Imagining Justice Beyond Cages with Felix Rosado

Felix Rosado is an abolitionist and restorative justice practitioner committed to ending human caging in all its forms. When 'justice' has become synonymous with cops, courtrooms, and cages, how do we begin to envision new ways of truth-telling and reckoning with harm? In our fourth episode of Season Four, Felix and Dwight explore this question, the griefs and gratitudes of freedom, the spiritual groundings of the fight to abolish prisons, and what it means to be 'free-ish.' 

Felix Rosado escaped a death by incarceration sentence after 27 years via governor clemency in 2022. He is cofounder of Let’s Circle Up, a restorative justice (RJ) education project. He currently serves as Program Coordinator of Healing Futures, an RJ youth diversion program with the Youth Art & Self-empowerment Project (YASP) and adjunct professor of RJ at Chestnut Hill College. He also is a founding member of the Coalition to Abolish Death By Incarceration (CABDI) and committed to ending human caging in all its forms.

Felix will be a facilitator for Continuing Revolution 2024: Restorative Justice as Spiritual Practice, a hybrid conference for young adults (ages 18-35) interested in exploring the connections between their political, interpersonal, and spiritual lives. Join us June 7-10 at Pendle Hill outside Philadelphia, Beacon Hill Friends House in Boston, Friends Place in DC, or online. We hope you'll join us! Learn more and register at https://pendlehill.org/learn/ 

The transcript for this episode is available on https://pendlehillseed.buzzsprout.com/
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Transcript

Felix Rosado  0:07 
The only thing that keeps me going is hope that one day things are gonna change, whether I see that day or or not. Believing in what you can't see--that's really the gist of this whole movement to abolish prisons.

Dwight Dunston  0:29 
You're listening to The Seed: Conversations for Radical Hope, a Pendle Hill podcast where Quakers and other seekers come together to explore visions of the world that is growing up through the cracks of our broken systems. I'm your host, Dwight Dunston. This season, we're exploring what spiritual alignment means in this moment of escalating social and political upheaval and violence. How do we cultivate discernment to stay the course and stay connected to our leadings? How are we being called to transform ourselves and our communities to break down systems of oppression and embodying new ways of being? Our guest today is Felix Rosado. Felix escaped a death by incarceration sentence after 27 years via governor clemency in 2022. He is co founder of Let's Circle Up, a restorative justice education project, and currently serves as program coordinator of Healing Futures, a restorative justice youth diversion program with the Youth Art & Self-empowerment Project. He is also an adjunct professor of restorative justice at Chestnut Hill College and is one of the founding members of the Coalition to Abolish Death by Incarceration. Felix is committed to ending human caging in all its forms.

Dwight Dunston  1:54 
Felix Welcome, welcome to The Seed: Conversations for Radical Hope. I'm buzzing for our time together, bringing in your thoughts and wisdom and experiences and vision to this podcast here in our fourth season. Before I get too ahead of myself, I want to just know what's it like being Felix today?

Felix Rosado  2:17 
First, thanks for having me. This truly is a blessing. What's it like to be Felix these days? Free, free in every sense of the word. I truly feel that my body's finally free after 27 long years of incarceration. Now I'm able to live the way God created me to live. I'm surrounded by people who love me, do work that I love. I get to spend every day the way I want to spend it. And there's no better feeling in the world. I dreamt of this for a long time. But even my dreams couldn't fully capture what it is to be out here as a free person, not only physically but mentally and spiritually as well. And I'd sum it  up in one word: I'm free.

Dwight Dunston  3:09 
I'm feeling into this reality versus dreams, right? You talked about the reality that is your freedom right now being even beyond what you could dream at points in your life. And yeah, I want to make some space for you to talk about that, what that road looks like, between dreams and reality.

Felix Rosado  3:28 
Dreams have have always played a special role in my life. I am definitely a dreamer. Literally, I dream at night, when I first landed in the county prison for a while my dreams were still free. And I remember waking up just about every morning those first few weeks, after being out there somewhere, to opening my eyes and seeing four concrete walls around me and thininkg "Damn!" After a while, elements of incarceration started to creep into my dreams. Prison was always looming. Until eventually I started having dreams of being exactly where I was. And when I came home, the reverse was true. And I remember having dreams of being in prison and waking up in the morning and realizing I'm not in there anymore. The same kind of shock but this time in the opposite way. This was a good shock. This was like wow, I'm not there anymore. That's dreaming on the literal side of things. Like, I like to also do a lot with my imagination. One thing my mother harped on while I was in there was to envision my freedom. And at the end of every phone call, letter or visit, she would look at me and say "You are free. I want you to see it, smell it, touch it, and it'll be yours, you're already free." she would tell me. After a while I started to do that, you know, I just started to think about what my day is going to look like, what I'm going to do when I get out of bed, you know, I'm going to eat my breakfast, I'm going to drink my tall glass of orange juice, I'm going to do a little quick workout, I'm gonna make my way to work. Like I used to lay in bed and really play that out. And now I'm doing it. She was right.

Dwight Dunston  5:29 
Yeah, there's something about the imagination, I want to continue to bring into our conversation, the ability to envision and see something before it's here. What I'm hearing from you, right, your mom was somebody who helped you to cultivate that, recreating the reality around you, right? So the imagination as this way to remember this thing that is true, that was true. And I'm thinking about the work that you do right now, too, and want to bring that into the conversation as well. You're connected with the Youth Art & Self-empowerment Project, also known as YASP. And the Coalition to Abolish Death by Incarceration, also known as CADBI. Curious if you could say a little bit about them and the work you do, how you bring in the imagination?

Felix Rosado  6:18 
Well, YASP is a youth led community organization that was founded in 2006, with the mission of ending what's called direct file. It's a policy that allows prosecutors to charge young people as adults automatically without having to have a hearing to determine whether or not a young person's case needs to go to adult court. And then from there, it went to doing workshops inside the jails and in the Youth Study Center. It eventually moved to just trying to end youth incarceration in general. And so that has taken many shapes and forms throughout the years. They currently have a youth defense participatory hub that helps young people and their families navigate the very complicated court process for people who do fall into the trap of the system. And our most recent project, the one I coordinate, is Healing Futures, which is a youth restorative justice diversion program. We get our referrals from the Philly DA office of young people who've been arrested for a variety of different things, we enroll them in our program. And at the end of it, their charges get dismissed. And it's as if they were never arrested, so that they can go on hopefully, successfully on with the rest of their lives without the stain of criminal record or the trauma of having spent any time in a cage. It's a restorative justice and diversion program. So we bring young people who caused harm together with the people who were harmed in whatever the situation was, in a circle to talk about what happened, to give the young person a chance to apologize, and to create a community-based solution to what needs to happen in order to put things more right, which usually involves some kind of volunteering in the community. The Coalition to Abolish Death by Incarceration, also known as CADBI, began as a group of different orgs getting together to end the practice of caging humans until death. And death by incarceration is the sentence I narrowly escaped from a year and a half ago, after 27 years of fighting it since the age of 18. During the first two decades of my incarceration, there was really nothing to look forward to, in terms of freedom for people serving what we call DBI for short. There was absolutely no talk of legislation to change the sentence to something that offers parole. The door on clemency, which is how I ultimately he came home, was completely shut because of something that happened a year prior to my arrest, and the highly political nature of the process. So we were left to try to be one of the less than 1% of people who get convictions overturned on appeal, which is an extremely isolating fight. It's mostly between you and your one loved one and an attorney. It's saving up money for the next round of appeals, getting denied and then doing the same thing again. So everyone was trapped in those isolated fights. And then a movement began to try to get the law changed so that everyone can have the opportunity for freedom at some point. We started to find power in that. Our loved ones on the outside and supporters started to connect. And they started to see that their fight was also someone else's fight. For example, my mother was totally isolated in this fight for my freedom for about two decades. I mean, this was just a part of her story that she kept to herself, because of the stigma that comes with being the loved one of an incarcerated person and the shame. Until CADBI started to form and there started to be different meetings and events, and I would send her to them. And then we had a rally in Harrisburg one year that I wanted her to go to. And at first she resisted. She said, "What am I going to do there?" This that and the other. But by the end of the visit, she said, "Okay, if this can some way help bring you home, count me in." So she went and met all these other mothers who were in the same situation and bonded and realized that she wasn't alone. And there was a reporter there from our local paper, somebody pointed her out to him. They had a conversation, she shared a few pictures off her phone. The next day, she was on the front page of the paper holding a "Free my son Felix Rosado" sign, just like that. Her secret was out to the whole city. She described how how nervous she was going to church that Sunday, their reaction, to her surprise, was so positive. People were coming up to her and saying, "Oh, my gosh, I didn't know this was going on." And "I could have been praying for you all these years." And you know, offering her all kinds of support that really skyrocketed her into this whole life of advocacy, and resistance and organizing. She started setting up meetings with legislators and became a beast. It just really speaks to the power of doing things together, as opposed to doing them alone. So that captures the essence of CADBI. That's what it's really about: joining forces instead of being ashamed and realize that there's power in the struggle, and that united we have a chance to topple this beast. Otherwise we don't.

Dwight Dunston  12:06 
You're probably well aware of this, but Mom has now shown up twice in our conversation together. And it's powerful to to feel her presence in your story.

Felix Rosado  12:17 
When I came home, she came home. She was locked up those 27 years as well. Part of my freedom fight wasn't just for me, but for her as well. And thrilled to see the difference in her now. She truly is free.

Dwight Dunston  12:40 
Our tagline for this podcast is "exploring visions of the world growing up through the cracks of our broken systems." You've mentioned some of the ways our systems are broken. The ways they're extractive, they look to destroy, there's no vision within them, no imagination. And last year here at Pendle Hill, you were on a panel for Continuing Revolution, where our theme was Nurturing Experiments in Spiritually Grounded Abolition. And you led this incredible workshop as well on A Vision for Community Justice. And you've mentioned the word restorative justice, community has come up as well, abolition. I want to just make some more space, if there's any of those things you want to define more in depth or that you wanted to speak to more for our listeners who maybe have no grounding or no understanding of ideas of restorative justice or community justice, or abolition. Where would you point them to? How would you break it down for them?

Felix Rosado  13:41 
We've all to some degree, have been conditioned to see justice as synonymous with cops, courtrooms and cages. We've internalized that, through our media, through our music, through what we see every day in our communities. Everyone seems to be obsessed these days with so called True Crime. There's all the copaganda dramas on primetime television, just about every night of the week. And if you watch any of these shows, it's basically the same script: a dead body somewhere, an hour worth of trying to nab the person who did it, a dramatic court scene and then the credits. We think that's justice. And it's really hard to break away from that. But what we need to do is start pushing ourselves to wonder what might some other ways of doing justice look like? And I was like everyone else, you know, I thought this was it. I got introduced to restorative justice in prison through a book that landed in my possession. And I remember thinking, "Wow, a way of doing justice that tries to seek harm by involving those directly impacted by it, and including those who caused it?" I thought that I was just straight up revolutionary. Had never heard of anything like that. And this is 12 years into my incarceration, I'm either close to 30, or just turned 30. And I remember thinking, "Why didn't someone come up with this a long time ago?" Turns out indigenous people did before Europeans came over here and colonized our better selves. But yeah, I mean, it's almost common sense. You hurt someone, you make it right. The system actually prevents that. It's a system that promotes deceit, at every turn--encourages it! And penalizes truth telling. We all know from watching any of these shows that when you start telling the truth once those cuffs get slapped on, you're gonna find yourself in a world of trouble. We say we didn't do it, we say some other story, we blame it on someone else, we remain silent--everything except tell the truth. Without truth, there can be no healing, there can be no justice, there can be no moving forward. Community Justice processes, which don't have the punishment element hanging over it, is able to create spaces where truth can come out, where people can be really honest about what happened. How did we get here? Why? The current system stays far away from the question "why?" These are the kind of questions we need to be asking. Because now we're just going to find ourselves in the same situation over and over. And we have been finding ourselves in the same situation over and over. If caging humans was the solution to all this harm, and all this violence, the US would be the safest, happiest country on the planet. And we know that's not true. So my answer is abolition, nothing short of that is going to produce what we need. And I don't come to that position lightly. I was conditioned to see this as the only way to do it. But through my experience, through my study, I've come to learn that there's really no way to tinker around with this. Can't just shave a few months or a few years of this or that sentence. You can't just pass something and slap the reform label on it and you know, think it's going to produce justice. This system is inherently dehumanizing and disempowering. And, in this country, racist. And there's just no way to fix that. It's the direct descendant of slavery. And you can put a few good people here and there within the system. But it's the institutions themselves that are bankrupt. People question me when I talk about this and say, "Hey, but what are you gonna do about this? What are you gonna do about that?" And I always say, those are the wrong questions to be asking. We obviously cannot do this overnight. It didn't grow overnight. But what we need to be doing is creating a society where people's needs are met. Where not as much harm is occurring in the first place. I mean, there's no question about the link between poverty and crime and violence. There's mountains of research that tell us that there's a direct correlation. And our common sense tells us as much. But we're definitely not doing as much as we can be to addressing that. It's not about a lack of resources or, or money. Money appears when it's time for war, and all these other things that none of us really want. But when it comes to making sure that people's needs are met, the government wants to cry broke.

Dwight Dunston  18:33 
You see what a society values. As I'm hearing you speak and just reflecting on the work you've done, the organizations you're a part of, it's really inviting people into a new way of imagining being in relationship with one another. I'm curious about how your spiritual life flows into the work that you do in the world. Perhaps any ways that your spiritual life helps you to navigate the gratitudes and griefs of life?

Felix Rosado  19:01 
Well, first, let me just start by saying I'm what's known as a Cradle Catholic, born into the faith, watched my grandmother and my aunts and my mother practice it when I was young, and myself, but never really fully got it or, or wanted to get it. And somewhere around age 12 I stopped going to mass with my mother altogether and got sucked into the streets, and 11 years into my incarceration, I decided to get serious about a relationship with God. And there was no question about where I was gonna go. I was gonna go back to the faith tradition of my upbringing. And I felt at home there. I started to really feel God's presence, knowing that there was something else beyond this really kept me grounded. If this was all there was, I'd be pretty miserable. That journey led me into a path of hope that I didn't previously have. And that hope ultimately resulted in my freedom, and that hope continues in my life out here. This fight is a hard one, there's very few victories in this fight. Now, maybe a little one here or there, but for the most part it's full of defeat. And the only thing that keeps me going is hope that one day things are going to change whether I see that day or not. And then there's all the little ways that hope is realized. The individual lives of the young people I work with, and their families and you know, people who, whose lives are making a difference in whether I know it or not. Sometimes people give me that direct feedback and say, "Yeah, you really impacted me." But most of the times, they don't. And I just have to believe that what I'm doing here is, is worth it. And that by generating good in this world, it sends ripples out that reach places that I can't even imagine. And all of that is really spiritual, believing in what you can't see, that's really the gist of this whole movement to abolish prisons. None of us can see it right now. We gotta hope, we got to believe, and we got to do the work to keep moving the needle in that direction.

Felix Rosado  21:20 
It's hard not to be grateful. Having my story, coming from where I came from. There's always something throughout my day that brings that gratitude to the front. Usually, it's when I emerge from underground after I get off the trolley at 13th and Market before I walk a couple blocks to get to the YASP office. I feel the fresh air and I see everyone moving to and from caught up in their hustle and bustle. At some point on that three block stretch of Market Street, it hits me that I'm free. No one else probably understands what I'm talking about, unless you've been incarcerated for a long time and have come home.

Felix Rosado  21:58 
And just as I'm having that moment of gratitude and pure joy, I'm also reminded of the brothers I left behind. I carry them in my heart every single day. There's always some detail in my day that reminds me of a specific person who I left behind. And that usually stops me in my tracks no matter what I'm doing. They deserve to be here. And they're not. And I carry the weight of that responsibility around every day. Knowing that I escaped, because of a lot of stars aligning, and some work and some luck. That's not what someone's freedom should depend on. That drives me. That if not anything else, will always keep me in this fight. I'm not free until we're all free. That's actually the message I chose to have on my T shirt. The day I walked out of prison. I remember thinking about that. And what do I want to wear when I come home? And what's the first thing I want to say? Before I even open my mouth? 'Till we're all free. And until that day comes, the fight doesn't end.

Dwight Dunston  23:26 
Yeah, I have this image that you provided us of of your mom in the front of the newspaper and the ways that you share that she was in there with you. She was locked up with you. Yeah, I'm just feeling into this real time experience of seeing you in front of me and feeling how alive and free you are. And knowing until the people you love and know are free, right? There's still parts of you that aren't free. And so yeah, just holding that holding that.

Felix Rosado  23:55 
And I started off by saying that the word to describe me right now is free. But actually the word I prefer to use is free-ish. One, I'm on parole till I take my last breath. So in that sense, I'm, I'm not free, Two, prison will always be inside me in one way or another. And three, until my people are home I'll never fully feel 100% free. So I'm free-ish.

Dwight Dunston  24:29 
We're nearing the end of our conversation today. I want to just invite you if there's any last message or a practice, maybe there's somebody who's listening who wants to begin a journey of learning about restorative justice or thinking about abolition.

Felix Rosado  24:49 
Every one doesn't have to be an abolitionist. Everyone doesn't have to be a restorative justice practitioner. But there is that one thing each person has that they can do better than everyone else. And I believe it's everyone's mission and purpose here on earth to discover what that one thing is. And to do it with all your heart and all your strength. And if you haven't found that one thing yet, I just want to encourage you to take some risks. Try some things that might be uncomfortable, follow those urges that that tug on you at night, that you do everything in your ability to resist. It's there, it's somewhere in there that you'll find that gift you possess that's uniquely yours. When you start to tap into that, that's true freedom.

Dwight Dunston  25:41 
Thank you, Felix, so much for everything you shared. Thank you for committing to following that urge within you. I can't wait to see how God, Spirit, love continues to use you in this world. I'm so grateful to be on this planet at the same time as you. Truly.

Felix Rosado  26:03 
Right back at you my brother.

Dwight Dunston  26:32 
The Seed is a project of Pendle Hill, a Quaker center open to all for Spirit-led learning, retreat, and community. We're located in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, on the traditional territory of the Lenni-Lenape people. Many of our guests are teachers, leaders and speakers at Pendle Hill. Felix will be a facilitator for our upcoming young adult conference, Continuing Revolution: Restorative Justice as Spiritual Rractice from June 7th until the 10th. Learn more about this and other upcoming education opportunities at PendleHill.org/Learn. This episode was produced and edited by Anna Hill with consulting from Peterson Toscano. Our theme music is the I Rise project by Reverend Rhetta Morgan and Bennett Kuhn produced by Astronautical Records. This project was made possible by the generous support of the Thomas H and Mary Williams Shoemaker fund. You can stay in touch by following us @PendleHillSeed on all social media platforms, or by emailing Podcast@PendleHill.org. If you're finding these conversations meaningful, you can support our work financially by heading over to PendleHill.org/Donate. And please subscribe, rate, and review us wherever you get your podcasts. These seeds could not be planted without you.