Transformative Justice: Psychological Services in the Criminal, Family, and Juvenile Justice Centres of the Subordinate Courts of Singapore

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

Confronting Sexual Assault: Transformative Justice on the Ground in Philadelphia

Transformative justice and restorative justice approaches to campus sexual assault: a scoping review Campus sexual assault (CSA) remains a persistent public health problem on U.S. college campuses. Changes in U.S. federal law have highlighted the need for responses to campus sexual assault (CSA) that meet the needs of persons harmed, increase meaningful accountability for persons responsible, and engage the whole campus in prevention efforts. These changes have simultaneously tightened standards of evidence in institutionalized campus adjudication methods and expanded resolution options to include processes such as restorative justice and transformative justice. The objective of this scoping review is to synthesize the available academic and grey literature about restorative justice and transformative justice responses to CSA up to September 2020. A total of 96 sources were reviewed, and 76 met the final inclusion criteria. For both restorative justice and transformative justice, there is a body of theory and praxis but minimal empirically established findings. Based on the available theoretical frameworks and praxis narratives, both restorative justice and transformative justice centre survivors’ needs, offer healing for individuals, and emphasize accountability for persons responsible for violence; however, restorative justice and transformative justice fundamentally differ in how they conceptualise the root cause of sexual violence and, therefore, what harms they aim to repair. While restorative justice in higher education settings focuses on interpersonal harms resulting from sexual violence, transformative justice emphasises repairing interpersonal harms resulting from sexual violence and transforming the structural conditions that enable sexual violence. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

“And Now She Sings It”: Conjure as Abolitionist Alternative in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing Joanna Davis-McElligatt In this essay I contend that Jesmyn Ward’S 2017 novel Sing, Unburied, Sing constructs conjure and, more specifically, conjure healing as a decarceral strategy—or what Angela Y. Davis terms an “abolitionist alternative” (105)—to counteract racism, class bias, patriarchal domination, ecocide, and the lingering violence of enslavement and its carceral aftermath. As an African diasporic syncretic system rooted in transformation, interrelation, collectivity, and radical change, conjure exemplifies what Mariame Kaba describes as a “justice infrastructure,” or a structurally creative justice system whose practice by Indigenous and/or African peoples has been suppressed by imperialist violence (62). Transformative justice, Kaba argues, requires rethinking all forms of complicity with carceral apparatuses, creating new structures that advance collectivism and interdependence, and reducing engagement with the criminal legal system; in other words, transformative justice is a call to “not only change how we address harm but also . . . change everything” (5). To that end, I adhere to Fred Moten and Stefano Harvey’s definition of abolition as a movement concerned both with the eradication of the prison system and “the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society” (114). I argue here that Sing, Unburied, Sing reclaims conjure as a model of transformative justice that advances the survival of Black people through rituals of healing and radical change, intracommunity interdependence, and by providing methods for the redress and prevention of harm. Though the narrative structure of Sing, Unburied, Sing intentionally disrupts space-time, the novel is primarily set in 2010s Bois Sauvage, [End Page 103] Mississippi, a racially-segregated rural town on the Gulf Coast saturated by the conditions of life in the afterlife of slavery—ecological precarity, structural underdevelopment, deep poverty, early death, and carceral state violence. Among the novel’s most urgent work is its close attention to the destructive effects of these spiritual, interrelational, and environmental forces on Black life. The novel follows a family of Black conjurers struggling to survive together: Philomène, the family matriarch, her husband River, their children Given and Leonie, and their grandchildren, thirteen-year-old Jojo and three-year-old Kayla. Just as the family is connected to one another through their unique conjure powers, however, so too are they cohered—and simultaneously fractured—by the violent intrusion of the carceral state. The primary action of the novel follows Leonie, Jojo, and Kayla as they make their way from Bois Sauvage to Parchman prison to pick up the children’s white father, Michael, where he has been incarcerated. While there, Jojo meets Richie, a boy-ghost killed by River during their own joint period of childhood incarceration at Parchman. Haunting all of the text’s characters, both literally and figuratively, is Given, whose murder at the hands of Michael’s racist cousin several years before the present moments of the text results in a traumatizing trial that offers the family neither justice nor reprieve. Over the course of the novel, conjure magic and healing emerges as the family’s most powerful way to resist and circumvent the complex of violences that accompany life in a carceral state. Whereas carceral logics advance isolation, dominion over the land, hierarchical stratifications between self and other (including animals, plants, land formations, and the universe), and authoritarian control of space-time, conjure values communitarianism, sacred ecological balance, and interconnected interdependence between all living things, existing things, and their domains. As I will make clear, conjure justice can be seen as an interdimensional intercollective healing event in which the individual and their community are inevitably changed. In its emphasis on the healing event as a necessary counterpoint to harm, conjure justice infrastructures resist modes of carceral (in)justice, in particular those that emphasize isolation, separation, and confinement as punishments. Most importantly, however, conjuration holds that life continues on in the spirit world after death; in Sing, Unburied, Sing, [End Page 104] orishas, loas, and saints answer prayers, the dead can...

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.

PROTOCOL: The impact of juvenile system processing on delinquency

New Models of Collaboration Between Criminal Justice and Mental Health Systems

State Mental Health Policy: Mental Health Transformation: Moving Toward a Public Health, Early-Intervention Approach in Texas

The nation is under an crime prevention obligation, so the nation have to owe the duty to recover ordinary life of victim unless discharge his responsibility. As principle of the essentials of national aid obligation. But in the other hand, by the level of society, members of society have to give a helping hand as the principle of solidarity. So if some criminal victims occurs, in terms of national obligation theory, criminal victim must receive full compensation from nation equally priori crime. But they are able to be aided as band together from same members of society. In this paper the concept of Transformative Justice theory is most important philosophy with the purpose of integration, which can provide a clue of integral national system and can be unity with nation’s aid and social voluntary resources for recovery of criminal victims as well as can make criminal victims to be re-socialization in the meaning of resuming normal activity. While coming from the same background as restorative justice, transformative justice takes a bit of a bolder approach. Instead of simply seeking to restore the actors, transformative justice sets out to transform them for the better. TJ seeks to change the larger social structure as well as the personal structure of those involved. Realizing the un-justness of our current criminal justice system, transformative justice wants to be productive by providing victims with answers for why they were victimized, recognizing the wrong that has occurred, providing restitution, and restoring/establishing peace and security. So in based of Transformative Justice theory can be provided in following policies for criminal victims. At first, it can make proactive protection to integrate with post protection. And it means consolidation of all social resources. Third, Transformative Justice theory can change nation’s approach for redistribution pf social resources and positive right of criminal victims. Next, it make to be able to conciliate the principle of solidarity with the principle of social welfare state. Lastly, Transformative Justice theory demands that nation should abandon distinction of role between offender and criminal victim, because for integration and restoration of society, distinction of role between offender and criminal victims useless and more harmful.

Sexual violence is used to maintain what Dr. Riane Eisler (1990) conceptualizes as the dominator model of society. The early days of the feminist anti-violence movement focused on changing the dominator model, but, in part, this focus was co-opted by seeking criminal justice solutions, contributing to punitive responses and mass incarceration that have been ineffective in ending sexual violence. The racist history of the rape charge and its disproportionate effect on people of color, an effect that continues today. Legislators have passed draconian laws that uniquely apply to anyone convicted of a sex offense, the definition of which has been broadened to encompass harmless behavior. A separate legal regime for sex offenders that isolates them from society and marks them for life as monsters obfuscates the causes of sexual violence and contributes to the problem. The feminist anti-violence movement remains influential, though little recognized, in today’s efforts to respond to sexual violence through restorative justice and transformative justice. A number of groups have adopted the RJ/TJ model, in particular women of color. The article provides examples of successful and unsuccessful implementation of RJ/TJ and discusses impediments to wider adoption of this approach. RJ/TJ is a promising alternative to the current criminal justice response to sexual assault, one that will bring us closer to a partnership culture.

This chapter examines a range of perspectives which question the assumptions underlying the concept of ‘punishment’. It first explains what is meant by the idea of critical perspectives on punishment before discussing a number of critical perspectives on the justice system including abolitionism, social control theories, community justice, and transformative justice. It then explores unjust punishment and problems for criminal justice of discrimination and inequality, focusing on the disparities in treatment between white, BME, and other sectors of the population in the criminal justice system. It also considers how ‘crimes of the privileged’ and state crimes can remain unseen or unpunished and concludes with an evaluation of the limitations of critical analyses of crime and punishment.

INTRODUCTION: As artificial intelligence, algorithms, and data-driven technologies become more embedded in social services, education, health care, and justice systems, concerns continue to grow about how these tools may reproduce existing social inequities. METHODS: From a critical social work perspective, this article examines the ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) development and implementation can reinforce racism, ableism, classism, and other forms of structural oppression particularly through predictive and surveillance-based decision-making practices. The article explores how data-collection practices and algorithmic design are shaped by historical and institutional bias, despite frequent claims that these technologies are neutral or objective. Drawing on examples from criminal justice, child welfare, and health settings that utilised custom-built enterprise models, the analysis highlights the risks of opacity, universalisation, and feedback loops that can deepen harm for marginalised individuals and communities. FINDINGS: In response, the article advances an intersectional power analysis and proposes a critical participatory practice approach to technology development. By centring the knowledge, experiences, and leadership of those most impacted by AI-driven systems, this approach positions technology as a potential tool for transformational justice rather than social control. CONCLUSION: The article concludes by arguing that ethical engagement with AI in social work requires ongoing reflexivity, political accountability, and meaningful community participation.

This chapter examines the development, effectiveness, and history of transitional justice in the 20th and 21st centuries. Then, it reviews some of the key issues facing transitional justice in the 21st century. These include the emergence of a normative framework for the field of transitional justice, arising in the 20th century in the shadows of World War II and the Holocaust. It then addresses a number of the key issues that have emerged in the 21st century, including transitional justice and its relationship with criminal justice, gender justice, the role of victims, transformative justice, the template or ‘check the box’ approach and the role donors play in transitional justice efforts. This chapter thus suggests that practitioners and scholars alike are challenging the limits of transitional justice and moving past the approaches, dogmas, and conventional boundaries of the field as it arose in the mid-1990s.

Public service psychologists engage their research competencies to explore the psychological health needs of underserved populations and the justice systems that deliver them psychological services. In late June 2023. the Criminal Justice Section of Division 18 of the American Psychological Association cosponsored the Fifth North American Correctional and Criminal Justice Psychology Conference: Towards a Justice System That Works, Toronto, Canada. This is the fourth time our journal, Psychological Services, has engaged to develop a section of peer-reviewed articles from the original empirical research presented at the North American Correctional and Criminal Justice Psychology Conference. Supplemented with additional justice-related articles featuring a theme of responsivity, this brief introduction outlines the importance of responsivity research-knowledge that informs unique aspects of a subpopulation so clinicians might better inform the services they deliver. Articles span a range of justice settings domestically and internationally and examine issues of gender, ethnicity, and the workforce to increase the empirically informed responsivity factors that deepen provider understandings of treatment needs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

ObjectivesThe objectives of the COMFT study (funded by the ESRC) are to generate new knowledge about female defendants who are also involved in the family justice system, and to understand caregiver outcomes for children. This collaborative study aims to assist policy makers as they strive to preserve mother-child relationships, to reduce offending. MethodsAdministrative records for female defendants appearing in the criminal courts (and prisons data), are linked to records for women appearing in the family courts (public and private law). Criminal court records provide information on offence type and case outcomes. Family court data enables children to be linked to their mothers, and provides children’s legal order outcome information. Records are accessed by a highly experienced, interdisciplinary team (inter-university; family justice and crime specialists) of researchers through the SAIL Databank. Year 1 (2025) comprises examination and documentation of data quality, scope, and dataset build. Year 2 (2026) comprises experimental sub-studies which provide new knowledge about dual system involvement. ResultsThe project team will share learning from Year 1 regarding progress towards the creation of cross-justice datasets. This will include all elements of navigating access and responding to governance requirements, new learning about data quality, scope and linkages, cohort design decisions and outcome definitions. Provisional descriptive results about the populations of mothers and their children will be shared, including demographic information which addresses questions of dual system involvement according to deprivation and ethnicity. Sharing Year 1 results will enable other researchers to understand the opportunities and limitations of linking data across justice systems (England and Wales). The team will also share learning about working with project partners, including mothers with cross-justice lived experience. ConclusionsThe project has been designed collaboratively with partners: the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), Cafcass and Cafcass Cymru, Birth Companions and COMFT-Together (Mothers with Lived Experience). It builds on the MoJ’s Data First programme and addresses questions that are long overdue about mothers and children at the intersection of criminal justice.