Transformative Justice

After the not-guilty verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman for killing 17-year old Trayvon Martin, some are asking what "justice" would look like for Trayvon. The conversation about whether the criminal legal system is the 'best' way to seek accountability for harm has been ongoing for several years. It continues in the wake of this trial. Some outstanding questions include:
1. What would transformative justice look like in this case?
2. How do prison abolitionists respond to the George Zimmerman trial?

The panelists below addressed these and other questions at the Jane Addams Hull House Museum on Thursday, August 15th 2013.

Dr. Erica R. Meiners is a Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Education at Northeastern Illinois University. She is the author of Right to be hostile: schools, prisons and the making of public enemies (2009) and articles exploring the school to prison pipeline. She is a member of her labor union, University Professionals of Illinois, and actively involved in a number of non-traditional and popular education projects including an anti-prison teaching collective (Chicago PIC Teaching Collective) and the Chicagoland Researchers and Advocates for Transformative Education (CReATE) and she is currently teaching classes at Stateville Prison and St. Leonard’s Adult High School. 

Dr. Beth Richie is the Director for the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Beth E. Richie is also Professor of African American Studies and Criminology, Law, and Justice at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Her scholarly and activist work focuses on the experiences of African American battered women and sexual assault survivors, and emphasizes how race/ethnicity and social position affect women's experience of violence and incarceration. Dr. Richie is a qualitative researcher and the author of numerous articles concerning Black feminism and gender violence, race and criminal justice policy, and the social dynamics around issues of sexuality, families, and grassroots organizations in African American communities. Her most recent book, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence and America’s Prison Nation, chronicles the evolution of the contemporary anti-violence movement during a period of mass incarceration in the United States. She is a founding member of INCITE!: Women of Color Against Violence

Dr. Traci Schlesinger is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies of Sociology at DePaul University. Questions about how the criminalizing and punishing system maintains racial oppression in the contemporary United States inform her teaching, research, and activism. While Traci has engaged in activism around numerous issues, including police violence, prisoner support, the privatization of education, global capitalism, reproductive injustice, and war, the focus of her activism for the past 13 years has been prison abolition, broadly understood. Currently, Traci is a volunteer with the Transformative Justice Law Project’s name change mobilization, which helps trans* folks file for legal name changes and report those name changes, once they are finalized, to a number of government agencies including the DMV and Social Security. Having documents with correct names and gender markers helps keep people safe from police violence as well as other forms of violence. 

The panel is moderated by Mariame Kaba

Transformative Justice and the Trayvon Martin Case: A Consideration

Project NIA volunteers Jane Hereth and Chez Rumpf on building community accountability strategies to respond to harm. Jane and Chez facilitated a reading group in 2013 with discussions centered on alternatives to the criminal legal system for survivors of sexual assault.

Interview With Jane Hereth And Chez Rumpf on Transformative Justice Responses to Sexual Assault

Deana Lewis and Ann Russo describe how Beth Richie's "Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America's Prison Nation" offers helpful tools in mobilizing communities to respond to interpersonal and state violence in Chicago. Deana and Ann presented a workshop at the Shifting from Carceral to Transformative Justice Feminisms Conference, engaging the key findings in "Arrested Justice."

Deana Lewis And Ann Russo On Using Beth Richie's "Arrested Justice" In Transformative Justice Work

Mia Mingus is a Bay Area activist and community organizer and educator with the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective. In this episode, Mia talks about the important work of love and transformative justice in order to foster community healing and accountability without the use of the criminal justice system.

*This segment includes conversation around child sexual abuse and may be triggering, so please take the care that you need before, during and after listening.

For more information on the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, and for a full transcript of Episode 2, visit the website at inplainsightradio.com.

Producer: Geraldine Ah-Sue
Advisor: Alice Wong

Music by:
Podington Bear – Chimera
Podington Bear – Firefly
Podington Bear – No Squirell Commotion
Chris Zabriskie – We Always Thought the Future Would be Kind of Fun

Episode 2 - The Work Of Love

L18 Transformative Justice

*This is the third episode in the series on "Transforming the Medical Industrial Complex."

For the additional episodes and audio transcript, please visit our blog here: https://freerads.org/2016/08/23/transforming-the-medical-industrial-complex-from-isolation-to-healing-episode-3/#more-2511

How can the ideas of transformative justice be applied to the medical industrial complex (MIC) to bring healing to oppressed peoples? In the last two episodes, we discuss the ways the medical industrial complex prioritizes profit over healing and actively harms people. This episode, we invite our friend Jaden Fields to share his work in navigating the MIC while grounding himself in transformative justice. He runs an HIV education and empowerment program for trans people of color, cofounded a social support space for trans masculine folks, and advocates for approaches to eating disorders that are trans-inclusive and anti-racist.

Transformative Justice and Healing (part 3/3)

Abolitionists are committed to creating a world without police and prisons, but what alternative visions and practices of addressing intimate harm might point the way toward such a world? In this episode we explore efforts to re-imagine the politics of violence, harm, safety, and redress, spearheading practices of accountability and healing that move beyond the punitive logic of the carceral state.

Mia Mingus from the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective discusses alternatives to carceral feminism, and how the movement to end child sexual abuse points the way toward radically re-imagining practices of justice. We also speak with Claudia Garcia-Rojas, co-director of The Chicago Taskforce on Violence Against Girls & Young Women, and Maya Schenwar, Editor-in-Chief of Truthout and author of Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better.

Beyond Punishment: The Movement for Transformative Justice

6th National Conference on Restorative Justice, Oakland CA 

Healing And Activism: An Intergenerational Conversation

** Trigger Warning: there is mention of sexual violence/rape in this episode ** 

WOWWWEEEE EPISODE 14 HERE WE GOOOO!!!

Y'all know about the #metoo movement, but #whatnow is the question we're asking! IF U THINK THE CARCERAL STATE IS THE PITS, THEN WHAT DO WE DO WITH PPL WHO DO TERRIBLE SHIT?! That's what we're talkin' bout, MMMMKAY?! 

One solution: get the shrink ray from honey i shrunk the kids and shrink all the terrible politicians and have them carry out their lives on a tiny scale that doesn't affect anyone ;) 

SPECIAL GUEST KRISTEN TODAY (SHE DOESN'T UNDERSTAND TWITTER, SRY) TO HELP US UNDERSTAND THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

Music by the INCREDIBLE Hophop (iamhophop.com, iamhophop.bandcamp.com) -- she's also on Spotify/iTunes/GooglePlay/Amazon -- u kno the drill - check her out and support her amazing tunes! 

TY BRANDON PAYTON-CARRILLO FOR THE THEME MUZIC <3

Episode 14: Transformative Justice

Speaker(s): Professor Christine Bell, Dr Aisling Swaine | ‘Conflict-related violence against women’ is often understood to mean sexual violence, specifically rape used as a weapon of war. But this is only one part of a broad continuum of gender violence which must be understood and addressed within and across conflict settings. In her new book, Conflict-Related Violence Against Women: Transforming Transition, Aisling Swaine examines the contexts of Liberia, Northern Ireland and Timor-Leste to identify a spectrum of forms of gender violence. She analyses their occurrence, and the relationship between them, within and across different points of pre-, mid- and post-conflict. Swaine proposes that a transformation rather than a transition is required in the aftermath of conflict, if justice is to play a role in preventing gender violence. Christine Bell (@christinebelled) is Principal Director of the Political Settlements Research Programme, Assistant Principal (Global Justice), Co-Director, Global Justice Academy, and Professor of Constitutional Law, University of Edinburgh. Aisling Swaine (@AislingSwaine) is Assistant Professor of Gender and Security at the Department of Gender Studies, LSE, where she teaches primarily on the MSc in Women, Peace and Security. Christine Chinkin is Director of the Centre for Women, Peace and Security. The Centre for Women, Peace and Security (@LSE_WPS) is a leading academic space for scholars, practitioners, activists, policy-makers and students to develop strategies to promote justice, human rights and participation for women in conflict-affected situations around the world.

Transformative Justice

Jaynna