Transformative Justice in the Shadow of Neoliberalism: A Critical Look at California’s Division of Juvenile Justice

This study examines the urgency of transformative justice in handling juvenile cases as part of legal reform in Indonesia. The research employs normative legal methods with statutory, conceptual, and case approaches. The importance of this research lies in identifying the need to expand the concept of restorative justice, which focuses solely on the offender and victim, towards transformative justice that also considers social, political, economic, and cultural aspects. The findings reveal that transformative justice offers a new alternative in the juvenile criminal justice system by not only focusing on the severity of the offense but also considering the personal circumstances of the child, including social status and family conditions. The implications of this concept show that transformative justice supports the more comprehensive development of children and serves as a more holistic approach to recovery in handling juvenile cases.

Restorative justice is a movement with traction. People are excited by it. They are volunteering in growing numbers to make it happen. Some people are even getting paid to do it, especially in schools, and usually through nonprofits like Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, Community Works, and the Insight Prison Project (all discussed in this issue). Marilyn Armour’s article (page 25) sums up the progress so far.Its practitioners say the movement’s innovative practices have immediate benefits and radical long-term potential.There is hope, first, that it will keep young people and especially young people of color out of the criminal justice system, out of the school-to-prison pipeline. Once that is well under way, many believe that other visions will appear possible, all the way to the end of prisons as we know them and a reconception of the entire legal system (see Peter Gabel’s piece on page 18). Many hope this movement can also provide new ways of responding both to conflicts in general (Kay Pranis, page 33) and to the inherited oppressive structures of race and class (see Fania Davis’s piece on page 30, Denise Breton’s on page 45).Restorative justice may be poised for a breakthrough into public awareness. It would be a boon for budget-cutting politicians and taxpayers if only the public could buy into it. For example, in the San Francisco Bay Area it costs around $50,000 to run a juvenile offender through the justice system, not counting the cost of incarceration if there is to be any, versus about $4,500 for a restorative process that typically leaves the victim much more satisfied, the young person reintegrated into the community without even being charged with a crime and much less likely to reoffend, and many community members relieved and grateful. Multiply the criminal justice cost many times for adults locked away for years.But the rub is, punishment is nowhere seen in this process—unless, when you have harmed someone, you consider listening to them express their pain to be punishment, rather than a chance to develop empathy for them, see yourself in a different light, and learn and change in whatever way you now perceive is needed. Some consider that process tougher even than receiving punishment. Others think it’s being “soft on crime.”Can a justice movement not based on punishment grow fast enough to win at the ballot box, even in an über-liberal city? In September the New York Times noted that “Restorative justice has long had proponents in some corners of the criminal justice system, but it is now gaining prominence in an unlikely forum: the San Francisco district attorney’s race.” We go to press too soon to know the result.Or will restorative justice appeal more to small-government and traditional-values conservatives? Some of its elements do appeal to the Right, others to reformist liberals, others to radicals, including prison abolitionists. Of course, there are also elements that each of these players may dislike or hate. And no one will resist it more than the prison-industrial complex and the politicians in its pockets.How it is presented by the media will be critical, but perhaps not decisive: it is how well it works in practice, in those places innovative enough to fund it, that will likely be decisive.Most articles in this issue come from progressive and radical activists, scholars, lawyers, and teachers who are writing wholly from within the restorative justice movement. We are centering their voices because it is they who have both the strongest hope for the transformative power of the movement and the most practical understanding of how the vision of restorative justice can take shape on the ground.While most restorative justice practitioners initially seem to present a unified front, there are certainly differences among them if you listen more closely. Some authors in this issue raise controversial issues within the movement directly, others by inference only. If they criticize anyone, notice how gently they do so. The movement has only got where it has by its practitioners’ commitment to reach out to the humanity in the other, to listen, to suggest and not to judge. A South Asian Buddhist goes to a conservative Florida town to support white Christians in developing a groundbreaking restorative approach to plea bargaining in a murder case (page 22). A survivor of child abuse works with prisoners in San Quentin prison, most of them serving life sentences for violent crimes (page 35). These practitioners could not do their groundbreaking work if they allowed either left-wing or right-wing stereotypes of prosecutors, conservative Christians, or lifers to cloud their vision. That doesn’t mean that restorative practitioners are blind to the realities of power and white supremacy, the legacies of genocide and slavery, the depredations of profiteers, or the violence inherent in the structure of our prison system. But their whole practice is to reach across any divide and connect, empathically.I am writing this article from a slightly different place, as a kind of sympathetic cartographer of the movement. I have felt drawn to restorative justice since first writing about it in Tikkun (September/October 2009) and have started to attend trainings in the field. So with one foot planted inside the restorative justice movement as a student and the other in more journalistic territory, I am hoping to offer a different perspective: a beginner’s bird’s-eye glance at some of the controversial issues both outside and within the movement, and at factors that may be enabling it to gather traction. I am offering this analysis not in a spirit of divisiveness but with the genuine hope that it will help readers who have never heard of the restorative justice movement to grasp the diversity of worldviews within it and understand where opposition and support are likely to arise. It is important for those within the movement to understand ways in which restorative justice is seen by individuals and groups from different places on the political spectrum, from conservative to moderate, and liberal to radical.Once restorative justice becomes a well-known policy option, I assume that small-government conservatives will welcome the budget savings and tax relief, provided they can be convinced that diversions from prison are not dangerous to society. The remarkable experience of New Zealand, which for over twenty years has run its entire juvenile justice system on restorative principles, and has closed its juvenile detention centers, should reassure them. As this experience is not well known in the United States, we are delighted to share an excellent survey of it by one its leading proponents, Judge Fred McElrea, as an online-only article accompanying this print issue.Many social conservatives, especially of a traditional Christian bent, already warm to the notion of bringing offenders to a point of remorse and genuine accountability, and then to redemption, a true change of heart. Chuck Colson, one of the players in the Watergate scandal (long since reformed as a born-again Christian), is considered by many to be America’s leading prison reformer as well as one of its leading Christian conservatives. Excoriating overcrowding and inhuman conditions, Colson signs on to a faith-based strand of restorative justice.However, the centrality of religious conversion to Colson’s version of restorative justice presents a concern for the mainstream movement. Further, conservative philosophy typically blames the individual’s sinful human nature rather than environmental factors in generating crime. Mainstream restorative justice operates from a different model. It is based neither on a medical model of the pathology of the offender, nor on a Christian model of the offender’s sinful nature and dependence on a Higher Power. Instead, a model of mainstream restorative justice is more likely to include concepts such as mutuality, respect, active listening, empathy for ourselves and those we have harmed or been harmed by, a focus on self-empowerment and attendance to the deeper needs of those involved, and the questioning and unlearning of prevailing punitive belief systems. For instance, the behavioral changes noted in violent men through mainstream restorative practices typically result from their coming to understand how they developed strategies to survive child abuse, poverty, racism, police brutality, or other environmental stresses and bought into the prevailing “male role belief system”; from this understanding, as well as from the care of peers and facilitators, flows empathy for their younger selves and then for their victims. The hope of many restorative justice practitioners is that such transformed men (and women) will become participants in reforming the social conditions and inequities that so restricted their options, in addition to practicing emotional maturity in their daily relationships.Many Christians find this development of empathy and social responsibility entirely compatible with Christianity, whether it involves Christian belief or not, but this is not the typical Christian conservative view. However, to an observer like me, both Colsonesque and mainstream restorative justice seem to have much in common—both believe in the individual’s ability to change. As more violent offenders transform themselves through both paths and meet and talk, I assume there will be cross-fertilization.Still, many conservatives who do believe in redemption see it as entirely compatible with punishment. Anyone harmed by crime is likely to feel colossal anger and so traditional notions of “an eye for an eye” will always have great appeal, especially if no mechanisms exist for satisfying the victim’s needs for empathy, answers, or restoration. If restorative options start to divert large numbers from prison, conservative investors in the prison-industrial complex will surely mobilize to protect their investment. They are likely to fund emotive appeals for punishment, many of them in traditional (and selective) biblical terms, and possibly with racist overtones.The essence of mainstream restorative justice is a practice of listening and empathy that is by nature corrosive of ideology and self-righteousness. Thus, combining thorough personal accountability with an understanding of the ways one’s environment has molded one is a complex task, not easily assimilated into some conservatives’ worldview. But that may change.On balance, I assume that most hardcore conservatives will not go for mainstream restorative justice. However, many middle-of-the-road people, including many evangelical Christians, may well support it when they see how well it works for crime victims they know and for any of their own relatives and friends who are arrested for offenses. In a recent case it was remarkable how quickly some police families came around to wanting a restorative justice option when one of their own kids was caught in a possible offense. If approval grows in middle America, it will mainly be because of positive personal experiences that will contradict the media stereotypes and polemics approving punitive justice.The appeal for liberals may be obvious: take better care of victims; drastically reduce the prison system; spend the money on education and public aid instead; reject ugly emotions of revenge; and reintegrate offenders into the community where they can lead productive lives and pay taxes.But what would liberals make of Peter Gabel’s vision of an astonishingly different kind of legal system? Some might feel that’s going too far. That’s to admit that fear of the other has been central to the liberal project all along. That’s to allow that the vaunted rationality of liberalism never has been free of emotion, but has too often been put to the service of a set of fears that serve neither love nor connection. To consciously serve love might be to infect public discourse with emotionality, spirituality, and even religion, in something of a creeping revolution.Something that’s too revolutionary for many liberals should sound good to radical anti-racists and anti-capitalists. Yet, there is something highly distasteful, or suspect, about restorative justice for many radicals.The greatest difficulty for the radical Left is implicit in Fania E. Davis’s words in this issue: “I would say this movement is more subversive than any of the revolutionary movements in which I have been involved since the 1950s. All previous social justice movements have kept us trapped in discordant, binary, either-or, right-wrong, and us-versus-them ways of being present to one another and to the earth.” Binaries are as central to the Left as they are to the Right. Many people have considered Right and Left to be equally self-righteous, equally prone to demonize the other side.It’s not just that someone like Sunny Schwartz (page 37) works for the sheriff’s department and expresses a vision for how corrections can become a noble profession, which looks to many radicals like collaboration with the imperialist and racist state. It’s also that restorative justice seeks to foster a sense of personal accountability in individuals who have perpetrated crimes. Doing so requires more focus on individuals—including on convicted members of oppressed races and classes—than some radicals are comfortable with. Some fear that restorative justice’s focus on individual accountability suggests that it’s the individuals’ fault they are in prison, not the fault of the system.If you imagine that Sunny Schwartz is compromising too much with the American empire, it is worth noting that the central anti-violence teaching in her program is provided by Manalive, which was developed by Hamish Sinclair. Sinclair cut his teeth organizing coal miners and their families in eastern Kentucky and autoworkers in Detroit in the 1960s who were all losing their union jobs as capital sought higher returns elsewhere. He saw his part of the Detroit resistance movement destroyed by the violent objections of union men toward women in their lives who wanted to share in the organizing. Sinclair dedicated his life to building programs for working-class men that would enable them to opt out of the “male role belief system,” in order to organize effectively with women when the times became conducive to organizing once more. Personal accountability and political organizing are two equal sides of Sinclair’s coin; he understands that neither comes easily and neither is complete without the other. One could argue that failure to grasp this has been the bane of most revolutions by radical utopians and of most elected social democratic parties as well. Animal Farm tells the classic tale of revolutionaries who both demonize the oppressor and, because they harbor romantic notions about the ability of the oppressed to be loving and just when they gain power, fail to learn the skills of accountability, empathy, and self-restraint (which a program like Sinclair’s Manalive teaches to highly competitive men).Combining thorough personal accountability with an understanding of the ways one’s environment has molded one is a complex task, not easily assimilated into some radicals’ worldviews. But that may change.Prison abolitionists argue that our current prison system is unreformable. Critical Resistance, a national grassroots group seeking to dismantle the prison-industrial complex, writes:Groups like these that see the restorative justice movement as already too fatally implicated in the criminal justice system (and unrealistic in its idea that there was anything good to be restored in the first place) tend instead to rally around the idea of “transformative justice.”Unlike restorative justice projects, which are often related in some way to the criminal justice system, either as an intervention meant to prevent incarceration or as an effort partly within the prisons to promote healing of offenders and victims, transformative justice projects tend to focus on creating a community-based system wholly outside the prison and courts system, thereby resonating more strongly with the prison abolitionist movement.Each side in this debate can push the other’s buttons. Failure to be sufficiently adversarial toward the criminal injustice system can look unconscionable to transformative justice activists. The use of more adversarial language and practices (e.g., in transformative justice, survivors making demands on those who have harmed them) and a perceived excess of theory over empathic practice can make restorative justice people doubt how transformative these other folks really are.But as Bench Ansfield and Timothy Colman’s article on a Philadelphia-based transformative justice project makes clear (page 41), at the heart of both is the development of empathic practices that work, that increase the sense of safety for survivors of violence, and that help those who perpetrated the harm to change. People who line up on both the restorative and transformative sides of the spectrum already meet and talk, and will do this more as their movements grow. Again, the focus on empathic listening will make it more likely that they will hear each other. Insofar as restorative practices actually work, transformative justice projects will adapt and adopt them, and vice versa.To me, both look like unfinished attempts at the same kind of thing, but starting from different positions in society as well as about society. Many restorative justice proponents start as professionals already in the system (the justice system or the school system—see Rita Alfred’s piece on page 48), who try to work it so that programs can get under way. While their methods may be those of reformers, working with district attorneys, within prisons, grade schools, or law schools, they have hugely transformative dreams. To them, the criticism from prison abolitionists may seem understandable but premature. Both movements, if successful, can end with prisons abolished, or reduced to housing only a tiny number of specific cases; one restorative justice lawyer speculated to me that this number might be as small as 2,000 people in the United States but added that the debate was fruitless at this point because it will be a matter of what works and how well we manage to create alternative methods for keeping people safe and transforming violent behavior. The movements are complementary, this viewpoint holds.And it does behoove restorative justice people to think how they would do things if there were no state-violence sanctions at all in the background of their work: If the alternative to a family or community circle were not criminal charges, or if there were no literally for role would there be enough for enough violent offenders to does a community do with those who an offender is in the community and no one is going to the what sanctions of of can be to to the person to a community It certainly may get to sound a But working out how to do this is a that many restorative justice people already we think of as radical on what we think the the of human to be in human nature as for by or is it or racism, or failure to For evangelical Christians, being is the most radical For some left-wing activists, does not sound radical For others it’s the that is the it suggests traditional of victim and offender, even of and when what is is to such notions and to the radical that has the same set of human is different strategies to meet their and to and to actually result in reduced safety and violence (see article on page of this there are and people feel strongly about them. However, in with restorative and transformative justice practitioners on different places on the spectrum, I have to criticize the they all seem their own visions them, they have much to to each other. is entirely within the empathic of these movements, and them from those whether on the Left or the Right, adversarial is different in restorative justice from other organizing. of that movement have their is this growing more becomes clear as soon as you to the They are less likely to theory than they are to you of and they are it is them experiences that they to deeper and the to One central practice is the in which can be heard and no one practitioners have different ways of A may be on the with of the and A or or other words that to the of those present may be A may be each person in a set by the They may start by how they the circle to what it should what they from the others in order to feel safe enough to what kind of respect, they on the circle goes to the it has been from a person who has been on a to the how well the has been or other inherent to that find that the circle structure them to more how it People and then their own of pain and A offender is to find that in the circle to how to the harm he has he can as long as he needs the district a to see how the process it is his to do so. A has already been with the that in the circle will be as should the case go to A was by a up the free A young who two and returns two years to offer because his is and he to make a he to pay the families in for what he and by his to spend the money on for and his to help the of abuse he has this becomes part of the he to criminal practices and of are the of the movement. However, it is not growing because the are and to all but also because they are and can find in juvenile and their is in of and in like reduced These practices do not on but can be so that from within the community and does not have to come from from a the same how much to and is an issue that may become and and is and there be ways of working out who has a debate on the of the versus other terms, it’s worth at September on his is one of the movement’s and leading One of his is to a by who of those who would like to the when restorative practices are not to the criminal justice on that another in the and the difficulty of such issues in the movement, which he started if there might be a strand of in the issues of justice, accountability, are issues not in of over too find a to the Christian movements that in I has been more with belief than most but it has always had that were most with behavioral emotional or may be of concern to such has been a likely of such movements, and so has resistance among and white proponents to questioning their own But in other such movements, love with the and the we saw in has people into for including and building the to me that restorative practices are a version of these movements of personal this movement is in and to be to people of all and but it is as as its practitioners it to radical of empathic listening and makes it with or a with any kind of version of personal is also much more strongly to of social racism, and inherited If the movement to like Fania who for in the movement to themselves more in the and in the ways the criminal justice system is as a new then we will start to have the kind of of personal change with change that many of us have been for years is the only way a society can be

Chapter 5 documents the ways organizing groups have confronted a vast school district and militarized system of police control in Los Angeles. It features the role of Black and Brown parents in CADRE as key leaders. These parents won the first district-wide breakthrough against zero tolerance discipline approaches in the country when they got the LA Unified School District to adopt schoolwide positive behavioral supports in 2006. The movement “nationalized” this local victory, inspiring groups across the country to launch campaigns against zero tolerance. The chapter also highlights the youth-organizing work of the Labor Community Strategy Center to end police ticketing of students, one of the pioneering efforts to address policing in the school-to-prison pipeline movement. It examines the Youth Justice Coalition and its Free LA High School that supports young people returning from the juvenile justice system and attempts to create a model for police-free schools based upon transformative justice.

The child welfare system (CWS), juvenile legal system (JLS), and school-to-prison nexus are often framed as distinct institutions, yet they function as interconnected mechanisms of surveillance, control, and punishment—particularly for Black, Indigenous, and other marginalized youth. Through the lens of carceral seepage, this article examines how punitive logics extend across these youth-serving systems, reinforcing cycles of criminalization rather than care. While mainstream discourse often debates reform versus abolition in the CWS, this article contends that the harm inflicted by these institutions is not incidental but structural, necessitating an abolitionist framework that moves beyond reformist solutions. Using a collaborative abolitionist lens, we explore the historical and contemporary entanglements between child welfare, juvenile justice, and education, demonstrating how these systems cohere to regulate and exclude marginalized youth. In response, we advocate for non-carceral, community-based and informed alternatives that center collective care, self-determination, and transformative justice. By shifting away from punitive interventions and investing in holistic, community-driven support, this article envisions a future where youth-serving institutions prioritize healing and empowerment rather than punishment and control.

Les tribunaux de première instance de Singapour assurent la prévention et une justice rapide, loyale et efficace; ils font en outre preuve d’innovation. Les tribunaux sont perçus comme étant un creuset de conflits, de traumarismes et de dysfonctions relationnelles, ce qui exige d’eux une grande compétence dans le traitement des problèmes humains complexes. Les services de la psychologie vont au‐delà de la fourniture classique d’un profil criminel pour devenir une aide au système judiciaire, ce qui peut constituer une force majeure de transformation individuelle, familiale et sociale. On présente trois interventions des services de la psychologie: les conférences familiales, les critères du comportement délinquant juvènile, et le projet HEART. Chaque intervention entraîne des transformations dans un cadre de légalité judiciaire.In addition to being a centre for the expeditious, fair, and effective administration of justice and the disposition of deterrence, the Subordinate Courts of Singapore have developed as a centre of innovation. Courts are also conceptualised as a crucible of human conflicts, traumas, and relational dysfunctions, thus requiring expertise in dealing with complex human problems. Psychological Services go beyond the conventional notion of providing expert criminal profiling to becoming an adjunct to a judiciary which can become a driving force behind individual, familial, and societal transformation. Three functions of the Psychological Services are presented—Family Conferences; the Juvenile Offender Behaviour (JOB) Criteria; Project HEART. Each function reflects transformation within a forensic‐legal framework.