Humanizing Justice Systems
“But simply punishing the broken–walking away from them or hiding them from sight–only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.”
– Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
Overview:
Our criminal justice system in America has been severely flawed from its inception. Our so-called “tough on crime” laws have led us to be the nation with the most incarcerated population in the developed world – disproportionately affecting minorities and some of our most already hard hit communities. Yet at the same time, we have some of the highest levels of violence and crime. It is clearly not an effective strategy, and in fact is largely destructive.
Pew research has shown that if you are locking up more than 500 people per 100,000, you are actually adding to crime because we are disrupting and destabilizing so many families and communities that cannot easily recover. The national average in many parts of the US is over 700 per 100,000 and there are many communities around the country that are at 2000 or even 4000 per 100,000. We must do better, and we can do better.
We are seeing a plethora of cost-effective and evidence-based approaches to implementing justice in society that focus more on healing harm done, rather than simply punishing it. These approaches are proving to work better than our current approach.
Our Mission:
To move away from overly punitive policies toward healing-oriented, rehabilitative-focused criminal and juvenile justice approaches that address underlying root causes.
Work to dismantle racial inequities in the current judicial system and monetary incentives inherently built into the current prison industrial complex and eliminate the cradle-to-prison pipeline.
Restorative and transformative justice, diversion/alternative incarceration programs, trauma-informed systems, and robust prisoner rehabilitation and re-entry programs are among the most promising solutions.
“Most people imagine that the explosion in the U.S. prison population during the past twenty-five years reflects changes in crime rates. Few would guess that our prison population leaped from approximately 350,000 to 2.3 million in such a short period of time due to changes in laws and policies, not changes in crime rates. Yet it has been changes in our laws—particularly the dramatic increases in the length of our prison sentences—that have been responsible for the growth of our prison system, not increases in crime. One study suggests that the entire increase in the prison population from 1980 to 2001 can be explained by sentencing policy changes.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Some of the Most Challenging Obstacles to
Humanizing Our Justice System
“Dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.” – Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
“It is about how easily we condemn people in this country and the injustice we create when we allow fear, anger, and distance to shape the way we treat the most vulnerable among us.” –Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: a story of justice and redemption
The viewpoints of The Peace Alliance are not meant to be representative of the organizations referenced or linked below.
Over the past 25 years, half of U.S. states have modified their laws and practices to expand voting access to people with felony convictions. Despite these important reforms, 5.2 million Americans remain disenfranchised, making up 2.3% of the U.S. voting age population.
- As of 2020, approximately 5.17 million people are disenfranchised due to a felony conviction, a figure that has declined by almost 15% since 2016, as states adopted new policies to address this practice.
- In 1976, there were an estimated 1.17 million people disenfranchised; in 1996, 3.34 million, and in 2020, 5.17 million. Currently, approximately 2.27 percent of the total US voting age population is disenfranchised due to a current or previous felony conviction.
The Ban the Box Campaign was started by All of Us or None, a national civil rights movement of formerly-incarcerated people and their families, to end structural discrimination against people with histories of conviction and incarceration.
Today over 45 cities and counties, including New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Seattle, and San Francisco have removed the question regarding conviction history from their employment applications. Seven states, Hawaii, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, have changed their hiring practices in public employment to reduce discrimination based on arrest or conviction records. Some cities and counties and the state of Massachusetts have also required their vendors and private employers to adopt these fair hiring policies. In some areas, private employers are also voluntarily adopting ban the box hiring policies.
While the 13th Amendment is widely believed to have ended slavery, there was an exemption that was used to create a prison convict leasing system of involuntary servitude to fill the labor supply shortage in the southern states after the Civil War.
Black, formerly-enslaved individuals, especially, were often charged and convicted of petty crimes, like walking on the grass, stealing food, or not stepping off the sidewalk to allow white people to pass, as a part of what is known as Jim Crow Laws. Arrests were often made by professional crime hunters who were paid for each “criminal” arrested, and apprehensions often escalated during times of increased labor needs.
Even those who were declared innocent in the courts were often placed in this system when they could not pay their court fees. Companies and individuals paid leasing fees to state, county, and local governments in exchange for the labor of prisoners in farms, mines, lumber yards, brick yards, manufacturing facilities, factories, railroads, and road construction.
What an Alabama Prisoner’s Strike Tells Us About Prison Labor
Early Intervention
Engaging at risk youth early and providing them with support needed to be successful in life can build them into strong, productive members of their communities before they fall into cycles of violence, incarceration, and despair. This can be accomplished through mentoring programs, at home family support, after school programs, and many other positive interventions. (See Community Peacebuilding and Teaching Peace in Schools Cornerstones).
Restorative Justice
We seek approaches to justice that provide an effective process and container for the development of understanding between offenders and victims as well as the wider community. It provides the conditions, guided by victims, for the possibility of healing, forgiveness and restoration. The nature of a restorative process guided by victims’ needs allows for offenders to come to terms with the human cost of their actions and attempts to right the wrong together with all stakeholders. This often is freeing to victims, as well, and a key aspect of their own ability to move forward. In laying the foundations for empathy, restorative justice can and has radically changed lives, prevented crime and recidivism, and rebuilt communities. Working programs in the US have shown astounding success in reducing recidivism, saving time and judicial expense, while preventing incarceration and its associated costs.
Examples:
Victim/Offender Dialogues (VOD)- The VOD is a facilitated process which occurs between victims, survivors, or family survivors of serious, violent crime and the offender in their case. Most often, the VOD process results in a facilitated face-to-face meeting between the victim or survivor and the offender. The overall goal of this process is to provide victims and survivors the opportunity to tell their story, express the impacts of the crime on their lives, and hear the offender take direct accountability for the harm caused. Watch Now
Language is ever-evolving, and we are open to any new words that help humanize the way we think about people who find themselves in situations that often define them. A new term to replace “formerly incarcerated” is “justice-involved individuals”. These are individuals who have been touched by our justice system in some way, whether that be arrested, charged, or convicted of a crime. The organizations listed on the downloadable report help to serve individuals who would identify as justice-involved. You will find resources listed under headings such as food, housing, employment, disability, and much more. We have included the url’s to be copied and pasted into browsers if you receive this information in printed form.
- Black Americans are incarcerated in state prisons at nearly 5 times the rate of white Americans
- Latinx Americans are incarcerated at 1.3 times the rate of white Americans
- The poverty rate for Black Americans is 19.5% compared to 8.1% for white Americans
- Hate crimes against Asian Americans rose 73% in 2020
- 32.9% of prisoners in America are Black and 23.3% are Latinx, despite Black people only making up 12.3% of the population and Latinx people 18.3%
The groups are listed here for educational purposes only. Listing them here is not meant to imply that they endorse the above ideas.
Coalition for Juvenile Justice: CJJ has supported a broad and active coalition across all 56 U.S. states, territories, and the District of Columbia, as the nonprofit association of Governor-appointed SAG members operating under the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA), along with allied staff, individuals, and organizations.
National Association of Community and Restorative Justice Employs principles of social and restorative justice seeking transformation in the ways justice questions are addressed. It promotes effective forms of justice that are equitable, sustainable and socially constructive. NACRJ serves as the parent organization for the biannual National Conference on Restorative Justice and provides members with information resources applicable to restorative and community justice theory and practice.
Restorative Justice On The Rise is an international live dialogue via Webcast and Telecouncil platform, held weekly, reaching an international constituency of a wide spectrum of individuals, organizations, professionals, academics, practitioners, stakeholders and beyond.
Additional Restorative Justice Links
Zehr Institute for RJ (EMU)
Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth
Community Conferencing Center – Baltimore
Longmont Community Justice Partnership – Colorado
Communities for Restorative Justice