“Restorative Justice: the commitment to build a beloved and loving community that is sustainable and growing.”
From Black Lives Matter at School
“Restorative justice and the indigenous ethos in which it is grounded, are strongly relational in their orientation. Both deeply value entering into and maintaining ‘right relationship’ as well as sharing one’s personal story. Indigenous protocol invites us to introduce ourselves through our ancestors, lineage, and land. ”
Restorative justice is about getting well, not getting even. “Getting well” in our relationships with ourselves, body, mind, spirit, with our ancestors, with our neighbors, with our world. Restorative justice is as much practices we do as it is the way we are in the world. See the Social Discipline Window for more context on this.
“Restorative Justice (RJ) is profoundly relational and emphasizes bringing together everyone affected by wrongdoing to address needs and responsibilities and to heal the harm to relationships and community, to the degree possible. While often mistakenly considered only a reactive response to harm, restorative justice is also a proactive relational strategy to create a culture of connectivity where all members of a community thrive and feel valued.”
Restorative
What happened?
Who was affected? How?
What can be done to repair the harm and prevent this from reoccurring?
Punitive
What are the rules?
Who broke them?
How can we punish them for breaking the rules?
The practices that help to forward Restorative Justice include circle practice, community conferencing, restorative chats, policy change, and any practices that center and give power to those most impacted, address root causes of harm and injustice, and heal in an attempt to prevent future harm.
“I think that restorative justice is a really important dimension of the process of living the way we want to live in the future. Embodying it. We have to imagine the kind of society we want to inhabit. We can’t simply assume that somehow, magically, we’re going to create a new society in which there will be new human beings. No, we have to begin that process of creating the society we want to inhabit right now.”
Transformative Justice picks up where Restorative Justice leaves off. Instead of ending the conversation at the personal, relational level, a Transformative Justice process takes the conversation to the next level by adding these questions to the practice:
What are the underlying causes of harm?
What are the systems at play?
What action can we take to disrupt systems?
Who is the community support network to support addressing underlying causes?
What commitments can be made to repair the systemic/underlying harms and prevent future harm?
“Transformative justice [is] a liberatory approach to violence…[which] seeks safety and accountability without relying on alienation, punishment, or State or systemic violence, including incarceration or policing.
Three core beliefs:
Individual justice and collective liberation are equally important, mutually supportive, and fundamentally intertwined—the achievement of one is impossible without the achievement of the other.
The conditions that allow violence to occur must be transformed in order to achieve justice in individual instances of violence. Therefore, Transformative Justice is both a liberating politic and an approach for securing justice.
State and systemic responses to violence, including the criminal legal system and child welfare agencies, not only fail to advance individual and collective justice but also condone and perpetuate cycles of violence.
Transformative Justice seeks to provide people who experience violence with immediate safety and long-term healing and reparations while holding people who commit violence accountable within and by their communities. This accountability includes stopping immediate abuse, making a commitment to not engage in future abuse, and offering reparations for past abuse. Such accountability requires on-going support and transformative healing for people who sexually abuse.”
Reference: “Towards Transformative Justice…”, p.5 Section One, by Generation 5, San Francisco based non-profit working to end child sexual abuse in 5 generations.
Transformative Justice is inherently political.
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