Restorative Food Justice as a Tool for Prisoner Reentry

• In Event: 331 - Section on Environment and Technology Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 12. Environmental Justice

Abstract

The current system of mass incarceration entrenches inequality and segregation. Before, within, and after people enter prison, they experience a range of structural barriers and institutional biases that make it difficult to break out of the prison pipeline. This article investigates a network of food justice and restorative justice activists in Oakland, California who are intervening at the point of reentry. I argue that food justice can be a tool for addressing non-food problems, and in turn help advance social justice. To explain this strategic pivot I show how the experiences and perspectives of former inmates who have gone through the prison pipeline motivate a reimagining of food justice activism that helps decrease various social inequities. A set of healing and mutual aid practices create spaces to overcome the historical trauma of mass incarceration, produce living wage jobs, rearticulate relationships to food and land, and achieve policy reforms.

Author

• Joshua Sbicca, Colorado State University