One of the most persistent questions that I get, as an advocate not just for prison reform or an end to mass incarceration, but for prison abolition, is: “What do we do about violence?” Even people who are deeply sympathetic to the need to change our dysfunctional prison system get stuck on the apparent need for incarceration to protect us from violence and danger.
Danielle Sered’s book, Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair, is the most compelling response to that question I can think of. Sered is the director of Common Justice, a restorative justice diversion program in New York that deal primarily with violent crime. Common Justice’s work is to take people who have done great harm to others and—if the victim is willing and they are willing to take accountability for what they’ve done—divert their criminal case into a restorative justice process, which often lasts a year or more. At the conclusion of the Common Justice process, criminal charges are dropped and the perpetrators avoid incarceration.
Sered’s years of practical experience give this book the specificity it needs in proposing restorative justice as a solution to violence. She’s not just arguing against prisons because they’re inhumane: she’s also arguing that they don’t make survivors of violence safer, because they don’t help the perpetrators avoid further violence. Survivors are pragmatic, Sered says, and their primary desire is usually to make sure the person who hurt them won’t hurt anyone else. Common Justice better meets their needs than prison does, because Common Justice is more effective than prison at preventing future violence. Violence has “four key drivers,” Sered writes: “shame, isolation, exposure to violence, and a diminished ability to meet one’s economic needs.” Sending violent offenders to prison imposes up on them all four of these drivers and makes further violence more likely.
Sered’s work is piercing in its emphasis on accountability. Restorative justice, she says, is about accountability, not mercy. She writes: “Often, people who recognize the harms caused by punishment seek to replace it with mercy. While mercy must have a central place in justice, on its own it is not an adequate substitute for punishment.” Why? Because “mercy is not precisely about the people who have caused harm at all—it is about those of us in a position to determine what should happen to them.”
Accountability, on the other hand, is the person who has done harm putting their own efforts in place to make it right. Sered writes: “When we cause harm, we misuse our power, and accounting for harm therefore required that we invert that misuse and put our power in service of repair.” Rather than disempowering those who have done harm, either by imposing punishment on them to make them powerless or offering mercy to them, Sered wants us to require those who have done harm to use their power rightly to make amends. This is a view of accountability in some ways more difficult than “doing time”—but also more transformative! There is nothing “soft” or “nice” about restorative processes based on accountability rather than punishment.
I found Sered’s book deeply inspiring and moving. Her description of accountability offers a paradigm shift in how we think about responding to violence. Her experience proves that there is a better way than prisons, even to address violence—if we’re brave enough to try it. Required reading for abolitionists. Buy it here.
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