by Chris Hilburn-Trenkle
Jennifer Thompson, the founder of Healing Justice and the 2016 North Carolinian of the Year, is a champion of restorative justice, an award-winning public speaker and an advocate for crime survivors and victims. She has testified on behalf of crime survivors and victims for criminal justice reforms before state legislatures and the United States Congress, served as a commissioner on the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission from 2013 to 2018, and co-authored the bestselling book, “Picking Cotton: Our Memoir of Injustice and Redemption.”
Nine years after its founding, Healing Justice is a leading force in addressing the harm caused to all impacted by wrongful convictions and preventing future harm. Through its programs, Healing Justice offers opportunities for collective and individual healing to crime survivors, the exonerated, both sets of families, and others. In its justice programs, specialized training and assistance to criminal justice professionals is provided to expand and improve support and services for crime survivors.
Thompson is the 2024 commencement speaker for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Social Work graduates. The School of Social Work will honor its 2024 graduating class of master’s and doctoral students on Saturday, May 11, at noon in Memorial Hall.
We spoke with Thompson to learn about Healing Justice, her message for students, and more. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Could you tell me in your own words what the mission of Healing Justice is?
The mission of the organization is to bring equity and fairness to the stories of all of the people that are impacted by a wrongful conviction by using a restorative justice lens. You can sit with people who have been directly harmed and help each other and ourselves engage in healing.
What led you to start Healing justice in 2015?
It was a very organic journey for me, being thrust into the world of being a crime survivor and then being a survivor of a wrongful conviction, kind of put me in a niche group of individuals. It’s very isolating. You feel extremely alone in the experience, and that was certainly the way I felt. But as I was working through different organizations and being an advocate and an activist and shifting and changing policies and procedures across the country, what I also ended up learning was the totality of who gets hurt in the wake of a wrongful conviction. Historically speaking, people traditionally look at only the exoneree as the person who’s been harmed, but of course as a crime survivor I knew that was different. I ended up meeting other crime victims from cases and exonerees from cases, but also their families from cases, and criminal justice system practitioners that had been a part of the wrongful conviction and the harm that it caused them. What I thought was sad and unfair was that we were all left to experience that harm alone and there wasn’t any organization that was working toward the healing aspect of what happened to all of us.
It led me in 2014 to work with people in Northern California to do the first small pilot to look at what would happen if we brought victims and exonerees together in a space where we could practice restorative justice principles and tell each other our stories. Would that work? I found that it did work. It worked really, really well.
In 2015 I decided to launch Healing Justice after receiving the special courage award from the Department of Justice’s Office for Victims of Crime.
How have you seen your work and the work of others help ensure that the victim was shown compassion and care?
That has been a very slow change. Not that that’s unusual because we have a criminal justice system that doesn’t necessarily ask crime victims and survivors what they need. It’s not part of our criminal justice system procedures. So the victim, even in pre-trial, is left out of the conversation and narratives of ‘What do you need to see happen for you, or your family, to help engage in healing.’
Twenty years later, 30 years later, the crime victims and survivors are once again completely and utterly erased and marginalized and ignored and go unnoticed when these convictions are overturned. What’s been interesting and also heartbreaking for me and our organization is to work in the field and get a lot of responses such as ‘Oh my gosh, I forgot about the crime victims.’
We are the only organization that does this work in what we call all harmed spaces and I think it’s beginning to shift, people are starting to say, ‘Wow, you’re right, that has to be awful for the victims to now have to reconcile that the system completely failed them.’
So, we’re seeing a very slow shift, but it’s due to our organization keeping the narrative out there and continuing to press other criminal justice system organizations such as Innocence Project or prosecution offices to say, ‘The victims, the original victims, the people who were hurt in the first case, cannot go ignored and disrespected.’
How have you seen the work of Healing Justice help not only survivors and those who are wrongfully convicted but also help policymakers in affecting substantial change?
When you survive what I’ve survived and the people that we serve, the community that we serve, when you hear their stories of their survival, whether it’s been the exoneree who spent 10 years in solitary, whether it’s the mother who says, ‘For the last 20 years I couldn’t celebrate Christmas with my other children and that had a terrible impact on my kids,’ or the murder victim’s family members who say to you, ‘Before we came to Healing Justice we could not even mention my daughter’s name. It was just too painful. We haven’t spoken her name in 20 years and now we can tell stories about her and laugh as a family again,’ or rape survivors who can start loving themselves again and seeing that they do have agency in their life choices … It means everything.
We know that so far, we have 3,300 overturned convictions and we know that we have at least 3,300 victims who are sitting there alone and we also have their families and the exonerees’ families. We have the jurors who are deeply harmed when they pick up the newspaper and read that the case they were involved in 27 years ago is now a wrongful conviction and how do they process that? To see people be able to recognize the totality of the failure, that it is actually much bigger than we think it is and it is something we need to care about, it means a lot to me because at the end of the day we want the person who harmed us or our family to be held accountable and make sure that person never harms another person again.
Those are the two things that every victim and survivor will tell you. But when the system got it wrong, now we have to reconcile that we didn’t hold the person accountable, and the person who harmed us or our family members has stayed out in the community and wreaked havoc. This is also a public safety issue, and I think that’s where the big shift has happened with policy makers and criminal justice system practitioners, is when you look at them and go, ‘But you are required to bring justice and to create safety. That’s your oath, and it failed.’ People have that ‘Aha’ moment of, ‘Oh my god, you’re right.’
For us at Healing Justice and for the people that we have worked with and served, it has become a framing shift that people are now starting to pay attention to and care about.
What does it mean for you to be the commencement speaker at UNC?
There are several things that mean a lot to me. One, I’m a North Carolinian and I was North Carolinian of the Year several years ago. North Carolina is my home state and I love it. I have two brothers who graduated from Carolina. I have a husband who’s a professor at Carolina.
The School of Social Work does such incredible work. Our first big hire at Healing Justice is a graduate from the School of Social Work at UNC.
Being able to work with young people, men and women, who are choosing social work as their profession, their vocation, and knowing the work that they’re going to be doing out in the world with people who are carrying stories of their own, personal traumas and their own harms, to be able to talk to them and impart whatever wisdom I have throughout my journey to help them move into this next phase of their journey, to me it’s just such a huge honor.
What do you hope students at the School will take away from your speech?
All of us are carrying stories. When we look in the faces of the people around us and don’t realize that, regardless of the color of skin we were born into, or the bodies we were born into, or the religion that we pray to, or the gender identity we identify with, regardless of any of that, when we can look at each other and assume certain stories, that each of us is carrying very deep and personal traumas and harms because we’ve lived a human experience.
What I hope they understand is when they go out into the world, when we make assumptions and automatically think someone else has lived a different experience we make terrible mistakes.
As they’re working in the field, what I’m hoping is they understand the deep need to connect with those individuals, to help form communities for those individuals, that these people can then begin to find a sense of belonging, they can find a sense of safety, they can find a sense of healing. That’s really what we all need. We live in a world that is focused on othering each other that we forget that we’re all more alike than we will ever be different.
