Against Abolition, Against Reform: The Case for a Transformational Vision of Restorative Justice

This article responds to contributions to an Author Meets Critics book symposium addressing the author's book Restorative Justice and Lived Religion: Transforming Mass Incarceration in Chicago (New York University Press, 2024). It further develops the account I develop in my book regarding how restorative justice has emerged as a transformational social movement, and what such a movement can do to address harms that are not merely perpetuated by one individual against another but reproduced by an entire “justice” system. To accomplish this, I explore the ways that several lived restorative justice initiatives on the South and West sides of Chicago both resist, but also transformatively engage, the U.S. criminal legal system. In light of this focus, in the first part of this response, I return to the controversy among contemporary restorative justice practitioners over the ability—or alleged inability—of restorative justice to transform systemic injustices. I reiterate that restorative justice must be understood holistically, taking into account what I argue are its distinctive moral and spiritual dynamics. Doing so, I contend, allows us to overcome a prison reform vs. prison abolition dichotomy that has emerged in scholarship and activism. In the second part of this response, I reflect on the colonial and racial dynamics that undergird work in the scholarly community’s restorative justice and lived religion spaces.