Building Abolition Futures Through Restorative and Transformative Justice Practices

• In Event: Stopping the STOPP: An Urgent Call to Critical Educators to Interrupt the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Abstract

Over the past fifteen years, an increasing number of schools in the United States have relied on harsh disciplinary policies and high stakes testing in an attempt to foster educational achievement among youth of color. These policies have funneled hundreds of thousands of children down life paths that lead to arrest, conviction, and incarceration: the school-to-prison pipeline. Aware that youth caught up in school disciplinary webs are more likely to be retained in grade, pushed out of school, commit a crime and/or end up incarcerated as an adult, local groups across the United States have organized to implement disciplinary alternatives in schools including peer mediation, peace circles, safety labs, peer juries and courts, mentoring, and other parental and community involvement initiatives. Often grouped under the heading “restorative justice” or “transformative justice” these programs are being embraced by youth, teachers, and parents in schools across Chicago. From our locations as educators, scholars and organizers, this paper examines the growth and the impact of restorative and transformative justice practices in Chicago schools, and links these local practices to wider prison abolition movements.

Part one briefly identifies this moment of mass incarceration in the United States and briefly outlines how educational practices and policies are enmeshed with prison growth and carceral state practices. With the world’s largest prison population, the U.S. is the global expert on detention, and educational policies and practices are a central component. Part two summarizes scholarship and advocacy that highlights the need for those invested in addressing educational inequities to build abolition futures, or as Angela Davis suggests, the imperative to ask “are prisons obsolete?” Part three identifies restorative and transformative justice alternatives in Chicago that aim to build abolition futures.

Authors

• Erica R. Meiners, Northeastern Illinois University

• Crystal T. Laura, Chicago State University

• Karen Reyes, University of Illinois at Chicago