Fritzi Horstman of the Compassion Prison Project discusses prisoners, policing, trauma, ACES, intergenerational trauma, the justice system, racism, and how our humanity can get lost in our occupations.
Fritzi Horstman of the Compassion Prison Project discusses prisoners, policing, trauma, ACES, intergenerational trauma, the justice system, racism, and how our humanity can get lost in our occupations. This episode references acts of violence.
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>> Myrna McCallum : I'm Myrna McCallum, Metis Cree lawyer and passionate promoter of Trauma informed layering. Welcome back to the Trauma Informed Lawyer Podcast. As you know, I believe that law schools and bar courses are missing a critical competency requirement in their curriculum. Trauma Informed Lawyering. Becoming a Trauma Informed lawyer will, among other things, challenge you to critically reflect on your personal behaviors, beliefs and biases, call on you to positively transform the way you approach advocacy, guide your practice to avoid doing further harm to others, and ask that you commit to remaining open to learn new and old knowledge you didn't know you needed before beginning your career. Your education starts right here, right now.
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>> Myrna McCallum : Welcome to another episode of the Trauma Informed Lawyer podcast, folks. Today I'm talking with Fritzi Horstman. So I came across Fritzi's work sort of by accident somewhere on social media. I saw this clip about something called Step inside the Circle. It's a seven minute film that brings awareness to the prevalence of childhood trauma, it and prisoners. It was so profound and so moving. And as every one of these prisoners were stepping inside the circle, I saw myself stepping inside the circle with them. and you know, as life would have it, somebody reached out to me and said, you should have Fritzi on your podcast. So then I reached out to her and it, you know, all the stars aligned and it totally happened. And I'm really excited to bring this conversation to all of you today. There's so many things I could say about Fritzi and about all of the tremendous, powerful, impactful work she's doing. She's got her own podcast called the Compassion Prison Project. She's the founder and executive director of the Compassion Prison Project. She's a Grammy award winning producer for her work on the Defiant Ones. She has, she's a producer, she is a director. She believes it is urgent to bring humanity and compassion to those living behind bars and that these acts will help transform our society. After you listen to today's conversation, if you were like, I want to know more, I invite you to go and check out a film that features, of course, Dr. Gabor Mate called the Wisdom of Trauma. Fritzi is featured within that film. Go and check it out. For now, I hope you enjoy today's episode.
>> Myrna McCallum : Okay. Hi there, Fritzie Horstman. Welcome to the Trauma Informed Lawyer podcast.
>> Fritzi Horstman: Thank you so much, Myrna. It's so good to be here.
>> Myrna McCallum : I am so excited to talk to you. I can't tell you. I was watching videos and interviews this past week that you were lending your voice to and really started to think about, segments of the population that I haven't really been thinking about lately because a lot of my focus has been really on the education of law students and lawyers and judges. I had to remember what inspired me to do this work. What inspired this was really my experience as an Indigenous person in Canada, my brother's experience as somebody who has been in and out of prison his entire adult life because of the residential school system that he attended, that I attended, and how that entire, institution, what many have called, Canada's hidden genocide, has really served as a pipeline to prison for so many people. And I know that, you know, through the work that you do, that where you see people who are labeled offender, which is a terrible label. There is a story of trauma there. So let's talk a little bit about what you do, because, like, I'm getting goosebumps. The first time that I. You came into my consciousness was, I stumbled across a YouTube video of an exercise that you were doing.
>> Fritzi Horstman: It's the Compassion Trauma Circle. And the film you saw was Step Inside the Circle?
>> Myrna McCallum : Yes. Tell me what inspired that.
>> Fritzi Horstman: I was working with these men at Kern Valley State Prison. It was my first year as a, volunteer, and the first year I started Compassion Prison Project. And I wanted to do an exercise that showed them. That showed everyone. That everyone in this room has trauma. And I had. There's another, exercise called Step to the Line. I don't know if you know that, which is so powerful. And we did that in a prison. I was a volunteer in another event, and we did that then. And I was weeping, and I was like, this. This change. This exercise changes hearts and minds. And so I knew that my trauma was similar to the. Not similar, but m. I have eight aces. I know a lot of the guys in the room had eight aces. And it's like, how do we show this? I was like, okay, let's do this in a circle. we were sitting in a circle. I was like, let's do it in a circle. And I had the ACE quiz, and we started working on it, and it took us four different, sessions before we really figured out what the circle would be and how it would work. And I also added 10 other questions. So you have the first 10 ACE questions, which are physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse. emotional neglect. Physical, neglect. Parent or caregiver, addicted to drugs or alcohol. Parent or caregiver, Mentally ill, suicidal or depressed, domestic violence. parents divorced or separated, and someone in your family going to prison. So I have eight of those. But then we're not Talking about the other things. And these are the things that I didn't experience as a child, but most of the people in prison did things like homelessness, being in the foster care system, juvenile justice, traumatic brain injury, which is a huge one. up to, ah, 50 to 80% of the people in prison have a traumatic brain injury. And the key here and March is traumatic brain injury is brain injury month, awareness. So I'm going to be talking about this for a lot for the next few months, because what happens when the brain is injured, you can't follow orders, you don't understand consequences, you do things irrationally, your impulse control is out of whack, you're more aggressive. All these ingredients coupled with a child or a teenager who is going through puberty, if this child doesn't have any hope or guidance, you've got a weapon there. You've got somebody who's going to do some serious harm. And so once we got through, those men were way inside that circle. When we finally figured it out and, we went to Lancaster, I worked with a man named Sam Brown, and he was inside, and he helped coordinate everything inside. And, we brought a camera crew and we, He, Sam coordinated 235 men. He got 235 men who would say yes. Which, you know, getting anybody in prison to do anything is difficult. So, you know, it was a great achievement, A great achievement on his part. so when we did that circle, we added it. We added. I think we added a couple more and we got rid of a couple of more. but with the traumatic brain injury, almost m. Everyone in the circle stepped in and so we, we created this, circle. And I really think it's, it's really powerful. We're doing it online now for the, for the community. And instead of stepping in the circle, we raise our hands. but you also get a sense that the idea of the circle is that we're not alone. And one of the things of trauma is trauma separates you and it makes you feel like you're by yourself. And, you know, this rugged individualism in our society, I think is a result of trauma. I think the reason why we feel so like we have to do it on our own. It's my way or the highway. I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it by myself. And I had that thought when I was 8 years old. I thought, I'm alone here. My parents are not going to give me what I need. I got to figure it out. Myself, So I remember the moment of separation that I had. But that's the thing. you know, when you look at our politics, we're completely. Everybody's separate. And the only way we can heal, ironically, is if we're in a community and we're in a circle and we're, we're together. And so, and that's what I. The healing of the circle. The healing power of the circle has been done for centuries and it's underestimated in our society. But you look at aa, that's, that's a healing circle. and indigenous populations, they are always sitting in circles and they're working out the issues of their tribes. And that's, you know, we have to work out the issues of our tribes and our tribes. Our tribe has become a global tribe. And so, so that circle is, you know, it's near and dear to my heart. And I'm, I'm grateful for Vince Felitti and Robert Anda who created the ACE quiz. And we're training facilitators at my organization so that they can do it in prisons. When prisons open up and spread this word, we really need everybody in prison to know that they're traumatized. And just to mention, our mission is to create trauma informed prisons and communities. We want everyone to know what trauma is, what it does to the brain, body and spirit, and show ways to heal. And, but like, what, what would a trauma informed justice system look like? What would a trauma informed judge be? What would a trauma informed lawyer be? It's like the first question you ask is, what happened to you, my friend? You know, it's not that. Look what you did. It's like what happened to you to put you in a place where you had to destroy someone or something.
>> Myrna McCallum : Yeah, 100%. And I think the, you know, judges and lawyers, the whole system would benefit from asking that question, as I've said in other podcast episodes, versus, I would say, what we've been conditioned to ask, which is what were you thinking? Or what is wrong with you? Right. And so, I mean, Gabor, when I had him on my podcast, he taught me that question to compassionate inquiry, he calls it. Right. And so as I'm listening to you, Fritzi, I'm thinking so many things that I want to ask you, but I want to take it back just one sec and ask you to just quickly describe, or explain. Aces for those listening to us who are not familiar with adverse childhood experience study. Can you just say a little bit about that?
>> Fritzi Horstman: Yes. There, there are 10 questions on the adverse childhood experiences quiz, which I went over, a minute ago. And. And I have eight of those. And so the more. What they realized doing this test, creating this test, was that the more aces you had, the more adverse health outcomes you had. So if you have three or more ACEs, you're more susceptible to lupus and multiple sclerosis and autoimmune diseases. Four or more ACEs, you're seven times more likely to go to prison. five or more ACEs, chances. Higher chances of alcohol abuse. Six or more ACEs, you lower your life expectancy by 20 years if you don't address him. And also huge, increase in opioid addiction. And it just. Social problems, divorce, all these things. Because this is the thing when you're in survival mode or stressed out, which is survival mode, even when you're doing an exam, you're stressed out, and you're not thinking. You have no access to your prefrontal cortex when you're in survival mode. So when you're in that kind of place, you're reacting to the environment as if it's a threat. Everything is a threat. And you're unable to say, wait a second. Your body's unable to differentiate between a threat and something benign. you hear stories of people thinking. Seeing a cell phone and thinking it's a gun. Or you see an officer shooting at someone as he's running away. Well, what the hell is that? The officer still thinks he's in threat. and for me, it's like, we forgive the officers because he's doing his job, but we have to forgive the people that commit crimes because they're not in their right mind. honestly. And we talk about premeditated murder or thinking about doing something to somebody. That mind is in a state of fight or flight. That. That is not a correct mind. That mind does not have someone to bounce off. Should I kill that person? They're fuming. They're fuming, and it's regurgitating. And all you want is vengeance. And vengeance is a trauma response. someone hurts you, you want to hurt them back. Instead of saying, wait a second. Why did you do that? And that's how our criminal justice system has been built up in retribution and vengeance. Instead of saying, wait a second, hold on, everyone. Why did he do this? Why did she do this? We say, they're irreconcilable. they will never be healed. They will never change. My cells change every seven years. The. In my entire body. How can we limit someone by what they did? When they were 16 and in, in a state of fight or flight after their parents had annihilated them, after their after the, after they didn't have any food to eat, so they stole, they stole food so that they could survive. And then we punished them because they've been victims first. You know, it's like, it is what happened to you when were you a victim? And then we see that they're victims. It's like, okay, this is a human, this is a victim first. And then, then someone who committed a crime and we have to bring that humanity back to, to, to the whole situation.
>> Myrna McCallum : Yeah, I'm with you. We really do. as I'm listening to you speak, I'm thinking about a couple other folks who I've listened to that are just kind of live in my head now. you know, Harold Jaunzems is ah, a lawyer turned award winning author. He was on my podcast and we talked about how there was ah, a drunk driver killed his brother. And because they're both Cree from my territory, Treaty 6, northern Saskatchewan. And they live by these Cree indigenous principles that really inform customs and relationships. Harold knew that in order for that individual, whose name was Hillary, to gain acceptance back into the community, back into family, into relationship, he had to repair the harm that he caused to the extent that he couldn't. So what they ended up doing was through a program that was run by Mothers Against Drunk Driving, they together went into schools. And this man, who killed Harold's brother, talked about how terrifying it was waking up in prison in cells one morning, not knowing what he had done the night before, having no memory of having taken this guy's life. And then Harold talked about what life has been like losing a brother. And so together they brought this story to all of these schools to educate on impaired driving and the damage that alcoholism can do to people and the trauma that it can create. And it was really quite powerful in healing. But Harold had said that what people need is an opportunity to rehabilitate and reintegrate. Prison does nothing but isolate, exclude, dehumanize and just completely, you know, push people into the margins where they are less likely to want to heal and reform or rehabilitate or reintegrate.
>> Fritzi Horstman: Yeah, prisons are a continuation of what happened at home. And if you ask me this is, if you want to stop the cycle, you have to stop prison. Should be an intervention is what I see is it's the opportunity for an intervention of violence. But you can't intervene with, intervene violence if you're being violent. And, you know, prisons are set up as a paramilitary, you know, organization. So you have captains and lieutenants, and, you know, the warden would be the general, I guess, and. And everything is custody and control. And, and they forget, you know, and if you're out of line, if you're out of line, you're punished. But guess what? If you have 80% of the population with traumatic brain injury, staying in line is almost impossible. Following orders is almost impossible. Continuing to be punitive just puts the person in fight or flight, which is a place where you cannot comply with orders, where you cannot, be a contributing member of that society. and it is a society, it is a community. Instead of seeing it as an us versus them, we really need to start seeing it as a unit, as a whole. It should be a holistic approach. My thinking is it needs to be a holistic approach. That's one of the reasons why I'm also worried about the officers. The life expectancy of an officer is 59 years old in the United States. Why is that? Well, we've got ptsd. We've got hypervigilance. We've got fight or flight. when you're in fight or flight and you have that toxic stress going through those cortisol and adrenaline coursing through your body 24 7, you have no immune system. You cannot fight off disease, heart disease, lung cancer, you cannot fight those things off. And that's why people. It's like they die 10 months after they retire. So if the people that were. That the state is paying to keep our society safe, but to keep these people locked up, if those people are in bad shape, first of all, they're going to be violent because that's what exhaustion and hyper vigilance, PTSD does to the body. Second of all, it's destroying their families. The divorce rate is 20% higher than the national average. Suicide rate is 39% higher than the national average. You got two of those. That's two aces for your child. not to mention domestic violence, that's three. Alcoholism and drug use, that's four. depression, that's five. We've already got five ACEs for most families. we're not even talking about what the effect is on, the morality of what they're doing. you think of an officer in charge of solitary confinement, and you see people, they call it decompensating and basically either going insane or losing, losing any kind of sanity that they had when going in. And, they can't help them. And they're really not able to do anything about it. And so one of the things I'm learning about moral injury is if it's repeated, like working in a prison, is you lose your sense of empathy. And I would argue this is the same for judges and for, attorneys as well, because they're exposed to so much adversity, so much violence, so many stories of violence, that it's hard to stay human. It's really hard to stay human. And when you don't feel like a human, you don't know how to treat other people like humans. So our humanity is lost in our occupations, and our humanity is lost in this assault of crime that people are dealing with. you talk, the people who have to look at Facebook, the child rapes and stuff, what's happening to them? This is similar to what's happening in our courtrooms throughout the United States. What's so frightening about a lack of empathy is that we continue to dehumanize people. And this is what we did, what slave owners did. You know, this is what, a lot of our laws, historic laws have been, have dehumanized black people, have dehumanized immigrants, and no shame, because they're traumatized. But we have to look at it from a different lens and a different perspective. The perspective is everyone in the United States is traumatized, and it's vicarious trauma or however you want to categorize it. But I would argue that a lot of it is trauma from their childhoods. I mean, if you think about the south, that's a traumatic region. That's just. It's a whole bevy of people that have dealt with being, you know, ancestors of slave owners, ancestors of sharecroppers, ancestors of people who have, witnessed hangings and, lynchings and dehumanize, dehumanizing black people for centuries. For centuries. And then we expect them, to behave. But no, this is in our. This is in their blood. This is in my blood. My mother grew up in the south, so she was a racist. So I had to. I had to really question those, you know, those thoughts that she was having, those beliefs that she had. And they didn't ring true for me. But at one point, I saw myself, you know, being racist against my best friend who was Jewish. And I'm part Jewish. I didn't know I was part Jewish at that time, but I'm part Jews. Like, what am I doing? And so. But this is. This is. The dehumanization is a trauma response. when you're Traumatized, you want the other person to hurt. and when you're traumatized, you want the other person to suffer for what you've gone through. And I would argue that this is what's going on in Congress right now in the senate. Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, all those people are traumatized. Joe Manchin, he's arguing for corporations instead of arguing for the people. he wants the corporations to succeed, which is a trauma response. Greed is a trauma response because he has a belief that he have enough, that there's not enough for him. So he has to. Whatever he does is justified. Well, in the bigger picture, he's hurting himself because he's hurting the people in his community. And then ultimately those people, you know, aren't going to be around. Those people are going to, you know, decompensate because of this. So, you know, we all of our thought. And that's the other thing, all of our thoughts have an effect in the world.
>> Myrna McCallum : Absolutely. I was thinking, you know, scarcity is a trauma response. And as I hear you talking about these politicians and, and people harming people, I'm thinking about how it is that lawyers and judges harm people and dehumanize. And what is that investment? Maybe it isn't a conscious one if that practice is just a trauma response. But I think about, what the experience is here in Canada. you know, before you and I came on the record, I had told you that here in Canada, indigenous people, we make up 5% of the population here in Canada. But, according to recent reports from the Federal corrections, investigator, 32% of people in prison are indigenous. For women, that number is 48%. And this is just federal prisons. We're not even talking about what's happening in provinces. and what I read recently is that for non indigenous, prisoners, that number has been steadily decreasing. They're about 20, like by 28% recently. So what I'm seeing is not just an uptick in my own people going into prison, who, by the way, are predominantly either survivors of the residential school, school system, or they're the children or grandchildren of survivors. So lots of intergenerational trauma. but there's also systemic racism at play. There's discrimination, there's bias, there's a lack of like here in Canada, predominantly. Who do you see as lawyers? Who do you see as judges? White people? Who do you see predominantly coming into the court as either victims or witnesses or offenders? People of color or indigenous people. And that makeup has to Shift. It has to shift, I think, in order to really inject some humanity. And there has to be a significant investment in the training that these people get around what they don't see, what they don't know. Part of it, yes, I think definitely has to be an education and trauma, but part of that has to be an education in bias, like, implicit bias. What? And in empathy and in. And in bringing, like, humanizing practices to what it is that they do so many, so many things. But I'm curious about what you think needs to happen to start to see, a shift occur in that dynamic.
>> Fritzi Horstman: Yeah, well, racism is an interesting thing. I just want to talk about racism for something because. Well, first of all, I was talking to Dr. Bruce Perry, and he says, as a human trying to be safe, you're always looking for something that is, familiar. Finding someone who looks like you feels safer than someone who doesn't look like you. This is something in our biology. This is not. It's implicit bias, as you say. But racism is. The fundaments are just survival. So it's a. It's a, I would say a trauma slash survival response. So, but that's. That's in the brainstem. So once we get to the cortex, we can say, wait a second, because I do this every time I see a black person, because I know my body has a reaction and I, need to go into my cortex and say, wait a second, is this person a threat? Who is this person? No, this person is my neighbor. and no, this person is not a threat. But I do this on a regular. I do this every day. I mean, whenever I see a black person or a Latino. Mostly black, though, because of my mother and her racist beliefs, they were embedded in me. But still, people that are black don't look like me. And I've been told by the media that they're dangerous. And you know what I find so ironic is that the trope is that white people are afraid of black people, but black people are also very afraid of white people. And, I hadn't really thought of that as, like, I'm just as scary to a black person as they are to me. So that's when we have this opportunity to be in our cortex and say, are you a threat? What's going on? The minute you say that, though, there is no threat, because you see, you're seeing that person as a human. And you know, if we go to prisons, and that's the question that when you meet somebody, hey, what's Going on. What happened to you? Why are you here? You know, are you okay? That person is going to feel more safe walking into a prison than he's ever felt in his neighborhood. but back to. So when we're. So that's just, that's implicit bias is just part of being alive. It's. There's nothing we can do about that unless we're in our cortex. Unless we, Unless, unless we're, able to over override these impulses. But if you're tired, if you are hungry, if you're cranky, if you, you know, anything can put you back into your brainstem. and that's not a place where good decisions are made. And Congress is basically in their brainstem. They are not in their cortex. but Biden was traumatized, Clinton was traumatized, Trump was traumatized. Gabor Mate talks about this all the time. But also the people we are looking to lead our country are traumatized and not making decisions from their cortex. We have a T shirt we're making in our organization called get to the cortex. Because that's where we have to start thinking is we have to be, we have to be in the part of our brain that is where wisdom is ideal, of consequences, idea of community is, because that's where change is. Change happens there. but back to the indigenous people. I remember seeing a documentary about indigenous people and there would be a $200 reward for people who killed indigenous people. and that's in our DNA too. That's part of, you know, we get ahead by destroying people that don't look like us. And you know, I was talking yesterday to a man from New Zealand and the Maori population is the biggest population in the prison system there too. So, you know, and I don't know what it is about white people and why we're such, ah, vicious, aggressive people. But historically we are, we are. I mean, I was, I was watching, a thing about the Queen in England. And it's like all this wealth that they have on the backs of so many civilizations and so many, so many people that, you know, I think we've destroyed enough as white people. The destruction is enough. We've done enough now. We've proved that we can have dominance over everything, over any race, over any landmass, over any river. we can destroy everything. And I think collectively we have to agree that it's not working. Not only is it not working, you know, there's like 10 people who have billions of dollars and the rest of Us have, you know, pennies and you know, this hoarding of research resources, of course is a trauma response. You know, we keep saying greed is a trauma response, but greed, greed is what creates this desire to dominate. And the richest people really have to look at that and say, wait a second, wait a second. Do I need to dominate this? Why am I, what's going on in me, in my makeup that has me needing to have all the warehouses be Amazon or all the cars be Tesla or all the software be Microsoft? What is it in me that has to dominate the situation? You have enough, you have enough for 7,000 lifetimes and you'll never spend it all. And, and I guess you want the power, but again, at what cost? At the cost of our, of our civilization and at the cost of our planet. And you know, we're so numb that we're all, we're, we, we don't even know how to get up and say, hey, can we stop this? Can we change this? but, ah, you know, the thing I think about indigenous people, they have the secret already. They know the secret, which is their community. They know that if they can get into community, all will be well. But the, the enormous pain of what we've done to indigenous people has to be recognized. What we've done to African Americans has to be recognized. What we've done to our planet has to be recognized. And these are, these are crimes that our ancestors did. But we're still responsible. Somebody has to be responsible. And I'm taking responsibility. I take responsibility for what my ancestors did. And I'm sorry, I appreciate you
>> Myrna McCallum : sharing that piece and that reflection. I've had some colleagues who have grappled with the same kind of thing because of, of things that their parents or their grandparents or their great grandparents were involved in that was like diametrically opposed to other parts of themselves. And trying to recognize that, you know, in, ah, at least in, in my culture, there's a belief that we inherit the resilience and the healing abilities of our ancestors. But in the same vein, we also inherit the inheritance, their traumas and the harms that they've done and the healing that they needed to do that they didn't do. so it's never all, all good or all bad. And it's something that we have this responsibility to, address. And as I don't know if you know who Eduardo Duran is, but he's a Native American psychologist who lives, I think in Billings, Montana. He wrote this amazing book called, Healing the Soul Wound and it's really about intergenerational trauma. And he talks about how whatever harm, trauma, unresolved pain, our ancestors never addressed, that is a burden that's passed down to us. So our only imperative in this life is to heal. Like, that is our only imperative. Heal within and heal our relationship, relationships with each other. That is our only imperative. He's such a powerful, Like, his thought process is really informed by his Lakota and Apache, teachings. And it's. It. I think psychologists, anyone, who's interested in healing in humanity should read his book, because it's quite profound. And I think it echoes some of what Thomas Hubl has said around how trauma fragments and it fractures. And it's really on us to actually look at the thing versus looking away from it, to be able to bring humanity back into these spaces. And so I'm wondering for you, Fritzi, what do you think needs to happen to bring humanity into courtrooms, into prisons? like what, beyond a commitment to vulnerability and education and, courage, what does that take? Like, what kind of systemic effort is that going to. What does that require?
>> Fritzi Horstman: Well, that's, That's what we're grappling with at Compassion Prison Project and not with the courtrooms. But it's the same thing. that question, what happened to you? But it's also about being trauma informed and really understanding that a person living in a state of fight, Fight or flight, like literally 24. 7 for 17. I'm going to say 17, because that's kind of the profile of most of the people in prison. 17 with a child. They've created a child, living with that kind of adversity. Now, it's not just their parents. It's also that the violent neighborhoods, the gunshots, the, you know, not feeling safe, getting. Coming home. That's, you know, that's being in a war zone.
>> Myrna McCallum : Right?
>> Fritzi Horstman: You're in a war zone. And so we have basically what we have. These are crimes of war. These aren't crimes of, This is not a peacetime crime. This isn't something that was done inadvertently. This is survival of the fittest. This is Darwinian. This is, And it has to be looked at in that lens that people that are traumatized cannot be expected and held to the same, the same, whatever that word is. They can't be held to the same principles that people that are functioning are. They. They need a break. They need a. They need to be held to an understanding that they're traumatized and they have to be Educated about their trauma. And they. But. But the people who are making these decisions really need to be. Of all people. They need to know what trauma does to the brain, body, and spirit. They need to read Bessel van der Kolk's book, Peter Levine's book, Donna Jackson Nakazawa's book, Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey's book. They need to know what PTSD does. to me, every veteran in prison should be let out. but let out once they're healed or somewhat healed. But every. Every person who lives in a bad neighborhood should be let out, because these are people that have been in war zones, and they're acting as if their life is at stake every minute. Every minute. And so, when you are a judge that has been so exhaust, Is so exhausted from all of this, and you can't see another human as a human, take yourself out of the game. Take yourself out of the game, because you're not going to be making decisions that really benefit anybody. But, you know, these life sentences, these death penalties, we have to think of the victims. Absolutely. And I'm not going to. But I can't keep talking about the victim, without letting the victim understand that the victims were victims as well. I mean, the people who committed crimes were victims as well. And nobody came to their aid when they needed it. If there had been an intervention, there would have never been a crime. And so that's on us. That's on us as a society. We've created this poverty. We've created, bad school districts, welfare, where mothers, if you get a job, you get your services taken away, but the job isn't enough to pay for anything, so nobody does anything. I mean, there's these loopholes. You know, everybody's worried about welfare moms taking advantage of the system. Do you know how traumatized those welfare moms are? Do you know what they've been through? Do you understand that getting a job, you know, finding a suit, getting a job, going on an interview is like. That's like climbing Mount Everest. For some people. That is not. That is not something that they've ever been told to do. these notions of bootstraps. And, you know, I did it. Well, my eight aces are nothing compared to the eight aces of the men that I've worked with in prison. and I did it. But the only reason I survived and is because I had a father and mother who said, even through their alcoholism and insanity, they said, you know, you can be something, Fritzi. You can. And most of the people in Prison. Don't have the hat. Have never had that person. And that's one of the people I'm working on being when I go to prison is, I believe in you. I say to them, I believe in you. We have signs, we have all the volunteers hold signs now that say, you matter. And, I think it's so important that we write a new narrative about what we do with people in prison. And I think we need to be the leaders in the United States and in Canada. We have to be the leaders and say, look, we need to work like the people in Norway. But even I know it's a socialist country, but still it works. Let's use the things that work. Let's use the things that actually, create change and create rehabilitation. To me, whenever someone goes to prison and comes out, if there's another crime, that's on us, that's on our, that's on our, our ourselves. Not just the person who committed to the crime because we didn't do our job. Making sure he didn't come out, he or she didn't come out and hurt somebody else. That's on us. so. And I'm part of us. And that's why I want to make sure prisons are, are functioning and doing what it should do is, which is be an intervention.
>> Myrna McCallum : Yeah. I'm having such an emotional experience listening to you and having all of these, like, all these, memories just kind of run through my brain. There's so much I'm thinking about and I don't even know how to, like, if I can even articulate what I'm thinking. I know for sure. Without a doubt. One of the things that I think we need to talk about in the, our, respective countries is the sexual exploitation of children and babies. Like, we have to talk about that. We don't talk about it enough. I don't think you talk about it at all because it makes us feel sad and uncomfortable. And some people don't even want to acknowledge that that's happening. But it's that thing that is kind of going, under the radar that people are looking away from because it hurts too much to look at it, that is creating behaviors that are landing people in these prisons, and we have to talk about that. And so I think about that and I think about, you know, here in Canada, there's like a push to create healing centers for indigenous offenders, prisoners to go into, to help heal them, which is, ah, all well and good. Yes, we need healing because you can't treat trauma with prison. You need to treat trauma with education and healing. But my question is, how the hell do we first stop the pipeline from police interaction to prison? Let's address that. Instead of the healing coming at the very end, Once you've got the criminal record, once you've done the offending behavior, I think about how our systems dehumanize. We're all labeled. That's the accused, the offender, the victim, the witness. Like, they take our names from us. Prisoner number blah, blah, blah is dehumanizing. It's a dehumanizing practice. And all of these things are just, like, coming through my head. And I'm thinking about how, you know, there's this practice that many of us do. I don't know why we do it. Maybe it's just the human condition to want to other all the time. Well, those people there. Those people do that thing or those people or whatever. I think about, you know, my brother's experience and my experience. We both went to residential school. He became homeless, addicted, an alcoholic. He's been in and out of prison. He's flagged as a violent offender. Like, the next time he is in prison, he may never get out. He'll get an indeterminate sentence. And then there's me who became a lawyer. And when people say, oh, but, like, you're special, you're different. Absolutely not. I am not special or different, I would say. And you just amplified this experience for me, Fritzi. So thank you. I think the difference is somebody said to me when I was in high school, you could do anything you want. Like, don't believe the stereotypes. Don't believe the. About what is expected of you just because you're a teenage mom, that your life is now about poverty. That's bullshit. You could do whatever you want. What do you want to do?
>> Fritzi Horstman: We know about the system. We know the system is. Is broken or injured, as I like to say. But the thing we also have to talk about is child abuse and child neglect and what has happened to allow us as a society or as just as individuals, to allow ourselves to dehumanize a child, which, to me is the greatest crime anyone can do, which I'm guilty of and my mother's guilty of. And, that's where it starts. It doesn't start in the schools. It starts at the home. And when you're, When you've been victimized and traumatized, like the indigenous population has been, or as. Even as I've been, or as. As all of us have been, we don't know how to Humanize. And when there's a crying baby, that's one of the worst things for any of us because we weren't tended to when we were crying. And when our child is crying, we can't deal with it because we don't know how. And it also brings up our own wounds. So we want to, we rage against that because it's so painful for us, the whole experience. I used to, but I used to go out of the room, I was like, I cannot deal with this. And which is basically kind of neglecting my son, but at least I wasn't hurting him. But I don't know, I don't know which is worse. but that's the thing is this. We need help, we need communities and we need to stop hurting our babies. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of communities and cultures that say it's okay to use capital punishment on your children so that they behave, so that they, they don't get in trouble, you know, whatever it is. But this is, this is changing your child's brain from that day, that day that he, that child has been dehumanized is the day that child separates and becomes, becomes traumatized. The day you dehumanize is the day you traumatize. I mean, we have trauma talks which I'm happy to help you just distribute to your community, to the indigenous communities.
>> Myrna McCallum : When we ask for help, help is denied or help comes in a form that is oppressive or punishing or patriarchal or just completely ignores that we have the solutions to our problem. We just need to be able to access those solutions. We need to be able to gather, to heal, to bring in our elders and bring in our ceremonial leaders. We have the solutions to our problems. But so hard, Fritzi, to even think about healing when in many of our communities we don't even have clean drinking water. We don't even have adequate housing. We have 16 people living in a two room house that is full of mold. You know, like we're, we're dealing with just basic physical survival. So how do you even get to a place where you could start to think about emotional and spiritual recovery from all of the colonization. Right. Colonization in all of its oppressive forms. And like that's our reality today 2022, we still don't even have clean drinking water in many of the our communities.
>> Fritzi Horstman: So when you're in survival mode, that's all you think about or that's all you can do is how am I going to survive the next day? But the problem with being in survival mode is you're hurting your children and you're not coming up with solutions. So there is no solution to clean drinking water, because you can't even ask the correct person who can make that happen. So that's the problem. When we're in fight or flight, there's no solutions. So everybody's is just, everyone's just trying to make it through the day. But there's collateral damage. There's damage to your children, damage to your children, injuries to your children's brains. And that's, that's where this cycle continues is because we don't know how to. We don't know how to get resources when we're in this state. You know, Gandhi says poverty is the worst form of violence, and it's violence. That's what's being done. Why can't we get clean drinking water to these communities? What's going on there?
>> Myrna McCallum : Yeah, I think definitely poverty. And I also, when I think about the history of Canada and also America in relation to indigenous populations, the act of government first coming after the children. Because in both, in both historical experiences, that was how, our nations, our communities were attacked. It was a specific focus on the children, forced removal, which is still continuing today. In many ways, there's lots of experts, greater minds than mine, that could talk about the ways in which the government still comes after the children. But I'm thinking puts you about the people who are listening to this conversation. I want to give them a little bit of, like, advice, ideas, things that they could build upon to either start to become self aware, self reflect on their practice. And one of the things that I learned as somebody who grew up in a lot of trauma, had a real investment in being dehumanizing. Because if I had to see the humanity in others, I'd have to feel the humanity in me. And that was the last thing I wanted to do. And so as I became, built a legal practice and started to, you know, work on the front lines of human suffering all the time, I realized that if I wanted to commit to doing no further harm, particularly to my own people, then I had to confront the things that I was refusing to see in myself. Right? I had to heal. I had to look at my harms. I had to look at how I harm. And so one of the things that I learned as I started to read about the brain and the prefrontal cortex and all of these things was how interesting. And this is something. When I deliver training to lawyers and judges and cops, and people whoever call me, one of the really, most profound things I think that we could do is really examine a little bit of our traumas, but how they've created triggers for us. Because if we could be aware of how we are triggered and we can build in some safeguards, maybe in these interactions in courtrooms and hearing rooms and these other spaces where we're having to be professionals, we don't do further harm to people. So one example of that is when I would be examining people who are living in their survival brain and their emotions are coming up. And we know trauma isn't always sadness and it's not always silent. Sometimes it's rage. It's a lot of f bombs. It's rage, right? So learning to. I had to learn to depersonalize. Okay. Even though my survival brain or my trauma brain starts to kick in and I want to run because there's a. You know, I'm now thinking about my mom and all of the rage that she used to, you know, inflict upon me. And I used to have to say things like, hold on a second. Okay. I'm feeling something come up, like fear. This is not my mom. This is not. This is not even targeting me. This is not about me. This person is showing me their trauma. So let me just calm myself down. So I'm going to take a breath. I'm going to remind myself, this isn't my mom. I'm going to calm myself down. I'm going to depersonalize. This isn't about me. This person is just showing me their rage. So if I don't react and meet them with my own rage, and I actually meet them instead with compassion. Instead, say, of course you're angry. Of course you're enraged. That was a horrible thing that happened to you. I want to hear about it. We need to hear about it in this process. So if you want to tell me, I want to listen. But of course you're angry, right? Validate their experience every time. Fritzi, what I saw in that kind of, like, shifting my response and staying calm and centered and compassionate. Meeting their rage with compassion almost every time resulted in just a release. Either a large, like, huge audible sigh or tears would start to flow, and then the story would be told. But, you know, having, like, learning to depersonalize, keep, ah, an eye on your own triggers, manage, like, and regulate your own emotions. Like, just that basic practice can transform interactions when you're working with traumatized people. And so in addition to that, or building on that, Fritzi, what do you think all of these, you know, lawyers and correctional officers and police officers and judges can do what is one of the gifts they can give themselves to help to transform their relationship with people who have done harm to others? What can they learn? What can they practice? What will help them to bring humanity into those spaces?
>> Myrna McCallum : Wow.
>> Fritzi Horstman: I'm still processing how you dealt with that person when you were triggered. Because I'm, still on, I'm still reacting instead of responding. I'm still.
>> Myrna McCallum : It's hard. It's not even like it's an. It's an active practice. Like. Because what I was noticing in the beginning, Fritzi, was as soon as I saw rage come up or silence or, even anxiety, any human emotion was triggering for me, I would shut things down, go, you know what? We're. We're going to reschedule this. you need to pull it together. And. But I also had power as the lawyer in that dynamic. Right. We're going to come back. You need to pull it together. And then as I started to realize and get informed and get educated. Holy shit. This. This is an asshole move that I'm doing. And it's a shitty thing to make someone else responsible for managing my emotions and my triggers. And I need to. If I'm committed to doing no further harm, I need to figure out how to do that for myself. So I never learned that growing up, because I've always been in survival mode. That's no excuse. I'm going to educate myself now. I'm going to go into therapy. I'm going to learn now. And I'm still constantly triggered, but as soon as I'm alive to the trigger, I could do those, those exercises that I've learned. Okay, I'm going to take a breath. This isn't about me. This isn't even targeting me. This person is traumatized. And I'm going to stay the center of calm because I also know that mirror neurons, the likelihood of them coming to meet me where I am, is possible as long as I stay calm and centered and present and I meet them with compassion, regardless of what it is they're showing me, because it's not about me. And I think for lawyers and judges and even some cops and correctional officers, that's a tough one. When we have either our own desensitization, happening as a response to trauma, exposure, or where we've got ego at play, it's a tough one, but it has to be an active practice.
>> Fritzi Horstman: Yeah, this is so such a great thing that I'm Kind of seeing is because all these people are on the front lines of so much trauma. Like, and, like, because I know how I get triggered. You can just, you know, you know, if you raise your voice in a certain way, I'm out. Like, I'm. That's my. My go to is I'll abandon the situation. I mean, I moved to California because I could get away from all my crazy family. but, yeah, you know, my m. Go to is I'm out. And, And that's. I know that's really triggering to anybody, you know, like, because it shows a lack of respect, but it's a survival strategy. But, yes, the police, like, let's acknowledge right now in this moment, the policemen, the officers, the correctional officers, the judges and the. The attorneys on both sides, what they're faced with every day. Well, let's acknowledge this because this is huge. This is, of course, this. The moral injury is huge. And of course, there's a lack of empathy. what else can this body endure and absorb? I mean, that's what we're dealing with. It's like, the tremendous hurt of all of us. The tremendous hurt of all of us. it just makes me so sad. And, you know, I used to want to hate DA's, and I used to want to. And there are days that I can't believe they're still in office, but still, what happened to them? Right. And that's what we have to ask again. As we ask the people that are here to protect us, we also have to ask them, are you protecting us or you're protecting yourself? And I think that's the question. It's like, where is this coming from? Is this coming from a true interest in justice or is it a true interest in getting back at somebody? And I think that's, you know, that's what's on the line here. And I cannot demonize anyone after knowing what they've done, what they've been through. Just hearing this is like, whoa, I didn't even put myself there. with the correctional officers, I have. But, you know, the first responders, the correctional officers and the policemen, they're seeing murder and suicide and domestic violence every day. They're seeing the worst of us. And they've been told to deal with this by force. I think we have to honor these people, but we also have to educate them and give them tools like what you just demonstrated. It's like, wait a second. This person reminds me of my mother, and I'm not going to make a good decision here, or this person is pissing me off and that is not justice. Or this person is black. I cannot make a good decision because he is black. And I've been told black people are bad. Hm. That is not justice. So, I mean, I think it's really, it's this new level of self awareness which is we're being called upon, in the personal, but also in the social.
>> Myrna McCallum : And that's 100% like this, this step inside. When I. After I watched the Step Inside the Circle video a couple times and then a few more times, and then I got some of my tears, you know, got. Let some of those go, I thought, man, I would love to do an exercise like this with lawyers and judges just so they can stop this dehumanizing practice that I would say we're conditioned to do, to do this job and start to see that their humanity that they bring to the work and the humanity they hold back, but also maybe equally important is the humanity in each other, because I think it comes down to we just have stopped seeing each other and we need to see each other again. And I would say maybe one of the reasons why this podcast and the work I've been doing has been so successful is because that message about connection, true connection, is something that's resonating and that people are really hungry for right now, particularly in this isolating time that we're all living in as a byproduct of this horrible pandemic.
>> Fritzi Horstman: Yeah. And I would also say attorneys need to get together and talk and judges need to get together and talk because they need to be in circles and they need to talk about what happened. Was my decision right? was there any evidence that I didn't. I don't think just because you pound the gavel and make a decision that we shouldn't be able to reconsider those decisions. But I think judges need an accountability quorum or forum or I don't know what the word is, but something for them to be accountable and to be vulnerable. That's the thing is if we're vulnerable and, you know, it's not about being right, it's about being about. Again, I'm going to say Brene Brown says it the best. It's not about being right, it's about getting it right. And that's. Is sentencing a man to life without parole getting it right? And why is that right? And have you asked the victim? And is the victim on board with this or is the victim too traumatized and too in fight or flight? That she can't even. Or he can't even understand what's happening and what's at stake. And, you know, really, I think, you know, restorative justice is. Is the new justice, is the only justice, because if the victims involve. Maybe they really just want them there until they get their act together, until they can be in their prefrontal cortex. and that may take 20 years, but there's a goal in mind. There's something like, if you want to, you come back to society and you come back and you build me a house or whatever it is. Whatever. Whatever that. That harm. How do we make that harm? Right. Yeah, but, yeah, vulnerability. I think vulnerability in the criminal justice system, which seems like an oxymoron, is the only way we can. We can actually find true justice if we're all vulnerable and say, you know what? I got to recuse myself from this case because I. My mother was raped, and this is a rapist or whatever it is. You got it. You know, you have to have objectivity, and if you can't, how can you make a decision? How can you make a decision about someone's life?
>> Myrna McCallum : Absolutely. Oh, my gosh. Fritzi, I could just talk to you and talk to you and just talk to you some more. I hope that we have more com. I hope this is just the beginning of many conversations.
>> Fritzi Horstman: Absolutely.
>> Myrna McCallum : I, thank you so much for making time to come and chat with me and share your expertise in your lens with all of my listeners. I just appreciate it so much, and I appreciate all the humanity and the humility that you bring to the work that you do. it was a real pleasure to talk to you today.
>> Fritzi Horstman: It's been great. It's. You know, I've. I love these conversations because I always learn something else, like, oh, wow, I didn't even know. and it's so good, because now my next conversation, this will be part of it, too. So, you know, thank you for your knowledge and your understanding and your. Your vulnerability, which is really changing our justice systems.
>> Myrna McCallum : M. Well, that was my conversation with Fritzi Horstman. I hope that you enjoyed it. I just want to comment on a few things that I was reflecting on as I was editing this episode. One was I made a reference to Harold Jaunzems, who had been a guest on this podcast.
>> Myrna McCallum : You were.
>> Myrna McCallum : Would know if you're, a committed listener to every episode that Harold came on, and we talked about his book, the Peace and Good Order, the Case for Indigenous justice in Canada. When Fritzi and I recorded this episode, Harold was Still with us, but he has since passed on, as a February 9th, and after a bit of a battle with, cancer. So I just want to acknowledge Harold Jaunzems and his family because I had really hoped that Harold and I would have had more conversations privately and of course, on this podcast. And so it was heartbreaking, to hear that he was leaving us so quickly. I also want to comment on, when Fritzi and I were talking on the podcast, it didn't come through in the edited version, but we talked about the life expectancy of indigenous people in Canada. And I had believed for a while, based on conversations I had with a friend of mine, that for some indigenous communities, some first nations, the life expectancy is as low as 55. 55 years. Right. Like, that's so crazy. And I think based on what Fritzi was sharing with us today about aces, you know, the more aces you have, the shorter your life expectancy for all kinds of reasons. Anyway, I was looking up today to see what the latest stats were on the life expectancy for at least maybe off reserve indigenous people. And according to, an article that was written back December 18, 2019, it says that the life expectancy is 77 years, for First nations people, 82 years for the Metis people, 76 years for Inuit people. And that is, based on an article called Life expectancy of first nations maintain Inuit household populations in Canada, which was published back on December 18, 2019. I don't know that that actually reflects, on reserve stats. I'm going to say it probably doesn't because we have such a high population, or a high percentage of first nations youth committing suicide on reserve, and there's also some other racism related deaths that are occurring, that targets some first nations people. Anyway, the stats are still not good. we have a long way to go. I really love how Fritzi was open and honest and courageous to talk about racism and how we're conditioned to fear each other and how we need to consciously rail against what we've been conditioned to field and to fear. And how moral injury can result in losing, our sense of empathy and how for some of us, our humanity is lost in our occupations. When she said that, man, I felt that. I really felt it. And to traumatize is to dehumanize. So I invite you to think about whether the way you do what you do traumatizes people, and if so, become aware of how that happens so that you could minimize those risk factors. Because to continue to blindly and recklessly traumatize people who come to us as lawyers or judges or police officers needing help and we traumatize them. Of course they walk away feeling dehumanized. So yeah, so think about that. To traumatize is to dehumanize. I really appreciate all of you hanging in, being loyal listeners. I'm on the fence right now about whether or not, this podcast will continue past season two for all kinds of reasons. But, if you love what you hear and you support this podcast, please leave me a rating, a review on Apple Spotify. every little bit of feedback matters. I appreciate it. yeah, and I've really enjoyed creating this space for new for me for collective education and growth into, you know, creating a humble profession that remembers that we're all human beings.
Thanks again. Until next time.
Take care everyone. This episode was recorded on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the Squamish Tsleil-Waututh Musqueam people.