Restorative Justice and Learning Journeys
A bit of current events, and school reading lists.
Friedrich Nietzsche told us to, “Beware of all those in whom the urge to punish is strong.” He attributes the quote to Zarathustra in “On the Tarantulas,” a sermon about people whose combination of resentment and powerlessness leads them to demand harsh punishments for criminals, not to achieve any higher ideal of justice as revenge for their own dissatisfactions with their lives. Zarathustra is skeptical of people who engage in schadenfreude, using other people’s suffering to mitigate their own.
Accused criminals, at the mercy of an adversarial court system with arcane rules and limitless resources for prosecution, are particularly vulnerable and easy to scapegoat. But even devoted prosecutors know that the state’s power to punish can upend and ruin lives completely out of proportion to the crimes people are charged with and that while severe and public punishments can theoretically deter future criminals that they can also undermine the cause of justice, if you define justice as making a wrong right again.
For example, prosecutors in Minneapolis have so far declined to criminally prosecute a man for vandalizing people’s Teslas, in an act of ill-advised (and camera-captured) protest against the political activities of Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The complaint is that Dylan Bryan Adams is being let off the hook for his crimes. But that’s now what’s happening here. Instead, the prosecutor is weighing options — is the best resolution of this case that Adams goes to prison for an extended period, loses his job in the process and picks up a criminal record that will disqualify him from all sorts of gainful employment after his release, or that he remains free and working, spending the next few years performing community service acts and paying restitution to the owners of the cars he vandalized?
What’s important here is that the vandal isn’t being let off the hook. The prosecutor has a ton of options here. Adams will have to pay restitution under a court’s supervision. If he doesn’t make good, the prosecutor can always revive criminal charges. Similarly, Adams would have very good reason not to commit other crimes while under the court’s watch, or even after. Mercy is seldom granted in our criminal system, and it pretty much never shows up twice.
The loudest objection to the prosecutor’s decision here seems to be coming from the Sheriff’s office who investigated and arrested Adams. But, ideally, the Sheriff should be satisfied with referring somebody for prosecution, not with securing any sort of maximum punishment. A better objection, or at least a question to ask, would be “why Adams?”
A possible answer is that because this is a property crime, which can be ameliorated through financial restitution, that this is a good case for restorative justice. A deeper question is whether this option has been consistently extended to other defendants in similar situations. That we give prosecutors tremendous discretion in our system is no excuse for double standards based on race, class or gender.
This might seem like an odd topic for The Middlebrow, and maybe too explicitly political for the mission of this newsletter, but there is a reading angle to it and we’re getting there now. As I think about this case and the prosecutor’s intentions, I am reminded of a book assigned to The Renaissance Son in middle school called The 57 Bus by Dashiki Slater.
Wow, did I ever hate The 57 Bus. There were a few reasons for that. The first had more to do with modern schooling than the book itself. Middle school education in the 2020s no longer emphasizes book length texts. I was excited that they had assigned a book to read, and then instantly disappointed when it turned out to be a didactic hybrid of fiction and non-fiction that wore its social lessons, including dictionary entries about different gender and sexual identities, on its sleeve. It’s not that I disagreed with the content, mind you, but I was disappointed to see his teachers assign an author more concerned with delivering a message than telling a compelling story. Messages thrive in narrative.
However, there’s a lesson to be learned here, which is that you don’t have to like a book to get something out of it. The 57 Bus is based on a true story about a non-binary, upper middle class, college-bound teenager who falls asleep on a public bus in Oakland while wearing a flammable gauze skirt. As a prank, a black teenager lights the skirt on fire, which gets out of control and causes severe burns. The incident, were it prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, could have led to hate crimes charges, imprisonment beyond juvenile detention and permanent life altering consequences to for the boy with the lighter. Instead, the victim, their family the prosecutor, defense attorney and assailant agreed to “restorative justice” which, even though it cannot erase the trauma for the victim, did limit the blunt consequences of the law and allow everybody to move on.
This book, stylistic objections aside, introduced me to this concept, which strikes me as a good solution for legal issues where the prescribed punishments have worse than intended consequences for society. In this case, labeling a youth as a hate criminal for life could have condemned him to an incredibly difficult life, cut off from educational and professional opportunities, potentially driving him towards more intentional criminality later in life.
As the Renaissance Son’s education has progressed, he has moved onto the much less didactic Antigone, which deals with a similar theme of the law bluntly and thoughtlessly applied, though here we have a timeless story and artistry at work to remind us that even a society of laws should have higher values than literal interpretations of statutes.
Society grows more complex every day as we connect more people to each other. We are also always looking for easy and fair-seeming answers. We are probably not far off from people arguing seriously that artificial intelligence will be able to interpret laws and even suggest punishments without the biases that make human judgments frequently unfair. A properly trained AI would not be racist, after all, nor worried about public opinion or corruptible by bribes or flattery. We already let AI-powered speed and red light cameras issue tickets to drivers. The mechanization of justice will definitely be a “letter of the law” scenario. There is no human police officer or judge able to let an infraction slide due to circumstances.
If we want to avoid going too far down the road of automatic justice, without compassion or mercy, then we are going to need a better media. The prosecutor in Minneapolis is not letting a vandal get away with anything. Her office is, rather, pursuing another path to justice, one which restores the losses of the victims, teaches the perpetrator a lesson while enforcing accountability and reduces the long-term effects of what should be a minor incident in the lives of all involved.
Similarly, when we say we want a “nation of laws and not men,” we should be very specific that we mean we want a nation where certain people aren’t exempt from the law, not one where the law is applied without regard to the humanity of the people subject to it.
As we head into an automatic, algorithmic world, our only hope is to insist on the messiness of human judgment and to find solutions to our problems beyond what sometimes long gone politicians have written into our laws. Oh, and read books! Aside from the ancient Greeks, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, Theodore Dreiser and Truman Capote have been trying to warn us about this kind of thing for a long, long time.