Justice: transformative, restorative, punitive—what’s the difference?
As a small child I had night terrors. One recurring fear was about prison: I was petrified that I might accidentally commit some harm and be put behind bars. Reflecting on my childhood anxiety, I notice that, while I might have had a shaky grasp on Canada’s legal system, I absolutely grasped the heart of the punishment. Humans are relational. To use Desmond Tutu’s explanation of the Zulu word ubuntu: “I exist because you exist.” To rip us from the ones we love, to deny contact between us, is to cut at the very heart of what it means to be human. So maybe I was born to be an abolitionist.
Despite understanding intuitively a central problem with our carceral system (that we somehow expect people to become better when we isolate them from love) it was years before it dawned on me that prisons might not be an unchangeable “fact of life.”
I remember the “ah ha!” moment well. A family friend, Neil Webster, was sitting at our dinner table. I was a teen, and in a somewhat surly stage. But I really looked up to Neil (having volunteered internationally, he demonstrated to me the ideal of putting beliefs into action. He was also the first openly gay man that I knew) and so was hanging on his words. Neil worked as a teacher inside Stony Mountain federal penitentiary. And in the course of that dinner table conversation he said: “I have come to realize that we could completely stop incarcerating people and if we did that we’d all be safer.”
I was floored—too shy to say anything, but utterly puzzled by what this hero of mine had said. How could that be in any way true?!
I had met my first abolitionist… and his words have stayed with me as a legacy for the rest of my life.
Working in El Salvador with Peace Brigades International (PBI, a not-for-profit organization that has deep ties to Friends) my understanding of prison abolition deepened, and my awareness of restorative justice began.
Our work led us to visit political prisoners, and I remember vividly the terror in the eyes of some of them, the sounds of the locks and doors, the unpleasant smells, the lack of light and air. There was no disguising the fact that this was a cage that people were being held in.
I was also learning about the need for conflict transformation and restorative justice.
Working with PBI involved being an “unarmed bodyguard” of sorts. That meant being inside the workings of social justice organizations—sitting through meetings, attending events, travelling in cars, being a presence in offices.
This insider perspective allowed me to see the ways that internal conflicts break social change groups. I started to look for resources that might help resolve these destructive conflicts. I eventually found myself reading about mediation.
To use a Quaker phrase that’s relatively new to me, I see that “way” has been opening in my life: first regarding prison abolition, then restorative justice, and now more recently penal abolition and transformative justice.
What do these various terms mean?
Quakers are still famous in abolitionist circles for the 1981 minute on prison abolition that reads, in part:
Today, Friends are becoming aware that prisons are a destructive and expensive failure as a response to crime. We are, therefore, turning our efforts to reform prisons to efforts to replace them with non-punitive, life-affirming, and reconciling responses.
It was a bold statement, ahead of its time. (For more on this minute see our 2021 article:
https://QuakerService.ca/1981Minute) While prison abolition names the need to do away with carceral institutions (a long-term process), Quakers realized that that wasn’t enough, and went on to expand on the 1981 minute, with a declaration in support of penal abolition.
While prison abolition focuses on getting rid of prisons and jails, penal abolition invites us to move from a punitive system to centering healing and accountability in all of the ways that we respond to wrong-doing—in our families, our schools, and our communities.
“To deny contact between us is to cut at the very heart of what it means to be human. So maybe I was born to be an abolitionist.”
Acknowledging that our current punitive system is a recent colonial imposition—and indeed a recent blip even in European nations—one way that prison abolition movements focused energy was on creating alternatives to the criminal justice system, many of which were based on traditional Indigenous justice-making practices that centred those who had been harmed, and those who had done harm.
Professor Howard Zehr suggests that the colonial criminal justice system (or retributive system) asks these three questions: What law was broken? Who did it? What punishment do they deserve?
A restorative approach asks very different questions: Who has been harmed? What do they need? Who is responsible for fulfilling those needs?
Restorative justice is now firmly embedded in the Canadian justice system and does offer alternatives. For instance, mediation can bring people together and offers those who’ve done harm a chance to make amends. It offers people who’ve been harmed a voice to ask questions and speak about the impacts on their lives. Mark Umbreit and other researchers have shown solid evidence that restorative approaches can be significantly more effective than the mainstream criminal justice system.
There are critiques of restorative justice as well. Some criticize it for having becoming professionalized, to the exclusion of the community. Others observe that it’s had a history of being practiced in very culturally exclusive ways. And it’s critiqued for being overly focused on involved individuals and not considering context enough.
As early as 2000, Friend Ruth Morris had coined another term, one that is only recently venturing into mainstream discourse about justice, and one that CFSC fully embraces in our work: transformative justice.
Onashowewin—an Indigenous organization in Winnipeg—embodies transformative justice. At Onashowewin, workers observe that the harm someone did, or the “crime” that someone committed, may not be the biggest problem in that person’s life. So Onashowewin focuses on the context that led to a person committing that crime. Transformative justice, therefore, seeks to go beyond restorative justice, and not just “restore” a situation (that might actually have been unhealthy or harmful) but transform it.
At CFSC, this term calls to us because not only is it imbued with Quaker values of peace and justice, but it seeks to go to the root of structural and social issues that underlie many instances of “wrong doing.” Moreover, transformative justice describes not what we don’t want, such as a carceral world, but the world that we do want to create. To borrow from James Nayler (1616-1660), transformative justice invites us to a
new creation, new heavens, and new earth, and new heart and mind, and a new law, a new man [sic] to walk therein with his [sic] Maker with cheerfulness, and the old bonds are broken by the Spirit’s leading, and to serve in newness of spirit.
For more information on transformative justice, I’d invite you to watch What is Transformative Justice, by Mariame Kaba et al.
Karen Ridd is CFSC’s Transformative Justice Program Coordinator.
