Restorative Justice and Punitive Commonsense: Contradictions, Co-Optation, and Possibilities

• In Event: 66.064 - Youth and Community Voice? Perspectives on Challenging a Racial Politics of Inclusion

Abstract

In recent years, as awareness of the racial discipline gap has grown and as the negative impacts of zero-tolerance discipline have become increasingly clear, more schools are turning to restorative justice (RJ). There has been a tendency for advocates for RJ, academic and otherwise, to celebrate this trend, assuming that the turn toward RJ serves an anti-racist social justice agenda. However, as this paper indicates, the underlying aims and philosophy of RJ are contradictory to those governing U.S public schools and as such, the introduction of RJ in schools poses deep contradictions and runs the risk of co-optation. Moreover, when implemented in superficial ways and without awareness of these contradictions, RJ can reinforce rather than challenge underlying assumptions and practices of school discipline (Evans, 2014; Lustick, 2015; Vaandering, 2010)—including, in particular, what Christianakis and Mora (2014) call the “punitive commonsense” of racialized neoliberalism.
    This paper presents ethnographic data from a youth-led restorative justice program in a high-reform urban high school that uses circle practice and youth participatory action research (YPAR) to address interpersonal conflict and structural inequity at their school. Drawing on existing work on neoliberal cooptation, neoliberal racism, and restorative justice I examine the contradictions that arose when students attempted to implement liberatory practices in a school where they have often been dehumanized (Davis, 2007; Phipps, 2014). Data includes three years of participant-observation of a high-school based RJ program, twenty interviews with student RJ  leaders, five interviews with adult RJ leaders, and analysis of relevant artifacts such as district policy documents and local news coverage. Drawing on the work of Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw (1995) I used open and focused coding to analyze my data.
    Understanding the contradictions and tensions inherent to RJ in school-based spaces, I have developed a set of guiding questions to support scholars and practitioners with assessing whether or not the RJ practices being used are leading to structural transformation or merely reinforcing and maintaining the status quo. While I attend specifically to RJ, I believe these questions can serve as a guide for researchers, practitioners, and activists who are trying to do various types of liberatory work in schools that are saturated with the punitive commonsense of racialized neoliberalism. While attending to these questions — (a) Who/what is expected to change? (b) How are the values of RJ taken up institutionally? (c) How is injustice understood and addressed?—does not guarantee that the practices are free from ideological influence or neoliberal co-optation they can help us understand, think about, and reflect on how we might move closer to transformation. Given the ease in which radical practices are taken up and distorted, purposefully or accidently, to advance neoliberal aims, it is imperative that those of us researching RJ and other liberatory practices attend to these questions. Doing so will not only help push our work in more critical directions but will also allow us to better understand the systems and structures that prevent transformation from being realized.

Author

• Dani O'Brien, Northland College