August 20, 2020 43
The only restorative justice program
in the US that addresses acts of vi-
olence committed by adults, albeit
young adults, is the Brooklyn-based
nonprofit organization Common Jus-
tice. Founded in 2008 by the activist
Danielle Sered, Common Justice works
in partnership with district attorneys in
Brooklyn and the Bronx on a particu-
lar subset of violent crimes: robberies,
shootings, and assaults committed by
sixteen- to twenty-six-year-olds. In her
recent book, Until We Reckon, Sered
describes how the program works and
issues a plea for the criminal justice
system to adopt restorative justice more
broadly. The book provides little detail
on how she negotiates with prosecutors
and why she takes some cases and not
others—crimes of murder, rape, do-
mestic violence, and sexual assault are
excluded from her program, for exam-
ple—but Sered makes a persuasive case
for the potential of restorative justice to
truly restore what has been taken from
the victim and the community when a
crime occurs.
Participation in the Common Justice
program must be voluntarily agreed to
by both victims and defendants. After
a prosecutor approves, victims and of-
fenders meet regularly with a mediator
over the next fifteen months. (If victims
do not want to participate in face-to-
face meetings, they can designate rep-
resentatives, often family members or
loved ones.) The victim decides what
he or she believes the offender should
do—this can include education, ther-
apy, community service at a site mean-
ingful to the victim, formal apologies
to those affected, and so on—as long
as it is lawful and does not involve in-
carceration. If the offender agrees and
completes those steps, the prosecutor
clears the charges.
Crime victims, Sered explains, often
choose restorative justice over prison,
though not necessarily out of a sense of
forgiveness. Some victims feel venge-
ful: one mother Sered worked with said
she wanted her fourteen-year-old son’s
attacker, who robbed and brutally beat
him, to “drown in a river of fire.” But
they also, she writes, desire something
more: safety, for themselves and others.
Victims may fear retaliation when the
offender comes home from prison, or
from the offender’s friends in ongoing
conflicts. They doubt that imprison-
ment will make offenders less violent—
on the contrar y, many expect it to make
them more so—and worry that offend-
ers will hurt someone else. Some sur-
viving victims just need answers: Why
me? Why did you do it? Do you know
what you have done?
The stories Sered tells in Until We
Reckon expose flaws in our criminal
justice system that familiar critiques
often don’t take into account. Consider
the mother who said she wanted her
son’s attacker to suffer. She has other
young children; the offender lived in
their neighborhood and was facing
three years in prison. Explaining her
decision to work with Common Justice,
she imagined her family in three years:
When my nine-year-old is twelve,
he is going to be coming to and
from his aunt’s house, to and from
school.... And one day he’s going
to walk by that young man. And I
have to ask myself: when that day
comes, do I want that young man
to have been upstate or do I want
him to have been with y’all?Sered uses the mother’s question to
highlight the lack of options the sys-
tem offers poor communities: “justice”
comes down to a choice between noth-
ing and prison. She cites a national poll,
conducted by the Alliance for Safety
and Justice in 2016, which found that
52 percent of crime victims “believe
that time in prison makes people more
likely to commit another crime rather
than less likely,” and that 69 percent
would rather hold offenders account-
able through other means.
Or consider Annie, an elderly
woman living in Atlanta, who was vio-
lently assaulted and robbed by a young
man. By traditional measures, the legal
process worked well: the case went to
trial, and the offender received the
maximum sentence. Several years later,
when Sered asked her whether she felt
relieved when the sentence was an-
nounced, Annie said of course she did.
But she added that on the way home,I was still afraid. And I got to my
apartment, and I was still poor. And
when I crawled into bed that night,
I still couldn’t sleep, and when
exhaustion finally took me and I
fell asleep, I still had those same
nightmares. And when I woke up
that next morning, the only differ-
ence was that I could not shake the
image of that boy’s mother’s face in
court when those guards took her
baby from her for good.A prison sentence, Until We Reckon
shows repeatedly, provides no guar-
antee of resolution, the trial no guar-
antee of closure. Restorative justice,
Sered argues, is particularly attuned
to the nature of crime victims’ trauma,
giving them a sense of control when the
emotional aftermath of violent crime—
hyper vigilance, depression, distressing
memories—involves powerlessness. One
man who worked with Common Justice
felt overcome with fear every day when
he passed the place where he’d been
stabbed. Guided by Sered, the victim
and offender came up with a solution:
the offender went to the place multiple
times, greeted the victim respectfully,
and shook his hand, overwriting the
traumatic memory with a new expe-
rience. Eventually, the victim’s fear
subsided. Sered observes that this out-
come would be inconceivable under
the traditional criminal justice system,
where power rarely belongs to victims.
Prosecutors decide whether to pursue a
case; lawyers decide whether the victim
testifies; judges approve the sentence,
and corrections officers enforce it. But
throughout Until We Reckon, we see
people—mostly poor people of color—
meeting each other, holding each other
accountable, making promises, at-
tempting together to repair their lives.
Restorative justice advocates believe
this process benefits both victims and
defendants. For offenders, discussion
nudges them toward a self- respect
that their own actions may have un-
dermined. For victims, hearing the
defendant explicitly admit fault can
help them overcome feelings of fear;
the process is based on the admission
of guilt as a shared premise. This is not
possible in court, where the defendant
is instructed by his lawyer to minimize
or explicitly deny his crime. Sered
notes that 90 percent of victims invited
to participate in her program choose to
do so, and less than 6 percent of defen-
dants have left the program due to newconvictions for a crime. A 2007 study
analyzing thirty-six studies from Aus-
tralia, New Zealand, Canada, the UK,
and the US found that restorative jus-
tice approaches significantly reduced
post-traumatic stress symptoms and
desire for revenge in victims; it also
found that such programs reduced re-
cidivism among both adult and youth
offenders.Who should have access to restorative
justice? Sered does not give precise cri-
teria. Those who have suffered trauma
deserve to heal, she argues, particu-
larly those whose trauma has been
underrecognized—namely African-
Americans in poor communities.
Studies on racial perceptions of crime
show that the media overrepresents
white people as victims of crime, even
though Black men are the most likely
to be victims of violent crimes. In 2015,
Black boys and men aged ten to thirty-
four were thirteen times more likely
to be murdered than white men in the
same age range. Sered observes that in
New York City in the first half 2012, 96
percent of shooting victims were Black
or Latino. Accordingly, 70 percent of
the victims participating in the Com-
mon Justice program are men of color.
Yet Sered, who helped run a program
to reintegrate formerly incarcerated
youth, recalls speaking to ten young
men of color coming home from Rikers
Island:When I asked...“How many of
you have been victims of crime?”
no hands went up. Not one. When
I asked, “How many of you have
had something taken from you by
force?” eight hands went up. “How
many of you have had something
stolen from your home?” Ten
ha nd s. “How ma ny of you have ever
lost a fight and been hurt or been
jumped?” Nine of the ten young
men raised their hands. Yet none
had been the “victim of a crime.”Studies show that those who do not
think of themselves as victims may be
less likely to seek help and more likely
to disregard their own trauma. “There
is no bright line between victims and
offenders,” writes sociologist Bruce
Western, who found, in a survey of peo-
ple released from prison in Boston, that
“40 percent... had witnessed someone
being killed, nearly half were beaten
by their parents,... 16 percent reported
being sexually abused,” and half said
they had been “seriously injured...
growing up.” Sered puts it plainly: “Al-
most no one’s entry point into violence
is committing it.”^3
The title of Sered’s book refers in
part to her belief that Americans must
reckon with the historical trauma of
slavery and Jim Crow laws, which have
profoundly shaped our criminal legal
system—but she stops short of specify-
ing what part restorative justice could
have in this bigger picture. Should
everybody have the chance to avoid
prison? Should the CEOs of companies
that dump environmental waste in poor
neighborhoods be afforded the op-
tion of this kind of reconciliation? Do(^3) Indeed, in describing parties as “vic-
tim” and “offender” while writing this
essay, I realized how difficult it is to
avoid reinforcing the notion that these
are two separate groups.
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