Satsuma @Satsuma@cat.family

@alpine_thistle @ljwrites hmm our difference of perspective may be coming from regional differences — i’d say upwards of 90% of the people i’ve personally talked to who are involved in restorative justice came to that position through anti racist activism & Black liberation so they view tearing out existing systems of harm as pretty clearly central to the work

@alpine_thistle @ljwrites “its the system thats the problem” can absolutely be used to dodge accountability, but considering that we’re coming from so much time in which blaming individuals has been used to avoid the hard questions of institutional inequality i’d rather overcorrect than under

@alpine_thistle @ljwrites if the police helped him cover it up, how do you ensure he gets the death penalty instead of their preferred fall guy? can justice truly be served by placing all the blame on the father and son, resolving the issue with a showy distracting murder trial, instead of attacking the system which enabled their actions?

i am not actually a hardline prison abolitionist personally — i don’t believe in prison as a form of punishment but i do think its sometimes a necessary form of harm prevention — but i do think that even in the most extreme examples of someone deserving punished, one needs to remember “how can i ensure this never happens again” must be answered in the broad as well as the narrow to be truly satisfactory

@ljwrites @alpine_thistle yeah — they’re both systems that have a lot to say about ethics so it can be interesting to compare, but i’m firmly in favor of the separation of church and state which dramatically alters how those ethical principles can actually be implemented

@alpine_thistle @ljwrites yeah i think the (good) restorative justice folks are most interested in that second half — does condemnation effectively induce safety and prevent harm? (recidivism rates indicate probably not, at least under our current system) if not, what system would effectively induce such things?

@alpine_thistle @ljwrites i don’t have a good activist for this off the top of my head unfortunately, but i’d be interested to hear what the restorative justice folks would have to say about this

I feel like they’ve worked through a similar line of thought, where the goal is achieving healing for both the victim and the perpetrator, to most effectively repair past harms and prevent future ones