Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/archive/page/45/)
The overuse of prison and extended probation casts a long shadow that devastates families and communities throughout the country. Restorative justice is a fast-growing state, national, and international social movement and set of practices that aim to redirect society’s retributive response to crime. It attends to the broken relationships between three players: the offender, the victim, and the community.
The United States itself was founded on a principle of human freedom that presupposed an inherent antagonism between self and other, a belief that the essential meaning of liberty was that we need to be protected against other people. Yet as we now look out at and live within the envelope of the world we have thus created, we must come to realize by a kind of evolution or enlightenment—by “waking up”—that the liberal framework, the framework of separation, is not only inadequate but harmful.
At the top of one of Rio de Janeiro’s favela shantytowns—one of several recently occupied by heavily armed military police units—an uneasy gathering begins. This simplest, most ancient of social patterns describes an intention—to recognize the other, to share meaning, to invite truth-telling. Guided by precise questions drawn on the wall for all to see, the participants edge forward in that most counter-intuitive of social discourses: dialogue.
This quarterly issue of the magazine is available both online and in hard copy. The hard copy of the print magazine will be mailed to our subscribers no later than January 25. Sorry about the delay! This is the first issue mailed by our new publisher, Duke University Press, and we encountered an unforeseen delay in transferring our mailing permit to a new state. Everyone can read the first few paragraphs of each online piece, but the full articles are only available to subscribers and NSP members — subscribe or join now to read the rest!
I want to stop violence, stop violent crime. I won’t live long enough to see that happen if it’s even possible, but I don’t think that my God requires of me that I see the possibility of it but that I do the work.
Seven web-only articles associated with the Winter 2012 print issue on restorative justice.
Letters on BDS, trauma in Israel, challenging Obama, reducing the U.S. Debt, and the One State Solution from the Winter 2012 issue.
Eisen’s book is written as a series of dialogues between two voices: one that believes Judaism accepts and affirms the use of violence, and one that believes Judaism much more strongly seeks and urges peace. This pattern is useful but could be a lot more useful, were it not for two baffling failings in this review of the multimillennial literature.
Mary Jane Nealon’s gorgeous memoir works along that revelatory thread, examining the physical and metaphysical life of a person who became both a nurse and a writer.