Against Abolition, Against Reform: The Case for a Transformational Vision of Restorative Justice

The responses gathered here illuminate one of the central purposes of Restorative Justice and Lived Religion: to develop an account of how restorative justice has emerged as a transformational social movement, and what such a movement can do to address harms that are not merely perpetuated by one individual against another but reproduced by an entire “justice” system. To accomplish this, I explore the ways that several lived restorative justice initiatives on the South and West sides of Chicago both resist, but also transformatively engage, the criminal legal system. In light of this focus, in the first part of this response, I return to the controversy among contemporary restorative justice practitioners over the ability—or alleged inability—of restorative justice to transform systemic injustices (with specific attention to the context of U.S. mass incarceration). I reiterate that restorative justice must be understood holistically, taking into account what I argue are its distinctive moral and spiritual dynamics. Doing so, I contend, allows us to overcome a reform vs. abolition dichotomy that has emerged in scholarship and activism. In the second part of this response, I reflect on the colonial and racial dynamics that undergird work in the scholarly community’s restorative justice and lived religion spaces.

Beyond the Reform vs. Abolition Dichotomy

To reiterate an insight shared by the respondents in this symposium, I begin by affirming that justice must be pursued at all levels and in all forms. This process requires transforming individuals through practices that ennoble and empower; transforming communities through cultivating healthy, just, and sustainable relationships; and transforming systems and structures. I agree with Professor Peters’s point that focusing on transformation should not overlook the importance of revolutionary change. However, it should also recognize the vital role played by reform efforts, which are often dismissed by those who advocate solely for revolutionary change.

The logic of revolution also has its limits, and fixation upon that logic has its dangers. The culture and legal wars over abortion to which Peters points analogically are acutely instructive on the point.  The prevailing belief has been that the revolution in reproductive health rights effected by Roe vs. Wade, with its status as a near fifty-year established precedent, could only be lost by a counter-revolutionary overturning of that ruling. It is arguable that precisely such fixation upon this revolutionary logic made the reproductive health rights movement ripe for ambush by what was, in fact, cumulative transformation built gradually over decades by the anti-abortion movement in stark contrast to revolutionary happenstance. As a result, when Roe vs. Wade was actually reversed it came in the wake of the “million cuts” against reproductive health rights that occurred over decades of slowly cultivated anti-abortion ideology, cultural movement-building, and, perhaps most importantly, institution building and transformation (for example, the invention, rooting, and expansion of the Federalist Society starting in the early 1980s, ultimately making possible capture of the Supreme Court itself). The logic of transformation, by contrast, helps us see how the anti-abortion movement effected gradual transition in its strategic developments of “fetal personhood” and judicial battlegrounds that eventually resulted in Roe vs. Wade being overturned as a tipping point (rather than revolutionary endpoint). This movement now turns its efforts to the States.[1]  The reproductive health rights movement will need to overcome the limitations of the logic of revolution and counter-revolution if it is to successfully counter these developments.

The logic of revolution also has its limits, and fixation upon that logic has its dangers.

I argue that a transformational social movement for restorative justice must heighten the contradiction between those who believe that only piecemeal reforms of the current criminal legal system are sufficient and those activists who argue that the entire criminal justice system should be abolished in a revolutionary way. This illuminates what I call the “reform/abolition” dichotomy. This dichotomy has become a major obstacle for many who teach about and work against the U.S. prison-industrial complex. A central goal of my book is to mediate this rigid opposition.

In contrast to those who portray restorative justice as strictly “interpersonal” and then call for revolutionary change in opposition to it, I argue that the capacity to counter structural and cultural violence is intrinsic to restorative justice when it is holistically understood and practiced. More specifically, I suggest that restorative justice has the capacity to transform structural and cultural violence in and through the cultivation of healthy and just relationships (rather than as an adjunct, after, or separate from that cultivation).

Approached holistically, restorative justice is a theory of justice with concrete practices that foster moral and spiritual forms of association between people. This approach rejects the view that restorative justice is a “tool in a tool kit” to help mediate conflict. Instead, it recognizes that restorative justice offers a framework for envisioning and cultivating an integrated approach to individual agency, life together in community, policy and legal change, and society more broadly.

Many actors in the system (judges, attorneys, and policymakers) recognize how unsustainable and destructive it is to all the people it enmeshes. Many of them are searching for ways to divert young people and families out of the system. Their efforts enable practitioners implementing diversions to pursue aims that might differ from those of the system. This happens in part through the conceptualization and implementation of a culture of restorative justice in particular neighborhoods and, gradually, across wider sections of U.S. society. In the book, I also offer examples of legislative and policy changes achieved by restorative justice proponents. For example, Julie Anderson led a mothers’ peacemaking circle and others in a relentless effort to pass state legislation abolishing the mandatory sentencing of juveniles to life without the possibility of parole (see chap. 11, 130–51).

The aim of such work is not to make the system as it exists kinder, more humane, and/or more palatable. It is rather to weave together and expand upward and outward transformed understandings of justice; it is to stitch together practices, initiatives, and community centers that are community-based and community-led to address harms and needs and to enact a constructive and reparative form of accountability. The key point I make in my book is that the daily, grinding, sometimes piecemeal work that is often diminished or dismissed as “reform”—when built upward and outward strategically over time—can contribute vitally to the work of transformation (though these are not sufficient on their own). Revolutionary ideals, energy, and utopian aspirations also can call and/or push the transformational process forward to its highest ideals and aspirations (though, in isolation, they are often un-pragmatic, alienating to needed third-party allies and potential collaborators, and fall prey to self-sabotage).  And thus the selective examples Peters holds up from my book only skim the surface of the case for transformation that I build there, and the numerous other examples I offer of the work of Chicago’s restorative justice community that accumulate in transformational potential and impact. Indeed, the policy vs. ideology account Peters sets forth is part of the problem. Sustained and sustainable transformation—and how to “change it all”—must be all of the above. It must occur in cumulative change through organizing people and communities around small then increasingly larger issues and goals. It must build up over time in changes in policy and law. It must occur in institutional changes and transformation of practices, as well as culture. It must seep into and come to pervade widely shared commonsense understandings. Each of these is occurring in the movement that I document in my book, and need to be recognized and understood for the ways they interweave and work together. My purpose in building this case is to counter the impulse to limit our imagination to either reform or abolition and to chart a more constructive path forward. This is a point to which James Hill’s response speaks powerfully.

Coloniality and Restorative Justice

Frantz Fanon found colonized intellectuals despicable. These were intellectuals who came from, lived among, and counted themselves among those who had been oppressed. Even in their efforts to somehow escape the colonial discursive regime that suffused their thinking, they maintained its hegemony. It is precisely this sense that James Hill’s meditation so instructively illuminates about the methodological and critical dimensions of my book. He illuminates the key methodological point of my book—namely, that the entirety of academia and “modern scholarship” is a discursive regime shot through with dynamics of its own self-fixation. Of course, this includes Black Theory and Black academic thinking as well. Black Theory (including Black lived religion) is not “outside” the funhouse, as though it somehow extirpates itself of the very discursive stuff in and through which it has its being. Black theory is a part of academic discourse and thus does not escape its funhouse.

Of course, Fanon did not simply castigate and reject the credentialed, professional academics and theorists who spoke among and on behalf of the colonized. Fanon held out some hope, saying they might—just might—eventually come to “discover the strength of the village assemblies, the power of the people’s commissions and the extraordinary productiveness of neighborhood and section committee meetings” (11). They might, in other words, cease striving to certify their “anti-colonial bona fides,” and open themselves up to what people on the ground actually engaged in resistance are saying, thinking, and doing. Through critical-participatory action research, my book undertakes precisely such work. Indeed, the whole point of Paulo Freire’s work on this point (who’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed drew upon Fanon’s account of praxis by inverting it from violence to love) is that the oppressed do not need an elite class of academics to theorize on their behalf. Through praxis—the use of critical intelligence to reflect upon practice in light of the work they undertake to transform the world—they, in effect, “theorize in passing” for themselves. I explicitly explore and convey this point numerous times throughout my book (Connie Mick’s response—a comparative meditation on her teaching in prison and the peacemaking circles I studied—provides a different, but no less powerful, example of what this can look like). Indeed, time and again, I call on academics to learn to be quiet, listen, and actually learn something in the process of critical participatory action research (the true, and only methodological and theoretical “anchor” in the book). Thus, the examples of “lived religion” I explore emerge from and are exemplified in the nonnegotiable independence yet persistent relationship-building insisted upon and struggled for by the restorative justice initiatives and practitioners themselves. In fact, critical participatory action research compels scholars and researchers to move inductively, so that, again, it is the agency—the praxis—of those with whom we engage, seek to understand, and learn from that orients and inflects the content of our terms. Such an approach is especially challenging for scholars of religion to grasp, let alone put into practice. This is because the theoretical and methodological castles in the air that credentialed scholars of religion formulate and build are just that—professionally credentialed and sanctioned—and thus function in precisely the way that Fanon despised, whatever their color, and however hegemonic or transgressive. Welcome to the funhouse, indeed.  

I call on academics to learn to be quiet, listen, and actually learn something in the process of critical participatory action research (the true, and only methodological and theoretical “anchor” in the book).

What I discovered in my work was that the reality within which the restorative justice practitioners live, move, and act is interspersed and interwoven with ideals (moral and spiritual) that take the form of practices of restorative justice. These are the practices and tools —and, indeed, tradition (as Josh Lupo helpfully points out and Amy Carr illustrates in her response)—through which these people have become—and are becoming—architects of their own liberation. The account of tradition toward which Lupo gestures illuminates that the point of holding up and amplifying examples is not merely to praise and imitate the ideals they embody and practice. It is also to subject those exemplified, embodied ideals to further discussion, deeper understanding, historical and present-day contextualization, and critical exposition. In so doing, it makes them available for further enriched practice and implementation in new circumstances and different, novel contexts. This all stands in the background of the concept of “tradition” Lupo invokes, and it also is at the heart of the concept of “critical praxis” that I rely upon throughout the book. So, portraying the moral and spiritual ideals embodied in the implementation of restorative justice is not simply act of reportage, but rather serves to make them available for further discussion and novel forms of application. These ideals are living and breathing in the bodies, lives, and practices of communities featured throughout the book, rather than static and imprisoned. As such, they are part of a living tradition of ideal-infused practice, and it is critical reflection upon this practice that makes wider structural changes realizable in the long term through further, enriched practical application.

Saturday “Sanctuary”

While I was working, there were many calls to abolish or defund the police. Such calls are an example of ideals imprisoned in rhetoric, with limited traction in practice (beyond protest). To such calls, Fr. Dave Kelly, a central figure in the book, asked, “And then what? What do you propose to put in its place?” Kelly told me again and again that if you speak of defunding the police, you must immediately qualify that with specific, concrete proposals to re-route and re-invest funding in local community settings to underwrite positive, constructive, community-led practices. While they infuse energy, analysis, and a vigilant posture that are valuable, rhetorical appeals to social revolution are not close to enough, not without concrete, practical plans and examples of actual transformation.

An example of transformational justice in practice is a program that a restorative justice community center in Back of the Yards Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation, calls “Saturday Sanction.” This example demonstrates what happens when we listen to those on the ground rather than theorize abstractly from within protected academic spaces. The center started this program at the request of the Cook County juvenile justice system. Probation Department representatives asked them for a program to refer young people in the system to fulfill their community service sentences. Indeed, the name “Saturday Sanction” was assigned by the Probation Department. Yet once placed in the hands of restorative justice practitioners and community members who were building a restorative justice community in Back of the Yards, the transformational possibilities I describe above opened up.

Precious Blood runs the program as anything but a “sanction.” The program is devoted to restoratively oriented relationship building with youth and young adults. The group integrates peacemaking circles for purposes of relationship building, sometimes in response to harm and wrongdoing. But it also takes the young people on day trips across Chicago and the region. In fact, the description of the group’s purposes and activities was so antithetical to “sanctions” that I worried I might have mis-transcribed the name in my initial interviews. In following up with the Director of the center, Fr. Dave Kelly, I asked whether the program was actually named “Saturday Sanctuary,” thinking it meant to convey that the group meetings and activities were a refuge from the various forms of violence that the young people in the group were dealing with. “No,” Kelly replied, “but [sanctuary] would be a good name for it. It was named by Probation [Department] so it was designed [to be a sanction]. But we never used it that way. And we were very forthcoming in telling them, ‘We won’t do that.’” He continued,

For us it’s Saturday engagement. It’s a chance for us to get to know these young people more, and to do something outside of our community. So it would broaden their world. . . . But it’s interesting because . . . the word [‘sanction’] was overwhelmed by what it became. So it’s like ‘sanction”’didn’t mean ‘sanction’ anymore. It was something that kids said, ‘Can I go?,’ ‘Can I do that?’ So it wasn’t punishment, even though the words, by definition . . . that’s what they called it. . . . And I told [the Probation Department representatives] right from the very beginning, because the idea was that rather than locking somebody up, they would send these kids to the [restorative justice] hubs and the organizations would have them paint, or clean, or something. I said, ‘I’m not interested in that. But I will take that young person and strive to build a relationship with them and strive to make them feel like they’re part of the community, and take them out of the neighborhood to let him experience something beyond their ghetto. I will do that.’ And they didn’t buck that. They just said, ‘Okay, well, it’s your program. Do what you want with it.’[2]

Kelly describes an opportunity that Precious Blood embraced to matter-of-factly resist the punitive orientation of the Cook County criminal justice system, even—and perhaps especially—when that system understood itself to be in a “reformist” mode (willing to collaborate with the hubs). The program implemented an altogether different engagement with youth and young adults caught in the system—quite literally transforming the very meaning of the word “sanction” in this context and circumstance. For this opportunity to present itself in the first place, Precious Blood and the other members of the community restorative justice hub network had to be in relationship with actors in “the system” (in this case, the Probation Department, as well as prosecutors and justices across the Cook County juvenile justice system). They had to be willing to talk and work with them, rather than maintain a strictly rejective, oppositional stance toward the state actors and representatives. It is, however, in their explicit, firm refusal to cooperate with the punitive interests and purposes of the system, and in their insistence that they remain free of the system’s dictates, that resistance and constructive transformation could merge in and through relationship building. Indeed, it was the trust and reliability that certain system representatives felt in their relationships with Precious Blood that led Probation administrators to hand the program over entirely to the discretion of Precious Blood, and ultimately say, “Okay, well, it’s your program. Do what you want with it.”

Operating at the grassroots level within neighborhood settings through holistic self-sufficiency and community building, as well as advocating for policy and legal reforms to create spaces of relative self-determination that are strategically resistant to state dominance—while still engaging with and relating to actors within the state—this approach mediates between the real and the ideal. These practices of restorative justice aim to avoid dictatorial control by the justice system itself, while also remaining open to collaboration with actors within that system who are willing to engage restoratively and to acknowledge and respect the integrity of restorative justice norms and practices. The key difference is that the latter works within the constitutional, liberal-democratic context to challenge and transform it, rather than trying to (somehow) leap outside it.

[1] See, for example, Mary Ziegler, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate  and Personhood: The New Civil War over Reproduction.

[2] Kelly, interview.