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 Our criminal justice system asks: “What law was broken? Who broke it? What punishment is warranted?” Restorative justice asks an entirely different set of questions: “Who was harmed? What are the needs of all affected? How can all affected parties repair the harm together?” This special issue features twelve articles on restorative justice, as well as articles on identity politics, self-mocking humor, and the future of world religion.
Subscribe to Tikkun or join the Network of Spiritual Progressives now to read these articles online! If you're not yet a subscriber, you can read an individual article for just $2. Click here for the full table of contents. The print version of this 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. If you are a member or subscriber who still needs guidance on how to register to read the online version of the print magazine, email miriam@tikkun.org or call 1- 888-PEACE40 for help.
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| Our Winter 2012 Issue |
From Individual Rights to the Beloved Community: A New Vision of Justice
by Peter Gabel |
 Like a rose that has sprouted in a weed garden and induced the weeds to back away in awe, the restorative justice movement has entered American legal culture and is posing an important challenge to core assumptions about human beings and about the very nature of human reality that our legal culture has taken for granted for more than two hundred years. Read More » |
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Walking Toward Conflict
by Dominic Barter |
.jpg) Restorative Circles have been extensively used in Rio de Janeiro's schools, court systems, prisons, and organizations—and more recently in faith communities, hospitals, universities, and development work. In each of these varied settings, as in each unique subculture in which restorative practices develop, the forms necessarily shift. Nevertheless, the defining characteristics of Restorative Circles remain rooted in this practice’s community origins in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Read More » |
The Day the Jail Walls Cracked: A Restorative Plea Deal
by Sujatha Baliga
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 When I got the call from Howard Zehr, I balked at the idea. “In a capital case? He shot her in the head? No chance, Howard.” Howard agreed, but encouraged me to speak with the young man’s mother and explain, from a restorative lawyer’s perspective, why it wouldn’t work. Read More »
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Restorative Justice: Some Facts and History
by Marilyn Armour |
 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. Restorative justice views crime not as a depersonalized breaking of the law but as a wrong against another person. It attends to the broken relationships between three players: the offender, the victim, and the community. Read More » |
Controversies Around Restorative Justice
by David Belden |
 Restorative justice is a movement with traction. People are excited by it. They are volunteering in growing numbers to make it happen. Some people are even getting paid to do it, especially in schools, and usually through nonprofits like Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, Community Works, and the Insight Prison Project. Its practitioners say the movement’s innovative practices have immediate benefits and radical long-term potential. Read More » |
What’s Love Got to Do with It?
by Fania E. Davis |
 Despite our own victimization, in every struggle for justice and healing Jews have been right there, often risking our own safety and sacrificing our treasure. This is by no means a random coincidence. Read More » |
The Restorative Impulse
by Kay Pranis
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 I believe that the restorative justice movement is a manifestation of something much larger than itself: a fundamental shift in how Western culture understands the nature of our species and the nature of the universe. Read More » |
Healing from Harm and Unlearning Violence
by Sonya Shah |
 For many, the moment when a victim and an offender come together is a peak moment of a restorative process. This is the moment when the victims express how they were harmed and what they need today and the offenders take accountability for their crimes. But what is all of the “invisible” work that comes before this moment? Read More » |
A New Vision for Correctional Officers
by Sunny Schwartz and Leslie Levitas |
 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. Read More » |
Confronting Sexual Assault: Transformative Justice on the Ground in Philadelphia
by Bench Ansfield and Timothy Colman |
 What would happen if our responses to sexual assault came from a vision of the world we want to live in? A scattering of groups are working to create community accountability and support networks based not on the punitive and coercive methods of the criminal justice system but rather on principles of care and harm reduction. Read More » |
Decolonizing Restorative Justice
by Denise C. Breton
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 When I first heard about restorative justice, I remember feeling liberated and inspired by the idea of a movement that advocates responses to harm that do not inflict more harm. What a concept! It gave me hope that the untold harms in this world could be addressed in healing ways—ways that addressed why harms were happening in the first place. Read More » |
Shifting School Culture
by Rita Alfred and Ina Bendich |
 That’s not fair!” This phrase was uttered daily by many of the students in Oakland’s public school system. Even when they were caught in an act that violated school rules, students did not readily take responsibility for their actions. They were simply playing their role in our punitive system, in which most students tend to blame others rather than accept the consequences for their behavior. Our search for ways to change this paradigm led us to explore the practice of restorative justice. Read More » |
Who’s Afraid of Identity Politics?
by Dan McKanan
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 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? Read More » |
The Terms on Which Jews and Muslims Join Western Civilization
by Sander L. Gilman
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 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. Read More » |
The Future of World Religion: Four Scenarios, One Dream
by Jorge N. Ferrer |
 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. Read More » |
Socialism in Civil Society
Review by John Brueggemann |
 Countless people have tried to clarify what Marx thought about class. One of the most productive efforts has been sustained by the sociologist Erik Olin Wright. He continues to argue persuasively that class relations constitute a fundamentally powerful force in world history. Read More » |
Educating for Wisdom
by Svi Shapiro |
 The dissonance between the vision that now animates public education in this country and the view offered by Jeffrey Wilhelm and Bruce Novak in their new book on teaching English is sharp indeed. Read More » |
Poetry in the Age of Mass Incarceration
Review by Stephen John Hartnett
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 The books of Reginald Dwanye Betts 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. The fact that Betts made it out of the system alive is a triumph; that he writes so honestly of his experiences is a gift. Read More » |
Dancing on the Edge of Abyss
Review by Michael Eaude
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 In The Warsaw Anagrams, his eighth published novel, Richard Zimler has reached the very heart of his essential theme: the Holocaust itself. Read More » |
The Shabbes Wife
Humor by Josh Kornbluth
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 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). Read More » |
Kaffiyeh on Mississippi Avenue
Poetry by Reginald Dwayne Betts
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 Reginald Dwayne Betts is a husband and father of two sons. As a poet, essayist and national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice, Betts writes and lectures about the impact of mass incarceration on American society. In 2011 Betts was awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship to Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies. Read More » |
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We Can End the Suffering of the People of Palestine and Israel
To do so will require changing Western societies in a profound way. Embracing Israel/Palestine shows how—it's a book not just about the Middle East but about how to rethink our entire approach to social and political change.
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