Giving Back: Stormwater Management and Alternative Sentencing in Newark

• In Event: STS and Security Studies: Expertise, Infrastructures and Practices - I

Abstract

Based on an ethnographic study of green stormwater infrastructures in the city of Newark, this paper discusses how urban green spaces become sites through which to locate disorder and layer solutions, including flood management and criminal justice reform. While greening initiatives have been taken up within grassroots food and environmental justice movements, which put forth notions of self-sufficiency, sanctuary, and wellbeing, this paper focuses on Newark’s Community Court and asks how green infrastructure and notions of transformation through land and food production are folded into processes of criminal restitution through community service mandates. Housed under Newark’s municipal court, the Community Court is an alternative sentencing program for low-level, non-violent offenses. “Clients” of the court, are assigned social services, including individual and group therapy, and a series of community service mandates, many of which are sited at vacant lot gardens and urban farms retrofitted for stormwater retention. The Community Court aims “to strengthen the connections between courts and communities” through its mandates. Based on observations at court proceedings and conversations with clients and urban growers on “service days”, this paper explores the role of urban green spaces in fostering ties and rebuilding confidence in the court process and the role of court mandates in generating labor for the citywide flood resilience and stormwater management plans. It examines figurations of greening and urban agriculture in relation to carcerality and community justice that are presented by the city’s pursuit of multi-benefit solutions to environmental vulnerability.

Author

• Kessie Alexandre, Princeton University