New York City
From HarmFreeZone
Rethinking Restorative Justice: Harm Free Zones in New York
In our communities, we face many forms of interpersonal harm in our everyday lives. We also face harm from state institutions such as the police, the courts, the INS, and the prison system (together we call these institutions “the prison-industrial complex” or PIC). The Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) in the U.S. is enshrined in the 13th Amendment that both formally ended chattel slavery and permitted involuntary servitude as a punishment for a crime. In effect, the 13th amendment has relegated slavery to the prison system. The Restorative Justice movement in the US is based on a critique of the ways that the PIC rips apart specifically poor and people of color communities in the name of “justice.”
The PIC in the U.S. has at least 2.2 million people warehoused in it, the largest and most extensive of any industrialized or “developed” nation in the world. The great majority of people who are incarcerated are poor people of color – African Americans, Latina/os, Native Americans, Asians and increasingly immigrants of color. The rates of incarceration of women have increased astronomically as misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia combine with racism and classism. The numbers, however, are much higher if one considers the long reach of the PIC to include all those persons who are on parole, in court-mandated treatment programs and those who are otherwise monitored by the coercive forces of the state. Some believe that as many as 6 or 7 million people are being monitored and controlled by the PIC. Increasingly, the PIC is trying to turn our entire communities into outdoor prisons through constant surveillance. They are seen as areas needing to be controlled because they are considered bad and high crime. The PIC increasingly reaches into schools, neighborhoods, churches, non-profit organizations and our streets with the police and the military as the enforcers of order coming into our communities to supposedly stop those harms.
The PIC is a huge-money making industry. Prisoners often work long hours for next-to-nothing wages. Also, the PIC drains our communities both of our loved ones and our resources. The effects of the Rockefeller Drug Laws, NY State’s mandatory minimum version of the federal war on drugs are a good case in point. 94% of the folks incarcerated in upstate prisons are African American and Latino, and 67% of the folks incarcerated there are from NYC. It costs $32,000 to house a person in these prisons every year, which means that all the supportive services to do so have to also be provided. There are 7 congressional districts in upstate New York that would not exist were it not for the prisons that are located in them. The U.S. Census counts the prisoners not in their home districts but as residents of these prisons in those rural districts, though these incarcerated folks cannot vote and are not represented by these white politicians. This in turn reduces the amount of federal and state money that their home communities receive for health, education, and other infrastructural services.
The PIC is based on punishment and economics, and not on repairing the interpersonal and state harms which are a reality in our communities. For this reason, we propose refocusing our energies and our efforts on addressing and repairing harms in our communities ourselves. We call this process creating Harm Free Zones.
A Harm Free Zone is a community-centered alternative to dealing with state violence and interpersonal violence. A Harm Free Zone is a community that has become strong through a process of taking seriously and resolving the harms that community members inflict on each other. In New York City, the Harm Free Zone Project, supported by the prison abolitionist group Critical Resistance and the popular education collective La Escuela Popular Norteña, provides tools and trainings to local communities to strengthen and develop our ability to confront and transform state violence, intra-social conflict, and interpersonal conflict.
The idea for the Harm Free Zone project grew out of the need to rethink approaches to restorative justice to deal with the forms of violence women of color face in their everyday lives. Although it has done much critically important work, the anti-prison movement has not come up with strategies for addressing these forms of violence or alternatives to prisons that keep survivors of intra-communal harm in a position of survival, a livable degree of safety, and with the possible transformation of violent relations. In our view, genuine security derives from strong relationships between community members, an understanding of power and inequality inside and outside our communities, and spaces for dialogue and growth.
Our work started in the South Bronx, in the same community in which Amadou Diallo was shot. In the beginning it was linked to a campaign to keep cops in check. While doing this work, we realized that we needed to redirect the focus to our communities themselves, and that strengthening our communities would be one way to keep the cops out of the neighborhood in the first place. In this, we’ve been inspired by the autonomous community-building projects in Latin America, in particular the peace communities of Colombia.
The Harm Free Zone Project sees restorative justice as a process concerning the whole community, not just those individuals who have been directly involved with a particular harm. We see in our communities over and over again that as we are angry, depressed, mistreated by the large society, and we turn against each other. To turn our communities into Harm Free Zones, we have to be clear that whenever we mess with each other, it is because we have internalized harms from living in an oppressive society. We need to get rid of these harms in our communities, in our relations and in ourselves with each other’s help, insight, awareness, care, and support. In our organizing efforts, we want to involve the whole community while keeping women of color at the center.
In a Harm Free Zone, we come to an agreement with each other that any time any one of us harms another community member, we have a commitment to address the harm among each other with every one involved. We have an agreement to think about how we will stop the harm and educate ourselves so that we can understand what is happening. As we understand what is happening, we often come to see that there is something wrong with the community and not just with the person who has engaged in the harming. If we understand why this is happening, we can come up with solutions: measures that not only stop and prevent the harm but also transforms the person involved and the community as a whole. This is not punishment; instead it is a process of addressing the harms that oppression has done to us and becoming strong with each other in order to go beyond survival.
In our framing, a community is accountable to its members through four processes:
Processes of intervention Processes of reparation Processes of prevention Processes of transformation
These processes are to be understood as linked with each other in such a way that separating one from the others changes its meaning and force. It is crucial to emphasize that the spirit and implementation animating intervention and reparation is not a punishing but a transformative spirit, a spirit that both requires and creates vision and hope.
The possibility of community members understanding themselves as accountable for social harms inflicted within the community depends on creating conditions for accountability. These conditions are:
a sense of community investment ongoing dialogue a sense of vision and hope
The more autonomous, the more independent and self-directing the community becomes, the greater the degree to which these conditions will be fulfilled. The achievement of these conditions is itself a very significant good to any community of the oppressed.
Our work thus far has focused on formulating the project through discussions with community groups and on identifying particular groups to work with. Some of the challenges that we have faced include the difficulty of redirecting our attention to the community itself in a climate of political movement that focuses attention outwardly on the wrongs done to us by the state and by capitalism. By living in a Harm Free Zone, the state and capitalism do not cease to oppress us. But even if these forces intrude in the lives of people in ways that are harmful, by transforming our relations with one another and by committing to the community as members of it, we can stand up against oppression in a much better way. Another challenge is that the work itself is slow and we face a despair that things might not be able to change within communities. At one meeting, for example, a community member wondered whether her community was too divided to be able to come to an accord. The work of the Harm Free Zone to help build on the conditions of community investment, dialogue, and vision and hope that can make challenging and healing these divides possible.
