In the wake of the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Rayshard Brooks, protesters have taken to the streets against the violence of policing and to make demands, including defunding policing.

That demand is gaining traction as organizers have ignited a new wave of interest in the abolition of prisons and policinga concept theorized mostly by Black women and femmes.

But this newfound hunger for abolition is accompanied by questions and concerns about how to implement abolition in practice. People wonder how society would hold people who commit violence accountable for their actions, and in particular, use sexual violence as an example.

One way abolitionists have confronted these questions is through the development of Transformative Justice (TJ) processes. These processes, which have roots in Indigenous practices, model a different set of skills and principles for approaching harmful and dangerous situations.

Abolitionists argue we should eliminate all forms of policing and incarceration, and instead fund life-giving, community-based social services. They understand that properly executing such services requires shifting values and resourcing the development of valuable relationship skills to give communities the tools they need to disrupt and intervene in patterns of harm. Thats where TJ comes in.

Abolition is not a new idea; its been theorized, practiced, and advocated for by Black feminists like Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Rachel Herzing for decades. They argue the carceral state emphasizes individual acts of harm, labeling those who commit harm as criminals to justify dehumanization, isolation, and punishment.

As demonstrated by the violence of policing, as well as the demographics of incarcerated populations, this is a mechanism of control over the most marginalized in American society: Black and brown people, Indigenous people, and often those who are poor, trans, sex-working, and/or disabled.

Those same people are proposing ways to exist and solve problems outside of this violent system.

In other words, abolitionists identify the punishment bureaucracy as a source of harm itself. Leila Raven is a queer mama, prison abolitionist, and organizer with Decrim NY and Hacking//Hustling, who points out that a thousand people are killed by police every year, Black people are three times as likely to be killed as white people, and half of those killed are people with disabilities. Sexual assault is also the second most common form of police brutality, primarily used against Black women and women of color who are also frequently criminalized for the strategies that we use to survive.

A police car on fire. Illustration by Dan Nott on Instagram (Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/CBV0i3kD8bl/)

While the state is actively harming folks at the margins, transformative justice seeks to do the opposite.

According to Mia Mingus, a writer, educator, and community organizer for disability justice and transformative justice, the process is a political framework and approach for responding to violence, harm and abuse. At its most basic, it seeks to respond to violence without creating more violence and/or engaging in harm reduction to lessen the violence.

JeKendriaa fat, Black, disabled, non-binary femme who is the Executive Director of Collective Action for Safe Spaces (CASS)argues TJ necessitates an understanding that the carceral system does not actually protect or heal survivors, but rather thrusts [them] into cycles of harm and trauma.

Like other abolitionists, she points out that sexual harm is still so prevalent despite having carceral systems in place. Not only is sexual violence prevalent within the carceral system, but she says that most rapists are not actually incarcerated. Instead, many have prominent positions of power.

Erin Gar-Yun Andriamahefa is a queer, genderfluid, Malagasy, Chinese person, who volunteers with CASS. She describes TJ as a framework through which people can begin to understand and address why harm is happening, while emphasizing collective responsibility to seek accountability when it happens.

It is a humanizing process, she told Shadowproof, that equips us to move beyond shame and punishment to normalize navigating conflict, seeing it as a portal for accountability, transformation, and healing.

CASS facilitates the creation of such a portal to accountability, transformation, and healing. JeKendria describes the organization as a small grassroots group that trains and supports communities, workplaces, bars/restaurants, and collectives in building safer environments that address harassment and assault through an intersectional, anti-carceral lens.

By prioritizing the survivors consent, safety, and healing, TJ ensures that carceral culture and systems arent recreated within communities.

Transformative justice is not one type of response, explains Ejeris Dixon, Executive Director of Vision Change Win.

We use transformative justice depending on what has happened, Dixon told Shadowproof. This can mean accountability processes, ways that we protect and interrupt violence in the moment through de-escalation or bystander intervention, ways that we can support survivors to heal, and structures that we create for communities to address violence, harm, and emergencies outside of the carceral state.

On an individual level, JeKendria explains that survivors lead the process, explaining what they need to feel safe. On a larger community scale, they say it can look like creating consistent containers for people to engage in co-learning, co-processing, and co-conspiring around upholding principles of collective safety and wellness. Communities have to be ready to pause, to assess and be accountable, to [create] shared agreements, principles, and methods that facilitate safety for everyone.

To JeKendria, this internal processing and work is paramount in collectives that organize externally as well.

A common refrain about transformative justice and other alternatives to carcerality is that they would only work in a utopia, or that they have never been used effectively. Though TJ generally requires community buy-in and consent of all of those involved, its untrue that alternatives to state solutions are not being practiced.

Raven points out that trans and queer people of color, especially those who are sex working, disabled, and housing insecure, have always known that we could not rely on policing for safety, and so we experiment frequently with many other strategies to keep each other safe.

Many of these folks may not have known or used the terms transformative justice, Dixon adds. But if we ask folks what they worked on, we will hear these practices in their answers.

Apart from engaging in community accountability and TJ processes, other non-carceral responses to harm can look like shared housing models that provide safety and stability to people by helping them rapidly exit houselessness.

It can also look like public calls for consequences. In these instances, people use the strength and reach of their combined platforms in an attempt to impose consequences on powerful individuals, who will not take accountability for engaging in harm.

Abolitionists are keenly aware that some people who engage in abuse will continue their harmful behaviors. Thats why TJ practitioners still believe in boundaries and consequences.

JeKendria emphasizes that consequences should be a series of steps grounded in minimizing future harm, taking power away from the harm-doer, and increasing the survivors agency and ability to thrive. This is different from punishment because to punish someone is to dehumanize, villainize, and inflict more harm on someone.

She offered examples of consequences, including the harm doer moving out of a housing situation, stepping down from a job, making a statement to every group theyre a part of disclosing the harm they caused, taking a break from social spaces where the survivor is present, dispersing funds to the survivor or to survivor-centered work, moving to another city, and gathering a dedicated group of accountability partners.

These steps require acknowledgment of the harm, as well as intentional and explicit actions to rectify it. According to JeKendria, this is something that punishment does not and cannot accomplish.

Consequences for gendered violence dont naturally occur in a cis heteropatriarchal society, Raven told Shadowproof. We have to actively disrupt oppressive behaviors and create consequences to keep people safe.

To her, such consequences can include the removal of someone engaging in abuse from spaces where they have power or access.

Since many people who engage in abuse are able to continue harming others and avoid taking accountability by expanding their access to important positions on multiple platforms, it can be important to deplatform them on social media, magazines, podcasts, and other media.

But experimentation is still necessary, as are adequate resources, to attempt to refine and increase the capacity of these approaches.

JeKendria sees this as rigorous study and training to continuously evolve in collective understanding of community safety and accountabilityhealing spaces that are proactive and address ancestral traumaradical consent and Black queer feminist trainings as a requirement for entering a movement space (shoutout to BYP100!).

Abolitionists apply these frameworks to their own lives and organizing spaces. To make those spaces safer, abolitionists continually analyze the environments they create and the harm that is perpetuated within them.

By questioning the conditions, environments, and systems that have allowed the harm to happen, Andriamahefa says, we reveal the spectrum and connection between our individual behavior and experiences and larger oppressive systems, including and upheld by the carceral state.

Understanding everyone is capable of committing harm, abolitionists have had to reckon with harms committed by other self-described abolitionists.

JeKendria argues that this should be a wake-up call for us to investigate how often were perpetuating harm in our movement spaces, how often were ignoring the signs of survivors, how easy it is for us to evade accountability, and how some of us weaponize and manipulate each other with TJ language.

A tree and stream appear where a burned-out police car once was. Illustration by Dan Nott on Instagram (Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/CBV0i3kD8bl/)

Its not easy work, as it requires us to focus on killing the cop in our heads and owning when we commit harm or enable others to do so. As we begin to actualize a world without police and prisons, we have to do the work to build communities of trust, with infrastructures of care to prevent the resurgence of carcerality as a solution.

Right now, organizers in New York City are confronting harm in their movement spaces. Lily Mishra, a Brooklyn-based organizer, is part of several organizing collectives in NYC. In response to abuse within one of her collectives, she and others entered a TJ process. (Shadowproof is using a pseudonym for Lily to protect the identity of those involved in the TJ process).

One of the difficult things, she says, is that were all at different points of personal reflection regarding everything that occurred. This makes an already difficult problem even harder, because people are going through their individual processes while realizing there were deeper structural issues that led to..how we collectively enabled abuse.

As Mishra notes, entering a transformative justice process is the beginning of a long journeya journey that takes commitments and consensus. Though these commitments are not always the most comfortable because of differences of opinion, theyre necessary when a group is prioritizing deep collective reflection. She says that this is particularly important in abolitionist collectives, where its important to organize at the scale of interpersonal relationships as well as institutional ones.

As such, its important to center survivors where they hadnt been centered before, such as within this particular collective. If not, the TJ process will not be a vehicle through which we learn how to transform that harm into vigilance and care, says Mishra.

Raven shared that after a recent experience of abuse and assault, she engaged in a process of community accountability with her abuser and their community.

I found myself revictimized and abused all over again by the community of the person who harmed me, and so I turned instead to the broader community to call on this group to be accountable by dissolving their collective and shifting resources toward Black-led abolitionist anti-violence work, Raven shared.

Something that I learned through this process, that now seems obvious, is that people who rape and abuse others are often surrounded by people who enable them.

Raven reiterates that despite the traumatic experience, she is hopeful that we can implement community accountability and TJ processes where we all acknowledge our role in causing harm, echoing JeKendria comments.

Dixon shared that one of the most important things to note is that TJ builds into the framework mechanisms through which we can support people who are navigating intense forms of violence. They note that TJ is as much about creating cultures of consent as it is about encouraging people to hold their friends and loved ones accountable, even when it is them who have committed sexual violence.

Im in a process right now holding a dear friend accountable, says Dixon, and it is both heartwrenching, challenging, and hope-creating.

Harm exists and will continue to exist. But the frameworks communities can use to address that harm are not static and can be improved. Transformative justice provides space to explore and react to individual situations as they arise.

We can use [transformative justice] to interrogate which systems need to be abolished and replaced in order for everyone to have their basic needs fully met, JeKendria said, and to grow communities that are communal, interdependent, and boldly accountable to each other.

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How Transformative Justice Can Address Harm Without Police - Shadowproof

The police killing of George Floyd, and the protest movement that emerged from it, has reinvigorated a national conversation around reinventing criminal justice policy in the United States.

At the same time, reports that violent crime is rising in many US cities have resurrected talk of the much-disputed Ferguson effect, a theory put forward by law enforcement professionals, and some researchers, who argued that police slowdowns in the wake of the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests resulted in elevated rates of violent crime. President Donald Trump is trying to weaponise this narrative, paired with images of federal officers clashing with protesters in the streets of Portland, to wage a 1968-style backlash election campaign.

People who want to mobilise a lock-them-up style of either policing or prosecution have tried to weaponise those short-term increases, says James Forman Jr., professor of law at Yale Law School. Criminologists will say you have to be very, very cautious about short-term movement [in crime statistics]. We don't know whether or not what we're seeing right now [with violent crime increasing] is going to sustain itself. But the fact is, it's here and people are talking about it.

In 2018, Forman won the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction for his book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. Drawing on his experience as a public defender in Washington, DC, he traced the emergence of anti-crime politics in late 20th century Black communities. Forman showed how newly empowered Black politicians fought for policies they believed would protect and uplift Black Americans, but inadvertently contributed to mass incarceration.

CityMetric recently caught up with Forman to discuss crime trends, where he sees reason for hope in this moment and how the Black political classs attitude toward crime and punishment has shifted since the latter part of the 20th century.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

There is talk right now about a resurgence of crime and violence in American cities. We saw similar, more localised concerns after the initial 2015 Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson and Baltimore. Do you fear this could reinvigorate the kind of politics you describe in your book among segments of the Black community and political class?

I fear that it could be reinvigorated nationally and also in the Black political class. Look at the political conversations that are happening in Atlanta right now, for example, a city that also has seen a short-term uptick in crime as it is a site of a lot of protests about George Floyd and Breonna Taylor on the national level, as well as Rayshard Brooks and Ahmaud Arbery more locally in Georgia.

I think that you can already see in some of the language of the local elected officials this idea that we have to be very careful about pulling back. [They are saying] while the protesters may make some valid points, we can't risk returning to the 80s and 90s. Those decades really traumatised the United States, and particularly traumatised Black communities. There's a deep fear about returning to the levels of the violence that we saw in the crack years.

You write a lot about class divides among Black Americans, where middle income and elite Black people don't suffer as much from extremely punitive policies. They also have closer ties to the politicians who are creating these policies. There are very specific groups of people, even in marginalised communities, whose voices are heard. As a result of these dynamics, you write about Black politicians fighting for things like mandatory minimum prison sentences or against decriminalising marijuana. Is there still that disconnect between those who suffer the most from criminal justice policies and those who are actually heard in political discourse?

Let me just say a caveat, that when we talk about class divisions in the Black community it's important to hold two truths in our head at the same time. Bruce Western and others have shown the way in which class, educational status, income can dramatically reduce the likelihood of being hardest hit by the criminal system namely incarcerated. Middle class and upper middle class Black people get some measure of protection. It's also true at the same time that Black people of all classes are worse off relative to their class counterparts in the white community.

One area where class is least protective is policing and police stops. The police do not know how many degrees you have. They don't know how much money you have in your bank account. I want to be very clear that in making this point about class, I'm not making the argument that race or racism don't matter in this context.

In terms of how it plays out now, I see an awareness that has developed in the Black community in the last 10 years or so about how deeply racist the criminal justice system has become. Twenty or 30 years ago they had a consciousness, but there's levels of understanding. Many of the people I write about in the book wanted to promote the interests of the Black community. They weren't motivated by indifference or callousness. When presented with mounting evidence of how awful this system has been in Black lives, they're reconsidering and recalibrating.

Lots of former elected officials have said to me some version of I didn't know at the time and I appreciate that you showed us in our full complexity. I appreciate that you showed the pressures we were under. If I had known then what I know now, maybe I would have been less quick to go along with some of these harsh measures.

The second thing that has affected the Black political class has been the emerging movements, led by Black people in particular and led by young people. They not only educated leaders, but pressured them and made them understand that there is a political cost. If you're not moved by the moral argument, then you'll be moved by the political argument. You'll be moved by the people protesting outside the office of District Attorney Jackie Lacey in Los Angeles, for example, where Black Lives Matter LA has held, I believe, a year of consecutive protests against a Black district attorney who has had really some of the worst practices.

From what I can tell, she's been pressured by the movement to change some of her positions on important issues like prosecution of low-level drug offenders, for example, and the aggressiveness with which she prosecutes police officers for acts of violence.

What do you make of the calls to defend or even abolish the police?

What I find so compelling about abolition, initially in the prison context and extended to the police as well, is that it shifts the conversation and forces us to go through experiments in which we imagine what it would take to build that world. I think that exercise is very important, because it pushes us further than we are naturally inclined to go. Cultivating a broader imagination is an incredibly important part of this work, because as you know from my book, often it was lack of imagination that caused people to fall back on [punitive policies].

That's what caused D.C. Councilmember David Clarke to call the police rather than public health experts when he was overwhelmed with letters about heroin addicts in public space. He was anti-drug war, but he couldn't imagine responding to a call for help with heroin addicts with anything other than police. That's a very common move from even really good and progressive people.

People who are for defunding, for abolition, are absolutely right about reinvesting that money into alternative structures that support communities. But the reinvestment part doesn't follow naturally from the terms. We might want to come up with a term that captures the new stuff we want to do. I think that's particularly important because one of the reasons Black communities have ended up supporting more police is that Black communities have always wanted their fair share of the resources.

Then, the evidence suggests the United States has too many police officers doing prophylactic, preventative, or stop-and-frisk style policing. The style of policing that leads to district level harassment, pulling people over for no reason. But we have too little investment in the parts of police departments that investigate unsolved crimes. I'm talking about the investigator or the detective who comes to your house after there's been a robbery, an assault, a rape, or homicide.

As compared to European countries, in the United States we actually underinvest in those parts of our police departments. Jill Leovys book Ghettoside shows this in dramatic detail. She describes an LAPD that's stopping and frisking Black drivers wantonly and yet the homicide detectives are still relying on a fax machine and the fax machine is broken. They have to go with their own money to Staples to buy a printer. Meanwhile, other aspects of the department are kitted out in this ridiculous riot gear that makes them look like they're in Fallujah.

That under investment is particularly damaging to Black communities because we're disproportionately victimised by crime. Because of racism and this allocation of resources, the police are less likely to respond in Black communities. The kids I used to work with in the charter schools in DC, we talk about no snitching, but one of the reasons they would never call the police after they'd been victimised by crime is they would say, They're not even going to come. You're wasting time.

I did a Q&A with Jill Leovy too and her argument is one I've struggled to articulate in our present moment. She argues the state doesn't have a monopoly on violence in low-income Black neighbourhoods, because investigations of violence are deemphasised and crime victims or their loved ones often take retribution into their own hands. But right now, establishing or preserving the state's monopoly on violence isn't an appealing talking point.

Yes, this is another thing nobody's talking about. Whatever we're going to do instead of the police has to be accountable to the public. The best, most direct way to have accountability is to have the individuals be public employees. As long as we have 300 million guns in this country at least some of those state employees are going to themselves be armed. It's unreasonable to ask them to do the job without it. Not as many need to be armed as are armed now, but some of them need to be. But they can't be hiding behind union contracts or civil service protections which make it impossible to remove even the worst performing, most abusive officers.

We can not call them police if we want to. That's semantic, but maybe symbolism matters. But those people have to be state employees. They can work with community-based nonprofits, but there are also communities that don't have as robust of a nonprofit network, and they deserve protection too. These [community] groups have to be accountable to the state and, when they don't exist, the state has to be there.

Progressives get all the points I just made when it's applied to education. The notion that things be public and accountable to the state is understood when it comes to schools. It's exactly why so many people on the left are opposed to charter schools, because they say they don't have public accountability. They want these things to be a state function. But this point about the difficulty in removing this entirely from the hands of the state is, I think, one that liberals and progressives understand from other contexts.

Jake Blumgart is a staff writer at CityMetric.

More:

How the rise of anti-crime politics caused lasting harm to Black Americans - CityMetric