OK, so it’s been a long and rough week. I won’t get into all of the things that have come my way and continue to dog my existence… They would bore you.

In preparation for a support circle that I will be facilitating on Sunday, I spent a good part of yesterday making phone calls. The thing that few people know about keeping circles is the inordinate amount of preparation that precedes the actual intervention. So on weeks like this one when I feel run down, the prospect of keeping a circle feels particularly daunting. Yet I see this work as essential to challenging our reliance on criminal legal interventions in order to address harm.

Let me be clear, there is nothing inherently revolutionary or transformative about sitting in circle. It matters greatly what people do as a result of the process. I am not a practitioner of restorative justice who believes that the approach is the panacea for the prison industrial complex. To dismantle the PIC, I think that we can borrow some RJ practices but those must be combined with something more. We need to move towards transformative justice.

Blogger La Lubu provides a good definition of transformative justice and poses some important questions about it too:

“Transformative Justice is a liberatory practice of healing individuals and communities. The process of transformative justice is not placed in the individual setting, but in the context of state and systemic oppression and violence. It prioritizes the needs of oppressed and marginalized people in an unjust system; it does not require vulnerable people to relinquish their human need for safety and security. Most important to remember is that much of the work on transformative justice in the United States was envisioned and developed by women of color in response to the prison-industrial complex. So, when asking questions of accountability, one has to keep in mind who is accountable to whom. In that light, why is it contingent upon marginalized people and communities to enact and enforce accountability from those with greater power who utilize and exploit the aforementioned state and systemic oppression for their own ends? How, exactly, can that happen? With the pre-existing structures still intact?”

I am and have been thinking a great deal about the differences between RJ and TJ lately. I am working on an article with some friends about the topic of practical applications of restorative justice in Chicago. How does one convey the value of restorative practices while staying away from reifying the approach or selling it as a cure-all? Because after all restorative practices exist within the confines of a deeply oppressive society. We cannot extricate ourselves from that oppression; the best that we can do is to become aware of it and to challenge it within ourselves and others mindful of the fact that we will still struggle with being oppressive.

Some days I just feel like throwing my hands up and saying “to hell with it.” It’s hard work and I sometimes wish that I was the type of person who could just go along to get along. The truth is, however, that wrestling with the contradictions and engaging in the process while messy and hard and often thankless is essential if we are going to claw our way out of the morass that we are in. We have to find ways of growing roses out of concrete. That’s how I think about my RJ work as a way to grow roses out of concrete…

For those who are curious or interested in learning about support and accountability circles, I suggest listening to this interview with members of a great organization in NYC called Support New York. You can click here to listen. What you will hear is the immense amount of time, care, and effort that it takes to facilitate a good support and accountability circle. If you want to learn more about restorative justice, TIKKUN Magazine has devoted its current issue to the topic.

I will be taking the next few days off from Prison Culture as I catch up on work that has been piling up for me. I should be back to blogging towards the end of the week.