Restorative justice can transform the world – if we let it

Dear Editor: 

Adam Gopnik’s column, “Overcorrection,” published on July 29, 2024 in the print issue of the New Yorker is an aspirational attempt to problematize mass incarceration, but his execution is flawed at best due to his grossly misguided readings of abolition and restorative justice.  

“Davis and others insist that the real villain of mass incarceration in the U.S. must be late capitalism or neoliberalism,” Gopnik observes. “In truth, we could empty our prisons tomorrow, and Apple and Google and Amazon and the rest atop the high heap of American enterprise would scarcely notice.” 

What this article misunderstands about neoliberalism’s connections to the prison-industrial complex is that the mega corporations Gopnik cites are not the origin of neoliberalism, but symptoms of its ideology taken to its furthest ends. What prison abolitionists mean when they cite neoliberalism as the root of mass incarceration is that neoliberalism is based on extending economic metrics into every possible context, including the state’s administration of its population. But these metrics are anything but neutral––they reflect long histories of exploitation justified through racism, classism, and other social inequities.  As a result, this system does not standardize the state’s treatment of its citizens so much as it rationalizes the devaluation, criminalization, and incarceration of marginalized populations. 

Furthermore, Gopnik asserts that Danielle Sered does not acknowledge how restorative justice may favor what he calls, “better-resourced offenders.” However, the state’s retribution is anything but an even category, as any look at sentencing disparities, the private attorney/public defender distinction, and overpolicing reveals: the existing system benefits these people as much if not far more than the kind of commitment to redistribution demanded by our approach. We practice “a kind of people’s justice,” as Gopnik summarizes, “seeping upward from Indigenous and marginalized communities robbed of wealth but rich in social capital.”  

The point of Until We Reckon is that accountability is broader, more challenging, and more expansive than a check. It demands critical reflection with the contexts in which harm takes place, with the ways in which we do not exist with endless options, but with the array offered to us based on our position in societal circulations of money and power. Restorative justice necessitates a substantive commitment to redress, to addressing the root causes of harm. It does not merely work to heal the wounds of the past, but to transform the future in the creation of a society defined by equity, mobility, and freedom. So restorative justice could work for the examples he brings up: it would only demand that they commit to actually atoning for and addressing the massive ripples caused by their misdeeds. That commitment does not exist at present in any of these cases.   

Gopnik argues that to create a better society for restoration––a “garden in which [incarcerated people] might blossom again” as he puts it––we ought to focus on reducing the incidence of crime, but this argument often serves to amplify and extend incarceration through policing. We cannot fully build better gardens on a national level when the air and soil are tainted with the violence of mass incarceration. In both our ethos and our approach, we believe safety can be achieved when violence is addressed at its root. When we examine and repair issues of inequity, we move closer to solving violence than a police state ever did. Until we reckon with an alternate politics of justice that does not center the state, but the interplay between victim and responsible party, that does not extend violence onto the body of the responsible party in prisons but pushes them to reflect and practice accountability, we will remain in the same unhappy situation of violence.  

Gopnik’s final takeaway is that “Public order can be, as the abolitionists warn, a form of class policing; it is also a necessity for civil peace.” Here at Common Justice, we witness the possibility of a public order that does not demand class policing, but instead conversation and reckoning. We refuse the pessimistic and unimaginative notion that the constitution of civil peace is built on the reproduction of existing inequalities. True justice demands a system that transforms both individuals and the contexts within which they make decisions. To plant a more nourishing garden, one must first believe something else can grow.