CHAPTER 3
ADDRESSING HARMS
Moving from Punishment to Accountability
June 28, 2010
In a civil trial brought by one of his victims, Jon Burge is convicted of two counts of obstruction of justice and one count of perjury for having previously lied under oath when he denied having tortured people. He is sentenced to four and a half years in federal prison, of which he will go on to serve three and a half. It doesn’t in any way feel like justice has been served. To those whom he harmed, it feels more like salt in the wound.
For almost twenty years, from 1972 to 1991, Burge, a former police commander in Chicago, and his crew of midnight-shift detectives tortured at least 120 and as many as 200 young men into false confessions.1 Most of them were black; some were Latinx. His victims were suffocated with plastic bags, stomped on, and held down against radiators until their skin burned. They had soda poured up their noses and were beaten with pistols. Their genitals were shocked with electricity and loaded guns were placed inside their mouths and pointed at their heads during rounds of Russian roulette. Burge called the electric shock device “the nigger box.”2
“They went home every night to be with their wives and their kids. They went home every night to teach their sons how to read, how to ride a bike, or how to drive a car. They went home every night to their families. They set the table and ate dinner. They got on the telephone to talk to friends as much as they wanted to. They were with their mothers before their mothers got sick and passed away. . . . The City of Chicago cut 21 years of my life. They can’t give me the time I wanted to teach my son how to ride a bike or how to tie his shoe. They can’t give me anything that I missed out on. No, justice has not been served,” said Ronald Kitchen, arrested in 1988 and tortured by Burge and his associates into a false confession that landed him twenty-one years in prison, thirty of them on death row.3
How many times did the justice system fail these young men? Let me count the ways, or at least give you some highlights.
The first allegations against Burge and his men were made in 1972. A request for an investigation into torture allegations was made by the medical director of Cook County Jail in 1982, yet the then-state’s attorney (later mayor) Richard Daley took no action. In 1984 the police department’s disciplinary agency, the Office of Professional Standards (OPS), filed a report about the use of electric shock on persons in custody. No action was taken. Between 1981 and 1988, fifty-five people were tortured in order to obtain confessions, and although the state’s attorney’s office was aware of this, the coerced and false evidence was still used in hearings and trials to send the victims to prison.4
In 1989, one of the victims, Andrew Wilson, sued Jon Burge and several other officers for civil rights violations, including torture. Burge was represented by private lawyers, paid for by the city government. The trial ended when the jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict. Burge was acquitted of the charges in a second trial. In 1990, the OPS filed a report, recommending Burge be fired and citing fifty cases of torture and abuse that were “systematic” and “methodical” and “included psychological techniques and planned torture.”5 No action was taken. In 1992, OPS released the reports to the public. The mayor and the police superintendent attacked the credibility of the OPS reports and took no action, while the city’s police union hosted a fundraiser to pay for his defense, which some three thousand people attended.6 In 1993, finally, Burge was fired. He continued to receive his monthly police pension until his death in 2018.7
Between 1993 and 1995, further investigations were undertaken, findings were hidden, Andrew Wilson’s case was retried and the judge approved a $1.1 million award, which the City of Chicago unsuccessfully appealed. Further cases came forward. Burge kept pleading the Fifth. Half of the claims were deemed credible, but because the statute of limitations for police abuse of suspects had by now been exceeded, no indictments were made.
Attorney Flint Taylor, part of the People’s Law Office, which represented many of Burge’s torture victims, described it as an “unremitting official cover-up that has implicated a series of police superintendents, numerous prosecutors, more than 30 police detectives and supervisors, and, most notably, Richard M. Daley.”8
Meanwhile, young men served time in jail and lived with recurring nightmares, depression, anxiety, and other trauma for the next three decades. Mark Clements was just sixteen years old when he was brutalized by Burge, and served twenty-eight years for the confession police elicited from him.9 Anthony Holmes, tortured by Burge and his associates in 1973, served his full thirty-three-and-a-half-year sentence before being exonerated.10 As many as twenty survivors of the torture ring remain incarcerated today.11
How do you possibly begin appropriately addressing the harms from a case like this, one in which almost an entire city government is implicated, over decades?
May 6, 2015
The City of Chicago signed into law legislation for $5.5 million in reparations to the victims of Burge’s racist and sadistic practices.
Under the legislation, each torture-ring survivor received nearly $100,000, defined explicitly as reparations. Checks went out in January 2016. All survivors and their families are eligible for free college tuition. The ordinance includes a formal apology from the current mayor.
In his apology, Mayor Rahm Emanuel said: “Jon Burge’s actions are a disgrace—to Chicago, to the hard-working men and women of the police department, and most importantly to those he was sworn to protect. . . . Today, we stand together as a city to try and right those wrongs, and to bring this dark chapter of Chicago’s history to a close.” A permanent official public memorial recognizing the victims is also to be erected in the city.
The ordinance also includes a mandate to teach the broader public about racial injustice through a public school curriculum. Starting in the 2017–18 school year, the Chicago public school system introduced a new required text in eighth and tenth grade. It is titled Reparations Won: A Case Study in Police Torture, Racism, and the Movement for Justice in Chicago.
A range of social services is available to survivors of the torture ring as part of the reparations. Under the motto “Sorry is not enough,” the Chicago Torture Justice Center offers a public health clinic with private therapy rooms, treatment for physical traumas, and case managers to coordinate access to public services. This is America’s first official trauma center for the victims of its own police forces.
The ordinance and reparations package was the idea of community activists and lawyers who felt betrayed by the justice system’s response to the atrocities. Between 2012 and 2015 they organized meetings, petitions, marches, teach-ins, and a Twitter campaign to pressure Mayor Emanuel. They met with city officials, and they were energized by the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. And finally, after decades of trying to get justice, they pushed the ordinance before the city council, and made history.12
“Police accountability” is a term that has come to mean that police officers should follow the law enforcement directive to control crime and maintain order. But the real question is, Which order, imposed by whom? The order of the day is a society in which many go without. Police intervene on behalf of bosses when people press for a living wage that the law doesn’t yet require. They intervene on behalf of businesses when people are loitering, sweeping those people away. As with the criminal legal system, the police are more likely to protect you and keep you safe if you are a rich white man or corporation. They protect power, prestige, and property.
America’s police need to be accountable to America’s people. This example from Chicago is a good first step toward making it so.
FROM PUNISHMENT TO ACCOUNTABILITY
What do we do with those who cause harm? I am not so naive as to believe that we can have a world without any violence or harm. Sometimes we fail. We fail to live to the best standards for ourselves, or we fail to escape the patterns of abuse that wrecked our childhoods. However, if we don’t figure out a different way to treat each other when we make mistakes, then no one is truly safe. We need a transformation of our current culture such that we can handle conflict, violence, and harm in more effective ways.
The important questions are: What can accountability and consequences look like beyond courts and prisons? How can we provide satisfactory experiences for those who were harmed? How can justice truly be served?
Punishment teaches that those who have the power can force others to do what they want them to do. Punishment involves control over someone, by fear or coercion, denying their fundamental dignity and rights. It is done to someone. Accountability, by contrast, occurs with someone. Even if someone makes a mistake, that person is still worthy of basic respect and humane treatment. When respect and basic dignity are present, accountability takes on qualities of a partnership, where those who made mistakes engage as agents in their own transformation, rather than having things done to them or for them. The sense of being in partnership with those who hold you accountable for your mistakes has been demonstrated to create more impactful and sustainable transformation. Punishment cuts people off from society and from participation, from the opportunity to thrive in the future. Accountability is about creating a future in which people change their lives as a result of learning from their mistakes, and the whole fabric of society is stronger for it.
Accountability consists of two parts: acknowledgment and consequences. Both parts involve dialogue with your community. Acknowledgment means you take responsibility for what was done (looking to the past). Consequences are the actions you take to make the present and future right (looking forward). Appropriate consequences are determined by dialogue with those you have a relationship with; they are the actions you must undertake to repair the relationship in a way that’s satisfactory to everyone impacted.
We can hold people accountable only when they are in some kind of real relationship with us—we have to share a community. Another word for accountable is answerable. You can’t answer if there’s no one on the other end. You need a relationship in order to answer, to be answerable, to be accountable. Establishing community, maintaining community, feeling a sense of community is a prerequisite for accountability. If you have harmed someone, you have harmed the relationships, destroyed the fabric of community, so you need to honor the relationships—that is the full meaning of accountability. It’s not just admitting: “I did this”—it’s also about acknowledging the real impacts on the person(s) you harmed and all the fallout of your action within your shared community, so that you can make amends.
The anthropologist Max Gluckman, who observed the judicial process among the Barotse of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in the 1940s, made the point that traditional societies, being smaller and more closely knit, often have “multiplex” relationships, meaning members interact in multiple arenas and are connected in a number of ways.13 For example, imagine if your landlord were a distant relative, also ran the shop where you got your car serviced, and served as a firefighter in your neighborhood. Gluckman contrasted this with modern societies, where many people tend to only have one connection to each other: just a landlord, or just a relative, or just a mechanic or firefighter. When you rely on each other for more types of interactions and services, you’re more motivated to resolve conflicts. There’s more of a sense of collective responsibility.
Even without the multiplex relationships of traditional societies, a strong social contract—in which people and government share both the responsibility for and the benefits from things like parks, public transportation, and healthcare—creates more sense of collective responsibility. Government disinvestment weakens the sense of collective responsibility; a social safety net will help us hold each other accountable.
Many traditional societies have long had justice systems where, when someone transgresses or causes harm, the response is to heal the relationships that have been hurt. According to Chief Justice Robert Yazzie of the Navajo Nation: “Western adjudication is a search for what happened and who did it; Navajo peace-making is about the effect of what happened. Who got hurt? What do they feel about it? What can be done to repair the harm?”14 In New Zealand/Aotearoa, prior to European contact, the Maori had a well-developed system that prioritized the stability, harmony, and integrity of relationships and kinship groups, with an exchange of goods and services usually considered adequate compensation when hostility occurred and relationships were disturbed.15 The goal of their process is peacemaking and the restoration of balance.
The idea of restoration of balance is key to overcoming the adversarial nature of Us vs. Them, expressed in the realm of crime as “good guys” vs. “bad guys,” perpetrator vs. victim, innocent vs. guilty. To restore balance is not about having one side win and one side lose: it’s about creating the conditions for well-being as everyone moves forward.
RESTORATION
Relationships, accountability, and healing are the principles at the foundation of the movement for restorative justice. Restorative justice is based on holding people accountable, because they are held in community. Restorative justice is influenced by the principles of healing and peacemaking; in fact, a key component of restorative justice is to view violence prevention as a public health issue.
Where the criminal legal system focuses on whether a law was broken and how to make someone pay for breaking the law, restorative justice emphasizes the root causes of harms. Rather than asking: “What law was broken, who broke it, and how should they be punished?” restorative justice asks, “Who was harmed? What do they need? Whose responsibility is it to meet those needs?”
Restorative justice places the needs of the survivor at the center. It avoids terms like “victim,” “perpetrator,” and “offender,” because of the way in which those labels can stick to a person forever and deny them the ability to evolve, to heal, to change.
Restorative justice asks: How can everyone in a given community—family members, friends, neighbors, coworkers, bystanders, and community members—get actively involved in making amends, ending violence, and righting relationships? Where are the elders and trusted members of the community who will intervene for the good of the whole? Who will be willing to step in and say, “If we do not deal with the unresolved conflict, it will divide the community into factions, leaving us fractured and less resilient?” School counselors and teachers, social workers, housing advocates, medical providers, faith leaders, and many others join forces to address why a harm was committed, how to repair the harm, and how to prevent other harms from being committed in the future.
Restorative interventions involve dialogues and discussion circles with trained facilitation that support people who have done harm in recognizing the impacts of what they’ve done and acknowledging their accountability. Sometimes the survivor and the person who harmed them participate in separate circles, as a safe way to offer for survivors to participate. Together they reach agreements and make a plan for appropriate consequences and reparations, which may include: stopping the harmful behaviors, listening to the person who was harmed and acknowledging the impacts of the harm, apologizing for the harm, making appropriate reparations, and agreeing to not repeat the harmful behavior with anyone, ever again. Sanctions and further consequences for failing to carry out their agreements and commitments are also part of the plan.
For survivors, healing can take time and may not happen immediately, but the coming together of community to discuss root causes and responsibilities always succeeds in the sense that it inherently refuses dehumanization and curtails cycles of trauma. Restorative justice builds our capacity for holding each other accountable and holding ourselves accountable, for the next time that harm occurs, on whatever scale it does. Through the act of repairing harm done to people and relationships, we learn to develop community, manage conflict, build relationships, and increase social capital.
Sometimes people object to the term “restorative,” pointing out that there is no idealized state to restore things to. In other words, the United States has never been a fair, safe, or just society for many people, given its roots in the genocide of Native people and slavery, and the lack of equal rights for women and gender-nonconforming and queer people, among other injustices and forms of discrimination that continue through the present day. But that’s not what I believe “restoration” means with regards to addressing harms and crimes.
What do I mean by restorative? On the first level: what is restored is individual humanity. Dignity. Agency. It is about healing from dehumanization.
The second level of restoration is interpersonal. When harm is done—especially if violent crime is committed—relationships are harmed. Because of what I’ve called the paradox of proximity, the one most likely to hurt you is someone close to you. So the relationship must also be repaired and restored.
The third level of restoration involves healing whole communities. The framework of fear has targeted entire races of people and types of people. In the same way that the ecosystem of a wetland must be restored after being destroyed, the integrity and safety of these communities must be restored.
Finally, there is the implication on the national level, of healing our bitter divides and restoring the fabric of democracy and the dream of America as a place of liberty and opportunity, where everyone is welcome regardless of religion or background.
HARDCORE ACCOUNTABILITY
But is it tough enough? We have to address this question head-on if we are going to transform the model of public safety in America, because when we are harmed, desires for revenge rooted deep inside us are activated. When my home was broken into, it felt like an invasion. Even though my daughters were unhurt, it awakened the most primal parts of me, and a desire for revenge shot through me. These are the natural and unconscious responses to a threat of harm, and they arise automatically when we consider how to keep ourselves safe.
The desire for retribution and vengeance is natural, in the sense that it is hardwired into us as a species. It’s human nature. When we experience vengeance, the same “reward” parts of our brains activate that are stimulated with cocaine and nicotine use. Evolutionary biology explains how vengeance was beneficial to our species (and other animals as well): “Revenge’s ability to punish aggressors, its ability to deter would-be aggressors, and its ability to discourage cheaters made it adaptive in our ancestral environment,” writes Michael McCullough, author of the book Beyond Revenge.16
So yes, it’s human nature to desire revenge against the one who has harmed us. Yet just because we’re individually wired to demand something that was advantageous to us when we lived in primitive societies doesn’t mean that as a society we can’t evolve and transcend that wiring. Evolutionary biologists have likewise traced how forgiveness was also advantageous to our primitive ancestors, in that it supported cooperation, which also contributed to survival. What makes revenge as opposed to forgiveness more or less advantageous in today’s world is social context.
As McCullough notes: “When people live in places where crime and disorder are high, policing is poor, governments are weak, and life is dangerous, they will tend to use revenge as a problem-solving strategy . . . we’ll see more forgiveness in places where people are highly dependent on complex networks of cooperative relationships, policing is reliable, the system of justice is efficient and trustworthy, and social institutions are up to the task of helping truly contrite offenders make amends with the people they’ve harmed.”17
We do not live in that context as yet. Still, we have the power to create a social context in which revenge makes less sense. What’s required for that is a society in which sufficient resources are available to individuals and communities, and the value of relationships is recognized and supported as of utmost importance.
OK, so in the meantime, is restorative justice tough enough? There’s a perception that alternatives to criminal justice like restorative justice are “soft” and “weak”—that they “let folks off easy.” The reality is that facing the full impacts of the pain you have caused is anything but being let off easy. Yes, it is a different kind of “toughness” than the horror and misery of prison, but it is hardcore. All we have to do is reflect on how deeply uncomfortable it is for us to be confronted by a loved one for even a relatively minor transgression, like not listening or becoming impatient. If you’re like me, like most of us, staying present in that moment and taking responsibility feels like a herculean task.
Sending people to remote prisons and into isolation is often described as being “tough on crime.” In reality, this is the opposite of hardcore accountability. Prisons and cages just remove you, cutting you out of the fabric of community.
But to have to stay, to be forced by your entire community to hear the pain, trauma, horror, fear, and grief you caused, that is hardcore. Real accountability comes when a person has to face what they have done, when they have to own up to it, and work to make it right. To be forced to acknowledge that you have heard it, let it in, and allowed yourself to feel what that felt like is tough. To know that until you have come clean and made amends not only to the person(s) you directly harmed, but also to your entire community, is hardcore.
Restorative justice causes a real reckoning with the harm an individual has caused. Studies have found that people who go through restorative justice processes are much less likely to break the law again than those who have gone through the courts and prison. The restorative justice approach has been proven effective at reducing rates of repeated offenses: in a recent study of a hundred felony cases, youth who went through restorative justice processes were 44 percent less likely to commit further crimes than those who went through the juvenile justice system. At the same time, survivors also reported a higher level of satisfaction: 91 percent in the same study said they would recommend the restorative process to a friend.18
So how does restorative justice work in various settings? Here’s an overview of how it’s implemented with harm that happens in our homes, in the workplace, and in schools, and on the national and international level.
HOME
Harm that occurs within the home or the family has a special set of challenges. The person doing the harm is almost always someone the victim knows, and often, knows well. Survivors often don’t want to talk about it, and members of the family or community can refuse to see it or acknowledge it. Given the multiple relationships, and often close bonds, that people have with one another, it is difficult for family members and community members to know what to do. Its prevalence and its presence within our most intimate spaces make us feel powerless to stop it.
Traditionally, violence in the home was considered a private affair. Calling the authorities could be fraught with danger. The police tend to rely on threats of punishment, which tend to make the abusive person angry and likely to mete out more violence, if the police leave without removing them. For decades, many police departments had policies that specifically discouraged arrest in domestic violence cases.19
Sexual assault of domestic partners is one of the most under-reported harms that happen in homes. Only a fraction of abuses that do get reported are prosecuted, and only in a fraction of those cases is someone found guilty. Far more harm is happening than is being punished, let alone healed. Survivors of sexual assault know that the current approach, which can mean facing interrogation and possibly blaming and shaming in court and perhaps also in media coverage, is likely to be uncomfortable at best and traumatic at worst. All of this leads to even fewer survivors coming forward.
Mary Koss, a professor of public health who has focused her research on sexual violence, comments: “Many victims say, ‘I want to tell my story to him, to the person who did this to me, and I want my family and friends to be sitting there so they can understand I am a legitimate victim.’”20 While some survivors may want their cases to end up in court, others are dissuaded by the fact that judges and lawyers continue to blame victims and that conviction rates remain stubbornly low. They would rather hear the person who violated them acknowledge the harm than navigate a criminal system that seems stacked against them.
If someone is arrested and convicted, which has occurred more often since the passage of the Violence Against Women Act in 1994 (the law is currently up for reauthorization as I write, and it is being opposed by Republicans), they are unlikely to have learned any new skills for dealing with conflict or how to be a better spouse, partner, or family member. The criminal legal system often serves just to deepen divides and normalize violence. When violence happens in a home, within a partnership or family, it destroys trust, safety, and health. Yet the traditional lock-’em-up response usually just increases everyone’s sense of powerlessness and promotes dissolution of trust, safety, and health, rather than their restoration. Of course sexual assault should continue to be a crime that is denounced and prosecuted. Yet survivors should have an array of options available that allow them to pursue the path that best suits their circumstances and need.
Further complicating matters, sometimes people who experience violence and harm at home want to remain there. This is often true when the harms are done to children. Some people want their abusive loved one to stay home and get treatment, therapy, and support. In other instances, it is necessary for the safety of others that people who have caused harm are removed from the home, but they should still be able to play a role in the community. The criminal legal system has little to no flexibility in accommodating these different cases.
According to the project generationFIVE, which aims to end the sexual abuse of children within five generations, putting people in jail and prison has proven to be unsuccessful in preventing child abuse, changing behavior, or making restitution to those impacted by child sexual abuse. When the person who has been sexually abusive is able to take accountability for their actions and to make meaningful reparations, greater healing is possible for everyone involved.21
The project generationFIVE also calls for accountability of bystanders who did not manage to protect children. Protective action by bystanders can include “setting limits with, confronting, and challenging those who exercise power in abusive ways” as well as offering to listen to those who were impacted by the abuse, and acknowledging their own collusion in the abuse. Community accountability recognizes that generally there are a number of ways that others in the community (and even within the family) ignore, minimize, or even encourage violence.
Moving from punishment to hardcore accountability asks how family members, friends, neighbors, coworkers, and community members can get actively involved in ending violence when their own loved ones are experiencing violence. Often, when asked to get involved in a conflict, people say things like, “I don’t want to take sides,” or “I love you all too much to get involved.” In restorative justice, rather than stepping away from people in a conflict, we are asked to step in.
#METOO AND THE WORKPLACE
Sexual harassment and misconduct in the workplace share some of the same complicating factors of violence and harm committed in homes. Given the power dynamics, survivors often don’t feel secure coming forward, and members of the workplace or community can refuse to see it or acknowledge it. This means that community and bystander accountability has to be part of the solution, as it is with harms happening in homes.
Recent events have indicated how widespread harm is in the workplace, particularly harm to women, and how far we still have to go to achieve safe workplaces. As allegations came forward against dozens of powerful men in 2018, some apologies were made and some of those who caused harm stepped down from their positions, but little was done to address the underlying power dynamics. As the reaction of half the country to the brave and credible testimony of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford revealed during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation battle, we have a long way to go, baby. Tarana Burke reflected: “Where’s the self-reflection and accountability? Perhaps if we saw some evidence of that, then we can have a more robust conversation about the road to redemption.”22
This moment in time presents us with an incredible opportunity to implement a form of justice that offers healing and that transforms the broader culture such that powerful people no longer feel free to commit sexual misconduct, as they have clearly felt until now. Those who have committed harm, particularly the powerful, publicly visible ones with many followers and fans, should use their platforms to model accountability and transformation, rather than denial and defensiveness. They should behave in ways that demonstrate not only their commitment to changing their own behavior but also their commitment to challenging the belief systems around power, namely patriarchy and white supremacy. We know violence isn’t just about violence: it is also about power. One of the campaigns my wife leads is for One Fair Wage. It calls for an end to the subminimum wage for tipped workers, which currently means many tipped workers endure sexual harassment so they can earn enough to feed themselves and their families. Restaurateurs committed to healing can step forward and pay one fair wage as part of their consequences—and because it’s the right thing to do—and lobby their colleagues in the industry to follow their lead.
Consequences cannot make the original harm go away, but there’s the possibility that it can lead to healing and behavioral change across society.
SCHOOLS
Many settings are conducive to restorative justice, and schools are among them. We know that zero-tolerance policies, suspensions, and expulsions are all associated with low achievement, poor attendance, and juvenile crime. Restorative justice, which has become a popular alternative to out-of-school suspensions, typically features a meeting of the person involved, students, parents, teachers, administrators, and a counselor or psychologist. The goal is to get students who cause harm to take responsibility for their behaviors and acknowledge they caused suffering to others. It works because it’s empowering. Rather than imposing a harsh set of punishments determined by the system, restorative justice enables students to create the consequences they deem appropriate and hold each other accountable. Young people have a strong sense of fairness and justice and how to make things right. Schools that have adopted restorative justice and accountability processes are seeing decreases in suspension and expulsion rates and disciplinary referrals. Restorative justice calls in the community to help resolve conflict, and many students benefit from that process. When you adopt restorative justice, you call students in and give them an opportunity to learn from their mistakes. When you suspend or expel, they are pushed out of school, and no such opportunity exists.
One model, Positive Behavioral Intervention and Support (PBIS), is a nationally recognized framework for shifting away from a punitive school culture. The model developed from individual behavioral support for children with severe disabilities. George Sugai, a professor of educational psychology and expert on PBIS, asserts that supports and rewards systems for individual behavior cannot be successful unless the entire school is transformed, including, for example, policies around hiring, training, and teambuilding among school staff; the system of collecting data, such as test scores and attendance, on students; and classroom management strategies. The social culture is as important as the instructional culture, and the relationships and the interactions that students have with each other is as important as the relationships and interactions that occur between adults and students.23
In PBIS, students and school staff collaborate to create the expectations of how to treat each other and how to behave, such as through a set of rules developed and agreed upon by staff and students requiring that the school be safe and that staff and students act respectfully and responsibly toward one another. These rules specify minor and major disciplinary infractions, as well as the associated interventions or consequences, in a process that is sensitive to the cultures expressed in the school’s student body and community. There’s a shift from assimilation to empowerment. Nationwide data on schools that have implemented PBIS indicate a reduction in disciplinary events that averages 50 percent.24
One of the caveats around restorative interventions in schools is that relationships are the prerequisite for accountability. This means that if students have poor relationships with one another and with teachers and administrators, restorative processes will be less effective. We need relationship-centered schools and social and emotional learning programs, which teach self-awareness and ways of coping with one’s own emotions in order to practice empathy, compassion, and awareness of the experience of others. Rather than use student performance on standardized tests as the default form of school accountability for evaluating and rewarding or punishing, we should use the personal growth of all stakeholders and the overall quality of community as our metric for schools.
CORPORATE ACCOUNTABILITY
The criminal legal response to corporate crimes needs to be stronger, with expanded resources devoted to prosecuting white-collar and corporate crimes; however, resolution of such prosecutions would not necessarily involve a prison sentence. True accountability is more likely to occur through restorative, community-based justice in which corporate actors have to participate in community accountability sessions, where they must come to terms with the harm they have caused and make amends.
When consumers organize to protest the behavior of corporations through boycotts or shareholder activism (such as when people purchase shares in a company for the sole purpose of speaking out and voting against bad policies or behaviors as members of corporate boards), it can be quite powerful. But consumers are only one part of the community of a corporation. The communities involved in growing, mining, and producing the materials for products are another part of a corporation’s community, as are the workers all along the supply chains of products and the provision of services. Collectively, all these people are stakeholders, and they all should have a say when it comes to holding corporations accountable and have a place at the corporate board table. More power than that wielded by shareholders is held, of course, by owners of corporations, so the movement promoting collective ownership is the most powerful way to keep corporations accountable. In places where workers don’t have ownership shares, they hold employers accountable by participating in unions. Unionization and bargaining need to be made easier through policies of default unionization, unless a majority of workers vote otherwise.
Finally, government at all levels should be the community that holds corporations accountable, rather than serving as a tool of corporate power. Efforts to diminish and ultimately end corporate control of government, by establishing public funding of campaigns and limiting corporate donations, are top priorities.
NEIGHBORHOODS AND NATION
Restorative interventions can be effectively implemented at various scales. For elected officials, for example, accountability is always to the communities that form their constituencies. Consequences for harms they cause might include community service to support people they’ve harmed, or being removed from their positions if the harm is too great. The example of Chicago, which opened this chapter, is instructive.
But even on the federal government level there are examples of restorative justice. Truth and reconciliation committees have been implemented in many places around the world. As their name implies, the committees are tasked with investigating, uncovering, and revealing the truth about wrongdoings on the national level, then cocreating efforts to address the damage. These include reparations to survivors that provide financial or other kinds of supports, as in Chicago. Official apologies, public memorials, and monuments are also often involved.
One of the first such commissions, the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, was created in Argentina in 1983. It produced a report entitled Nunca Más (Never Again), which documented the widespread human rights abuses of the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. It documented 8,961 desaparecidos—victims of disappearance. In this case, the report led to a war crimes trial in civilian court.25
Most famous is probably the South African Truth and Reconciliation Committee, formed in 1995, which brought survivors and perpetrators of apartheid-era violence together in an attempt to heal and move forward with Nelson Mandela’s vision of a rainbow nation. Chile also created a Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, and later a Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture following the reign of Augusto Pinochet, during which approximately three thousand people went missing or died. In 2006, Canada launched a Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the last of its Indian boarding schools closed in 1996. Government officials had kidnapped some 150,000 Native children from their families in order to assimilate them.26
Rarely has the United States government made amends for the kinds of actions I described in the first chapter—the forced relocations, family separations, and forced labor among entire populations, including Native Americans, African Americans, and immigrants. If anything, after decades the government might issue an apology, but this has not gone anywhere near accountability for the scale of harm rendered. The one exception on the national level is the case of Japanese Americans who were incarcerated during World War II.
In 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act to provide reparations to the 120,000 Japanese Americans who had been incarcerated during World War II. The legislation offered a formal apology and paid $20,000 to each of the survivors.27 As with the legislation in Chicago, the bill was the result of over a decade’s worth of campaigning by activists in the Japanese American community, including the Japanese American Citizens League, which formally resolved to pursue reparations at its 1970 convention. The Japanese American Citizens League first sponsored legislation to create a federal investigative commission, which was approved under President Carter. The findings of the 1982 commission report justified reparations and prompted the 1988 legislation.28 Of all the atrocities I recount in stories of America’s historical scapegoats and forced family separations, this is the only one that has been federally acknowledged with reparations.
But the time of reckoning is coming. Between author Ta-Nehisi Coates’s landmark article “The Case for Reparations” in 2014 and the official platform of Movement for Black Lives, which includes a demand for reparations to African Americans, consensus is growing.29 Reparations are due not just for slavery, but for decades of Jim Crow injustice and the systematic dehumanization, deprivation, and criminalization carried out through the framework of fear.
In nearly every city across America, there is a history of violence against black people and other people of color. A new president should create incentives for every city’s police department to embark on a process of truth and reconciliation. This would help build real community/police dialogue. By doing so, government officials might identify officers who are unwilling to take part in such an examination and thereby begin to identify and remove officers with ties to white supremacist groups and or officers sympathetic to the ideology.
People in power rarely want to be held accountable; few of us do, but people in positions of power have more means, helpers, and enablers to avoid it. Overcoming trauma in this country will require holding powerful institutions and people accountable. Full accountability means we take responsibility for our history as well as our present.
RESTORE OAKLAND
A new vision for community healing and accountability is what my organization is modeling with Restore Oakland, a place that will demonstrate what investment in communities, resources, and relationships makes possible.
A true justice system has to be based on two things: One, it should ensure that people who have caused harm can make amends for the harm they have caused. Their consequences should be commensurate with the harm they have caused, while taking into account their membership in their own families and the human family. Two, it should provide an opportunity for people to do better moving forward, and to engage fully in society. If people make amends but still find themselves without meaningful work, they are more likely to risk committing economic-driven crimes again.
Restore Oakland is both a building and a scalable model of future possibility. A partnership between the Ella Baker Center, the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, and other community-based organizations, Restore Oakland is an advocacy and training center where Bay Area residents can heal together and create the future together.
It will house a restorative justice center where the organizations Community Works and Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth will hold accountability circles. Their work helps ensure that people are held in community while being held accountable. We will welcome everyday people looking to address harms and violence in their communities. We plan to offer a program that will train and certify people as facilitators for accountability processes and healing circles. The more people are trained in these skills, the more we build capacity for solving conflicts and addressing harms within community, and are no longer reliant on the framework of fear.
The first floor of the Restore Oakland building will house a restaurant run by formerly incarcerated people and others who have been locked out of opportunity. It will include worker training programs for people to access career ladder jobs in the restaurant industry. Finally, it will be a place where people can come together to exert their collective agency in order to bring these solutions to scale.
Restore Oakland encapsulates all the constituent elements of the care-based safety model: resources, relationships, accountability, and participation.