Restorative Justice: A Fresh Look at Justice
I want to share a few stories with you today that are about real people and the impact of our criminal justice system on their lives.
We start, of course, with the story of the victims, and we have come to believe that what victims need is retribution and the arrest, conviction and incarceration of the perpetrator and once this is accomplished, we have justice. Or do we?
In reality the victims of violence are many and include partners and spouses, children, and the community, and they all live with the aftermath every day. And often the trauma is exacerbated by the loss of the incarcerated family member – often for non-violent offences, and this is particularly difficult when this family member was the bread-winner, spouse/partner, parent or caretaker. And our criminal justice system has no answer for this trauma.
I know a black boy who lost his father to a conviction on drug charges, and whose trauma around this led to emotional outbursts at school, behavior problems, and these led to removal from classes, and eventually removal from his school and now he is a young man among many such young black men who are on the school to prison pipeline, their chances of incarceration are roughly 1 in 3. Our notions of justice do not consider the impact of his father’s incarceration on him and the rest of his family.
I know a black woman, whose father lived with what was known as Asperger’s Syndrome and is now known as Autism Spectrum Disorder. This impaired his judgement and that resulted in his becoming involved in a theft resulting in his arrest, felony conviction and incarceration. He was the bread-winner in his family and his incarceration led the family into poverty and welfare. His then 14-year-old daughter, who loved and depended on him, had to visit him in prison, see him in an orange suit, shackled in chains, she suffered panic attacks each time she entered the prison walls. His disability did not enter into the picture as material to his criminal activity and the impact on his young daughter, and their family, was of course not weighed in the balance.
The stories go on and on, and the trauma and harm done bleeds out to harm victims, the accused, sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, spouses and partners, and community – all of us are impacted by this. And of course, we have been socialized to believe that the sole accountability for this harm lies with the accused – if only they would just behave. The circumstances leading to the offense don’t matter and the impact of our criminal justice system is seen as inevitable and deserved. We need to examine this system.
There is another possibility – transformative justice – sometimes referred to as restorative justice, a system and way of handling harm that considers what it would take to restore safety and security and wholeness for everyone involved.
And before we can bring transformative justice into our society we have to be willing to fully consider the tremendous harm our current system of justice inflicts on all of us.
We have to be willing to fully consider that justice is not served by a system that measures success by the number arrests and convictions and incarcerations it accumulates and instead of the number of human beings restored to safety and security and wholeness.
We have to be willing to consider another kind of justice that addresses trauma more broadly, yes, considers the impact of losing a father on a boy who needs him, on the father struggling with disability, somehow.
Maybe we can all ask ourselves what price we all pay when we ignore these issues and what our responsibilities are?
Resources:
Danielle Sered – Until We Reckon
Michelle Alexander – The New Jim Crow
Mariame Kaba – We do this til we free us