RANGE

Video games obviously don’t just come into being. Like any piece of art, they have creators. And we happen to know one right here in Spokane. 

A couple weeks ago we talked to Justin Baldwin, Creative Lead & Cofounder at Moonlight Kids. He’s one of the creators of a pretty popular indie game called The Wild at Heart. It’s described as cute and cozy, but it introduces important themes to kids and other users, like working through childhood trauma.

Trailer

Follow Justin on Twitter: @butttoots 

Or Instagram: @themoonlightkid 

Follow Moonlight Kids: @moonlightkids_

In today’s RANGE of Care, we’re continuing our talk on productive disagreements. Joining us is Inga Laurent, Professor of Law at Gonzaga who studies, theorizes and helps implement restorative justice practices in court systems and outside of judicial settings like schools.

So how does the conversation from our last episode on productive disagreements in interpersonal relationships tie into a legal framework like restorative justice?

It’s in the name: restorative. The point isn’t to cast a person out of society or community. The point is to encourage a conversation in which the person or people who were harmed can gain closure and those who did harm can make amends.

If you want more of Inga’s insight, she’s an occasional columnist at The Inlander.

Don’t forget to share this with a friend and if you’re able, become a member of RANGE for $10 per month.

We’re at the end of Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Heritage Month and hopefully you’ve had a chance to go to one of the many events hosted around town celebrating the rich and almost unfathomably diverse peoples and cultures represented. 

The majority of those events were put on by a coalition led by two organizations: APIC Spokane, whose mission is advocating for racial, social, and economic justice for Asians & Asian Americans in solidarity with Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and other systematically oppressed communities, and the Pacific Islander Community Association of WA an organization dedicated to establishing a cultural home, centering community power, and furthering the wellness of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities physically, culturally, socially and spiritually.

These two partner organizations rallied around using this month to draw attention to their criticisms of the imposed category “Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander.”

The category groups wildly different cultures that span literally 40% of the globe, lumping together the American diaspora of over 60% of the world’s population – everything from Bangladeshi-Americans to Tahitians — in one category. 

So it’s like, are we really spotlighting this incredible individual and cultural diversity by smashing them all into one month? And beyond that, you’ll hear our guests, Ryann Louie and Sarah Dixit of APIC talk about how statistical aggregation papers over legacies of colonial violence and completely obscures real disparities in health outcomes and death for many Pacific Islander communities. 

There is a lot of excess death – unnecessary death, preventable death – happening that is not truly understood because of how we lump people together statistically. 

In this podcast, you’ll hear about their efforts to push for race data disaggregation and why it’s important. You’ll also hear what you can do to help, like not using aggregated terms, asking aggregated organizations if they do have NH/PI representation and simply following APIC and PICA on social media. 

ALSO, don’t miss the companion art show called “Hidden in Plain Sight” that is only open for three more days, through May 28 at the new Terrain Gallery at 628 N. Monroe.

In the US, it’s supposed to be “innocent until proven guilty,” but it’s a routine part of our criminal legal system to imprison people while they await trial, causing them to lose their jobs, housing, access to transportation and more.

This is a problem across America, and we’ve covered it extensively on RANGE (see links below), but here’s a new wrinkle, courtesy of our friends at InvestigateWest.

Whether or not you get access to pretrial services, which often requires home monitoring, drug testing and other costly programs, largely depends on the jurisdiction you’re in. Some counties have no services at all. In others, the defendant is responsible for the cost of those services — such as ankle monitors, which can run $500 per month — effectively keeping the most destitute people in jail. 

Even in counties where services are offered, the costs can be drastically different depending on what part of the county you’re arrested in. That’s the situation in Spokane, where getting arrested in the City of Spokane gives defendants free access to many more services than people arrested for the same crime in other parts of the county. 

We talked to Wilson Criscione, a reporter from InvestigateWest, who covered this issue extensively in the first article for their project called “Justice by Geography.”

In it, he told us the story of Amber Letchworth, a Washington woman who was pulled over and arrested after a police officer found a dirty baggy containing meth on her car floor. 

She couldn’t pay for bail, so while waiting in jail for the next few weeks, she lost her home and access to a car. She pleaded guilty to felony drug possession in an effort to get out of jail sooner. But she still left jail homeless and lost her financial aid for college because of her felony record. 

Amber had been mourning the death of her grandmother and was not in a good place. On paper, she was a good candidate for pretrial diversion, but no diversion took place, and she spiraled, for a time, to an even darker place.

Had she been diverted to mental health or addiction treatment, her arrest may not have started her on a path to drug and alcohol addiction, homelessness, and more arrests. 

There are two bitter ironies in this case, one personal, one systemic: The drug charge that set this whole chain of events in motion has since been vacated after State v. Blake — a State Supreme Court decision last year that ruled Washington’s simple possession law  unconstitutional. 

But the real kicker is that Asotin County is one of the counties that actually HAS pretrial services — on paper anyway — but the program administrator had retired and the remote, rural county hadn’t been able to find a replacement. 

This story is crucial as we examine the disproportionate effects of our criminal legal system and what can be done to lift more people out of it.

Wilson and Luke talk about the current patchwork system of pretrial services in Washington and how they play out differently in Spokane compared to the rest of Spokane County. 

Read the full story, republished with permission from InvestigateWest, here.

Previous Coverage of Pre-Trial Inequalities:

• EPISODE 010 | Independence Day
• EPISODE 011 | Independence Day (cont)
• EPISODE 025 | No New Jail feat. Jim Dawson
• And Justice for Some feat. Cam Zorrozua & Virla Spencer

References: 

Season 3 of Serial, where a reporter sits inside a Cleveland courtroom to highlight the ins and outs of the criminal legal system. (It’s worth a listen, we promise)

Today we’re talking about productive disagreements: why we need them, what they look like and how to have them. 

It’s not whether or not we agree or disagree that is the issue, but how we do it and how we teach the next generations how they can disagree productively and empathetically. 

Meg and Ingrid talk about some of our first experiences with disagreements from a developmental perspective: toddlers who disagree with their parents on eating their peas or going to bed, kids who disagree with their classmates that pink is the best when they really like yellow, and teenagers who disagree with their parents that 9 p.m. is a reasonable curfew.

What we learn at a developmental level at those ages– what our parents teach us on how much our voice matters and how to have empathy– shapes how we approach disagreements on much bigger issues when we’re older. It shapes if we feel safe disagreeing with others or if we feel safe going against the grain. 

Disagreement is a fundamental part of our government and democracy. And our ability to disagree directly correlates with our ability to advocate. 

To be clear: we’re not ever saying that people’s humanity is up for disagreement. Nor are we saying that people of marginalized communities and identities need to be doing this work or subject themselves to being the object of someone’s anger. It’s those in the dominant culture– white, cisgender folks– who’s responsibility it is to be leading this bigger change.

Meg and Ingrid talk about a few ways to do this on a micro level. Here are a few, but be sure to listen to the episode to get the full picture:

• Teach your children how to disagree safely and hold space for disagreements. 
• Start monitoring your own physical and emotional reactions to things you disagree with.
• Start small, with people you already feel safe with. 
• Take a pause if you start to recognize deregulation in your body.

References: 

“The Dying Art of Disagreement” by neo-conservative Bret Stevens https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/24/opinion/dying-art-of-disagreement.html

Braving the Wilderness by Brene Brown https://brenebrown.com/book/braving-the-wilderness/

RANGE of Care is a series of conversations on the intersections between mental health, the biology of human emotion, our bodies response and the social, cultural and political happenings in our communities. It’s hosted by Meg Curtain Rey-Bear, a Spokane psychotherapist, and Ingrid Price, a Spokane child psychotherapist. Luke usually chimes in too because he can’t help himself. 

You can support RANGE by becoming a member by going to rangemedia.co and clicking the subscribe link.

Happy birthday to us! Is that weird to say? We hope not because we’re excited to still be going strong a whole TWO years after Luke decided to start a podcast in his attic.

We asked you, dear readers/listeners, to send us your questions for our very first reader mailbag– and you all delivered!

We got questions about wildfires, climate change, county commissioners, the housing market, crime, and a lot more. We did our best to answer as many as we could in the time we had, but some will need their own original reporting.

In this episode, we also shared with you what’s been going on with RANGE, formally introduced our Audience and Membership Editor Valerie Osier and what the heck she does, and told you all about our hopes and dreams for this fledgling publication.

Additional reading/listening:

• Agtastrophe
• The More Climate Changes
• Faith Some More feat. Chris Bovey and Bryce Neusse
• Housing in Crisis feat. Terri Anderson
• House Money feat. Ben Stuckart

This week on the pod, we talk to Deb Conklin, former Clallam County Prosecutor and current pastor of two churches in Spokane, Liberty Park Methodist in Perry and St. Paul’s United Methodist in West Central. In her almost 25 years as a pastor, Deb has also served rural congregations in Deer Park, Davenport and Rosalia.

That’s the sort of resume that Deb had been on our list of people to talk to for RANGE because of her justice work in Spokane, and she got bumped to the front of the queue when she declared her intention late last week to run for Spokane County Prosecutor as a non-partisan candidate.

We discussed competing models of justice between retributive and restorative theories of justice, and beyond that, you’ll also hear some pretty big differences between how Deb was trained as a prosecutor – only charging people with crimes you’re certain you can get convictions on – and the way we’re used to we’re used to hearing prosecutorial decisions being made in Spokane. If you think back to our Bail Project episodes and the episode with Cam Zorrozua and Virla Spencer, of the Way to Justice, you’ll remember those advocates talking about prosecutors throwing every charge possible at an accused person as a way of heightening bail and heightening pressure to take a plea.

Take a listen and let us know what you think of our first candidate interview.

Poet, Spark Central Executive Director and general purpose badass Brooke Matson joins Luke and special co-host Elissa Ball to discuss the historic (and current) stigma around ADHD and the steps individuals and (hopefully, some day) society itself can take to reimagine and reframe day-to-day life to help people harness and come to love their unique brains, and the tremendous drive for experimentation and incandescent creativity they're capable of, if given the space to flourish.

Brooke's recent TEDxSpokane talk is a great primer for this episode.

• “ADHD Redefined | Brooke Matson | TEDxSpokane”

If you want to support Spark Central, April 15th is “Amplify Us,” Spark Central’s annual salon and benefit show. This year’s gala will be a hybrid online and in-person event held at The Knitting Factory. The evening features an interview with best-selling author Jess Walter and a silent auction, plus live musical performances by T.S. The Solution, Atari Ferrari, and other music acts — including one of Spark’s own Girls Rock Lab bands.  

How in the world do we unpack from a pandemic? It's an important question during a profoundly important time as the world contemplates decisions that when made, will once again shift the ground beneath our feet. 

“We are tired of change. We are pandemic fatigued, we crave predictability, we want connection unfettered by mandates and limitations. We want to be done. But if the question is, how in the world is everyone at the same time unpack from a pandemic? Then the answer is they don't,” says RANGE of Care host and psychotherapist Meg Curtain Rey-Bear. 

Meg and Ingrid gather again to chat through this endless pandemic, chronic trauma, how to build resiliency, and the journey back: what happens for all of us when the world starts lifting mandates and shifting from pandemic to endemic. 

They also talk about how adults with kids and teens, who have had crucial developmental moments interrupted for the past two years, might help hold space for processing this pandemic.

This is RANGE of Care, a series of conversations exploring the intersections of our mental health, the biology of human emotion, our body's responses, and the social, cultural, political and environmental happenings in our communities. It’s hosted by Meg Curtain Rey-Bear, co-owner of Wellness Therapy Spokane and a longtime mental health advocate. Meg is joined by Ingrid Price, child psychotherapist and owner of the Giving Tree Wellness. Luke occasionally chimes in too.

If you’re about to be evicted in Washington state, what rights do you have? Luke talks to Heidi Groover, who is the real estate reporter for the Seattle Times, about a story she wrote last October about tenant protections in Washington state. These protections give low-income people facing eviction the right to an attorney. 

This is a first of its kind state law anywhere in the United States and Heidi walks us through how these protections are supposed to work. 

• A landlord can’t file an eviction until they have offered a tenant a chance at mediation through an Eviction Resolution Program with a “reasonable repayment plan.” This program can help connect the tenant with rental assistance programs too. 
• If the case makes it to court, the tenant has the right to an attorney even if they can’t afford one. 

Most importantly, if you are a renter and need If you need help staying in your home, contact the Tenants Union of Washington.