Reform/Abolition Tensions in School-Based Restorative Justice

• In Event: Toward a Critical Restorative Justice Praxis

Abstract

Objectives
This paper offers a conceptual tool for comparing different strategies for implementing restorative justice practices (RJP). Specifically, I examine how each strategy supports a) the immediate reduction of harm to children and/or b) the long-term abolition of the school-prison nexus.

Theoretical Frameworks
A growing line of scholarship argues that the connection between schools and prisons is best understood as an interconnected nexus (Meiners, 2010). Very recently, popular calls to defund the police have motivated a surge in attention to the longstanding movement for abolition of the prison industrial complex (PIC). But what does PIC abolition look like in the context of the school-prison nexus (Meiners, 2011; Stovall, 2018), and what role might RJP play?

Recognizing what Meiners (2011) terms the reform/abolition tension, Critical Resistance, a collective of abolitionist activists and scholars, offers four criteria by which to distinguish “reformist reforms” from incremental steps towards abolition (Critical Resistance, n.d.). In this paper, I take up the Critical Resistance framework as a lens to examine processes of de-institutionalization (Author, under review), adapting it to analyze strategies for implementing school-based RJP.

Methods and Data
I illustrate this framework with data collected in the Chicago Public Schools, primarily via fieldwork at three high schools: Rustin, Heritage, and Southlake. These schools were similar in size, demographics, and student achievement, but each adopted restorative justice practices to different degrees using different constellations of implementation strategies (Author, 2017).

This paper focuses on five common RJP implementation strategies: (1) adding RJP as an alternative for “low level offenses;” (2) combining RJP with exclusion, as in re-entry circles; (3) remaking exclusionary practices to be more restorative, as in restorative in-school suspension; (4) proactive restorative relationship building strategies; and (5) policy limitations on allowable uses of exclusion and policing in schools. For each strategy, I analyze the extent to which it offers short term relief for children’s suffering as well as its connection with dismantling four sites of reproduction of the school-prison nexus: resource allocation, legitimacy, tools and tactics, and scope and scale.

Findings
My analysis reveals that all of the identified strategies can be helpful in addressing the immediate crisis of children’s suffering and pushout. At the same time, in terms of serving as a step towards abolition of the school-prison nexus, most of the strategies identified are limited. For example, using restorative justice practices in lieu of exclusionary punishments for behavior considered to be a “low level offense” does reduce the scope of exclusion in a school by limiting the situations in which it would be used. However, it maintains, or arguably strengthens the legitimacy of exclusion for other more “serious” situations, and maintains exclusion as a viable tactic for those situations. Only policy changes formally limiting the use of suspensions, expulsions, and policing directly address all four sites of reproduction.

Significance
This framework offers a structure to guide decision-making by activists and school leaders considering the adoption of school-based restorative justice practices as a step towards abolition of the school-prison nexus.

Author

• Eleanor Anderson, University of Pittsburgh