In Restorative Justice and Lived Religion, Jason Springs is deeply invested in establishing that restorative justice is a strategy that can transform the systemic injustice of America’s carceral system. He builds his case by analyzing a variety of activities that restorative justice advocates pursue in their work in and around Chicago. While all of the strategies that he describes are deeply intentional, they are not always focused directly on facilitating systemic or structural change. This begs the question then of how to define transformation.
Strategies for Change
Working to theorize the dialectical relationship between individual moral and theological formation (virtue ethics) and transformational structural change that leads toward justice (social ethics), I have been challenged to think concretely about the goals and efficacy of different types of strategies that religious social ethicists and activists pursue in our work for social change. I think these categories bear on how Springs thinks about the transformative potential of restorative justice. I have categorized three types of strategies—reform, transform, and revolution—for pursuing social change. The purpose of naming and describing these different categories is not to suggest that they exist in any type of hierarchy of importance (or virtue) but to recognize that they are distinct and that they do different kinds of work.
Reform is the work of procedural change. It engages in incremental change that can be transformational for individuals, but it does not effect systemic change. Examples of reform work or procedural change include the incredible work that members of CRIIC (Communities and Relatives of Illinois’ Incarcerated Children) engaged in to effect the significant reforms that Springs describes in the book:
- Changing the number of visits for inmates across Illinois from four to seven a month
- Resisting replacing in-person visits with virtual visits
- Changing the predatory pricing of vending machines during visits
- Fighting the arbitrary exclusion of family visitors on visit days
To be clear, these reforms were enormous wins that changed the quality of life for the CRIIC members and for their incarcerated children and these wins should be celebrated. Reform is an essential element of social change that addresses the immediate injustices that make life challenging on a day-to-day basis. But reform rarely touches the structural injustices that shape our world. They make the systems a little more humane or bearable, but they don’t fundamentally change the systems.
Transformational change, on the other hand, is that work of social change that is targeted directly at changing the very structures that shape our social life: the carceral system, the education system, the funding of elections, etc. “Zero tolerance” and “three strikes” are examples of policies that marked a transformational change (albeit a negative one!) in the carceral system in the US in the 1980s. Such change led to the current punitive, racialized policing that Michelle Alexander has labeled “the New Jim Crow.” Structural change in the carceral system would represent changes that did more than make the lives of inmates more humane, it would change the policies that make it easier for innocent people to plead guilty, or equalize the penalties for crack cocaine and powder cocaine, or eliminate the “Broken Windows” and “Stop and Frisk” policing that dominate the streets of urban America.
At the same time, it will be almost impossible to achieve the kind of transformative structural change that restorative justice seeks without also recognizing the importance of revolutionary change. Revolutionary change is focused on ideological or worldview change and it is virtually impossible to imagine moving beyond the “Broken Window” or “Stop and Frisk” policies until we work to unlearn and defang the deeply violent ideologies of White supremacy, patriarchy, and misogyny that are the undercurrent and lifeblood that shape not only our carceral system but also the public who tolerates, supports, and encourages it. This kind of revolutionary ideological change is the kind of change imagined by the most radical branches of the prison abolition movement who imagine a world where incarceration as justice is anathema. Instead, their vision is for a world that sees and values the humanity and human rights of all people and seeks to address problems of crime through rehabilitation, education, restorative justice, and the building of communities of justice and peace. For this kind of deep revolutionary ideological change we would need to move from a retributive justice model to a restorative justice model and this requires nothing less than a complete ideological shift and a concomittant structural reconfiguring of our economic and social relationships to reflect a world in which people have access to the education, jobs, wages, healthcare, housing, and other basic social needs to build lives of meaning and purpose.
Let me shift now to parallels in my own work with reproductive justice to further illustrate the point of why ideological change is necessary and how and why theology and religious communities are essential to long-term successful social change.
Abortion & Reproductive Justice
People concerned with issues of reproductive health, rights, and justice face a hegemonic ideology that functions similarly to the way retributive justice works in relation to the carceral system. Namely, we live in a country where abortion has been demonized, along with the people who have them. It is a country deeply shaped by an ideology of justification that believes abortion is immoral and therefore women must justify their desire to end a pregnancy. This hegemonic worldview of justification shapes how we think and talk about abortion in the US and is reflected in the ubiquitous polls that ask if people think abortion should be legal always, never, or under “certain circumstances”—those circumstances primarily representing what are considered to be the morally acceptable justifications for ending a pregnancy. I call these the PRIM reasons: prenatal health, rape, incest, and mother’s life. PRIM abortions represent roughly one-quarter of abortions, meaning 75% of abortions in the US are culturally condemned by an ideology of justification brought to us by misogynist and patriarchal interpretations of Christianity.
In other words, absent misogynist interpretations of Christianity that teleologically women are to be wives and mothers and the relatively recent invention of fetal personhood—there is no foundation for requiring people to justify their desire to end a pregnancy. This ideology of justification not only undergirds how we think and talk about abortion in the country, it impacts our ability to build a culture rooted in reproductive justice.
Early strategies to decriminalize abortion in the 1960s took two different tacks: repeal or reform.
The reform approach sought to rewrite the statues to decriminalize and open up access to abortion care. And while Roe made abortion legal nationally through the point of viability, the incremental nature of Roe’s impact was evident in its vulnerability to successive waves of anti-abortion reforms that chipped away at people’s access to abortion care. This began almost immediately after Roe was implemented in 1973 when two years later the Hyde amendment was passed. This amendment prohibited government funding for abortion, making abortion access more difficult and even impossible for economically vulnerable women, many of whom were young and/or BIPOC. The precarity of the reform approach became increasingly obvious through the 2010’s as Targeted Restrictions on Abortion Provider (TRAP) laws and abortion bans began to be passed across the country, ultimately laying the groundwork for the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe.
The repeal approach sought to provide longer lasting structural change around the policing of women’s sexuality and women’s reproductive autonomy by taking the issue out of the legal system entirely. The argument of those who took this approach was rooted in an human rights approach, which held that women have basic human rights that must be respected, including the right to bodily autonomy and the right to make decisions about whether and when they will bear children. Taking abortion out of the legislative sphere entirely would have had the transformational structural impact of placing abortion back in the sphere of health care where it belongs.
Ultimately, however, the problem that we face with regards to abortion is not one that can be solved either by procedural changes (reform) or structural changes (transform) because as long as we live in a culture that marks abortion as sin, tragedy, and death, not only will abortion be vulnerable to recriminalization, people having abortions will be subject to shaming, stigma, and the public violence of forced pregnancy and death.
Unless and until we reject the idea that abortion is murder and dismantle the justification framework that supports it, not only will we continue to fight about where to draw the legislative line about abortion, but we will also fail to move beyond the profound stigma associated with abortion. A stigma that not only allows for things like abortion bans to pass but that also fosters the internalized stigma and a culture of silence and shame associated with abortion. Building the kind of deep ideological and revolutionary change needed to move toward reproductive justice requires reimagining our theological understanding of pregnancy, abortion, and parenting. It is only when we replace the justification ideology with a worldview that reflects a commitment to reproductive justice that we will know we live in a society that values people equally and that respects that individuals are capable of managing their reproductive power with dignity and grace.
Conclusion
Similarly, we cannot trust that any progress we make on reforming laws related to inmates or policing or sentencing are secure when we continue to live under an ideology of retributive justice. Similar concerns to the ones I outline about abortion access would apply if we were able to repeal the “Broken Windows” and “Stop and Frisk” approaches to policing. What is revolutionary about restorative justice is that it seeks a complete shift in the ideological foundation of how we think about crime, harm, community, safety, and the common good. So, yes, the work of restorative justice can and does focus on transforming the hearts and lives of individuals and on transforming the material structures of the prison-industrial complex. But the true success of the movement will only come when the principles, values, and practices of restorative justice replace those of retributive justice. That is what revolutionary ethics looks like.
