Radical Restorative Justice: Reflections on Conflict, Trauma, and Hope in Chicagoland Schools

This Article tracks how abolitionist and reformist debates are unfolding within urban schools’ attempts to smash the school-to-prison pipeline. We document how Chicago-area public school teachers are grappling with new restorative justice programs and their complex and divergent sociopolitical and institutional meanings. Drawing on over forty qualitative interviews with teachers, we illustrate how difficult widespread implementation of new conflict resolution mechanisms, in the name of restorative justice, are turning out to be. We analyze how teachers are interpreting restorative justice practices and the challenges they involve for students, educators, and school administrators who learn and teach and work in hierarchical and bureaucratic institutions.

Through this analysis, we bring readers face-to-face with some of the broader challenges that restorative justice and abolitionism confront as a large-scale and world-making project, digging in to show how teachers are having to transform themselves and the work they do as educators in order to meet the calls of the present day and age.