Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/archive/page/44/)
Growing up as a totally secular Jew, I was always intrigued by the idea of the shabbes goy—a non-Jew who would perform certain tasks for Jews on the Jewish Sabbath, tasks they were forbidden to do themselves (such as turning on a light, which would count as “work” on the day of rest). It seemed pretty sneaky to me—a way to follow the letter of the holy law while violating it in spirit. By which I mean to say: I dug it.
As a result of the transformation of America into an incarceration nation, the now-bursting prisons have become hotbeds of testimony, poetry, art-making, and speechifying. The books of Reginald Dwanye Betts, which are part of this flood of prison-based testimony, recount the tale of a young man who entered prison as a confused sixteen-year-old but who now, more than a decade later, has embarked on a career as a writer.
What Wilhelm and Novak have to say represents a light in dark times. They have written a book that is at once a sophisticated philosophical treatise on education and a radical guide for those who teach kids in the classroom.
In this project Wright seeks to document, in a manner intelligible to a broad audience, the main problems of capitalism and the realistic possibilities for overcoming them.
Jews have gained acceptance in part through their use of self-mocking humor. Now some Muslims have launched a sitcom to counter the prejudice they face.
Will a single religion arise? Will syncretism proliferate? Will the world develop shared interspiritual wisdom? Let’s find a way to energize interfaith dialogue without losing the beauty of religious diversity.
From the women’s movement to the Black Power movement, identity-based organizing has transformed our society. Does identity politics really deserve its bad rap?
During the fall of 2005, I (Rita) was employed by the Oakland Unified School District as a case manager working with students and their families who were referred for expulsion. My job was to create a paradigm shift within the school context by introducing restorative justice as an alternative to the traditional discipline system. Together, we began the restorative justice journey at Cole.
As with any victim-offender situation, restorative justice processes begin when the perpetrators of harm acknowledge what they did and take responsibility for the harms they caused. If the restorative justice movement fails to address the colonial crimes embedded in our history, it will risk losing credibility in this country, as it seems to have already done in Canada. Restorative justice does not have to be hijacked into being an accomplice to colonization, for its roots are not there.
What would happen if our responses to sexual assault came from a vision of the world we want to live in? Applying a transformative justice approach to the issue of sexual assault means working to support individual survivors while building real options for safety, justice, and healing outside of punitive and disciplinary state systems.
In this article we share our experience, as longtime developers of restorative practices in a San Francisco County Jail, of the deputized staff who have assisted in bringing about a new vision. We recognize how a profession that is unavoidably brutal can, with the right institutional leadership, encouragement, and training, take steps toward becoming the noble vocation that many correctional officers long for it to be.
What does it mean to make accountability not a buzzword but a solid foundation for a life path? True accountability requires an offender to commit to entering those deep, dark, scary, shut-down places and attempt to heal. Healing is hard work.
There is a deep human yearning for connection and community. Restorative practices offer a pathway for shifting social structures to be more responsive to that need.
While several hhttps://www.tikkun.org/newsite/wp-admin/themes.php?page=custom-headeristorical antecedents converged to give rise to the restorative justice movement, the Civil Rights Movement was a principal contributor, having a defining impact on its thrust and spirit. I believe we have forgotten our recent historical roots. I believe we have not learned from the history of the peace, women’s, and environmental movements’ initial failures to intentionally engage issues of race.
Most articles in this issue come from progressive and radical activists, scholars, lawyers, and teachers who are writing wholly from within the restorative justice movement. So with one foot planted inside the restorative justice movement as a student and the other in more journalistic territory, I am hoping to offer a different perspective: a beginner’s birds-eye glance at some of the controversial issues both outside and within the movement, and at factors that may be enabling it to gather traction.