Break Every Yoke by Joshua Dubler and Vincent W. Lloyd

Author:Joshua Dubler and Vincent W. Lloyd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Indigeneity and Beyond

ICOPA’s 2012 meeting in Trinidad and Tobago also lacked religious sponsors and featured only two presentations that touched at all on religion. The two talks were “Hindu and Muslim Perspectives on Justice and Peace” and “Amerindian Spirituality and Blessing.”77 The theme of “Amerindian Spirituality”—and the ambiguity of this designation—is particularly significant in the history of the restorative justice movement.78 It points to yet another moment when the abolition spirit promises to manifest—and yet another moment when the forces of law-and-order threaten to void that promise. Because they are impersonal, bureaucratized, and professionalized, criminal justice systems express, and in turn engender, alienation. As with the turn away from organized religion, turning away from the state’s system of justice and “returning” to a more organic system of justice, supposedly indigenous, promises wholeness and peace. Moreover, in our spiritual-but-not-religious age, indigenous religion seems fitting—even for Christians who want their message to resonate with the broader culture. Indeed, the impulse that animates the turn to “Amerindian spirituality” may, perhaps, be seen in the Mennonites’ turn to what they presume as the more ancient way of life found in the Hebrew Bible.

The path that connects indigenous spirituality to restorative justice in the United States is circuitous. The first attempt to implement a restorative justice model is sometimes credited to the Minnesota Restitution Center in 1972, when that state’s Department of Corrections funded an initiative developed by two University of Minnesota graduate students drawing on lessons they were learning from secular criminology scholarship.79 Over the next two decades—the peak of the prison population explosion—such projects remained sporadic.80 The restorative justice experiments taking place in North America, against the liberal religious background and shaped by it, attracted international attention even before ICOPA convenings began in the mid-1980s. These models crossed the Pacific, with the government of New Zealand, and then Australia, enthusiastically adopting and institutionalizing restorative justice programs.81 By 1989, New Zealand employed a restorative justice model in lieu of prison for all juvenile offenders, and by 1994 it had extended the model to include some adults. Australia followed a few years behind, though without quite as widespread an embrace. In these contexts, with the support and funding of the state, restorative justice techniques grew rapidly in reach and sophistication. Among the changes that accompanied this Oceanic embrace was the foregrounding of indigenous terminology and practices. Often connected explicitly with the concept of “spirituality,” indigeneity became central to the theory and practices of restorative justice.

The first mention of restorative justice in the New York Times took place in an article published in 1995, where restorative justice is framed as a possible ameliorative response to the problem of jail overcrowding.82 The article’s protagonist is Father John Bonavitacola, a minister to incarcerated men in Philadelphia’s Industrial Correctional Center. Bonavitacola is blunt in declaring that the criminal justice system is a failure, and he holds up restorative justice as the likely solution to the problem. The Times reports how secular liberals, law enforcement, and evangelicals were all beginning

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