Carolyn White believes the best way to deal with youth who have broken the law is a mediation process called restorative justice. The offender comes face-to-face with the victim, and together they explore the causes and ramifications of the crime and determine a suitable punishment.
White reached this conclusion by following her heart, something she has done even when it’s been broken.
She was Connie Cowan in 1955 when she left Stanford with a degree in speech and drama, determined to find her place on Broadway. She made it as far as Indiana, where she married Marv White, a professional photographer. The newlyweds moved back to Palo Alto, Connie’s hometown.
White appeared in local plays, but church began playing an ever-larger role in her life. Combining her two enthusiasms, she produced W.H. Auden’s oratorio, For the Time Being, at her church. “There’s no disparity between theater and faith,” she says. “Both are expressions of people’s hopes, dreams, despair.”
In 1984, the mother of three entered the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley to become an Episcopal priest. “In prior years, women weren’t allowed in,” she recalls. “Moving toward ordination was pushing a big rock uphill.”
About this time, her 17-year-old daughter, Becky, was involved with a much older man. The relationship soured, and Becky killed the man. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. “They don’t teach you how to handle that in any classroom,” White says.
Becky’s catastrophe led her mother into prison ministry, where she brought compassion and understanding to inmates whose lives were devoid of both. “Visiting the Santa Clara County Jail, I saw the other women were so young, as young as my daughter. It really did hit me like a bolt of lightning: how much God loved these women and how much they needed to know that.” After being ordained in 1989, she worked at the men’s prison in Vacaville, Calif.
White eventually served for seven years as the rector of an Episcopal church in Salinas, Calif., but she resigned in 2001 to direct the Monterey County Victim Offender Reconciliation Program. She and Marv live on five acres outside Salinas. Their sons, Gordon and Charles, operate a garage.
Like many who work with youthful offenders, White believes restorative justice—used mostly in property crimes—is a hopeful trend. When victims and offenders meet, matters get discussed that are rarely, if ever, aired in brief court appearances. With the help of a court-appointed mediator like White, victims and offenders determine together what restitution the perpetrator will make.
“It’s an amazingly simple and wonderfully empowering process,” White says. “It’s like watching the walls that divide become the walls that surround.”
