What is restorative justice and how does it respond to structural forms of violence?
In North America, “restorative justice” typically names a range of small-scale measures that “divert” alleged wrongdoers from a standard path of arrest, trial, and prison by funneling them into “alternative justice” programs (such as victim-offender mediation). These aim to repair harms caused to the victims, the wider community, and even those who caused the harm.
Restorative justice contrasts with the contemporary conception of justice in the criminal-legal system that is typically referred to as “retributive justice.” Retributive justice portrays justice as payback “in kind” (or a currency similar enough to satisfy the belief that a person who causes harm to others deserves to have harm done to them as a form of punishment and to deter future such actions). As numerous restorative justice practitioners characterize this—a retributive, punishment-centered criminal-legal system (such as the U.S.) “harms people who harm people, in order to show that harming people is wrong.” The U.S.’s contemporary retributive criminal-legal system focuses on 3 questions in the way of wrongdoing, harm, destructive conflict, and so forth—namely: “What laws have been broken?” “Who did it?” “What do they deserve?”
Restorative justice is form of justice (or practices through which each person receives what they are due) that defines itself in terms of holding each other accountable in ways that repairs harm that was done, and to heal to the extent possible all of the parties that were involved (the person who caused the harm, the person who was harmed or survived the harm, the community, and the society more broadly). Restorative justice asks a fundamentally different set of questions: “Who has been harmed?” “What are their needs?” “Whose obligations are these?” “What are the processes by which those needs can be met, and harms repaired?”
Why is US mass incarceration a spiritual crisis?
US mass incarceration is, at its heart, a spiritual crisis—a crisis of meaning, value, and identity that expresses itself in a number of ways. For example, the crisis calls into question the identity or character (the ethos, or the spirit of the culture) of the United States as it has been, as it currently is, and as it can become and is becoming.
First and foremost, this crisis is caused by the deep historical devaluing, dehumanizing, and domination of minority, marginalized, and poor people and communities of all colors. US mass incarceration is a spiritual crisis of meaning and value, further, in that it is an extractive enterprise. It plunders and diverts value from the communities it harms in the forms of actual monetary wealth. But, just as importantly, it drains and diverts social value, individual and community self-worth, and symbolic significance. It decimates so-called social capital—the networks of relationships that nurture and enable individuals to thrive and promote communal prosperity.
This crisis is spiritual, relationally speaking, in that US mass incarceration destroys the relationships and broader communal bonds that people depend on for their well-being and flourishing as whole persons. Most encompassing of all, the crisis of mass incarceration is spiritual in that it directly bears upon our shared societal identity—the “soul of America,” as Martin Luther King Jr. described it in the context of the civil rights movement. Historically, policing and incarceration have been key instruments for enforcing racialized social control throughout US society. In effect, they continue to be.
And so we must ask, regarding consequences of policing and mass incarceration, will the present-day United States continue to be a society inspirited by, and beholden to, the ghosts of its White supremacist past? And how can restorative justice aid, support, and facilitate the transformation of that past (and its realities in the present)?
What are some of the distinctive forms of structural and cultural violence that restorative justice must address?
Disproportionate, targeted, and brutal policing, more generally, policing that lacks accountability, housing and resource discrimination that is the result of the aftermath (well into the present day) of redlining and financial disenfranchisement, lack of access to good and safe schools, safe streets. The perception, and especially the pre-conception or bias (sometimes unconscious), that these communities, and the people who live there, are uniquely prone to be dangerous, or involved in conflict, or violence, or crime—such preconceptions and biases (however unconscious) are, themselves, instances of cultural violence, in so far as they are aspects of culture (social and psychological associations) that justify, support, or even camouflage, structural and direct forms of violence.
How can communities frequently stigmatized as “ganglands” and “ghettoes” become sites for resistance to violence and struggle for justice in the present?
Through cultivating relationships and thereby building up community, neighborhood people can concert their efforts upon shared projects (from beautifying the neighborhood shared spaces, to community gardening, to recreational events that help grow community, to facilitating occasions for community members to come together to articulate their needs, their struggles, as well as their hopes and aspirations, and then look for, and plan, ways to pursue those).
Sustained relationship building, and deepening and integrating of those relationships, is the antidote to the most stringent community-destroying acids of the racism and classism of the prison-industrial system. Peoples who are caught in the criminal legal system, and their families, frequently experience shame and silence. This fragments the very community building that is necessary to resist, change, and transform the criminal legal system. Relationship building through restorative justice cultivates mutual understanding, empathy, reciprocated support for people and families enmeshed in the critical legal system. It enables them to concert their powers to promote change.
Historically, how have policing and incarceration been key instruments for enforcing radicalized social control throughout US society?
Basically, since the end of the Civil War, policing and incarceration have provided ways of enforcing laws and exerting forms of social control that either explicitly, or indirectly, segregated and subjugated Black and Brown Americans, as well as poor people of all colors. In various ways over time, laws were passed that were enforced by police that targeted Black Americans for their labor, to take advantage of them financially, to keep them out of spaces that primarily or exclusively designated white, to limit the possibility of Black people entering into intimate relationships with White people (so-called ‘race mixing’), and more generally to keep them in an inferior place and social status.
How does Chicago offer a concrete example of how restorative justice and lived religion can shift the entrenched dynamics of structural violence that fuels the prison-industrial complex across the US?
A key way that the structural violence of the prison industrial complex exerts itself is by severing relationships and keeping people apart from one another, suspicious of and turned against one another, in ways that fragments their communities. This keeps them from organizing themselves and concerting their agency and power in ways that might actually generate constructive change (in terms of building community-based and community-led alternatives to the criminal-legal system, but also working to transform that system itself through policy and even legal change).
Over the last 15 years a network of restorative justice hubs has emerged in various neighborhoods across the city of Chicago. These are community based, and community led centers and non-profit initiatives of various sorts. They are independent and autonomous from one another, but they intentionally collaborate, and support one another, and integrate their resources and specializations. This has created a web-like network across the city. It is decentralized and highly innovative.
In my book I conduct an in-depth study of a couple of these restorative justice community hubs—and one, in particular, in a South Side neighborhood called Back of the Yards— the Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation. As I explored the different ways that restorative justice was being practiced around Chicago, it was engaging with, and learning from, the folks at the Precious Blood center that I began discern and understand the ways that they conceptualized restorative justice in an encompassing, holistic way to build healthy and just relationships, and that through cultivating relationships they could make explicit, critically reflect upon, and the work together to respond to (and thereby begin to transform) many of the systemic forms of racism to which many of the young people who are enmeshed in the criminal legal system, and their families and friends, are subject.
The Precious Blood Ministry of Reconciliation seeks to, and facilitates, listening to, walking alongside, neighborhood people to meet the needs, and address the harms and difficulties, that come with being affected by the systemic injustices of the criminal legal system, and the legacies and present day realities of systemic racism in the city of Chicago. They work to build up the neighborhood and cultivate community by facilitating job readiness, and job placement initiatives, by tutoring and mentoring young people, helping them building relationships in ways that are healthy and which address what they may be struggling with, and strategize constructive responses to those.
A key insight of my research is that rather than imagining structural transformation in contrast to cultivating healthy and durable communal bonds in the form of interpersonal and communal relationships, restorative justice practices enable people to proactively promote structural transformation enacted through relationship and trust building, not before, alongside, or after it. Integral to this understanding is the effort to change the culture by creating a safe environment where people can trust enough to be vulnerable with one another: to tell their stories, share their experiences of harm and their needs, and thereby transform their relationships. The practices must be engaged in regularly for the values and understandings to take hold and seep in. This is a persistent, ethical practice of mutual recognition and respect, compassion, care, reciprocated aid, accountability, and healing.
What actions can individuals and community networks take to enact restorative justice?
In my research across Chicago, I learned that peacemaking circles are the probably the most widely-used practices, and remarkably effective, situation- specific practices that can be integrated within any other initiatives and which provide platforms for responding to what individuals, families, and the community says it needs in a given context. One of the initiatives I explored cultivated community gardens and, eventually, an urban farm to bring the neighborhood folk together to concert their efforts in common projects. They launched job readiness initiatives and job creation initiatives in the form of wood working and wood shop (to make peace circle talking pieces), and silk screen printing. They worked with local carpenters to apprentice and train some of the young people in carpentry and construction as part of rehabbing some of the local vacant properties to create housing for citizens returning to the neighborhood from incarceration (which addresses the difficulty that many people returning from incarceration have in finding housing—which is one of the forms that systemic injustice takes). They facilitated tutoring and mentoring of youth and young adults to support them.
How do restorative justice efforts foster moral and spiritual forms of association between people and the greater community?
Restorative justice is both philosophy and a set of practices that emerge from that philosophy. Philosophically, it’s based in the recognition that human beings are most basically ‘relational creatures’. Based on this philosophy of relational personhood, restorative justice conceives of ‘justice’ as relationships of mutual recognition (in which each person recognizes the other, most basically, as someone like themselves, and respect, each for the other, as someone (like oneself) who both desires to be, and deserves, to be respected).
In practice, then, in the wake of harm, or destructive conflict, injustice and so forth, restorative justice practices (such as peacemaking circles) proactively cultivate relationships that can repair harm and promote healing of all the parties involved, and in connection with the community in which the harm occurred, and help reintegrate a person who may have caused harm into the community in question.
It is spiritual in that it recognizes that persons are most basically and fundamentally relational creatures, and that it is through healthy relationships that we can grow, and thrive, and flourish. Restorative justice is about listening and understanding, to each person finding and speaking their truth in their own voice from their perspective and experience, and to listeners being attuned to and receiving the truth that they share, then seeing beyond the surface to the common experiences and struggles that connect people.
How important is it to restore trust between law enforcement officials and oppressed civilians and how can it be achieved?
My research indicates that it can help—as one practitioner put it to me in an interview, “it helps people see each other as people” who would otherwise only see each other as enemies. This can make some difference and is an important thing to persist in. But nearly everyone I interviewed and encountered reported this is not something that is going to have a transformational impact on its own. In several of the interviews I conducted— people who work and live in the communities reported that—and my own interactions with police in restorative justice contexts, confirmed to me that the culture of policing in Chicago must be reconfigured and transformed from within, that the culture and practices of policing must change altogether, for the conditions of genuine trust and respect, and healing, to be developed between police and oppressed civilians.
How do you respond to those that say restorative justice is soft, naive, or wishful thinking, a version of justice that ultimately lets wrong-doers off the hook?
Such perspectives mis-conceive the nature and character of restorative justice. Restorative justice focuses on accountability—but accountability that promotes taking responsibility through practices of mutual respect, trust building, and truth telling. Once relationships have been established, it works to repair harms, meet needs, heal and transform, rather than punish (punitive responses)— which actually only parades as accountability (because it incentivizes denial of responsibility) and multiplies harm.
Jason A. Springs is Professor of Religion, Ethics, and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of several books, including Healthy Conflict in Contemporary American Society: From Enemy to Adversary.