Policy Panel: History and Justice Reform: Sustaining Transformation through Reckoning

Session Submission Type: Policy Panel

Abstract/Description

Over the last six years, the Square One Project has convened researchers, advocates, and practitioners with the aim of changing public understanding and elevating transformative efforts to change societal responses to violence in the social contexts of poverty and racial inequality. In that work, a consensus has begun to emerge that a shared understanding of the history on which our current policies stand, and a commitment to healing and repair from the damage they have done - in other words, a process of reckoning - are crucial to our efforts for sustained change and true fairness and equity. Without this work of reckoning, justice policy reform efforts are doomed to remain limited and precarious. But with it, even in a time of great political and cultural divide, we have the opportunity to bring together broadly disparate perspectives around shared values that will last. This panel explores the power of historical reflection for changing both culture and policy, through a conversation among historians, advocates, and researchers.

Sub Unit

• Area XX. Policy Panels

Individual Presentations

• The Historical Reckoning that Revokes an Irreducible Minimum of the Youth Justice System in Ending Incarceration of Indigenous/Chicanx/Latinx/Afro-Latinx Two-spirit Youth - Marcia Rincon-Gallardo, Alianza for Youth Justice

• A Review of Recent Historical Scholarship on Racial Criminalization and Punitive Policy in the United States - Khalil Gibran Muhammad, Harvard University

• The Values of Justice - Keith Wattley, Uncommon Law

• “Maximum Feasible Participation:” A Precedent for Social Change in the Twenty-First Century - Elizabeth Hinton, Yale University

Chairs

• Sukyi McMahon, Columbia University

• Jasmin Sandelson, Columbia University

Discussants

• Vivan Nixon, Columbia University

• Keith Wattley, Uncommon Law

• Marcia Rincon-Gallardo, Alianza for Youth Justice

Organized by a Division or external group?

The Square One Project at Columbia Justice Lab