The Prison Podcast Episode 10: The Power of Bearing Witness
February 19, 2025
In this episode, Martina from the Ahimsa Collective takes us into the often misunderstood world of Victim-Offender Dialogue. With deep empathy and insight, she explores the traumatic experiences that shape both survivors and offenders. Her work is rooted in the belief that healing is possible through compassionate listening and understanding, rather than through punishment. Drawing on years of experience, Martina shares with us how she guides individuals through this delicate process, showing us the transformative power of dialogue, healing, and human connection.
Martina also shares valuable insights on how society can better educate the public about this powerful process. As she emphasizes, punishing individuals for their wrongdoings often doesn’t lead to lasting change. Instead, real transformation comes from showing compassion, listening to pain, and supporting the healing journey. This episode isn’t just about Martina’s work, it’s a call to rethink justice and how we approach healing within our communities.
Transcription
Michael: My name is Michael, and I’m the Inside Communications Director for Humans of San Quentin. The contents of this episode include strong language and graphic descriptions of violent crimes, which may include sexual assault. This podcast is intended for mature audiences. Listener discretion is advised.
Diane: Welcome to the powerful closing episode of this season of the Prison Podcast. We’ve saved an incredible episode for last with Martina, a victim-offender dialogue facilitator. Martina has dedicated her life to helping people through some of the hardest and most transformative conversations imaginable. In this episode, she takes us through the complexities of trauma and the powerful process of holding space for each other. With her wealth of expertise, Martina also shares valuable insights on how we can better educate the public about the importance of this work. As Martina wisely says, trauma exists on both sides, and what we actually need is engagement—tapping into our evolution and responding with love. Can we forgive? Can we have compassion, which means staying present in the face of suffering? Good afternoon, Martina. Thank you for being here with us today. I’m excited to share your knowledge with the world. To start, could you bring our audience up to speed by sharing more about the organization The AHIMSA Collective? Specifically, can you explain their role in facilitating connections between two individuals who have been affected by the same crime?
Martina: AHIMSA is Sanskrit and means “do no harm.” AHIMSA was founded by Sonia Shah, who has her roots in India, in the Sanskrit word ahimsa. It started with collecting people who have a big heart and passion for restorative justice. We do multiple things. There are four pillars of the AHIMSA Collective. We have two re-entry homes in Oakland that operate on the people-first paradigm, really centering people’s needs. Then we have a retreat center in the Santa Cruz Mountains where people get to convene for free. This is particularly for people of color and grassroots organizations that focus on restorative justice and “people work.” We especially want to bring out people who have not had the opportunity to be in nature. Then we have Life Comes From It, which is a philanthropy circle—a grant-giving circle. The last pillar is Healing Pathways, which encompasses restorative justice in the community. The way this works is that a person who wants to do a victim-offender dialogue will reach out to the Office of Victim Services. Then there is a screening of the incarcerated person to see if they’re suitable. They look for someone who is emotionally and physically capable, disciplined—are they violent by nature? So there’s a suitability check. If there are restraining orders or active appeals and court proceedings, they are not able to participate in the victim-offender dialogue. If the institution finds them suitable, Victim Services will decide which organization is going to be tasked with the facilitation. That mostly depends on location. Once we know that we can move ahead, Victim Services reaches out to the organizations—either a director or a program manager—who then finds facilitators. These facilitators also get connected with what’s called a ROD liaison, the person in prison who supports us in making a victim-offender dialogue happen inside the prison. Then the program manager or director finds suitable facilitators and reaches out to the survivor to reconnect with them and understand who they are and what they need. What kind of facilitator might be best suited? We pay close attention to language and gender. For instance, in cases of sexual harm, we always ask: Is a male facilitator okay? Do you need a female facilitator? We pay close attention to the survivor’s needs—race, language, and age are all important factors. We do our best to match well and find out what they’re looking for in a facilitator. The facilitators get introduced to the VOD participants and begin working with each one—the incarcerated person and the survivor. Of course, there’s a lot of explaining about the program. One of our core values is agency—really ensuring that both participants feel like they are in the driver’s seat and have a say in what will be discussed, who sits where, and, to the extent possible, that they have a sense of control. These separate preparation meetings can last anywhere from six weeks—the fastest we’ve ever done, which is very unusual—to an average of six to nine months. We’ve even had one last two years. Sometimes life happens—this is deep emotional work. It’s very intense for both parties and sometimes even more so for the survivors. In some states, there’s a strict timeline—four or five prep meetings, and then the VOD has to happen. We’re really lucky and well-supported, so we can give this process the time it needs without any kind of time pressure. At this point, there are five restorative justice organizations that facilitate victim-offender dialogues, and we feel very lucky. There’s a lot of trust placed in us by the Office of Victim Services in running these programs.
Diane: Martina now delves into the process of recognizing when someone is truly ready to sit down and have that face-to-face conversation in prison.
Martina: It’s very intuitive work, and to me, it’s almost like when we don’t know what to talk about anymore—at some point, you just know it’s time, that the conversation is ready to happen. But there are certainly markers that we’re looking for. We really want there to be accountability. At times, there is no accountability because they don’t have the mental and emotional capacity. In those cases, we might not necessarily say no to the survivor—you can’t come in—but we would only bring in a survivor if we feel they have the emotional capacity to be disappointed in that way and to not get what they’re looking for. So if a survivor is very raw and fragile, we might say, This might not be the best thing for you. We pay close attention to the people involved—their emotional state, where they’re at, and what their needs are. For the survivor, the preparation work really includes asking: What are you truly looking for? I remember doing one ROD, and as she was talking, we realized that what she actually needed was to grieve. Her husband was killed. She had three little kids. She never had time to grieve. So we want to discover where they really are in their healing process. We want to support them in developing what we call a high level of self-agency in healing. This includes fully accepting what happened and moving away from just blaming the other person. Because when you blame, you depend on the other person to make the hurt go away. Healing really comes when people recognize: Yes, someone else caused this pain, but now it’s my responsibility to take care of it. That’s a very bitter pill to swallow and a huge task. And what we have seen is that a lot of participants actually make that shift. Very few survivors of severe violence start with forgiveness. They begin with anger, resentment, bitterness—all the angst and sorrow that come with trauma. But many VOD participants, in their journey of healing, recognize that they don’t want to stay in that place. They don’t want to be angry. Take Adi, whose husband was killed by a drunk driver. She said, I found myself screaming and yelling at my children because I was so angry. Or Kevin, who was 13 when he was shot in the neck and paralyzed. He said, I was so angry. I just got too exhausted. I didn’t have the energy to be angry anymore. So when survivors look in the mirror and really do not like who they have become—when they see how this experience has impacted them—they start to think, This is not who I want to be. I don’t want to be angry. I don’t want to be a hateful and angry person. And then, it’s almost like they start looking around and asking, What else is there?
Diane: This is the moment when someone who has been harmed begins to see the person who caused that harm as a human being. Martina will walk us through how someone decides to view the person who caused harm differently and how they come to the decision to change their life and seek a meeting with the one who hurt them.
Martina: It’s curiosity. And once they become curious, anger is no longer an option. That’s a choice—to choose not to be angry anymore. Then they need to make another choice. And that is how many of the people who end up asking for a VOD (Victim-Offender Dialogue) begin their journey of self-agency in healing—by not making their healing dependent on anybody or anything outside themselves. That journey often includes becoming curious about the person who caused the harm, even developing empathy and a measure of compassion for them. But most of all, it begins with curiosity. We don’t get survivors who are still deeply angry—rightfully so—and carrying unprocessed pain. Frankly, our society does very little for survivors. We spend billions attending to the person who caused harm—incarcerating them, imprisoning them. But we do very little for survivors. There are so many survivors who, decades later, still walk around with unprocessed pain from what was done to them, from being victimized. The survivors who have not been supported in deeply processing their trauma, in gaining a deeper sense of self-agency, and in truly healing—those are not the ones coming to us for a victim-offender dialogue. When you don’t know how to process your pain, you do what I call stuffing it into the basement of your being. It builds up. Mama Jane, whose son was brutally murdered, put it this way: My son died twice. First, he died when he was murdered. And then he died again when I could not say his name because it was too upsetting for his two brothers. They were never supported in coping, in healing, in making sense of what had happened to them as a family when their beloved was murdered. And then, the idea of sitting across from the person who harmed you—it’s not just about meeting them. You are also meeting yourself. All these unresolved emotions get re-triggered, and many people still don’t know how to cope with them. Because it’s not something we teach. We don’t teach grief in schools. We don’t teach how to deal with pain. People are not prepared to cope.
Diane: Martina reflects on her time with Elle, whom we had the privilege of interviewing in Episode 5, “I Have a Hug for You.” She emphasized how Elle’s curiosity, sparked by her own grief, became a turning point. That’s when she began to truly connect with Alan—his struggles with alcoholism, and the trauma he had endured.
Martina: And it’s like Elle—her daughter was killed by a drunk driver, and she says, “This person changed my life like nobody else, and I knew nothing about him.” It was his seventh DUI, so she was curious. Having had a lot of alcoholism in her family, she knew something had happened to this person. Another reason why survivors come is that they want to do whatever they can so that this person will never harm again. So they have an intuition of the core moment of restorative justice. In the criminal justice system, if there was a murder, the person was killed, and the person who caused the murder is told, “You violated Penal Code 187.” I think it’s 187, which doesn’t mean a whole lot. And then they’re sentenced and go to prison. When this person has to sit across from the mother whose son was killed, they cannot help but feel the pain that this mother is experiencing. As humans, we are innately wired for empathy. If I smile long enough—see, I smile at you, and you smile—we are innately wired for empathy. So that is the core of restorative justice: to bring people to this empathic connection to the harm they have caused. And at that moment, when they actually feel the pain of the person who was harmed, they go, “Oh my gosh, this is what this feels like? I don’t want to ever do that again.” So that is what many of the survivors are after, right? To interrupt the cycle of violence. They don’t want another family to suffer like they have suffered.
Diane: Next, we’ll hear what it’s like to be human in prison and the process of rehabilitation within those walls.
Martina: In working with the person who’s outside, mostly we’re working on shape. There is this idea that people who have done horrendous deeds, horrifying deeds—that’s who they always are. That’s the only thing they are. But it’s not. They’re still human beings. They still have a beating heart. They’re still husbands and fathers and uncles and aunts and mothers. They’re still human beings who have other ways of being and being in relationships, other than causing severe violence. People take to heart what they did. We feel bad when we do not contribute to somebody’s well-being or when we cause harm. It impacts us. There is what we call a moral injury. It hurts us when we hurt somebody else. We don’t talk a whole lot about that, but this is what we see when we work with people in prison—how deeply impacted they actually are by what they did. When people are put into the right environment… if you have a prison culture that supports people in staying in life, the criminal life, and not caring about others, then that’s what they’ll lean into. And when you are in prison, you are not particularly cared for in a way that makes you think everybody cares about you. Prison is very punitive, so you’re constantly wronged, you’re constantly shamed. Prison is a little bit like, “Let’s make them feel really bad about themselves so they do good.” This is a logic that’s waiting. This is not how human beings work. Human beings become loving, caring human beings when they are loved and cared for. So in California prisons, the whole rehabilitation system and all the volunteers, all the people who go in there to work with people, aim to bring them back home to their healthy selves, not their wounded selves. Because we do know that most people in prison have experienced trauma themselves. There’s this saying—some people don’t like it very much—but “hurt people hurt people” is also true for survivors. It’s true for you. It’s true for me. It’s true for everyone. Shame is actually a very self-centered emotion. Shame is all, “I am bad. It’s all about me.” So we really work with people to let go of some of the shame so that they can make more room to have empathy and stay in empathy for the person who was harmed by their actions. If there’s too much shame and too much guilt, there’s no room left in their hearts to actually empathize with them. So we want people to let go of some of the shame. If you read James Gilligan’s book Violence, shame is a root cause of violence. When we hate ourselves, when we think we’re worthless, when we think we’re good for nothing, when we think nobody cares about us—that is the moment in which we don’t care about others and we don’t have empathy for others. And that is the moment in which we can cause harm.
Diane: How facilitators create a safe space for survivors is through bearing witness. The importance of compassion, being fully present, sitting with the discomfort, and most importantly, validating both survivors’ experiences.
Martina: We don’t talk a whole lot about the power of bearing witness. There’s something transformative that happens when we bear witness. It’s when people can unload—really, it’s an unloading for the survivors, for the victims. It’s unloading all the aftermath of what was done to them. To just speak it and have the person who caused the harm listen and hear it. Christy Morgan, she did this a lot. Her husband was stabbed as a police officer, and she got to do her own process with the person who stabbed her husband. She said, “Jason, listen.” Jason was what we call a programmer in the prison system—someone who truly sets out to change themselves and goes through all the programs. Jason had a lot of tools and emotional intelligence skills to be present, and he knew exactly what to do in empathizing and having compassion for her experience. Christy described it as if Jason reached into her being, took all her pain, and knew what to do with it far better than she ever could. I don’t remember one survivor who didn’t say, “I feel lighter.” It’s like the old clothes wringers, from back in the day when you washed clothes. That’s the process we go through. Everything gets squeezed by emotional intensity. Something gets squeezed out and left behind. As facilitators, that’s what we bring. We don’t ask survivors to have compassion. If they do, that’s wonderful. If they don’t, that’s okay too. They’ll get there when they’re ready. But facilitators hold the container of compassion, care, and dignity. Whatever you feel, whatever you think, everything you bring to the table is okay, and we can be with it. And there’s something in being with it that transforms it. Angel Keanu Williams, one of only two Black female priests in the United States, says, “Transformation happens when we allow ourselves to be moved by the truth of the other.” That’s what we’re doing in these Victim-Offender Dialogues (VODs)—survivors get to really hear what happened. In the court proceedings, it’s not about the truth—it’s about winning. It’s an adversarial process where people often don’t tell the truth, and those who caused harm rarely get to apologize. But here, they get to apologize. They get to show remorse. And the survivor gets to actually see that. There’s an exchange of healing elements that happens, which no one else can give them to that extent. It’s like 10 years of therapy. It’s an extremely healing process to look each other in the eye and for the other person to say, “Yes, I did this,” and for the survivor to hear that. That’s what helps us access compassion and care. When we see, like in the trauma world, we say the first level of trauma is the event itself. The second level is when our experience isn’t validated. That’s what we’re doing here—we’re doing trauma work. In these VODs, there’s a validation of the survivor’s experience. Everything they’ve experienced, whatever it is. They get to share, and somehow when they share, they leave it on the table and get to walk away without that intensity.
Diane: Next, you’ll feel how liberating this process of accountability is for both parties and how, without it, the survivor can feel left alone in the world.
Martina: We also bring survivors into our groups to share their experiences of harm, particularly sexual harm. The people who have caused the harm often don’t take accountability because it’s so incredibly shameful. It’s very difficult to take accountability for having abused your own child. So, what we do is bring survivors—especially those who have experienced child sexual abuse—into our groups, and they get to share their stories. The survivors walk out saying, “Wow, what just happened? I feel so much lighter.” I started asking them when they first came into our groups, “Is there any other place, besides this group, where your pain, your suffering, your brokenness, and your shattered life are as welcome as they are by the men and women in this group—the incarcerated people who are listening to you?” And they all said, “Heck no. After six months, nobody wants to hear anymore. After a year, it’s like, ‘Can you just get over this?’” Survivors are left out here in our society. They are left alone. They withdraw and go into isolation. They’re just not supported the way they need to be. Tristan and Marilyn, two child sexual abuse survivors, went inside the prison and shared their stories, and they were welcomed. The people who had caused sexual harm said, “We need to know what we did, so we never do it again. How are we going to know if nobody tells us?” Ironically, both survivors say, “As victims, I found what I needed to heal in prison.” So, keeping people apart causes so much harm. The people who are impacted need to be the ones who get to address what happened. In Australia, the Aboriginal communities handle things differently. When harm happens, there’s swift punishment, but then the person who caused the harm is taken back into the community as a wisdom holder. People who have caused harm have wisdom in how they arrived at causing it. I went to a sexual harm conference—it was all about child sexual abuse—and I thought, wait, there are voices missing. Why aren’t we talking to the people who caused the harm about prevention?
Diane: This is the moment when Martina has an aha realization. How does she process and cope with her role as a facilitator? Hearing these stories and helping recreate such powerful memories.
Martina: I’ve received 100 VOD requests. I’ve worked on 45 and completed 26 of them. I’ve sat in these very intimate, emotionally intense settings. What we bring to these Victim-Offender Dialogues is a willingness to stay in the discomfort, a willingness to embrace the messiness of who we humans are, and a willingness to see each other. Our job as facilitators is to help both parties build the capacity to be there for each other.
Diane: How is she able to hear such horrendous, horrific stories and have these deep conversations with people? I’m sure you’re just as curious as I am, especially after listening to this season. I can hear it in her voice—this calm, soothing tone. Now, she answers that question for us.
Martina: Compassion. I have a memory of a man who was extremely violent. He shared his childhood story and revealed something that adults had asked him to do when he was eight years old. It was horrific. I’m not going into detail because I don’t believe in sharing specifics that leave people with haunting images. But he described what he was asked to do, and it involved a murder and blood. I had these horrible images, and they were haunting me. The Zen Peacemakers go to places of atrocity and meditate, radiating compassion. Then there’s the movie Inside Out, which showed how memory is not like a drawer with a picture in it but is recreated in our minds each time. So, we can actually change our memories. I took those two ideas, and with this haunting image, I invited the Dalai Lama, his children, and all my teachers—Desmond Tutu and others who embody compassion for life. That’s what I do: I hold onto compassion for life. I placed them in the horrible image, meditating in their robes, radiating compassion. Now, when I revisit that image, I’ve changed its emotional undertone. When I think about it now, I don’t cringe; instead, I feel connected to that compassion. Compassion is, I believe, our most powerful tool. If we can’t stay present with each other in the face of hurt, we’re never going to make it. We need to stick with each other through it and not vilify the other. I sat with someone who had caused harm, and I said to him, “This is how I feel when I think about what happened—I feel sick. I want to throw up. I feel green. And this is how you feel? This is what you’re living with? The young child you violated?” And then, just holding both of them—holding them with all my heart. Joanna Macy says, “When our heart breaks, we can hold the whole.” It’s a capacity, something we can learn. I’d love to continue this work because we’ve had experiences where we shift from seeing the relationship as victim and offender to recognizing that there’s trauma on both sides and that both need help. The shift we need to make is realizing we’re all traumatized—the person who caused harm and the one who was harmed. Both need healing. I want to end with one of my favorite quotes by the Buddha: “In separateness lies the world’s great misery. In compassion lies the world’s true strength.” The lower brain is present with revenge. Revenge is a misguided need for empathy—it’s wanting to cause harm to make the other person feel your pain. What do we ultimately want? We are the most magnificent and evolved creatures. Can we start responding to wrongdoing with love? Can we wish well to those who have done horrible things? Can we love them, even because of what they did, because they need more love? Compassion simply means staying present. Cynthia, whose son Mitchell was killed by his friends at age 14, says, “In my VOD, I learned that compassion is infinite.” Can we recognize that we are all interconnected, that we are all one? It’s not a matter of who deserves it and who doesn’t—we all deserve the same. I feel so strongly about this: who do we want to be? If we want a loving, compassionate world, let’s be loving, compassionate, and caring toward everyone. What did Jesus say? “What you do to the least of us, you do unto me.”
Diane: Martina, thank you so much for sharing your time, your wisdom, and your heart with us today. Your compassion and dedication to this work are truly inspiring. We’re grateful for the space you’ve created, for these powerful conversations, and for everything you’ve taught us along the way.
Martina: Thank you for sharing this with the world. It’s much needed, and the people in prison really want to be seen and know that they’re truly trying to do the right thing.
Diane: Martina invited us into the profound and often misunderstood world of Victim-Offender Dialogues, showing us that healing begins when we shift from anger and shame to curiosity, self-agency, and the courage to bear witness to another story with openness and grace. Her wisdom has been a gift, opening my heart and mind in ways I never expected. I hope her words have offered you something meaningful as well—a new perspective, a sense of hope, or even just a reminder that healing is possible, no matter how deep the wounds. Your willingness to engage with these stories, to sit with their weight, and reflect on their meaning has made this season of the Prison Podcast truly impactful. By listening, you have helped amplify voices that are too often silenced. As the season comes to an end, we leave you with important questions. What does accountability look like when rooted in humanity? How do we foster healing in a system built on punishment? These are not easy questions, but they’re necessary ones. Next week, we’ll be dropping a bonus episode, where you’ll meet Jorge, an incarcerated artist at San Quentin State Prison, whose work speaks to healing and redemption. He is the artist behind the Prison Podcast logo. Listen to how he’s rediscovered himself and hopes to inspire you to choose a better path. Until then, be kind to yourself.
