Restorative Justice and Lived Religion: Transforming Mass Incarceration in Chicago by Jason Springs takes Back of the Yards Chicago as its primary setting, a place with an exceptionally high incarceration and poverty rate. As Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson says, “In too many places, the opposite of poverty is not wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice” (17). In a world of plenty, the presence of poverty signals the presence of injustice. Poverty is both a cause and a consequence of incarceration. While this is a thoroughly academic book that theorizes and argues that restorative justice practices enact justice, it is also a book about the people who teach us how to do that work. Through his description of the Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation work, Springs invites readers to visit a place with high poverty and low justice populated by people with immeasurable vision and love. Springs helps us see how transformation happens through critical participatory action research and deep, empathetic listening.
Springs includes the voice of critics of restorative justice from the beginning to the end of the book. The power and place of restorative justice in our world today, he establishes, is a living question and we live in a critical moment for determining how it can play a role in transforming mass incarceration across the United States. He outlines critical debates related to restorative justice and mass incarceration: interpersonal versus systemic transformation, religious versus spiritual frameworks, and prison abolition versus prison reform. He gives all positions careful attention while showing that restorative justice has often been misrepresented by its critics.
Teaching Justice Inside and Out
I teach a course inside the Westville Correctional Facility, a 3,400-bed Indiana state men’s prison. Every Friday, I take University of Notre Dame students into the prison to learn with incarcerated men and corrections staff in a course called “Poverty and Justice: Inside-Out.” This book prompted me to consider how this program fits into the ecosystem of restorative justice.
One day in this class, one of the younger incarcerated students arrived with his blaze orange synthetic knit hat pulled way down on one side. But he could not pull that hat down far enough to hide his huge black eye. He was late and sat quickly between two outside Notre Dame students. The students sit in a circle alternating between those who live inside and outside the prison so that they can get to know each other. They are not allowed to touch one another in any way. All exchange of materials has to go through me, so there’s a spoke system with the instructor in the center. The inefficiencies in the system are incredibly irritating—and enlightening. I have these tiny moments throughout the day where I get to look at each student and exchange a few words. I savor those opportunities to connect.
In a world of plenty, the presence of poverty signals the presence of injustice. Poverty is both a cause and a consequence of incarceration.
This student was agitated and I was deciding how I should address him as I handed him materials. I never ask how an inside student’s week has been going. I assume it hasn’t been going great. In these situations, I try to focus on the present. So that day, I said what I always said, “It’s good to see you. I’m glad you’re here.”
He paused to see if I was going to ask the obvious question or demand a story. I did not. Then he said, “Shit happens.” I said, “Yep, shit happens.” And I moved along. He relaxed and participated fully in class. His cap gradually moved back up to normal position.
This image came to me when I read Springs’s description of our current justice system as retributive, a system that “isolates and incapacitates,” that prescribes “an eye for an eye” (79). In this case, an eye was the literal payment for some transaction in the underground economy of the prison, which functions a lot like the above-ground economy in that it extracts and exploits us until we are broke and broken. Oppression replicates oppression.
In his description of the Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation neighborhood, Springs notes that this is the same place Upton Sinclair exposes in his muckraking 1906 book The Jungle. Springs says Sinclair describes the “squalor of impoverished life” there, and those of us who know that area today might say that in some ways that description still applies (29). I assign The Jungle to my Inside-Out class so that they can connect the injustices described centuries ago to what they have observed and experienced in their own lives in that same region. The phantom of systemic injustice emerges as something very real and tangible through their recognition of these historic continuities. Sinclair writes, “There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside. And there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside” (235). For some people, the persistence of poverty and injustice means that being inside or being outside a physical prison isn’t that different.
And to complete this class picture, I will share that another young inside student in that class had lost an eye entirely. His wound was older and had healed, physically anyway. I cannot help but think that these men bore the physical scars of the psychological wounds we inflict through our current justice system, which is blind to the pain it causes.
Inside-Out Courses as Restorative Justice?
I don’t know if Inside-Out courses would be considered pure models of restorative justice, but they are certainly informed by it. While Inside-Out trains us to teach in circles and build community, it also mandates that we not contact the inside students after our class ends. Relatedly, Springs notes, “The criminal justice system operates by severing relationships. This is one of its structural features” (56). This Inside-Out rule, which is in place for valid reasons—protecting confidentiality of inside and outside students so that there is no question that we are there purely for academic purposes—thus seems to run counter to that goal of building and maintaining relationships.
Still, somehow, I do think this course works toward that restorative justice goal of humanizing all participants. It operates at the individual level, of course, so it might not achieve the systemic transformation Springs argues is key to restorative justice. But I think it is in the right orbit. Let me make the case for its relevance to Springs’s vision for restorative justice by reflecting on a recent change made to the course.
During the Spring 2025 semester, my class included 8 Notre Dame undergraduates, 4 Notre Dame Law students (at least two of whom want to be prosecutors), 9 incarcerated men, and 4 corrections staff. This was the first time that corrections staff were included in a Westville Inside-Out course. It is a rare exception to how Inside-Out classes are organized anywhere. The founder of Inside-Out cautioned me about taking this approach.
Through his description of the Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation work, Springs invites readers to visit a place with high poverty and low justice populated by people with immeasurable vision and love.
But I did so at the request of the Deputy Warden of Westville and the Director of Prison Education for the Indiana Department of Corrections, key partners for all the Notre Dame Prison Education Programs. We have a longstanding and strong relationship with them, and to keep the prison education programs in good standing, we entertained this request.
To be honest, I was willing to include corrections staff immediately. It was clear to me that they often come from similar backgrounds as the incarcerated men and thus would be rich conversation partners for the other students. I could only take four of the six selected. The Deputy Warden said that was fine, the others could do it the next time. I was glad to hear that he was already invested in a “next time.”
It went as expected—a little bumpy. On the first day, one of the incarcerated students said something about the corrections staff getting paid to be there, and they quickly corrected him that they were off-the-clock and there by choice (or more accurately incentivized, in part, by the three credits, just like every other student in the class). Later, one of the corrections staff got into a back-and-forth with one of the incarcerated students about why people end up in prison. We moved on, but on the way home, the outside students said they were uncomfortable with the exchange and I considered how I could address it. Then at the start of the next class, the corrections staff person apologized to the student unprompted.
Is that a spark of systemic transformation? Are the core elements of holistic restorative justice as Springs outlines them present here: encounter, accountability, and transformation (76)? Or is this program an example of restorative justice being co-opted, “captured” by the state? (161). I do not know. I do know that this experience made us throw out our reductive dichotomous labels—our “inside” and “outside” geographies were no longer the most important part of how we showed up in class (Springs, 75, 96, chap. 14). What became more important was what we held inside ourselves and what we choose to put outside into the center of the human circle we created.
Like Springs does so often in his book, I find myself asking questions as I think about this work. I wonder, for example, is it cruel to talk about poverty and justice in the heart of mass incarceration? The more I teach there, the more I am convinced that this is exactly the place for serious academic discussion on poverty and justice. It is a form of critical praxis, Springs says, “that facilitates people’s recognition of the sources, nature, and character of the injustices they experience in their lives and in their communities” (77). In some ways an honest education is cruel—it’s hard to confront the atrocities of our ancestors and our contemporaries.
But honesty is a core principle of restorative justice. And right now many schools are expunging that history from the curriculum in the United States as it relates to DEI and critical race theory. If we censor evidence of those harms, there is no avenue to even consider restorative justice as a means of addressing those harms. And that unresolved pain often shows up in and is amplified by our carceral system. As we read Matthew Desmond’s Poverty, By America, incarcerated students said things like, “I always felt like things were stacked against me, that I couldn’t get ahead. Desmond confirms that it’s not just me, there’s a whole system out to get me. Desmond has citations, he has science.”
Shit happens—by design.
That evidence can be both heartbreaking and liberating. There are street smarts and there are Wall Street smarts. This class is defensive training against powerful predatory financial and social systems that rely on ignorance and submission. Springs quotes Fr. David Kelly quoting Fr. Greg Boyle of Homeboy Industries as saying, “nothing stops a bullet like a job.” But maybe books are bulletproof, too; books read in accompaniment, in radically inclusive classrooms.
Narratives of Justice
As I read Restorative Justice and Lived Religion, my mind also wandered to two popular kinds of heroic justice transformation stories from my youth. The first was the DC Comics Hall of Justice that held superheroes, the kind that started out “mild mannered” and quite ordinary until they went into a phonebooth to change or spun into Amazonian perfection. In a flash of dramatic transformation, these heroes had the power to impose justice on anyone who violated their rules. They were the indomitable League of Justice. As I read Restorative Justice and Lived Religion, I wondered if there’s a restorative justice flash that signals successful transformation.
Then I thought of the other, even more popular, transformative justice story from my youth: the story of Jesus. In this story we start with the all-powerful hero, and that hero does the most unexpected, extraordinary thing: he divests his power, he becomes human. Fully human. Jesus ate, he drank. He made friends, he made enemies. He taught, he learned. He lived and he bled.
So what does restorative and transformative justice look like?
I taught at Westville on Valentine’s Day. Holidays are tough to celebrate in prison.
Nonetheless, I still wanted to acknowledge the holiday, so I opened the class by asking the students to define a different kind of love, agape love. The collective wisdom was impressive. They said that Agapic love is “unconditional,” “empathetic,” “abundant,” “action-oriented,” and “selfless.”
We had finished reading Poverty, By America for that class. In his conclusion, Desmond has his readers imagine a world without poverty. He encourages us to ensure all Americans have their basic needs met so that they do not feel the kind of isolation and disconnection that leads to acts of despair. He has us imagine a place where that better world is enacted through what Springs might call critical praxis.
So I handed out blank paper to the students and had them draw agape love. Some drew pictures of an abundant and flourishing natural world with clean water and air. One student drew the basketball court where his struggling family would gather in their own cheering section to support him. Another drew hands reaching to connect.
Then I had the class read pages 36 to 37 of Restorative Justice and Lived Religion aloud. This passage describes how Precious Blood reclaimed the dismantled and denuded space where St. John of God church had stood. What the formal church vacated, the everyday church re-inhabited, transforming “the vacant crater that the diocese left into a peace garden—a welcoming space, mowed, blooming, and useable,” replete with grills, a basketball court, and beehives. The students read this passage aloud, summoning this sacred space, breathing agape love into the room. And for just a second I felt that transformative flash. I felt that maybe this book has the power to stop bullets.
