Transformative justice sees crime as an opportunity to build a more caring, more inclusive, more just community. Safety doesn’t lie in bigger fences, harsher prisons, more police, or locking ourselves in till we ourselves are prisoners. Safety and security – real security – come from building a community where because we have cared for and included all, that community will be there for us, when trouble comes to us. For trouble comes to us all, but trouble itself is an opportunity.
– Ruth Morris, Stories of Transformative Justice, p 21
Ruth Morris was a Canadian activist, scholar, and Quaker. She was at the forefront of the early prison abolition movement, and a founding member of the International Conference on Prison Abolition (ICOPA) which is one of the most prominent abolitionist groups working today.
All of that would be reason enough for me to read what she wrote, but the reason that I really get all hot and bothered for Ruth Morris is that she worked in non-profits her whole life, regularly spending time with the people she was advocating for. We live in a world where that’s easy to avoid, and she didn’t. Boss.
So rewind for a second to me a year ago at my teeny tiny coffee shop table, reading Morris’ Stories of Transformative Justice. Pretty soon I was embarrassing the heck out of myself, because I was crying in public. Not eyes watering, dabbing at the corners crying, but tears-and-snot-everywhere crying. It was pretty gross, but it was totally justified because the stories were so moving. I’ll synopsize an example:
One of the stories that Morris tells is about a family with a six-year-old boy. This boy is charming, loving, adored by his parents and his teacher. Then, one day he leaves a little late from school. He is crossing the cross-walk by himself, and a car comes racing around the corner. Either the driver doesn’t see him there, or he can’t stop in time. He hits and kills the six-year-old, leaving his parents childless.
Obviously the parents are crushed. And angry. Angry at God, and fate, and the idiot 16-year-old kid who thoughtlessly drove well over the speed limit past an elementary school.
As Morris tells it, that night the father is absolutely beside himself with grief and anger, and doesn’t know what to do. And then something clicks. One life is over: his little boy will never come back. But now another life stands to be lost as well.
The man goes to his wife and tells her what he wants to do. There isn’t anything they can do for their son now, but maybe there is something they can do for the sixteen-year-old who killed him. And his wife agrees.
The couple petitions the court to drop the charges against the young man. He is grateful, and incredibly remorseful. But they don’t stop there. They also give him a part-time job at the man’s business, and eventually help pay his way through college. He becomes a regular fixture at holidays, a member of their family.
This is a story Morris read in a Canadian newspaper, though to my ears it sounds almost biblical. It is an incredible thing to imagine offering emotional and economic support to the person who killed your son, but it is also clear that what everyone gained from that situation far outstrips what anyone would’ve have gotten from a prison sentence.
Transformative justice takes a lot of forms, but whenever I think about it now my first thought is about two parents who are willing to not only forgive but to love the person who killed their only child, and who gain so much from that willingness.
Abolish Prisons 