Source: restorativeactionalliance.org
[Note from Janice: Please consider being a part of this]
Restorative Action Alliance is excited to introduce Many Truths: Breaking Down False Dichotomies, a unique creative expression program designed to empower people affected by cycles of harm and the criminal legal system. This initiative invites crime survivors, family members, and system-impacted people to share their experiences and creativity, fostering healing and community connection.
We invite submissions of original visual art, photography, poetry, or short stories (no more than 500 words) for inclusion in a curated collection and online gallery.
Themes: Many Truths, Healing, Connection, System Impacts, Impacts of Harm, Surviving, Thriving, Restorative Practice
Why participate?
- Foster Connection: Build community through artistic expression of shared humanity and experiences.
- Explore Self-Healing: Use creative expression as a tool for reflection.
- Challenge Narratives: Help dismantle harmful binaries and promote empathy.
Click here to read more details
Deadline is September 30.
Even odds if they recieve a contribution from a PFR they wouldn’t use it. Drugs, violence, ok But sex offenses? No way!
ACSOL posts these types of articles knowing full well these groups will turn away or just ignore PFRs. Just like the employment opportunities that say no thx to PFRs. I take these articles as a passive slap across our collective face.
The Restorative Action Alliance is an allied organization in that it is working toward the same goal as ACSOL: to end the registry. We would not have posted this message if we believed they would reject input from registrants and family members. Please do your homework before you criticize what you don’t understand.
My life was free and movable, now its fixed, confined and monitored, yet they tell me I’m free.
A woman whom I love stretches her flight across the oceans, as I’m left to search through the photo album as she returns.
“The Seat Is Always Empty”
I chose the cell over the leash. Ten years of deferred silence traded for steel and time— because I thought freedom would follow. But when I walked out, they handed me a map of places I could never go. No parks. No playgrounds. No barbecues with cousins chasing frisbees. No graduations where my child scans the crowd for my face. No school plays where the lights dim and the seat beside my wife stays cold.
They call it registration. But it’s prison without walls. A sentence that never ends, written not in ink, but in absence.
They say it’s for safety. But who feels safe when love is legislated out of reach? When a father can’t stand beside his child on the day they become something more?
This is not protection. This is punishment dressed in policy. And if this isn’t unconstitutional, then the Constitution has forgotten how to cry.
Three Days Is Never by Quiet Too Long
I came to meet my son. Not to reclaim—just to witness. To say: I was there. To let him see the face that chose love through distance.
But the phone was lost. The contacts vanished. And the law said: One day only. No second sunrise. No waiting room grace. No time to search, to call, to explain.
I stood in the city where he was born. Where I had once whispered his name into the wind and signed away my rights so he could have a life unshadowed by mine.
I was ready. But the system wasn’t. It gave me three days. Then took two. Then warned me: Stay longer, and you’ll be punished.
So I left. Not because I wanted to. But because I had to. Because love, in this country, has a curfew.
And I have never met him.
For Russ I did not commit the crime that the law claims. But I live under its shadow. This piece is not a confession-it’s a reflection. It speaks to the absurdity of criminalizing biology, stillness, and survival. It’s about how the law sees us, not how we see ourselves.
So… here it is:
The Gaze By Quiet Too Long As is known, the crime was a necessity. The liquid was yellow. The bush was sparse. There was a stroller near. The gaze didn’t know. The crime was futile-and visiting. Not moving is a crime for life. Now we see flashing red.
(There was a show on TV where the cop points out: “Well, if your child saw it…”)