Ritual4Return is committed to establishing and supporting homecoming rites of passage as a regular cultural practice in the United States as a means to nurture the physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, and civic restoration of human beings returning home after incarceration

We envision Ritual4Return as a regular part of the homecoming process for returning citizens around the country. We imagine a world in which the healing and integration experienced by returning citizens through rituals of return leads to the healing of families and communities, the end of mass incarceration, the abolition of prisons, and the restoration of our shared humanity.

• We value the knowledge and lived experiences of those directly affected by the criminal justice system. We believe they are most qualified to lead the movement to abolish mass incarceration and revolutionize our society’s ideas about justice.
• We value cultural practice and understand that it must live at the heart of the social movement to end mass incarceration. Cultural practice brings people together, fosters community-building, fuels hope, excites the imagination, and nurtures the spirit.
• We value diversity and inclusion for their roles in strengthening our community. Intentionally cultivating training groups and audiences from different backgrounds and with different values, beliefs, and lived experiences, and inviting all to share and participate, is how we work to increase empathy and understanding, encourage connection, and advance the work to end mass incarceration.
• We value equity, and hold ourselves and our community accountable to the ongoing process of building relationships and practices that are grounded in justice, dignity, and love.
• We value honesty in our relationships with others, but above all else in our dealings with ourselves. We believe that truthful self-examination is a powerful aspect of healing and community repair.
• We value every person’s innate artistry. We believe artistry is the birthright of every human being. Sparking and supporting the imaginations of formerly incarcerated people in visioning alternative futures and teaching them to wield the tools to build such futures, is central to healing and to building the movement to end mass incarceration.
• We value boldness, imagination, and risk. In the face of decades of policy failure and limited success in movement building to end mass incarceration, boldness, imagination, and risk are required to end mass incarceration.
• We value the expression of the full and awesome range of our humanity, and believe it is essential to counteracting the traumatizing effects of dehumanization. We believe that ending mass incarceration requires expanding beyond rational, logical, linear, and mental modes of knowing to include the emotional, symbolic, circular, imaginative, somatic and embodied.
• We value participatory democratic culture. Solving the most pressing problems, including mass incarceration, impels us to develop the tools of participatory democratic culture, including dialogue, storytelling, listening, compromise, imagination, empathy, deliberative decision making, and collective problem solving.
• We value love as a real and animating force in the universe with the power to heal on all levels, from the individual to the global. We believe love must be cultivated, encouraged, and expressed. Being in community, feeling connected, making art, and the experience of being seen and heard all allow for love to emerge and for healing to occur.