Possibilities & Challenges of Restorative Justice

               A book ostensibly about prisons, Are Prisons Obsolete? instead highlights how prisons are really the natural result of a story of self/world that characterizes modernity: one of individualism and control (Davis, 2003; Jenkins, 2006). What Angela Davis (2003) calls for then is not prison reform, or even a transformation of the prison system alone, but the transformation of every dimension of our society and the paradigm that underlies it. Like prison abolition, restorative justice is about a lot more than dealing with crime (Davis, 2019). It is about tending to psychological needs, social relations, and social systems in ways that generate healing, empathy, and an overall sense of interdependence that recognizes the shared fates of all, instead of cultivating individualism, selfishness and competition (Davis, 2019).

         Restorative justice asks why harm was committed (Zehr, 2002). In modern society, the deep answer is likely oppressive conditions such as racism, capitalism and poor education that lead too often to fatalism, greediness, desperation, and violence. It is easy to see, and commonly understood, that a lack of material resources leads to crime. Michael Lerner (1996) argues that spiritual resources – such as the human need for meaning, recognition and nurturance – are equally as important as economic needs, and their unfulfillment also leads to violence. Restorative justice should address not only the systems of power that cause material dispossession, but also how those systems cause spiritual dispossession and allow the suppression of unmet psychological needs.

         Fania Davis’ personal journey of seeking justice was an archetypal one in which she swung from the warrior archetype, embodied in her role as a civil rights litigator, into a balance between a warrior stance and a healer stance, in which more intuitive capacities and attention to trauma came to the fore (Davis, 2019). Our systems of justice must recognize our full humanness – our demands for justice, and also our need for repair and meaning. Louise Thompson of the Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne, describes their restorative justice efforts: “We bring these people back down to reality and back down to earth, make them realize that life is so much more meaningful than having money to buy cars and clothes. You have to believe there there’s somebody spiritual over you” (Mirsky 2004, p. 2). Restorative justice is about accessing a deeper meaning and sense of connection, from which repair and mitigation of harm comes naturally.

                Western culture is centered around scientific understandings of reality that foreclose meaning and posit that without control, we’d each maximize our own self-interest to the peril of those around us; they are centered around the assumption that humans are, by nature, bad (Jenkins, 2006). Indigenous understandings instead see humans as intrinsically good, and any missteps of the individual to be reflections of wider social misalignments (Davis, 2019). The current criminal justice system reflects this bias, punishing individuals instead of seeking relational answers.

                Restorative justice represents not just an opportunity to repair harm, but to repair this foundational delusion of the Western paradigm: that we are fundamentally discrete and separate selves. “African justice making, rather than an occasion to inflict punishment, is an opportunity to teach, learn, reemphasize social values, and reaffirm the bonds of our inherent interrelatedness” (Davis 2019, p. 23). Restorative justice is not just a system of justice, but what Lerner calls (1996) “a politics of meaning” in which victims and perpetrators together with their communities, can recognize and feed interbeing.

                A challenge of restorative justice in this country is just how individualized American culture is. It makes sense that restorative justice would be practiced in native communities and black communities both because it is a practice grounded in Indigenous wisdom and also because those groups have retained a sense of community that is missing in many sectors of society. This separation is even more apparent across race and class lines (Roche, 2006). The liberal context of rights, which are simply given (and too often withheld), is starkly different than a culture of mutual obligation (Mitchell, 2018). Just as many Americans would rather pay a grocery store than grow their own food, I imagine most would rather leave the tough work of responding to harm to someone else, especially those privileged by the system. Ironically, the very meaning and sense of community that many long for is possible through just such initiatives. As Wendell Berry says in his poem A Vision – its hardship is its possibility. 

References

Davis, A. (2003). Are Prisons Obsolete?. Seven Stories Press.

Davis, F. (2019). The Little Book of Race and Restorative Justice. Good Books.

Jenkins, M . (2006). Gullah Island dispute resolution: An example of Afrocentric restorative

justice. Journal of Black Studies, 37(2), 299-319.

 

Lerner, M. (1996). The Politics of Meaning. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.

 

Mirsky, L. (2004). Restorative justice practices of Native Americans, First Nation and other

indigenous people of North America, Part I. Bethelem, PA: International Institute for Restorative Practices. "http://www.iirp.org/article_detail.php?article_id=NDA1 " http://www.iirp.org/article_detail.php?article_id=NDA1

 

Mitchell, S. (2018). Sacred Instructions. North Atlantic Books.

 

Roche, D. (2006). Dimensions of restorative justice. Journal of Social Issues, 62(2), 217-238.

 

Zehr, H. (2002). The Little Book of Restorative Justice. Good Books.