Can you fix prisons without abolishing them?: Restorative justice

Ninety minutes in Oakland

In 2016, inside a juvenile facility in Oakland, a fifteen-year-old sat in a circle with the woman whose purse he snatched outside a BART station. He had run. She had fallen. Her wrist broke. The facilitator did not speak for eleven minutes. He said he was sorry — flatly, the way teenagers say things they mean but do not yet know how to perform. She said she had been afraid to ride BART since. He said he did not want her to be afraid. Neither used the word justice. Both did something that looked like it.

We have sat in hundreds of these circles and watched something the formal legal system does not produce. The formal system asks: what law was broken, who broke it, what punishment? We ask: who was harmed, what do they need, whose obligation is it? The outcomes — victim satisfaction, reoffending rates — are consistently better.

New Zealand has run its entire juvenile justice system on restorative principles since 1989. Youth incarceration dropped over seventy-five percent. Victim satisfaction exceeded eighty percent. The model works. It has worked for thirty-five years.

The reformers are our closest allies. Where we diverge is the endpoint. They want a better prison. We want a process that makes the prison unnecessary for the seventy percent serving time for nonviolent offenses.

The public safety camp asks about murder. We do not pretend to have a circle for every act of violence. Some harm is so severe separation is real and immediate. What we push back on is that separation requires cruelty.

Where we concede ground: We romanticize the circle. Facilitators sometimes lack skill for serious power imbalances. Our evidence is strongest for juvenile and property offenses.

What would change our mind: A large RCT across violent and nonviolent offenses shows no improvement in victim satisfaction or reoffending versus conventional prosecution.

Read the full synthesis: Can you fix prisons without abolishing them?