Eric Butler, 49, dead; promoted ‘restorative justice’ for youth – DNyuz

Eric Butler, an anti-violence counselor with a gift for building the trust of emotionally closed teens who worked with students, school districts and prosecutors to keep young people out of the criminal justice system, died Aug. 4 at his home in New Orleans. He was 49.

The cause of death is unknown, said his sister, Najla Butler, who said the death was being investigated by the Orleans Parish coroner’s office. She said Mr. Butler had suffered from seizures much of his life, which he attributed to stress.

Mr. Butler’s work, which began with street gangs in Oakland, California, and extended to a last-chance high school in that city for students expelled from other schools, first gained attention through 2013 articles in The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor and a 2017 documentary film, “Circles.”

The notoriety earned him a reputation in the field of restorative justice in education, which is an alternative to “zero tolerance” policies like suspension and expulsion, which are much more likely to be imposed on black students than on white students in many school districts. Suspension can be a first step in a school-to-prison pipeline.

Rather than punishing students, restorative justice seeks to ensure that bad actors take responsibility for their mistakes, develop empathy, and make meaningful reparations, leaving the victim feeling healed.

Mr Butler led ‘talking circles’ in which young people who had harmed each other were encouraged to confess their guilt.

Raised by a single mother in a public housing project, he often had his ears pierced, wore a baseball cap on backwards and Beats headphones, and had a knack for winning over hostile youths.

“He could take a room full of kids who were trying their hardest to hide from everyone — you could feel that boiling negativity — and Eric didn’t believe it for a moment; he saw it all as an act,” Cassidy Friedman, the director of “Circles,” said in an interview.

Mr. Butler often began sessions by apologizing to young people for the wrongs adults had done to them.

“He said, ‘We don’t have a child problem, we have an adult problem,'” Friedman said, adding that the admission often reached teenagers.

When he led sessions with adults, such as prosecutors, Mr. Butler asked them to think of a time when they had been harmed and a time when they had harmed someone else.

“Eric had a tremendous impact wherever he went,” Fania Davis, the founder of the group that trained Mr. Butler, Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, said in a text message. “He facilitated circles of gang violence where families of the youth involved initially didn’t want to be in the same room, but eventually they embraced each other.”

At Ralph J. Bunche High School in West Oakland, where Mr. Butler was a full-time restorative justice counselor, suspensions dropped 51 percent in the 2011-12 school year.

As The Monitor reported, three teenage girls were about to fight when Mr. Butler pulled them into a circle of chairs to face each other as he facilitated the encounter. One girl admitted to stealing shoes from one of the others so she could sell them to pay for a drug test for her mother. The perpetrator began to cry. The two other girls hugged her. The victim of the theft said there was no need to replace the shoes and the perpetrator promised she wouldn’t steal again.

Through Talking Peace, a consulting firm he co-founded with Hannah Bronsnick in 2015, Butler introduced restorative justice principles to other school districts around the country, including Napa, California, Selma, Alabama, and St. Louis.

In Selma, he trained junior high school teachers in restorative practices, going against the grain in a state where corporal punishment is legal in schools. Sometimes a student’s pastor was called in to dish out the beatings.

“So the kid learns, the way I deal with conflict is I hit somebody,” Mr. Butler expressed his frustration in a Mother Jones magazine article describing his time in Selma.

Restorative justice in schools, which emerged from a movement to apply it to the criminal justice system, received a burst of attention in 2014 when the Department of Education found that black students were suspended three times as often as white students. However, research has not shown that restorative justice is an effective alternative to traditional disciplinary practices.

Still, Mr. Butler expanded his consulting work beyond the school system, leading training sessions for prosecutors in Dallas, trial lawyers in New York City and a technology company in San Francisco, where he helped employees examine their corporate culture.

“He always told the story in his trainings about how children can tell right away if you’re not real,” Ms. Bronsnick, a co-founder of Talking Peace, said in an interview. “His authentic self loved every child he met, and they could sense that.”

Eric Lee Butler was born on August 7, 1974, in New Orleans and grew up in the Ninth Ward in the Desire Projects. He was the eldest of three children of Dorothy Cameron, a hairstylist, and Ernest Butler, who abandoned the family.

Eric attended George Washington Carver High School and John McDonough High School. He played football in high school and was hurt, he once said, that his father never went to his games.

Mr. Butler had three children with two women, but never married. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, he moved to Oakland for several years before returning to his hometown.

In addition to his sister Najla, he is survived by his parents; his children, Diamon Turner, Tre Thomas, and Taylor Thomas; his sister Malikah Butler; his half-sisters LaToya Marine Healy, Amanda Young, and Zakira Butler; his half-brothers Malik Young and Marlin Walker; his grandmother Mattie Butler; and two grandchildren.

In 2010, an adopted sister, Lanell Butler, was murdered by her abusive boyfriend, who shot her in the face. Despite Mr. Butler’s training in restorative justice, he told Mother Jones, “I never felt the urge for revenge the way I did in that moment. It felt so personal.”

He flew from Oakland to New Orleans and, together with some childhood friends, plotted revenge.

But then his phone rang; it was the mother of the man who shot Lanell. She said she wanted to see his family. The woman drove five hours from Florida, and when Mr. Butler opened the door, she pushed him aside to run to his mother.

“And she kneels down. And she says, ‘I am the mother of the person who murdered your daughter. And I belong with you,'” Mr. Butler recalled.

“My mother stands up. And she puts this woman up. And they just start hugging each other. And they’re crying and sobbing. And through the sobs you can hear my mother say, ‘You were forgiven before you came here.'”

Mr Butler said his desire for revenge had disappeared.

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