Restoration Ceremonies and the Limits of Institutional Repair

• In Event: Crime, Law and Deviance Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 3: Criminal Justice System Actors (1)

Abstract

Garfinkel's degradation ceremony remains a dominant framework for understanding how institutions transform social identity through condemnation. Far less is known about what happens when they attempt the reverse: organizing ceremonial support for people back into society after casting them out. This paper analyzes what those restoration ceremonies produce and what they do to the people inside them, using RISE Court in the Southern District of New York as a case. Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork, the analysis shows that participants experienced genuine symbolic recognition, often the first a legal institution had extended to them, alongside material conditions that the ceremony alone could not change. Those two things coexisted, producing a specific kind of disorientation: people who felt seen and stuck at the same time, holding an upgraded social identity in a world that was not organized to honor it. By encoding wage labor market participation as the primary condition of restored standing, RISE authorized a definition of worthy personhood organized around exactly what incarceration makes hardest to accumulate, outsourcing the redistribution problem to participants while reading their success or failure as evidence of authentic change. Restoration ceremonies are structurally better at symbolic repair than material repair, and the conditions they attach to recognition tend to reinscribe what they cannot resolve.

Author

• Eric James Reeves, New York University