Our Model of Justice Is Perpetuating Injustice
How might we rewrite our notions and systems of justice to stop the cycle of violence?
Someone from the Denizen community recently shared a video from 10 years ago of President Obama calling on Israeli citizens to put themselves in Palestinian’s shoes. He expressed his longing for this type of leadership today. None of us can argue with the need for leaders who inspire empathy for both sides, rather than division. The world definitely needs that now more than ever.
But as I watched the video, I realized President Obama’s words carried a serious contradiction. He says “It’s not just when violence against Palestinians goes unpunished.” And therein lies the problem. So long as our notion of justice carries the need to meet harm with punishment (i.e more harm), the cycles of violence will only continue.
Charles Eisenstein published an essay today entitled “Whose Reality Is It?” which includes some wise words along theses lines:
“The execution of peace policies requires knowledge of facts and histories, but it doesn’t start there. It starts with the human reaction to violence that lets it hurt and says “No more.” “Never again” — not just to me, my side, or my people, but to anyone. In contrast, the partisan feels the pain through a filter of story that directs it toward revenge: the desire for someone else to suffer as I (or those I support or identify with) have suffered. That’s my definition of hate: the desire for another to suffer harm.
Peace is not the opposite of violence. Peace is the opposite of hate.”
Taken through this lens, we can see the rub. The dominant view of justice in the world today is punitive. Punishment follows harm. An eye for an eye. Rights taken away as people are locked up in jail for years, even lifetimes. I remember the heartbreak I felt upon visiting a maximum security prison several years ago. I met countless men who had spent decades in prison and the story was nearly the same every time: broken homes and childhood trauma, young men seeking belonging in gangs, committing horrific acts of violence as teenagers before their neocortexes had even fully developed, tried as adults even though they were not, locked up for life as a consequence.
One of the most potent things I learned when studying non violent communication is the notion that every human behavior stems from a human need. When actions are seen from that perspective — even the most horrific ones — we are drawn to empathize. When you can see the behavior of a teenage boy through the lens of his trauma, ultimately motivated by the fundamental human need to belong and be loved, the injustice of taking away his right to a free existence for the rest of his life is abundantly clear.
If we are going to get serious about a world where wars do not happen, we need to completely rewrite our notions and systems of justice. This is not to say there should not be accountability for harm done. We cannot move forward from harm without atoning for it. The pain must be felt for those harmed to process the trauma in a healthy way. The pain must be witness and acknowledged by those perpetuating harm for the ones who are hurt to be able to forgive. We must learn how to forgive.
This reorientation at the core naturally shifts us away from punitive justice, where we simply perpetuate models of dominance and cycles of violence. Restorative justice is the commonly discussed alternative. In models of restorative justice there are no sides to be right or wrong and no consequences to be suffered, other than the natural emotional consequence that comes from confronting the harm one has caused to another. That feeling, by the way, is our moral compass, which got over written when the harm was done. In restorative justice there are humans who learn to empathize with each other and ultimately forgive.
But for us to realize the future we envision at Denizen, this is not enough. What’s needed is for us to take a step further into the realm of transformational justice. To not just restore us to a prior state, but to use our systems of justice to transform us. This model of justice gets to the root of the problem: the intergenerational trauma and our ways of being with each other. In the process of addressing harm, we heal the trauma that currently plagues us all and learn to relate in superior ways.
If you have not yet read adrienne maree brown’s We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice, I highly recommend you do so asap. adrienne brilliantly outlines the distinction between punitive, restorative, and transformational justice. She says:
“Transformational justice is some of the hardest work. It’s not about pack hunting an external enemy, it’s about deep shifts in our own ways of being. If we want to create a world in which conflict and trauma aren’t at the center of our collective existence, we have to practice something new, ask different questions, access again our curiosity about each other as a species.”
So now is a chance to get curious. Denizen’s first value is curiosity, by the way. We say “As listeners, we default to curiosity, especially when others offer a different perspective. We seek to understand our biases and challenge long-held assumptions.”
So can we get curious right now, in the areas where it’s the most uncomfortable? As we condemn the actions of Hamas, can we also learn to see the humans behind it? Can we ask how it could be possible that a human being could be compelled to do such horrific things to another human being? What discord must their souls feel in committing such acts? What trauma have they suffered from? How has religion fed into such disassociation from their humanity? What fundamental human needs are so desperately unmet that they believe this is the solution to their pain? Can we find a way to empathize with the humans behind Hamas, as impossible as that sounds? I don’t see a way forward for us unless we can.
