discover something about this person. The impact is twofold: it gives a voice to the victim's suffering, helping them heal, and it transforms the inmate. "It's not that they can repair their past," Leonard says, "but they can repair the damage that they've done to themselves so that they become better people, and they don't continue that kind of damage in the future. An Unlikely Romance In 2005, Aouie was shocked to find a story about Leonard in a Catholic newspaper, and equally shocked that he was still in prison after almost 17 years. While Leonard was coming to grips with who he was and what he had done, Aouie had remained active in her church, accepted a job at USF's Information Technology Services Department, and finished her degree at USF. Then, she made a decision that would close a circle and affect the rest of her life. The first time Aouie visited San Quentin she was nervous. She had never been to a prison before, let alone one of the most notorious prisons in the country. She passed barbed wire and armed guards and walked a quarter mile uphill to the visiting area. She wasn't prepared for what she saw when she entered the visiting room. Looking around the room at the rapists and murderers in prison blues, she saw men who looked just like people she'd see on the street and in the grocery store. "And they had family that looked like mine, like my neighbors and my friends' families," she says. Still, the seed for romance is the last thing you would expect. But Aouie was about to meet her future husband face-to-face for the very first time. "Inside that visiting room, there's nothing to do other than stare at each other," says Aouie. They talked about faith, family, prison life, and the genuine change someone can experience. A visit every few weeks turned into a visit every week, then on both Saturday and Sunday. o o People wondered aloud, sometimes aggressively, how Aouie could love someone who had murdered an innocent girl. "I had one colleague tell me, the reason they go to prison is so we can lock them up and throw away the key," Aouie says. Aouie started to question her own ideas about crime and justice. She attended the National Conference on Restorative Justice in Kerrville, Texas, and while she was there the state executed a man. Do I think the Old Testament way of an eye for an eye, or do I think that people change? And for me, my conclusion is that people can change, if people have that desire to learn to be different, to change their choices." And if people can change, then shouldn't they be given a second chance, a chance to contribute to their communities? o o Leonard had become eligible for parole in 1996 but was turned down again and again. "There were times when I asked her if she wanted to leave because of the hurt I saw her go through, coming up to the prison every weekend, dealing with the board saying no," Leonard says. On a late February morning in 2010, after more than fo...
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