When we see restorative justice in the news, it’s frequently presented as a way to reduce the burdens on the criminal justice courts, to help prevent the school-to-jail pipeline, or to prevent minor offenses from growing greater.
All that is of course true, and these are real benefits that we want.
However, restorative justice practitioners also think of it as a different way to think about justice and about what makes a just response.
Lauren Abramson highlights another benefit to restorative justice in a powerful interview featured in the Boston Review: “Trench Democracy in Criminal Justice: An Interview with Lauren Abramson”. In this interview, she reminds us that restorative justice increases opportunities to experience a truly participatory democracy.
Lauren Abramson is the founder and director of the Baltimore Community Conferencing Center. In this article, she gives an example of a community coming together to repair small harms, rather than letting them grow bigger and catch the attention of the police and criminal justice system. She then talks about how and why community conferencing works, and finally focuses on two themes:
• restorative justice is inherently democratic
• our institutions determine what types of solutions we will get
The article is well worth a read.
Like what you see? Lauren Abramson is coming to speak at the Western New York Restorative Practices Conference on April 9-10 2014. Her talk, “We Are Shaped by Institutions that Govern Us: The Promise of Restorative Approaches in Juvenile Justice and Education,” will elaborate on her two themes above.
You can find out more about her and her presentations at our conference website.
(submitted by Katherine Schaefer)