We must face violent crime honestly and courageously if we are ever to end mass incarceration and provide survivors what they truly want and need to heal.
By Michelle Alexander March 3,
2019 New York Times
Chicago
is besieged by horrific levels of violence, including thousands of shootings
and hundreds of homicides each year. More than 500 people were killed in 2018,
down from 664 in 2017. This ongoing tragedy cannot be blamed on any lack of
aggressiveness on the part of law enforcement. Indeed, if wars on crime and
drugs, militarized policing, “get tough” sentencing policies, torture of
suspects, and perpetual monitoring and surveillance of the poorest, most
crime-ridden communities actually worked to keep people safe, Chicago would be
one of the safest cities in the world.
Despite
the abysmal failure of “get tough” strategies to break cycles of violence in
cities like Chicago, reformers of our criminal justice system in recent years
have largely avoided the subject of violence, instead focusing their energy and
resources on overhauling our nation’s drug laws and reducing penalties for
nonviolent offenses.
It’s
not difficult to understand why. After all, violent crime was used by
politicians for decades to rationalize “get tough” rhetoric, declarations of
war, harsh mandatory minimum sentencing, and a prison-building boom unlike
anything the world has ever seen. The tide has turned somewhat, but reformers
are proceeding cautiously, reaching first for the low-hanging fruit.
Drug
law reform has never been an easier sell — especially now that opioid addiction
is perceived as ravaging primarily white communities, generating far more
compassion than black communities ever experienced during the crack epidemic in
the late 1980s. The opportunity to curb the drug war is critically important
for many communities of color, especially in places like Chicago where it has
caused catastrophic harm.
Nationally,
the drug war helped to birth our system of mass incarceration, which now
governs not only the 2.2 million people who are locked in prisons and jails in
this country, but also the 4.5 million people that are under correctional
control outside prison walls — on probation or parole.
More
than 70 million people now have criminal records that authorize legal
discrimination against them, relegating them to a permanent second- class
status. The overwhelming majority ensnared by this system have been convicted
of nonviolent crimes and drug offenses.
And
yet, as Danielle Sered points out in her profoundly necessary book, “Until We
Reckon," if we fail to face violence in our communities honestly,
courageously and with profound compassion for the survivors — many of whom are
also perpetrators of harm — our nation will never break its addiction to caging
human beings. Fifty-four percent of the people currently held in state prisons
have been convicted of a crime classified as violent. We will never slash our
prison population by 50 percent — the goal of a number of current campaigns -
much less get back to levels of incarceration that we had before the race to
incarcerate began in the early 1980s, without addressing the one issue most
reformers avoid: violence.
Reckoning
with violence in a meaningful way does not mean “getting tough” in the way that
phrase has been used for decades; nor does it mean being “smart on crime"
to the extent that phrase has become shorthand for being “tough” on violent
crime but “soft” on nonviolent crime — a formulation that continues to be
embraced by some so-called “progressive prosecutors” today. As Ms. Sered
explains in her book, drawing on her experience working with hundreds of
survivors and perpetrators of violence in Brooklyn and the Bronx, imprisonment
isn’t just an inadequate tool; it’s often enormously counterproductive —
leaving survivors and their communities worse off. Survivors themselves know
this. That’s why fully 90 percent of survivors in New York City, when given the
chance to choose whether they want the person who harmed them incarcerated or
in a restorative justice process — one that offers support to survivors while
empowering them to help decide how perpetrators of violence can repair the
damage they’ve done — choose the latter and opt to use the services of Ms.
Sered’s nonprofit organization, Common Justice.
Ms.
Sered launched Common Justice in an effort to give survivors of violence — like
herself — at meaningful pathway to accountability without perpetuating the harms
endemic to mass incarceration. As a restorative justice program, it offers a
survivor-centered accountability process that “gives those directly impacted by
acts of violence the opportunity to shape what repair will look like, and, in
the case of the responsible party, to carry out that repair instead of going to
prison.” The people who choose to participate are victims of serious violent
felonies — people who have been shot, stabbed or robbed - and who decide that
they would prefer to get answers from the person who harmed them, be heard in a
restorative justice circle, help to devise an accountability plan, and receive
comprehensive victim services, rather than send the person who harmed them to
prison.
Ninety
percent is a stunning figure considering everything we’ve been led to believe
that survivors actually want. For years, we’ve been told that victims of
violence want nothing more than for the people who hurt them to be locked up
and treated harshly. It is true that some survivors do want revenge or
retribution, especially in the immediate aftermath of the crime. Ms. Sered is
emphatic that rage is not pathological and a desire for revenge is not
blameworthy; both are normal and can be important to the healing process, much
as denial and anger are normal stages of grief.
But
she also stresses that the number of people who are interested only in revenge
or punishment is greatly exaggerated. After all, survivors are almost never
offered real choices. Usually when we ask victims “Do you want incarceration?"
what we’re really asking is “Do you want something or nothing?" And when
any of us are hurt, and when our families and communities are hurting, we want
something rather than nothing. In many oppressed communities, drug treatment,
good schools, economic investment, job training, trauma and grief support are
not available options. Restorative justice is not an option. The only thing on
offer is prisons, prosecutors and police.
But
what happens, Ms. Sered wondered, if instead of asking, “Do you want something
or nothing?” we started asking “Do you want this intervention or that prison?”
It turns out, when given a real choice, very few survivors choose prison as
their preferred response.
This
is not because survivors, as a group, are especially merciful. To the contrary,
they’re pragmatic. They know the criminal justice system will almost certainly
fail to deliver what they want and need most to overcome their pain and trauma.
More than 95 percent of cases end in plea bargains negotiated by lawyers behind
the scenes. Given the system’s design, survivors know the system cannot be
trusted to validate their suffering, give them answers or even a meaningful
opportunity to be heard. Nor can it be trusted to keep them or others safe.
In
fact, many victims find that incarceration actually makes them feel less safe.
They worry that others will be angry with them for reporting the crime and
retaliate, or fear what will happen when the person eventually returns home.
Many believe, for good reason, that incarceration will likely make the person
worse, not better - a frightening prospect when they’re likely to encounter the
person again when they’re back in the neighborhood.
As
one woman whose 14-year-old son had been badly beaten and robbed explained to
Ms. Sered, “When I first found out about this, I wanted the young man to drown
to death. And then I wanted him to burn to death. And then I realized as a
mother that I don’t want either of those things.
I
want him to drown in a river of fire.” But when she reflected on the fact that
the young man who harmed her son would eventually return home from prison and
cross paths with her children again, she said, “I have to ask myself: When that
day comes, do I want that young man to have been upstate or do I want him to
have been with y’all?”
The
restorative circle, a meeting during which responsible parties sit with those
they have harmed (or surrogates who take their place), a trained facilitator,
and people who support both parties, is central to the process. It offers those
affected by a crime with the power and opportunity to ask questions, as well as
describe their needs and the ways they’ve been harmed. Ultimately, the parties
strive to reach agreement about what the responsible party can do to make
things as right as possible. The circle can be transformative for both
survivors and those who’ve caused harm. In Ms. Sered’s experience, survivors
not only want answers to factual questions, they want acknowledgment of their
suffering and the moral wrongs. They want to be able to say: “How dare you? My
brother was killed the year before you stabbed me. Can you imagine how it felt
to my mother to get the call from the hospital that I was unconscious in the
E.R. and had been stabbed?” Sered explains.
Witnessing
the pain and anguish of survivors, and taking full responsibility for what
they’ve done by committing to specific actions to repair themselves and others,
has a far greater impact on those who’ve committed harm than we might imagine.
One young man, who had been a gang member since he was 8 years old, could not
leave the building after participating in a restorative circle with Common
Justice because he was shaking so badly after admitting the harm he had done.
He asked staff members, “Can I stay in your office for a few minutes before I
leave?” When asked to explain, he said, “You know, for all I've done and all
that’s been done to me, I don’t know if I’ve ever heard a real apology before.
Do you think I did all right? Pardon my language, that is the scariest shit I
ever did.”
A
growing body of research strongly supports the anecdotal evidence that
restorative justice programs increase the odds of safety, reduce recidivism and
alleviate trauma. “Until We Reckon” cites studies showing that survivors report
80 to 90 percent rates of satisfaction with restorative processes, as compared
to 30 percent for traditional court systems.
Common
Justice’s success rate is high: Only 7 percent of responsible parties have been
terminated from the program for a new crime. And it’s not alone in successfully
applying restorative justice principles. Numerous organizations — such as
Community Justice for Youth Institute and Project NIA in Chicago; the Insight
Prison Project in San Quentin; the Community Conferencing Center in Baltimore;
and Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth — are doing so in communities,
schools, and criminal justice settings from coast- to-coast.
In
2016, the Alliance for Safety and Justice conducted the first national poll of
crime survivors and the results are consistent with the emerging trend toward
restorative justice. The majority said they “believe that time in prison makes
people more likely to commit another crime rather than less likely.” Sixty-nine
percent preferred holding people accountable through options beyond prison,
such as mental health treatment, substance abuse treatment, rehabilitation,
community supervision and public service.
Survivors’
support for alternatives to incarceration was even higher than among the
general public. Survivors are right to question incarceration as a strategy for
violence reduction. Violence is driven by shame, exposure to violence,
isolation and an inability to meet one’s economic needs — all of which are core
features of imprisonment. Perhaps most importantly, according to Ms. Sered,
“Nearly everyone who has committed violence first survived it,” and studies
indicate that experiencing violence is the greater predictor of committing it.
Caging and isolating a person who's already been damaged by violence is hardly
a recipe for positive transformation.
That
said, Ms. Sered makes clear that she doesn't believe that having been a victim
of crime excuses acts of violence in any way: “When we hurt someone, we incur
an obligation. Period.”
In
fact, it seems her greatest complaint about our system of mass incarceration is
that it fails to take accountability seriously. Our criminal injustice system
lets people off the hook, as they aren't obligated to answer the victims’
questions, listen to them, honor their pain, express genuine remorse, or do
what they can to repair the harm they've done. They’re not required to take
steps to heal themselves or address their own trauma, so they’re less likely to
harm others in the future. The only thing prison requires is that people stay
in their cages and somehow endure the isolation and violence of captivity.
Prison deprives everyone concerned — victims and those who have caused harm, as
well as impacted families and communities — the opportunity to heal, honor
their own humanity, and to break cycles of violence that have destroyed far too
many lives.
Ms.
Sered acknowledges that we, as a society, are not yet prepared to apply
restorative and transformative justice principles to all crimes of violence.
Some people do need to be separated in order to keep others safe. But if we
invest our resources in the healing, restoration and rebuilding of
relationships and communities — and stop pretending that caging people on a
massive scale makes our communities safer — we just might discover that we are
capable of reckoning with one another.
Michelle
Alexander became a New York Times columnist in 2018. She is a civil rights
lawyer and advocate, legal scholar and author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass
Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”
