Restoring Justice While We Can
- Sep 8, 2025
- 7 min read
Today, I'll reflect on a few ideas I had in 2021 about how culturally and contextually appropriate forms of justice can be implemented in a community for young people. Oftentimes, a community can set up certain profiles for failure. Sometimes we succeed due to societal reasons, at least partly. A metaphor to imagine this is when you feel that strong breeze of air speeding up your bike in the direction you want to go. For many the breeze is, unfortunately, more of a dusty storm in the opposite direction.
The way out of the school to prison pipeline, as is affectionally understood in this line of study called restorative justice, demonstrates how poor handling of early mistakes, in a strong punitive manner without any gained lessons, can cause more harm than help. For many in the world of criminal justice, restorative justice is almost like a dirty word, particularly because of the way in which this kind justice gets interpreted. A typical lawyer finds this to be an easy way out for people who deserve to be corrected more rigorously. However, seen closely, restorative justice is the apt response in cases where change is more probable due to age or psychologically receptive conditions found in the person seeking such a route. To really understand the tangible long-term benefits of restorative justice in school settings, you can see work by Dr. Fania Davis who transformed the retention and graduation rates of the Oakland school system, pulling young minds from a downward spiral of crime to education.
The essay shared ahead was written in February 2021 for a graduate level course taught by Dr. Susan Hirsch and aims to elaborate some of my hopes from this area of applied research.
Recognizing Restoration Responsibly in Arlington, Virginia
by Anjali Mishra, PhD
Essay written for CONF 625-DL4: Community Restorative Justice (Spring 2021)
Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, George Mason University
Restorative Justice is a relational approach to justice (Zehr, et al., 2002). In many ways, it is a return to what indigenous groups knew already a collaborative engagement in justice, meant to recognize harm, and the needs and dignity of everyone, often in settings of shared concern. In North America, restorative justice, as known today, has origins in aboriginal teachings, faith communities, the prison abolitionist movement, the alternate dispute resolution movement, and socio-political movements witnessed in the past few decades (Leung, 1999; Zernova, 2008, p. 7). Despite these achievements, a less frequently discussed reality is how each justice system gets built in relation to the immediate surrounding society. It helps the main culture thrive for a number of years in its most adaptive form. Early forms of law in the United States were designed in such a way, to separate good citizens from bad ones, and to create a sense of safety for most people1.
Given the dangers of crime as a human experience, we find some comfort in our main legal system. However, as diversity increases, the nature of harm begins to diversify as well. The assumed meanings of good and bad citizens begin to shape who is protected. Due to cognitive bias, speed, and errors, first-time offenders from selective groups are sometimes seen as much worthy of a second chance compared to someone less familiar (Payne, 2006). Only once visible injustice happens, the origin of lapses is recognized because no room for misinterpretation is left anymore. In light of these reservations, raising awareness about restorative justice in Arlington, Virginia, would require the openness of setting aside everything we know about Arlington, and closely watching the many faces it has to offer. It would entail imagining collaborative intent stretched across identities, and in the absence of any shared ancestry, it would require paving the way for authentic human dialogue with interdependence in mind. If executed well, it may help create a replicable system of justice, one that would adapt and adjust with shifts in societal harm felt. A visual representation of this basic idea is expressed in Figure 1. Possible challenges to raising awareness about restorative justice are discussed ahead.
Defining and Identifying a 'Community'. Physical proximity is not always indicative of ideological proximity or similarity in socio-economic experiences (Dhami & Joy, 2007). Residents of the same city may witness quite different daily lives. As a consequence, they are likely to have different needs and experiences of harm, invisible to someone living on the next block. This stark difference within close quarters is much easily visible in developing countries. In the US, Washington DC is a good example of similar stark disparities2 seen in the same geographic region. Exploring the natural social-economic, life expectancy and employment breakdown of communities within the same city can help gather a keener understanding of the stronger divisions in the region. Therefore, in Arlington, Virginia, understanding and exploring the nature and cause of any such differences3 would be important to address potential roadblocks. In the absence of an inclusive definition of youth, for example, there is the danger of only helping particular groups that have access to restorative justice due to educational and organizational networks. This could mean not being able to introduce restorative justice to those who are supposed to benefit from it the most and consequently avoid poor life trajectories (e.g., first time offenders, students out of school).
Endorsing the Interdependent Benefits of Restorative Justice. Harm and needs are first experienced as personal. The entire notion of 'victimhood' begins with a realization of the self being diminished. With enough awareness, many develop the ability to look around and see personally felt injustices as a shared experience with similar others. In intergenerational conflict, shared harm is much easy to find due to a repetition of difficult life stories found in succession.
Other times, the disillusionment and delay felt by newer generations can emerge as mere symptoms of damage done long ago. Restorative justice asks us to go a step further recognize harm and needs in all parties involved. It is based on the assumption that we would be able to get past the enemy perceptions and see the other side as worthy of respect and restorative justice. Making Restorative Justice Possible with Equity. To many populations, accustomed to the punitive legal language and the speedy execution of the law, restorative justice may either sound too idealistic or it may be seen as the next cultural-fad in Arlington, of a legal kind, built only to complicate their disadvantaged lives further. To the skeptical-minded, it may even be seen as a way of legitimizing harm worthy of harsher treatment. This is not what restorative justice is designed to implement. However, without proper awareness, restorative justice can be interpreted as a way of benefiting only groups with privilege or power. Therefore, averting the danger of the biased use of punitive legal system for disadvantaged groups and of restorative justice mainly for groups with better presence in the community, due to social standing, is important to consider. Cognitive Biases and Human Errors in Understanding Harm to the Community. Selective implementation of restorative justice or practice can happen, not consciously, but mainly due to the preexisting biases that impact the recognition of offenders and explanations of harm in general (Bilewicz, et al., 2017; Yamamoto & Maider, 2017). Harm and needs may be expressed with good intent in a restorative practice setting. However, if there is an incongruency in daily contextual conditions or sub-culture between groups, it can be difficult to find agreement about harm done. A lot of harm done is explained away as harm created. Once this happens, entire groups are labeled as prone to crime and accustomed to disruption not as individuals imprisoned in difficult living conditions that need to be changed.
The challenges to raising awareness about restorative justice may be alleviated by unlearning some of our preexisting assumptions and returning to our human ability of realizing harm. Repairing harm, in essence, is meant to enliven our moral nature and maintain us as part of groups (Keltner, 2006; de Waal, 1996), particularly when experienced as a shared responsibility toward a collective good. As Wallace Warfield describes it, the endeavor of ethical challenges in restorative practice can be managed by maintaining a non-biased stance, observing boundaries of confidentiality and proper contextual framing of the conflict, understanding conflict between personal values and ethics of the field, and being aware of cultural differences in appropriate behaviors and differences individual expression due to political freedom (Warfield, 2002). In conclusion, a successful implementation of restorative justice would require a) being cognizant of a collectively relevant future instead of one that only impact us and our immediate groups; b) knowing the ethics of the power and privilege (or the lack of) brought in by the identity of the facilitator or interviewer since it can create difference in the type of or degree of information shared; c) not divulging information, shared in confidence by conflict parties, with carelessness since it may unknowingly threaten the restorative process; and d) considering the multiple causes of misbehavior since necessary for survival in unreliable or extreme settings4. The initiative would involve giving precedence to an interdependent sense of existence, instead of a separate one, which is where we first find harm. A co-existing sense of lived harm and obligations is supposed to minimize the victimization felt as separate entities and lessen the burden of any future harm due to a shared sense of accountability.
Footnotes
References
Bilewicz, M., Witkowska, M., Stefaniak, A., & Imhoff, R. (2017). The lay historian explains intergroup behavior: Examining the role of identification and cognitive structuring in ethnocentric historical attributions. Memory Studies, 10(3), 310-322.
Dhami, M., & Joy, P. (2007). Challenges to establishing volunteer-run, community-based restorative justice programs. Contemporary Justice Review, 10(1), 9-22.
de Waal, F. (2009). Good natured. Harvard University Press.
Keltner, D. (2009). Born to be good: the science of a meaningful life (1st ed.). W.W. Norton and Company.
Leung, M. (1999). The origins of restorative justice. The Canadian Forum on Civil Justice. https://www.cfcj-fcjc.org/sites/default/files/docs/hosted/17445-restorative_justice.pdf
Payne, B. K. (2006). Weapon bias: Split-second decisions and unintended stereotyping. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15(6), 287-291.
Warfield, W. (2002). Is this the right thing to do? In Lederach, J. P. (Ed.). Handbook of International Peacebuilding (pp. 213-223). Jossey-Bass.
Yamamoto, S., & Maeder, E. (2017). Defendant and juror race in a necessity case: An ultimate attribution error. Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice, 15(3), 270-284.
Zehr, H. (2002). The little book of restorative justice. Good Books.
Zernova, M. (2008). Restorative justice: Ideals and realities. Routledge.
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