Photo Credit: Free the People
How to Love Your Enemy Review
How to Love Your Enemy is an excellent, relevant, and timely 43-minute documentary that takes us to Longmont, Colorado where restorative justice is used as an alternative to incarceration. In cases where both the responsible party and the crime victim consent to it, a challenging yet rewarding restorative justice process is used that centers accountability, cooperation, and healing.
As our nation, urged by the Black Lives Matter movement, moves towards adopting nonviolent and just forms of community policing and criminal justice, this documentary provides a successful example of how restorative justice has reduced recidivism rates, decreased community violence, and provided healing to both crime victims and responsible parties. How to Love Your Enemy provides both a vision and a template for how our communities can create a more humane and effective criminal justice system.
Produced by Free the People and co-directed by Sam Martin and Matt Battaglia, How to Love Your Enemy won Best Feature and Best Director at the Front Range Film Festival.
By posting the documentary on YouTube, Free the People share their work using a gift economy. To thank them for their gift of time and talents to enrich our lives, please consider giving them a donation at FreeThePeople.org.
Review by Mindfulness Teacher Freeman.
Additional Resources:
• Longmont Community Justice Partnership