A vocabulary of her own

«We live in times when catchy slogans, like the "revolving door", gain ground in matters as serious as security. Under a veneer of apparent firmness, they hide a deep contempt for the complexity of social problems and for human dignity.»

Easy answers promise automatic prison on the second offence, as if justice were a magic formula. But behind every "case" there are life stories, contexts of exclusion and, very often, a State that arrived late or never arrived at all with opportunities. Refusing these simplifying traps is an obligation, especially for those of us who have lived the pain in our own flesh.

«The idea that judges should be handed "an Excel sheet, not a Word document" is, frankly, terrifying. Law, in its essence, is a "Word" full of nuance, of principles, of humanity; not a cold table where a number leads you inexorably to a cell.»

Reducing the judicial task to ticking boxes empties out the Constitution, the codes and the human-rights treaties that cost us so much. It asks judges to give up their role as guarantors of rights and become mere enforcers of a dehumanised prison policy. The law is interpreted, contextualised and applied taking into account the particularities of each human being.

«Overcrowded, unhealthy and violent prisons deter no one; on the contrary, they are schools of resentment and of perfecting crime. Do we really believe anyone comes out of hell a better person?»

Or are we simply kicking the problem down the road, for when those people return to society inevitably more damaged and with fewer tools for a dignified life? The prison crisis is a problem of the State and of all of society, because its consequences affect us all. Investing in dignified conditions of detention is not a luxury: it is the only way for the sentence to serve any purpose beyond punishment.

«We need fewer policies based on fear and more based on intelligence and empathy. To stop hunting for the guilty and start building responsible people. To stop shouting slogans and start truly talking about what society we want to be.»

This does not mean impunity. It means understanding that crime is, at its core, a broken social bond, and that true justice is not exhausted by locking someone up, but lies in trying to mend those ties and heal everyone’s wounds, the community’s included. Only by recovering the humanity of our justice system can we aspire to real coexistence.

«The penal system does not represent the reality of crime, but the reality of the penal system. Economic crimes never arrive; what arrives is what someone decided to pursue.»

What we see in the statistics is not the map of real harm, but the map of prosecution decisions: what is sought, which offices and prosecutors’ units are created, which behaviours are made visible. Confusing one for the other makes us debate insecurity through a distorting mirror, and demand more of the same where something else is needed.

«That seriality people talk about is not real. Once the data is broken down, recidivism in crimes against sexual integrity is 0.1%. Working so there is no next victim is not being soft: it is the only thing that truly keeps us safe.»

In Argentina statistics are hard to come by, but the numbers debunk several myths: that these crimes have the highest recidivism rates, that those who commit them are beyond recovery, that they happen between strangers. The vast majority are intra-family and recidivism is minimal. If we keep thinking that "nothing can be done with these people because they are monsters", we guarantee they walk out the same after six years.

«Punitiveness, as Nils Christie defined it, is the capacity to inflict pain: to add pain to pain. That is why the folklore of "let him be raped in prison" shakes me: we expect from society exactly the same thing we are condemning.»

When we demand for the other the very cruelty we repudiate, the line between social defence and revenge grows dangerously thin. Adding pain never neutralises pain: it multiplies it. Recognising this is the first step out of the circle in which we end up tearing each other apart.

«It means exploring what we have normalised so thoroughly as a society that it no longer even raises questions in us. We urgently need to examine how our judgement has been programmed to understand conflict and, above all, to desire justice.»

From childhood, the media and the entertainment industry hammer us with a pre-written script of rage, hopelessness and revenge. If we let those messages colonise our will, we end up blind to the other, believing the only way out is to return harm with interest. "Scratching where it doesn’t itch" is the uncomfortable but vital exercise of switching off the screen, looking each other in the eye and daring to seek a restorative path where the system tells us only anger fits.

«Restorative encounters cannot be squeezed into a fixed recipe or standardised; they are handcrafted dialogues, built to measure, with extreme care and by listening to the real needs of each person involved.»

Against the coldness of a judicial structure that seeks only a "procedural truth", we devote ourselves to creating a holding space where word and silence intertwine to weave the possibility of repairing what seemed unreachable. It is not about improvising, but about humanising the conflict case by case, person by person. No one comes out of those encounters unscathed: they confront us with our capacity to do harm, but also with our immense potential for healing.

«Substantial remorse is an honest, deep process toward a person’s real truth. It has nothing to do with the legal tactic of saying rehearsed words in a plea bargain just to get your sentence reduced.»

In the day-to-day of retributive justice, procedural remorse abounds: a formal step to change one’s status in the file, which to us holds no real value. Substantial remorse, by contrast, is travelled far from any convenience of legal strategy. It is the space where a person fully owns their harmful conduct, brings the victim into their reflection and begins genuine inner work toward repair.

«Restorative justice at its fullest is the kind that is born from the soul and has the power to change the world; but it does not do so with grand magic formulas, but one heart at a time.»

Even in the midst of desolation or the deepest darkness, the capacity to love, to forgive and to seek the restoration of another human being can emerge with transformative force. When we manage to walk back through the pain, a knot forms in the throat that does not choke, but the kind that frees and widens the chest. It shows us there are other possible paths of healing and encounter that no cold sentence, on its own, will ever offer us.

«I reclaim a word devalued and forgotten by the codes: love. Restorative justice needs love, a loving gaze upon the conflict and upon the people.»

«My basic vocabulary when facilitating an encounter fits into two questions: "What would make you feel repaired?" to the one who suffered the harm, and "How would you repair what you did?" to the one who caused it.»

«Restorative justice will be creative or it will be nothing. It cannot be squeezed into a fixed recipe: each encounter is built to measure, by listening to the real needs of each person.»

«We refuse to carry the stone of resentment forever, pushing it uphill only to watch it fall again and again in the same cycle of violence. We choose to shed the label of "broken victims" and to offer a transformative dialogue instead.»

The challenge is enormous, almost mad, in a world that prefers the strident headline and endless punishment to the restorative embrace. At times, when a violent event is amplified exponentially by the media, it feels as if our work loses heart and we are back to zero. But we persist, because we know that violences add up and feed on each other, they are never neutralised. We choose to collectivise pain and turn it into a deeply political and human action to build social peace.

«There is an attempt to install the notion that all victims think alike, that we all clamour for more confinement and fewer guarantees. But victims are diverse. Using our pain as a blank cheque to justify punitive policies is an insult to our intelligence.»

From the experience of those who have suffered crimes and still seek paths of peace, I can say that many of us want torture to be watched for and prevented, because state cruelty repairs no pain: it only breeds more violence. The problem is not spending to protect rights; the problem is believing there is a single authorised voice to speak in the name of pain.

«No person is equal to the worst act they committed in their life. And those of us who have suffered such violence do not want it to define us either, nor to become the worst of a society that is so often broken.»

It is the hardest claim to hold and, at the same time, the most necessary. It does not erase the harm or play it down: it acknowledges it in all its gravity and, even so, refuses to seal a person inside their worst moment. From there —and not from the monster we imagine— is where something can begin to transform.

«Hope always drives out fear. And mine is not a vain hope: it comes from having worked by going to the very places where humanity, as we know it, seems to have been lost.»

In that darkness —the prisons, the people who have caused great harm— is where I believe one can make the difference. The difference held up by the phrase that moves me: "I don’t want others to go through what I went through."