Transformative justice is a spectrum of social, economic, legal, and political practices and philosophies that aim to focus on the structures and underlying conditions that perpetuate harm and injustice. Taking up and expanding on the goals of restorative justice such as individual/community accountability, reparation, and non-retributive responses to harm, transformative justice imagines and puts into practice alternatives to the formal, state-based criminal justice system.
Overview As defined by American activist Mariame Kaba, transformative justice is a framework that focuses on community-building and collective solidarity against the repressive mechanisms of the carceral state. First popularized by Queer, Black, Indigenous, Latino, and other marginalized communities due to their perception that they were unable to rely on the police and the courts to obtain justice after being victimized by interpersonal harm (such as hate crimes, sexual assaults, and domestic violence), it prioritizes the relationships between the individual, the communities to which they are accountable, and the broader systems and surrounding environment in which we are implicated. Contemporary transformative justice theorizing traces its lineage to other anti-carceral and abolitionist social movements as led by Black, Indigenous, and other racialized communities who are often directly harmed by the carceral state. Transformative justice aims to resist and divest from traditional methods of state-sanctioned punishment such as police, prisons, the judiciary, and juvenile delinquency programs. Premised on the recognition that these institutions frequently inflict compounding harm on individuals through surveillance and social control, transformative justice advocates look to move away from the ways in which the criminal justice system perpetuates harm both within prisons and communities on the outside. Transformative justice also rests on the belief that interpersonal harm interacts with and reflects systemic and institutional mechanisms of oppression. For instance, sexual assault mirrors the patriarchal conception of women as devoid of personal agency. Therefore, transformative justice recognizes that addressing individual interpersonal harm and conflict must simultaneously aim to dismantle systemic structures of power (such as patriarchy, cisnormativity, racism, ableism, and colonialism). To this end, transformative justice applies a systems approach, seeking to see problems as not only evidence of crime but also as a catalyst for crime. With respect to those impacted, it aims to recognize instances of harm as an opportunity for a transformative, relational, and educational intervention for victims, offenders, and the broader community. In this light, applications of transformative justice practices can meaningfully apply even between people who have had no prior contact. Transformative justice takes the principles and practices of restorative justice beyond the criminal justice system. It applies to areas such as environmental law, corporate law, labor-management relations, consumer bankruptcy and debt, and family law. Transformative justice uses a systems approach, seeking to see problems, as not only the beginning of the crime but also the causes of crime, and tries to treat an offense as a transformative relational and educational opportunity for victims, offenders and all other members of the affected community. In theory, a transformative justice model can apply even between peoples with no prior contact. Writer and transformative justice practitioner adrienne maree brown contends that transformative justice cannot occur if the reaction to each committed transgression is one of a public takedown (reminiscent of cancel culture). brown calls out the hypocrisy of thinkers in the transformative justice movement who reproduce the very forms of retribution and violence in their disagreements that transformative justice seeks to subvert. Additionally, brown offers practical considerations to reflect on in situations of conflict in the goal of a collective pivot to transformative justice:
deliberate listening with the goal of understanding the contexts that enabled a specific harm; learning from each conflict to help facilitate introspection; considering alternatives to public confrontation in response to conflict, such as personal exchange to breed trust, resilience and interdependence. Transformative justice can be seen as a general philosophical strategy for responding to conflicts akin to peacemaking. Transformative justice is concerned with root causes and comprehensive outcomes. It is akin to healing justice more than other alternatives to imprisonment. In this, transformative justice takes the principles and practices of restorative justice beyond the criminal justice system and applies to areas such as environmental law, corporate law, labor-management relations, consumer bankruptcy and debt, and family law. As in transformative learning, one works from desired future states back to the present steps required to reach them. The issue is not whether the perpetrator may make a choice to do something similar again, but whether the community is willing to support the victim and perpetrator in some form of contact. It is possible for the community to choose to support the perpetrator and not the victim as defined by the law, but if they do so they may be obligated to support some re-definition of "equity" so that law comes back into line with the social concept of equity. For example, it is possible for the community to support imprisonment as a means of isolation but not punishment. This model for decarceration may have roots in the work of Samuel Tuke and B. F. Skinner but departs by relying on individual volunteers' caring and supporting capacity, not any socially imposed etiquette derived from civilization. Transformative justice theory has been advanced by Ruth Morris and Giselle Dias of the Canadian Quakers. Anarchist criminology tends to favour holistic transformative justice approaches over restorative justice, which it tends to argue is too beholden to the existing criminal justice system.
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