Decarcerating America
Page 19
The second thing we would do differently if we were actually serious about reducing violence is to ask: who are crime survivors, what do they want, and what do they need to be safe? While the disparate impacts of mass incarceration are widely documented and understood, what is frequently under-appreciated is the degree to which those victimized by violence are so often also disproportionately people of color, and young men of color in particular.
Although young men of all races between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four experience higher rates of violence, including assault and robbery, than any other age group, data collected by the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice from 1996 through 2007 show that young black men were the most likely to be victimized by violence overall in six of the eleven years.32 For young men of color, this violence is also more likely to include homicide.33 According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, homicide is the leading cause of death for young black men ages ten to twenty-four.34 The disparity can be especially acute in urban settings, where homicide is more common.35 For instance, in New York City in 2015, 96 percent of shooting victims (fatal and non-fatal) were black or Latino.36 Added to the challenge is the fact that the victimization that young men of color experience is likely to happen in a larger context of structural inequity, poverty, and disenfranchisement that diminishes their access to necessary supports; roughly three times as many black children, for instance, live in poverty as compared to white children.37
Young men of color are only one among many groups of survivors whose pain and preferences have been insufficiently heard and insufficiently heeded in the public conversation about crime and punishment. These other groups of survivors include women of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, the working poor, undocumented immigrants, and more.38 Together, they represent a substantial portion of those harmed, but they make up only a very small minority of the voices lifted up in the public debate about crime and punishment. Our national understanding of what survivors want is artificially monolithic and, because it draws from a largely nonrepresentative sample of crime survivors, often distorted.
If we truly listened to crime survivors, we would also find that many voices are excluded not just because of the survivors’ identities but because of their views and preferences. Survivors who support draconian sentencing and punitive policies, while deserving of a voice, too, are given disproportionate space in the public discourse. Were we to listen to survivors more broadly, we would find that, across demographics, the vast majority of survivors, when asked what they want, answer with things that are entirely consistent with and supported by the literature about both trauma and recovery: validation, answers, voice, control, healing, and, above all, safety for themselves and others. Increasingly, for more and more survivors, safety does not mean—and certainly does not only mean—prison for the people who harmed them.
The criminal justice system fails to deliver to many survivors what they need and deserve—in part because we have not genuinely prioritized their well-being in our response to harm. What if instead of asking Who should be punished and for how long? we asked What would it look like to build a criminal justice system in which the greatest portion of survivors experience a sense of justice and safety when they are harmed? This is not a radical or partisan question. It is distinctly not an anti-law-enforcement question—quite the contrary. It is a practical question and a human question. And yet I believe we have abdicated our collective responsibility to answer it.
At Common Justice, the organization I direct, just over a decade ago we began asking this question—and rising to the responsibility of joining those who seek to answer it.39 When asked, many survivors were for the development of alternatives to incarceration for violent crime—particularly for alternatives consistent with the principles and practices of restorative justice. Restorative justice brings together those most directly impacted by a given harm to reach a decision about how the responsible person can make things as right as possible. Restorative justice has been shown to leave those harmed more satisfied with outcomes: victims of crime who have taken part in restorative processes in the United States have reported 80 to 90 percent rates of satisfaction, compared with satisfaction rates around 30 percent for the traditional court system.40 More recently, restorative justice programs have also been shown to significantly reduce post-traumatic stress symptoms in victims.41
Those impacts are in part attributable to the fact that these processes include precisely the things survivors want and do not get from the criminal justice process: answers, voice, control, repair, and a belief that others will be protected from the harm they survived. Their belief in these processes’ contribution to safety is well founded: substantial research in the United States, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom has demonstrated that restorative justice can reduce recidivism rates by 34 percent and more42
Common Justice aims to make a new option available to survivors of violence in the adult court system in the United States. The project develops and advances solutions to violence that transform the lives of those harmed and foster racial equity without relying on incarceration. At the core of our work is an innovative victim service and alternative-to-incarceration program rooted in restorative justice principles for serious and violent felonies.
Based in Brooklyn and the Bronx, in New York, the program offers a response to serious harm such as assault, robbery, and burglary. If—and only if—both the harmed and responsible parties agree, these cases are diverted into a dialogue process that gives participants the power and opportunity to collectively identify and address impacts, needs, and obligations, in order to heal and put things as right as possible. In the dialogue process, all parties agree on sanctions other than incarceration to hold the responsible party accountable in ways meaningful to the person harmed. Staff closely monitor responsible parties’ compliance with the resultant agreements, which replace the lengthy prison sentences they otherwise would have served. At the same time, the project provides wraparound services to the survivors of crime. The project works with a broad range of survivors of all demographics, but crucial among them are the young men of color currently excluded from most victim services—notably, a full 70 percent of Common Justice’s harmed parties have been men of color.
One of the most important lessons we have learned in our work at Common Justice is what happens when survivors are presented with options. At Common Justice, we have found that survivors—even those who, before they were presented with alternatives, were eager to see the person who harmed them prosecuted and incarcerated—choose an option like Common Justice over prison, when given the choice, with far greater frequency than one might anticipate.
At Common Justice, the vast majority of survivors—in fact, a full 90 percent—across race, class, and gender who have been given the choice between seeing the person who harmed them in the Common Justice program or seeing them in prison have chosen Common Justice. It is essential to note that the overwhelming support among survivors for these processes is not just about the promise of restorative justice, nor is it about mercy; it is about the failure of incarceration to meet survivors’ needs. While some certainly choose Common Justice out of compassion, most choose it for sheer self-interest and pragmatism: because they believe Common Justice stands a better chance than prison of meeting their short-and long-term needs for safety and justice and for ensuring that others do not experience the same suffering they did. While incarceration certainly provides some people with a temporary sense of safety from the person who harmed them and/or satisfies a desire to see someone punished for wrongdoing, it does not in itself deliver the healing that those harmed deserve. What is more, many survivors find that the incarceration of the person who hurt them makes them feel less safe.43 For some, this is because they fear others in the community may be angry with them for their role in securing the responsible person’s punishment. For others, it is because they know that the person who harmed them will eve
ntually come home and they do not believe that he or she will be better for having spent time in prison; to the contrary, they often believe that incarceration will make the person worse. Many victims who live in communities where incarceration is common are frequently dissatisfied with its results. And even those victims who do want the incarceration of those who hurt them are often disappointed by what it delivers in practice.44 Many survivors seek incarceration only to find later that it did not make them safe and did not heal them in the way they had anticipated.45
We do not believe Common Justice is right for all survivors. Some survivors will continue to want the people who hurt them incarcerated, and meeting the needs of the full range of survivors will require the development of a wide range of strategies and interventions. That said, we have heard survivors’ resounding demand to create options that address the underlying causes of harm and generate resolutions that bring people peace in both the short and long term. Developing survivor-centered responses to violence will require far more listening of the kind that produced Common Justice, and that listening will generate a far wider range of options and solutions than have existed thus far.
The third thing we would do differently if we were truly committed to reducing violence is to align our responses to violence with the best knowledge about what actually reduces it. That is not currently what we do.
All too often, we talk about violence in isolation without an appreciation for the context in which it takes place, the people responsible for it, the needs of those harmed by it, the opportunities for intervention, and the long-term impacts of our strategies. A domestic violence homicide in a small rural town and a shooting related to an open-air drug market in a large city are unquestionably not the same, nor are they the same as a robbery and mugging committed by a group of teenagers, a sexual assault committed by someone known to the survivor, or a stabbing resulting from a long-standing dispute between former friends. Yet regardless of the type of violence, we as a nation have chosen to rely on incarceration as the single blunt instrument in our toolbox—all without any data-driven indication that it is the tool most likely to secure the short-and long-term safety of the survivors and others with a stake in the outcome.
In fact, we know a good deal about what causes violence. The four core causes are shame, isolation, exposure to violence, and diminished ability to meet one’s economic needs.46 (These are on the individual level, not the community level, though they are unquestionably aggravated by the structural factors described above.) One might argue that the core defining features of prison are shame, isolation, exposure to violence, and diminished ability to meet one’s economic needs. That means we rely almost exclusively on an intervention for violence that we know is characterized by precisely the factors that drive it. Using prison to reduce violence is therefore like trying to put out a house fire by throwing a Molotov cocktail through the window. That is not what people who are serious about quelling the flames do.
Studies in fact demonstrate that prison can have a criminogenic effect—meaning it is likely to cause, rather than prevent, further crime.47 To put it simply, prison is a risk factor for violence. This is especially problematic because virtually all incarcerated people—a full 95 percent—come home.48 Securing the safety of survivors and communities impacted by violent crime will therefore require an honest reckoning with the degree to which our current approach delivers safety in the short and long term to survivors and communities impacted by violence. And it will require developing interventions rooted in the best and most current understanding about the drivers of violence so that we are poised to reduce it.
Fourth, if we were serious about reducing violence, we would commit to reducing one of the single greatest drivers and products of violence—racial inequity. Violence is not distributed equally. Research in the field demonstrates the disproportionate impact of violence in communities of color, even when other factors, such as poverty, are accounted for. It is also widely documented that not just poverty but inequity is a key driver of violent crime rates.49 When we understand this reality in the historical context of intergenerational racial inequity in the United States, we become poised to develop responses to violence that are informed by, rather than blind to, this context.50 Addressing these inequities will require, in part, recasting a persistent and pervasive narrative that overrepresents young men of color as aggressors or criminals, and often erases the experiences of women of color entirely.51 The narrative about men of color, age-old and still prevalent in the media and public discourse, includes portraying young men of color almost exclusively—and disproportionately to actual crime rates—in their capacity as people committing crime, not as victims of it. This distortion, which excludes such a substantial portion of young men of color’s experience and humanity, nurtures the misperception that violence and pain somehow impact young men of color less profoundly than other victims. This is not without consequence—failing to see young men’s vulnerability clearly may limit our ability to recognize accurately symptoms of trauma (such as being overly reactive to perceived threats) as natural human responses to pain and fear rather than as signs of character flaws or moral failure.52 This distorted narrative can also powerfully shape how others see and treat young men of color, with serious implications for social services, the criminal justice system, and the development of an equitable society more broadly.53
And while we tell dehumanizing stories about young men of color, all too often we do not talk about women of color at all. The stories of women of color who experience violence are largely excluded from mainstream white public consciousness about harm and healing. The absence of these stories—like the absence of any stories that constitute a substantial portion of a situation we are trying to understand—demonstrates and perpetuates a failure to respond to women of color’s experiences of violence with the gravity and respect they deserve. When people do tell these stories, the public narrative can portray women of color as uncommonly, even superhumanly, resilient—to the point of obscuring their human vulnerability and diminishing their continued need for healing and care. This story is as old as our country. It conceals our history from us. It allows us to ignore the pain of women of color and to abdicate our responsibility to provide what they need and deserve to heal. Whether through erasure or distortion, our failure to tell and hear the stories of women of color’s pain compromises our ability to develop solutions that will help make all survivors whole.
The call to transform these long-standing and interlocking racial narratives is an urgent one. These narratives hide immense suffering from view; in their different ways, they deny the validity of the pain of black and brown men and women. And when society discounts their pain, public policies will necessarily fail to include what survivors of violence want and need, and to create sound criminal justice policy that can truly keep people safe.
If our nation is going to rise to the challenge of reducing violence, we will have to pay attention to the actual impact that incarceration has on survivors, listen to the full range of people who survive harm, center racial equity in our responses, and become honest about the profound limitations of prisons as a method of delivering safety or healing. And if we are going to end mass incarceration, we must include crime survivors in the process—because their lives are at stake in our success.
What we have learned at Common Justice is that when we demonstrate care for the full range of survivors of crime, two things happen. First, we can begin, finally, to meet the needs of all survivors, regardless of their race, class, and gender, and begin to repair an extraordinary, long-standing, and damaging inequity in the criminal justice system. And second, that in a broad and honest listening to the full range of survivors of crime, one thing emerges with surprising commonality and clarity: the need to end mass incarceration—so much so, and with such consistency, that it begins to become clear that any truly survivor-centered criminal justice reform platform will have to have ending mass incarceration at its center.
/> Notes
1. “Patterns of Violence in American Society,” in Understanding and Preventing Violence: Panel on the Understanding and Control of Violent Behavior, vol. 1, ed. Albert Reiss and Jeffrey Roth (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1993), 70.
2. See Bruce Kennedy, Ichiro Kawachi, Deborah Prothrow-Stith, Kimberly Lochner, and Vanita Gupta, “Social Capital, Income Inequality, and Firearm Violent Crime,” Social Science and Medicine 47, no. 1 (1998): 7–17; and Cleopatra H. Caldwell, Laura P. Kohn-Wood, Karen H. Schmeelk-Cone, Tabbye M. Chavous, and Marc A. Zimmerman, “Racial Discrimination and Racial Identity as Risk or Protective Factors for Violent Behaviors in African American Young Adults,” American Journal of Community Psychology 33 (2004): 91–105.
3. “Perspectives on Violence,” in Understanding and Preventing Violence: Panel on the Understanding and Control of Violent Behavior, vol. 1, ed. Albert Reiss and Jeffrey Roth (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1993), 145.
4. James Gilligan, Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes (New York: Putnam, 1996).
5. Li-yu Song, Mark Singer, and Trina Anglin, “Violence Exposure and Emotional Trauma as Contributors to Adolescents’ Violent Behaviors,” Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine 152 (1998): 531–36.
6. Kara Williams, Lourdes Rivera, Robert Neighbours, and Vivian Reznik, “Youth Violence Prevention Comes of Age: Research, Training and Future Directions,” Annual Review of Public Health 28 (2007): 195–211.
7. Urban Institute, The Challenges of Prisoner Reentry: Facts and Figures (Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2008).
8. Redlining is the practice of refusing loans or insurance to people because they live in areas deemed to be “poor financial risks”—a practice applied almost exclusively in communities of color. See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: The New Press, 2012), 20–26; Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Anchor Books, 2009); Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” Atlantic, June 2014; and Alex F. Schwartz, Housing Policy in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2010), 332.