1Beginning with small-scale experiments in the 1970s, restorative justice has been one of the most influential criminal justice reform movements in the United States in the last quarter century. Despite their success within criminal justice administration, however, restorative justice practitioners have produced few of the social transformative effects sought by early pioneers like Howard Zehr. The most common program, victim-offender mediation, has been shown to have positive effects for individual victims and offenders, yet it often lacks deep roots in communities and fails to engage the general public. This type of program has not had a significant humanizing impact on how most Americans think about punishment practices. Even as restorative justice has gained acceptance within criminal justice institutions, most people in the United States know very little about it and do not draw on its core concepts in thinking through difficult criminal justice issues. Indeed, it remains a sobering fact that the United States is the global leader in incarceration, with a greater portion of its population in prison than any other country. Restorative justice discourse and practice have not been influential in the struggles over de-carceration.
2This article takes up the problem of how public awareness can be catalyzed from both a practical and a normative angle. Guiding examples are programs in schools, non-governmental community organizations, and prisons that seek in various ways to create a transformative public impact through greater lay involvement in the business of doing justice. I examine what innovative reform-minded practitioners have done to encourage community involvement and dialogue about punishment practices, what resources are available to support public engagement, and what barriers exist that are preventing wider impact. There is a normative story to be told as well about developing the core participatory democratic dimensions of restorative justice more prominently in the theory and practice of the movement. The innovative efforts discussed below show the need to think more radically about the civic environment in which restorative justice programs are embedded. This article argues that programs must attend more explicitly and effectively to citizen agency: they must contribute to building civic capacity in neighborhoods, schools, and other relevant institutions, to catalyze and shore up people's ability to self-govern. [1]
3Criminal justice institutions are both more and less impervious to democratic innovation than they seem at first glance. They are more resistant, despite the inherently public nature of their task, because of the many ways they repel public awareness and involvement: the background institutional environment of policing, prosecution, plea bargaining, and imprisonment is largely nontransparent, hierarchical, and nonparticipatory. [2] Nevertheless, the criminal justice system is not really a "system" and contains different professional cultures, each with access points for innovation as well as normative motivations for improvement. Moreover, criminal justice happens in many rooms: a courtroom, of course, but also a mosque where a gang truce is settled, an elementary school where everyday conflicts are worked on by students themselves, and many other quasi-formal sites in which tensions, problems, and frictions can receive the hearing and settlement they deserve. [3]
4The last quarter century has been a dismal time to be a criminal justice professional. Some scholars have called this the "nothing works" period, an era of exhaustion with the two major prevailing theories undergirding their institutions. [4] The first, rehabilitation, also known as penal welfarism, understood punishment as a means to correct behavioral and thinking patterns that lead to harmful acts, held sway until the 1960s. Facing liberal challengers on one flank concerned about indefinite sentences and widely varying penalties for the same offence depending on the corrigibility of the offender and, on the other, conservative critics irked by what they saw as the moral vacuity of a clinical paradigm for understanding violent acts, rehabilitation gave way to the retributive, or just deserts, model, with rigid sentencing guidelines that pegged sentences to the seriousness of the offense. Yet neither approach succeeded in achieving the goal of humane public safety with the minimum of coercion.
5From a relatively lenient status quo, at least in the North, the United States rapidly moved in the mid-1970s to a condition of "hyperincarceration". [5] In 1972, for example, 64 out of every 100,000 citizens in the state of New York were incarcerated, a ratio consistent with the previous hundred years; by 2000 this figure had risen to 383/100,000, in keeping with the even higher national trend over the same thirty-year period. [6] This trend began, to some extent, in response to increasing urban crime rates. It continued, however, even after crime rates tapered off in the early 1980s and then again in the 1990s, by tougher sentences for non-violent crimes such as drug trafficking and by procedurally fair but substantively harsh mandatory minimum laws taking away judicial discretion. [7] Also relevant to penal expansion is the business of incarceration, once called the "prison industrial complex", involving for profit prison corporations' political influence, guard union support for mandatory minimum sentencing, and the strong interest in prison construction in impoverished rural America. [8] By the end of the century, the United States was leading the world in incarceration, with a higher percentage of its citizens in prison than any other country. [9]
6While the effects of crime are significant, punishment itself brings about severe consequences. Most evident with the penalty of incarceration, they include shame, dehumanization, feelings of inferiority, and physical suffering. Many of these consequences are experienced to some degree too by the spouses, children, and other close relatives of the incarcerated. [10] In most states in the United States, those convicted of a felony lose their right to vote: in 48 states for the duration of the imprisonment, in 36 for the duration of the probation or parole period, and in 13 for life. [11] Economic consequences can also be significant, as prisoners' families struggle with lost wages during incarceration and severely impaired incomes afterwards. Bruce Western and Becky Pettit report that "serving time in prison was associated with a 40 percent reduction in earnings and with reduced job tenure, reduced hourly wages, and higher unemployment'. [12]
7Alongside these negative effects are the equally troubling racial and socioeconomic biases of the current system. As Wacquant has pointed out, the current rise in incarceration in the United States should not be called "mass" incarceration at all, but rather the "hyperincarceration" of a specific group of people: low income African-American men in the inner cities. The "cumulative risk of imprisonment for African American males without a high-school diploma tripled between 1979 and 1999, to reach the astonishing rate of 59%". [13] "On any given day", writes Roberts, "nearly one-third of black men in their twenties are under the supervision of the criminal justice system—either behind bars, on probation, or on parole." [14]
8The system's failings are widely acknowledged at every level of government. Attorney General Holder, the nation's highest ranking and most visible criminal justice professional, recently proclaimed that his colleagues need to be "smarter on crime", meaning more sensible about sentencing for non-violent or low level offenses and more conscious of the racial biases of current practice. [15] Though Holder took rhetorical pains to laud the professionalism of his colleagues standing at the gateway to prison—the attorneys, prosecutors, and judges—"smarter on crime" means that status quo tough sentences and racial bias do not lead to safer streets; they are "dumb". Holder's remarks were just the most prominent instance of professional self-criticism pointing to how criminal justice institutions are serving their own needs rather than the people they were meant to serve: the victims and communities affected by offenses, but also the offenders themselves who are also citizens and deserve fair and appropriate treatment inside prison and require some constructive way of transitioning to law-abiding life.
9The predominant language of professional reform in the last generation has been "restorative." Since the 1970s, restorative justice programs across the country have involved offenders in structured dialogues with victims, victim surrogates, and sometimes with other members of an affected community. The process is typically facilitated by a volunteer mediator who is not a court professional or official. [16] Juvenile, misdemeanor, and other low-level offenders freely choose the restorative justice track, if one is available to them. After reflective dialogues with affected parties or their proxies, a successful restorative justice case ends in restitution, apology, or some other form of recompense rather than a penalty. If an offender fails to meet the demands of the restorative justice process, then his or her case defaults back to the formal criminal justice system.
10Present in every state in the United States, though most widely used in a handful of states, restorative justice has been one of the most successful criminal justice reform movements in the last quarter century. [17] In part this is because of its ideological expansiveness and institutional flexibility. Ideologically, it brings together faith-based and social justice advocates of a more peaceful resolution to social problems, libertarians eager to shrink state involvement, and victims' rights advocates pushing for greater voice and appreciation for victims; it has appealed to seasoned veterans within the halls of criminal justice administration as well as doggedly idealistic community activists. Restorative justice programs have been housed in mayors' offices, lower courts, prosecutors' offices, departments of corrections, and in non-governmental community organizations as well. [18]
11Most practitioners and advocates of restorative justice do not talk about their work in democratic terms. At one level, this is unsurprising, as too much democracy via populist referenda and get tough electoral posturing is commonly—though mistakenly—blamed for the sentencing severity of measures such as three strikes legislation and for criminalization and over-incarceration more generally. [19] Criminal justice reformers operate in a tense, politically charged environment. Yet the core thinkers in the restorative movement, Nils Christie, Howard Zehr, and John Braithwaite clearly understand it to be about increasing citizen control over institutions that currently serve their own needs while repelling public awareness and engagement. [20] Not all restorative justice programs involve meaningful citizen participation, but some of the most interesting and promising do so.
12Criminal justice institutions are prima facie undemocratic. They involve coercive power, systematically impose rigid hierarchies, and involve inequalities throughout the process. For these reasons, and perhaps also because they currently repel public awareness and involvement, they rarely feature as topics of discussion in democratic theory. [21] Yet much is happening under the surface and in the surrounding umwelt. While dominant pressures still incline towards managerial control, strict hierarchies, professionalized divisions of labor, and bureaucratic rigidity, there are powerful signs of democratic agency emerging precisely in some of the worst off places. I consider here three sites of innovation: non-governmental community organizations, schools, and prisons. Drawing on interviews with reformers in each area, I note motivations for encouraging citizen participation, discuss barriers to change, and identify resources available to sustain and expand innovation. [22] While still sparse on the ground, these innovative practices help challenge prevailing assumptions that criminal justice institutions are inherently undemocratic and must involve coercion, hierarchy, and inequality.
13The most commonly employed restorative justice program, victim-offender mediation, does not involve lay people in any widespread fashion, but there are other more robustly public programs in operation. Community Reparative Boards in Vermont, for example, are staffed by citizen volunteers and hold their meetings in public places like libraries, community centers, town halls, and police stations. [23] They conduct dialogues with offenders convicted but not sentenced for nonviolent offenses like underage drinking, impaired driving, and shoplifting. They seek to communicate the meaning of the harm for any victims involved, to determine how to repair whatever damage was done, and to consider how to avoid such action in the future. The outcome of dialogues is a contract with offenders involving community service, reparation, apology and the like. [24] Other explicitly public programs, such as those of the Community Conferencing Center of Baltimore, Maryland respond to referrals from police, prosecutors, schools, and community organizations by conducting neighborhood dialogues concerning conflicts that have not yet become formal offenses. [25]
14Lauren Abramson is the founder of Baltimore's Community Conferencing Center, an organization that aims to divert people from the criminal justice system before they enter it by providing "a highly participatory community-based process for people to transform their conflicts into cooperation, take collective and personal responsibility for action, and improve their quality of life'. [26] Abramson's center has helped thousands of people address problems in their communities before they become formally designated as crimes to be handled by the justice system.
15Not long ago, Abramson's center was called on to handle a typical neighborhood problem. All was not well on Streeper Street in Southeast Baltimore. Kids played football in the road late into the night, bumping into cars, setting off alarms, even breaking mirrors and windows. Why not play in the park just two blocks away? Were they selling drugs in the street rather than just playing football? Tensions between adult residents and the players escalated into arguments, into hundreds of calls to the police, and into petty retaliations such as putting sugar in gas tanks. Finally, when police interventions did not succeed and the conflict threatened to get more serious than minor property damage, a neighborhood organization contacted the Community Conferencing Center to arrange a meeting with those affected.
16One of the Center's facilitators, Misty, canvassed the neighborhood for three weeks, going door-to-door inviting everyone to participate in a conference where they could articulate concerns and contribute to a desirable and workable solution. Remaining neutral, she encouraged attendance by showing them a list of those who had already agreed to participate. In all, forty-four people attended, with a mix of adults and youth. [27]
17The conference began with angry comments. Parents defended their children against what they felt was unfair treatment by neighbors. In turn, the adult residents expressed their frustration over the late night noise created by the football games: was this really the best place to play football at night? The children explained that the park two blocks away that the adults thought was much safer than the street was actually fouled by dog waste at one end and inhabited by drug dealers and older bullies at the other—problems that the adults had not heard before. From that point on, the neighbors started brainstorming possible solutions. They shifted focus from what to do about a bunch of noisy young people to how to find a safe place for the neighborhood children to play. Misty asked people how they might put their solutions into practice and in less than half an hour the group had come to an agreement on a list of actions, such as adults volunteering to chaperone kids in the park and kids helping clean up the neighborhood.
18The next day, in fact, Don Ferges chaperoned 22 kids in the park. By the end of three weeks, the number had grown to 64, and by the end of the summer there was a thriving football league. What started out as a public nuisance warranting police action developed into neighborhood-wide recognition of common interests and action to improve the space they shared. The residents had the power to make these changes, but it took a well-structured and facilitated conference to deliberate and act together. As Abramson puts it,
19We've defined "community" as the community of people who have been affected by and involved in the conflict or the crime. Everybody who's involved in or affected by the situation, and their respective supporters, is included. We really widen the circle. Thus, conferences usually include between ten and forty people. The Streeper Street neighborhood conflict had been going on for two years and forty-four people attended. Conferences are always about engaging the entire community of people affected by whatever's going on and giving them the power to try to fix it. [28]
20Organizers of community conferences use a deceptively simple process. First, they gather together in one place everyone affected by a harmful action. Then, they encourage each person, one at a time, to tell the group what happened. Then, again, another round of contributions as each participant tells the group how it affects them personally and how they feel about it. Finally, participants say what they want to do about the action to move forward. It is a simple process, but crucial normative choices are built into it. Especially important is the freedom to be passionate, sad, and even angry. Few limits are placed on emotions in a community conference because organizers believe strongly that public expression of emotions brings them out in a safe space where they can be observed, felt, and become part of a collective practice. Relatedly, few limits are placed on speech; difficult, even mean-spirited, words are acceptable for the same reason: better to have them out in public than withheld and simmering inside individuals.
21Conferencing is elegant. There are three questions that the group's going to talk about. And they can talk in whatever way they want. We don't go in saying, "You can't make racist comments", because if you do that then the person who is racist is never going to get a chance to change. We let the group decide. So once something offensive comes up, the facilitator will say to the participants: "There is a request to not say these kinds of things, is this something everyone can agree to?" It lets people be who they are and then lets that group decide for itself the norms for their behavior from this time forward. [29]
22Abramson is insistent that the conferencing process does not in any way repair social problems for people, but rather serves as a medium for them to handle their own problems in their own way:
23[C]onferencing recognizes that we all have a larger capacity to resolve complicated conflicts and crimes than we are allowed to. But people also need to have an appropriate structure to do it. I think it was Winston Churchill who said, "We're shaped by the institutions that govern us." So if our institutions are top-down—if we need a judge in a black robe telling people how they should be punished—then we're going to get one set of outcomes. But if we engage people with this alternative structure—in a circle where they acknowledge what happened, share how they've been affected, and then decide how to make it better—then we will get a whole different set of outcomes. This could happen in a workplace or in any number of places in our society where we don't manage conflicts well.
24Because urban areas with high concentrations of poverty have more violence than other communities, many assume that the people who live in them are different. And that is not true. We need to look at what structures we offer people in our society to resolve conflict and crime, because they determine the outcomes. The fact that people in highly distressed neighborhoods can negotiate solutions within the structure provided by Community Conferencing only emphasizes the fact that we are all capable of safely and effectively resolving many of our own conflicts. Maybe we could really prove this point if we could get the U.S. Congress to sit in circle and address some of their conflicts! [30]
25While restorative justice practitioners like Abramson are openly critical of mainstream criminal justice, they are also realists. They realize that to be successful, reforms must be done in connection to established institutions rather than against them. Their time-line for change is long:
26Restorative justice programs bring about reform from both the bottom up and the top down. In Baltimore, our juvenile courts are diverting felony and misdemeanor cases from their system to Community Conferencing. Could they refer more cases than they do? Absolutely. But for them to take a felony case and say, "We think these people can resolve it better through Community Conferencing than through our system", that's a significant change. And every year around 1,400 people in Baltimore participate in a Community Conference.
27Has it completely changed our criminal justice system? No. But when judges call us and ask us how they can use Community Conferencing more, I know that we are making progress. [31]
28Similarly, reformers view the general public skeptically as part of the problem, but also realistically as crucial to moving forward. Abramson's form of restorative justice is not used after a community has come to recognize its responsibilities for deliberate thought and action regarding social order, it is used before, as part of a community-building process.
29I think the more people you involve in the justice process the more potential there is for community building. Imagine justice that builds a sense of community. If only two people are involved, the potential for building community is very limited. That's why we use the process we do. I love the fact that nobody talks on behalf of anybody else. Inclusion has a ripple effect and we include all the ripples. [32]
30Abramson's program is uncommon but it is not unique. Community Works, in Oakland, California, and Red Hook Community Justice in Brooklyn, New York operate along similar lines. Community Works, for example, partners with the San Francisco District Attorney to annually divert 100 juveniles who would otherwise go through the normal juvenile criminal court process. In facilitated conferences, these young people meet with victims and other members of an affected community to come to a better understanding of the harms caused by the acts and to form a plan for addressing the harms. Upon successful completion of the plan, the juveniles are no longer subject to criminal charges. [33]
31Closely related to community conferencing programs, but involving less load-bearing work on the part of citizens, are the numerous community policing efforts across the country. These involve advisory bodies composed of citizens who meet regularly with key criminal justice actors in an evaluative as well as problem-solving capacity. The "community beat meetings" held by the Chicago Police Department since 1993, for example, create channels of communication between officers—who make the all important street-level decisions that open the gates of the criminal justice process—and members of distressed neighborhoods impacted by both crime and incarceration. Facilitated by civilians, these regularly scheduled hour-long meetings bring residents together monthly with the police officers who patrol their neighborhoods. There, citizens can articulate their concerns about gangs, violence, theft, social disorder, dilapidated and abandoned buildings, traffic, parking, and even the competence and conduct of the police. Citizens also learn about the progress or lack of progress on previously raised issues and brainstorm ways of solving them. As Wesley Skogan writes about the Chicago experience, citizens involved in beat meetings are "setting the agenda for police and community action, monitoring the effectiveness of police responses to community priorities, and mobilizing residents to act on their own behalf". [34] Citizen advisory bodies are present in other institutional locations, too, such as the community prosecution efforts in Portland, Denver, Indianapolis and elsewhere. In Denver, for example, prosecutors have formed "community justice councils that provide direct community input into the definition and prioritization of problems, and the development and implementation of remedies to solve those problems". [35]
32Another site of participatory innovation in criminal justice is found in schools. Nearly a century ago, Dewey argued against traditional textbook civics education that merely lectured students on law. A proper civic education, Dewey insisted, would provide students a truly collaborative environment at school; education for democracy requires acting democratically. To understand the meaning of core ideals of procedural fairness or political equality, for example, "involves a context of work and play in association with others." "Social perceptions and interests", he wrote, "can be developed only in a genuinely social medium—one where there is give and take in the building up of a common experience". [36] Deweyean education in criminal justice means allowing young people to make decisions early and often on how to cope with norm-breaking.
33Early experience with collective decision-making may be effective even while not closely resembling either the form or the substance of typical adult adjudication. Vivian Gussin Paley, an intellectual descendent of Dewey's who also worked in Chicago's Lab Schools, noticed a recurrent problem in her primary school classroom. The most popular students had a surplus of playmates at recess while some children, much to their shame and disappointment, were constantly excluded. After repeated meetings with the children and referring to this painful, if invisible, issue through an ongoing series of animal stories, Paley and the youth formulated a simple rule: "You Can't Say You Can't Play." Chronically marginalized children could present this rule to those in more popular groups in order to gain admission to games they would normally have to witness from the sidelines. With the rule in hand they could stand up for themselves and have recourse, as well, with their teachers and playground monitors. By taking part in rule-making and rule-enforcement, these children were learning by doing important lessons in self-governance and participatory social control. [37]
34Consider a second case of early education featuring the "Bathroom Busters", a group of middle schoolers in a low income area of St Paul, Minnesota troubled by restrooms covered in graffiti, lacking in privacy because of broken stalls, and chronically short of soap and paper. They learned how to work with an inefficient school bureaucracy and to communicate with parents, teachers, and administrators at the school and district level to gain the resources needed to repaint walls, repair missing stall doors, and replenish needed supplies. [38] Thus a problem that might normally and straightforwardly be seen as a juvenile offense to be handled by school administrators and police officers was translated into a social problem taken up by the students. By acting on their own the Bathroom Busters refused to have their institutions think and act for them. [39]
35Finally, consider a third story I call "Basketball Blowup" which takes place in Forest Grove Community School, a public charter school located in a coastal agricultural community in Oregon. [40] During recess some months ago, a group of seventh-grade students were playing basketball. Tensions from inside the classroom were coming out in the game. Two boys were closely guarding another boy, trying to steal the ball by reaching in aggressively. Angered, the boy lashed out and punched one of his opponents.
36When the victim's father heard what had happened, he came to Principal Vanessa Gray with an ultimatum: "Either that boy gets suspended or I am going to call the police and ask them to charge him with assault." Principal Gray had a different plan. After reassuring the parent, she sought out the basketball players and a group of students who were on the playground and pulled them into her office one by one. As she asked each individually to tell her about what had happened on the court, they all said the same thing. The facts surrounding the basketball blowup were not in dispute.
37Principal Gray allowed the victim to go home, sent his teammate back to class, and kept the perpetrator in her office for a while to talk. Over the course of their conversation, she came to realize that communication was something he needed to work on. Being able to use his voice when problems are mounting and he feels stressed and frustrated was an underdeveloped skill. Telling him she understood his frustration, she also made it clear that it was not acceptable to communicate with his fists. Moreover, Gray took responsibility for her own role in the conflict, acknowledging to the perpetrator that he had come to her earlier in the year to say that basketball games could get overly aggressive.
38This is really helpful for me to do a better job of trying to understand what a kid is communicating to me and for you, kid, to learn a little more about how to use your voice. The way you expressed the tensions on the basketball court earlier this school year was in the same tone you use when you tell me that school is boring or you are going skiing this weekend. What you said did not make me concerned that you were angry. And I'm wondering if your way of expressing your frustration with your classmates has also been similarly flat and that you need to work on feeling more comfortable with saying "Hey I'm upset!" "I'm mad!" "I want someone to do something about it!" "I want someone to work with me on this". [41]
39Before sending him home for the day, she tells him that there are going to be further conversations when he comes back to school.
40The next day the conferencing begins and Principal Gray tells the three students that they cannot play basketball until they have a congress with all the basketball players about what the rules are going to be and how they are going to go forward with the game. "I really wanted these three to understand they messed up the basketball game. And I wanted the other basketball players to understand they were bystanders. They knew these tensions were going on a long time before it erupted and before I knew about it. I wanted them to understand they had a responsibility to right a wrong and there are lots of ways for them to do it." [42]
41Rather than sealing off a problem, attributing blame to a specific central actor, and taking ownership of it as simple disciplinary matter for the administration to take care of, Principal Gray did four things: she made the problem public; she had conversations with everyone involved; she spread out responsibility for the conflict, herself included; and she empowered everyone involved—including bystanders and others in the school—to figure out ways of creating more peaceful basketball games at recess. Yes, there was an offense that happened that should not have, and yes there was an offender and a victim. But the participatory process Gray used focused on the relationships that were causing tension and that focus allowed her to help students themselves play a bigger role in solving the problem by working on the skills they need to have better relationships in the future.
42Just like the citizens involved with Lauren Abramson's community justice center, Forest Grove Community School students are learning—by doing—important lessons in how to work and live together. Like Abramson, Gray is introducing people as far as they are capable into an institutional field of self-government. Her school is fostering a more deliberative and more collaborative mode of being together through everyday routines performed by students, teachers, and administrators who refuse to let themselves be captured by conventional assumptions about the dependency of disciplinary order on institutional hierarchies. Civic engagement is not a free-standing class or a subject area in this school, nor is it an extracurricular activity; it pervades the culture of the playground, the library, the hallways, the assembly rooms, the school garden, and the principal's office.
43While this example is drawn from an explicitly democratic school, there is considerable interest in participatory innovation in conflict resolution across the United States in otherwise non-democratic schools. While far from being in the majority, some prominent school districts have come to understand the negative consequences of tough-minded "zero tolerance" policies meting out expulsion and other exclusionary penalties for disciplinary problems: increased disengagement from school for penalized youth who are shunted from school to school and are more likely to eventually enter the formal criminal justice system via the so-called "school to prison" pipeline. Public schools in cities such as Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Minneapolis, and New York have thus felt a pressing need to break free of the dominant model and experiment with more restorative and participatory programs.
44Severe limits are placed on lay citizen involvement in prisons, but there are also many ways in to these restrictive environments. Prison education programs like Inside-Out, which link college and university teachers and students with groups of current prisoners do more than provide educational opportunities for inmates; they create spaces of public dialogue about prison life and, more generally, about the reality of punishment. Over 50 Inside-Out programs exist across the US, in 60prisons, in 25states. More than 10,000 people have taken these credit-bearing courses, which bring 15 to 18 college students together with the same number of inmates for a few hours every week for one semester. They participate as fellow members of the same class, usually focused on issues of criminal justice, and work together on a class project. Other arrangements between universities and prisons have emerged organically, using the Inside-Out model as a starting point.
45Lisa Guenther, a philosopher at Vanderbilt University, has held reading groups in a maximum security prison in Nashville with 6 graduate student "outsiders" and 6 "insiders" who are inmates, including some on death row. [43] The small size of the group and its meeting schedule were established through negotiation with the prison administration. Guenther's group engages in wide-ranging discussions driven largely by prisoners' interests. Last year they read Plato's dialogues concerning the trial and punishment of Socrates, which became a way of talking about the prison experience that otherwise would have been difficult.
46They were really good and interesting discussions, and it also helped to mediate the situation so we weren't talking about prison in some kind of stark direct way. That can turn into a kind of voyeuristic situation where the insiders are expected to be experts on suffering in prison and the outsiders, who know little or nothing about prison, go to them to be educated. Weird power dynamics can unfold in a situation where you bring together people who often have very different economic, racial, gender social positions and also different levels of formal education. Everything we do is about negotiating that terrain and trying to create and recreate the space for meaningful conversation through and across these chasms of social inequality. You cannot undo inequality by just having the best intentions to treat everyone as a singular human being. You really have to work at creating the situation in which a conversation can happen and keep happening. Plato helped in ways I had not anticipated to open up a situation where we have a third term in the room. We all had the character of Socrates to look at and to talk about and we could bring different insights or different perspectives to bear on that third term. [44]
47Connections made between the reading group and the prison catalyzed further outside work, such as an art show held on campus exhibiting work done by the inmates in the group, campus workshops and conferences related to mass incarceration, as well as community organizing on the death penalty. Here too, prisoners have helped shape an agenda.
48[We] develop a kind of activist practice within the group focused on issues that have been identified by the insiders as of central importance to them. (...) One of the extraordinary things to me is that abolishing the death penalty was definitely not first on their list. The issues that everyone agrees are the most important are medical care—or lack thereof—and the school-to-prison pipeline, so broad-based social transformations such that kids would not be funneled into the prison system, and not end up in a place like they are. [45]
49It is a slow, long-term strategy, aiming not at electoral politics but "the level of the demos understood as people, socially situated, with broad, intersectional concerns." [46] Indeed, opening spaces for dialogue inside and outside prisons, while seemingly abstract and timid in the face of mass incarceration as a social problem, is actually a hard-nosed practical effort. Not only does it strike at a root cause of the problem, namely the social distance between the public and our institutions of punishment, but it does so without raising the red flag of political activism that would trigger administrative denial of security privileges for lay citizen efforts inside, such as reading groups.
50Some prison education programs result in full-fledged college degrees. An exemplary model is the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), which offers high quality liberal arts education across six New York state prisons. Incarcerated women and men who gain admission to the highly selective program take courses equivalent to those offered on the main Bard campus and earn the same degrees. BPI offers over 60 courses per semester and has enrolled more than 700 incarcerated men and women. To date Bard has granted over 300 degrees to BPI participants.
51The overarching purpose of the program is to provide inmates with the educational resources needed to find a place in society. As BPI founder Max Kenner notes:
52BPI (...) creates opportunities for people later in life to work hard to achieve real fulfillment, to get sense of the breadth of one's own curiosity, to engage with the world in an entirely different way. And, it happens that we do this with the people who the last generation of America's best social scientists called "super predators" and "hopeless." (...) Most concretely, the vast majority of our students go into the human services or they do advocacy after they are released from prison. They are working with people who are homeless, with youth at risk, people returning home from prison, people with HIV and AIDS, etc. They do God's work, they do work that desperately needs to be done well, and they are highly qualified for it. The vast majority of our people are returning to the communities that send the most people to prison. And they do so with two qualities employers in those fields always want but virtually never come together: people who have really "been there" and have had first hand experience and are "authentic", on the one hand, but who also have a really rigorous and unusual education. [47]
53A college degree program has a ripple effect on a prison, turning it from a purely carceral institution to something with a wider range of transformative possibilities. The "signal the program is sending to the entire prison population", says Kenner, is that "there is a path. It may be hard to get to but you know there is a path to something different. And you know that is true for your children. And you know that is true for how your children perceive you." [48] The human capacity a program like BPI can release is immense.
54There is astonishingly broad support for BPI at the college, evidenced by the waiting list of faculty eager to teach seminars in prisons and the considerable pride in the program displayed by the traditional undergraduate population. The loudest moments in campus commencement ceremonies are when BPI students receive their degree. For faculty and students alike, the program illustrates the meaning and value of a liberal arts degree to shape lives and to transform society. While not conventionally political, this kind of effort tears down barriers between elite and disadvantaged, citizen and non-citizen:
55[O]ne can imagine us as a kind of Highlander school in the era of mass incarceration. We are not training people just to be civic advocates in one way or another, of course. Not by any stretch. We are thrilled when alumni go into business, or when they go into the arts, or the ministry or what have you. But there is a sort of physics to the work: if you ensure that the places in society that are worst off have outlets for people to become the best they can be, unexpected and profound things can happen. [49]
56Bard is a leader in these efforts, but it is not the only elite liberal arts school extending a full range of teaching into prisons. The recently created Consortium for the Liberal Arts in Prison joins together Grinnell College, Goucher College, Holy Cross College, the University of Notre Dame, and Wesleyan University in establishing high-level teaching programs for inmates.
57William DiMascio, as head of the Pennsylvania Prison Society, has experimented with a different kind of participatory innovation. DiMascio has organized deliberative forums involving visitors and inmates in every prison in the state. These forums involve moderated small-group dialogue about current issues such as social security, health care policy, and school violence, which are laid out in nonpartisan booklets published by the National Issues Forums Institute.
58In Spring 2013 we held a deliberative forum training session at the State Correctional Institute at Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. We trained eight life sentenced prisoners and eight outside guests—a professor and students from Juniata College and four members of the Prison Society chapter of prison visitors. Our intention was manifold: first, we wanted to get forums going in the prison; second, we wanted to have our chapter trained so they could help reluctant prison administrators to see the interest and value in permitting the forums to take place; and third, to stimulate interest in public deliberation on the campus. [50]
59As with Guenther's reading group, one purpose of DiMascio's deliberative forum is empowerment. Here, within the space of a moderated group discussion, you have the freedom to form your own opinion on something, to express it to others, and shape an ongoing group discussion. After a first round of forums, which DiMascio spearheaded, inmates in a number of prisons requested further sessions.
60There is a thirst, if you will, to be heard, to be relevant, to feel like people can engage with them, people are interested in hearing what their opinions are. And this is something they are deprived of, for the most part, while they are in prison. You know the steel bars and the big fences and all really cannot prevent that quite natural human desire. So I think that is why they requested them. My goal is to begin to bring marginalized men and women back into a society where their thoughts and feelings are heard. [51]
61Prison life is "day in and day out, a pretty dismal and boring existence—one that really reinforces the lack of humanity in everybody who is there", notes DiMascio. "I have always been taken by the fact that in visiting with different inmates I met some positively brilliant minds. And yet they live in this intellectual wasteland." [52]
62While only contingently achieved because of prison administration reluctance, DiMascio's deliberative forums show the possibility of creating a platform for discussion that can regularly bring lay citizens in to local prisons to share experiences and engage in dialogue with inmates. Such circulation of people and ideas serves the simple but also very difficult goal of responsibilization: placing one in the position of taking responsibility for what one thinks and does. By becoming involved, lay citizens can learn indirectly about the causes and consequences of crime and punishment and achieve sobriety about incarceration.
63I believe that people would see what they do not seem to want to see if they would begin to accept responsibility for what our criminal justice system is doing. The failed system has cost untold millions of dollars. I do not think people realize generally that the system operates the way it does. [53]
64Participatory innovation in prison has both the exceedingly long-term goal of public awareness but also the concrete, short-term objective of improving well-being one participant at a time. Inmates coming to make choices about what to read, how to focus their thinking, and how to argue are active citizens the republic of ideas even as their civic agency is otherwise severely hampered. This is a democratic education in one of the least democratic places imaginable.
65Work in a community justice conference, or in a prison discussion group, or in a conflict resolution program for a 5th grade classroom may seem trivial given that the bulk of decisionmaking in criminal justice institutions proceeds in relatively nonparticipatory fashion, but it can make a difference. Restorative justice volunteers, beat meeting participants, school children repairing breaches in social order on their own have real existence in political space and time. They are load-bearing members of the manifold institutions of criminal justice: the institutions are thinking and then acting through them. This is a model kind of civic agency well worth expanding: it begins as early as elementary school, is called for periodically even if we have not chosen to participate, brings us into close contact with people who differ from us, refuses to segregate those judged from those judging, and fits into a political culture that becomes better able to see, hear, and talk about difficult subjects. These institutional innovations address what Margaret Urban Walker calls our "morally significant non-perception:" the ways mainstream practices shield the advantaged from the consequences of policies like the draconian criminalization of certain drugs that has sent so many fellow citizens to prison. [54] Normal, regular, citizen action inside and outside is required for contemporary publics to soberly acknowledge and assume responsibility for criminal justice institutions.
66Three factors seem important to sustainability and growth for participatory innovation in criminal justice. The first is critical mass. Echoing what political theorists have referred to as a democratic ecosystem, restorative justice advocates talk about gradual culture change via continual, steady pressure on and in institutions. [55] As Abramson notes:
67[C]ultural change does not happen overnight. Kay Pranis, who is a leader in this country on restorative justice, says restorative justice is like groundwater. Most people don't see groundwater but it nourishes a lot of things. Eventually, it is going to bust through. So has restorative justice fixed everything? No. Is it incrementally making steps toward a tipping point? I would say, most definitely, yes. It is really starting to happen in education. A lot of school systems are talking about restorative practices. But it is going to take a long time to change our cowboy-puritan culture of individuals to begin to look at things as relationships and accountability instead of punishment. [56]
68Second, and closely related, are the institutional weaknesses that drive professionals on the inside to look to alternative practices and to welcome in new ways of doing traditional tasks. Penal managerialism is extremely costly in human and monetary terms, driving an increasing number of professionals to realize that the bill for getting tough on crime through imprisonment is morally and financially unaffordable. All throughout the system we see professionals willing to take risks on alternative procedures. In the state of Washington, for example, prisons have partnered with university environmental studies programs to develop sustainability measures such as communal gardens. [57] In Indiana, college students perform the role of mentors to incarcerated juvenile offenders. [58] These are just two examples of openings into a closed penal world for citizens to play a role inside institutions to co-produce a form of justice professional practice has failed to deliver; for their part, inmates are beginning their own path back to civic agency.
69Third, there is the cultural embarrassment many professionals feel in reproducing an institution that causes human suffering and generates inequality. This is evident in Attorney General Holder's rhetoric urging his colleagues to be "smarter on crime", as noted earlier. With growing awareness of participatory alternatives, as well as greater recognition of institutional weaknesses, comes accountability: the belief that "we"—the ones with knowledge, or training, or simply the ambition to help solve social problems—can do better. Though the BPI program might be seen, uncharitably, as the noblesse oblige of an astronomically expensive liberal arts college, it is also a vibrant sign of accountability—or, as Kenner bluntly states, "Bard believes its own bullsh*t." Breaking down civic inequality and persistent, chronic divisions is what many went into their professional lives motivated to accomplish. Participatory reforms in criminal justice allow professionals to live up to their own values, to be part of the solution and not the problem.
