A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #33-25 - Breaking the Justice of the Fathers. Transformative Justice: Some Reflections (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

When we talk about "transformative justice," I believe it's inevitable 
to ask a preliminary question: what does "doing justice" mean? ---- If 
we were to interview random people on the street, I believe the answers 
would largely revolve around the concept of "punishing the guilty." We 
would therefore have a dual focus: on the perpetrator as the primary 
object of the discussion and on punishment as the primary purpose. All 
of this interpreted through the lens of guilt. A guilt that, moreover, 
does not actually end with the punishment, but crystallizes in the 
identity of the "criminal," the "delinquent," the "convicted." This last 
expression seems particularly interesting to me, as it identifies, 
through a mere objective fact, the existence of a pre-judgement: an 
immutable and irredeemable condition, despite the re-educational 
function of punishment.

Obviously, the primary instrument of punishment is prison, although I 
have no doubt that the death penalty would soon appear in our 
hypothetical interviews.

This is the constricted horizon within which most public discourse 
surrounding justice unfolds, even when it comes to gender-based and 
sexual violence.

This is also the horizon within which much of contemporary feminism 
moves, what various scholars and activists have called "punitive 
feminism" or "carceral feminism."

"Transformative justice," on the other hand, is "a type of justice that 
gets to the root of the problem and generates solutions and healing 
there, so that the very conditions that create injustice are 
transformed" (Adrienne Maree Brown, Transformative Justice, Meltemi 
2024). It therefore seeks to present itself as an alternative to the 
justice of punishment and deterrence.

Furthermore, in this vision-and in its embryonic attempts to implement 
it-a central role is attributed to the person who has suffered the harm.

And here we already have a major difference compared to punitive 
justice. On the one hand-as obvious as it is, it is worth 
emphasizing-the automatic assumption that "crime x corresponds to 
punishment y" (even with all the aggravating, mitigating, or 
contingency-based distinctions) is undermined in an attempt to identify 
specific solutions for each individual situation; on the other, the 
assessments and decisions of those who have directly suffered the harm 
become crucial.

While this seems an interesting and undoubtedly positive element to me, 
I cannot deny that it also raises several issues: is it appropriate to 
burden the victim with so much responsibility? Is it reasonable to 
expect the injured party to be capable of being "reasonable" and 
proactive? Could I, a rape victim-and this is not a rhetorical 
question-be the person best placed to try to "generate solutions and 
healing"? Let's be clear: solutions and healing in transformative 
justice are seen as responsibilities and goals of the community as a 
whole. Nevertheless, I believe the above questions cannot be avoided 
when the centrality of the person who suffered harm is postulated, if 
only by removing the connection with the desire for revenge.

Revenge and reparation are other important concepts linked to that of 
"justice." In my opinion, the former is problematic, the latter 
fallacious. The debate on the legitimacy of revenge is too broad and 
complex to be summarized in a few lines. I will limit myself to pointing 
out that, in my opinion, it is difficult to reconcile with a 
transformative posture.

Restorative justice, by emphasizing reparation, can have transformative 
elements of reality, despite the often reductive and hypocritical nature 
of its treatment in courts today. However, I see a major limitation and 
an unexpressed issue here. The obvious limitation is that it's rare for 
a wrong to be repaired or for the harm suffered to be truly compensated, 
unless we adhere to a monetization logic à la US legal drama. If my car 
is stolen, I can get it back, but if my daughter is killed, it's clear 
that no real compensation is possible. Of course, there's the aspect of 
recognition, which I don't intend to underestimate: both the 
acknowledgment of the harm done by the perpetrator and the social 
acknowledgment of the harm suffered by the injured party. But it's not 
enough. "What's done is done," and here we return to the question with 
which we began this text: what is the purpose of "justice"? In my 
opinion, the focus shouldn't be primarily on repairing what happened-not 
because it's wrong, simply because it's often impossible-but on 
preventing what happened from happening again, whether against the same 
person or others.

This is where the idea of transformative justice comes into play, with 
its forward-looking implications. However, I don't want to give the 
highly reductive impression that it's simply a matter of ensuring that 
"the person never does it again" (although-let's face it-that would 
already be a great achievement).

At its core, the assumption is that punishing the individual relieves 
the community of responsibility; instead, it's necessary to create 
pathways in which the harm is "systematized," attempting to bring about 
a "healing" for the surviving victim, the abuser, and the community as a 
whole; the "healing" should be general, with a view to radical change.

Society is shaped by a dichotomous vision in which the definition of 
good and evil is foundational, necessary, and exploitable: it excludes 
the complexity of the factors from the picture, without re-elaborating 
and attempting to overcome the structural and transversal conditions 
that underlie the harm, both caused and suffered.

Punitive justice, by identifying good and bad, by positing an abstract 
and ideal outside and inside, always difficult to clearly establish in 
reality, actually entails a structural absolution for the social, 
economic, and political system.

Transformative justice is the polar opposite of this vision: it is 
precisely the structural and transversal conditions that are the first 
to be criticized.

These are lofty goals, which obviously-let's not deny it-in practice 
often clash with our limitations, as individuals and as movements.

In the aforementioned excellent essay by Maree Brown, many of these 
limitations are explored and discussed: I simply refer you to its reading.

There is another issue, however, that seems to me to remain in the 
background, when it deserves in-depth analysis. If the goal is the 
healing of the community, it is necessary to ask the question: who is 
the community that must heal?

In its attempts to implement it, to date the reference is predominantly 
to political communities/collectives, especially feminists, queers, and 
trans people. We are therefore talking about communities that are 
essentially small, and above all "chosen" communities, therefore 
relatively homogeneous, although far from free of differences and 
disparities of power within them, as Brown rightly reminds us in the 
aforementioned text, as do Palomba (La trama alternativa, Minimum Fax 
2023), Argenide (review in issue 135 of the magazine Germinal), and 
everyone else who has written on the subject. And here, the difficulties 
are not lacking. However, there is a basic assumption: the community, 
when this process is triggered, is recognized by the actors involved as 
a valid point of reference. If this recognition is lacking, the very 
conditions for the journey to begin are undermined.

But "outside"? In a dense, diverse, and complex social fabric, what does 
community mean? Who is part of it, what do the people who live there 
have in common? Its moral principles? And so, who defines its sense of 
justice and therefore the ethical horizon that identifies it? To 
function, does the transformative mechanism therefore require moral 
guidelines that everyone must identify with in order to remain part of 
the community?
How to define and guarantee these guidelines without them becoming a 
principle of overwhelming power over individual subjectivities-a 
prospect far from desirable from an anarchist perspective-is a complex 
problem and, in the writer's opinion, truly difficult to solve.

Asia

https://umanitanova.org/infrangere-la-giustizia-dei-padri-giustizia-trasformativa-alcune-riflessioni/
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