Peace Without Punishment
Lucinda J. Garthwaite, ILI Director
What if we lived in a world entirely without punishment? For some readers of this newsletter, this is not a surprising question, but my guess is that for many, it is.
Peace without punishment is not at all a new idea; it has worked for millennia for many of the world’s people. Indigenous people of what is now known as the United States and Canada managed to maintain peace within communities with practices centering accountability and reconnection. Since the mid-twentieth century, these practices have become more broadly applied and called alternative dispute resolution, restorative justice, or restorative practice. But before that, as one Mashpee-Wampanoag writer has said, it was simply “Some of the tribal people [doing] what they had always done.”
ILI advisor Dr. Olufemi Pamela Kennebrew reminded me the other day of Ubunto, a philosophy traditional in many African cultures dating back thousands of years, which also includes restoring victims to wholeness and integration of offenders back into community as critical to social harmony.
There is of course much more to understand and say than this about ancient and contemporary indigenous non-punishment practices; there are a few resources in this edition of Intersections, and much more available online But for the purpose of this short piece, the main point: responding to harm without punishment is not new, and it works. It works in prisons, schools, and efforts to stem violence and jail for young people. ILI friends and colleagues at Roca and Stronghold, and our research partner U32 Middle-High School see this in their every day.
So why, as of this past June, are prisons in the US more full than any other country in the world, with 655 prisoners per 100,000 people, 11% more than the next highest, El Salvador and almost 2000% more than the statistically safest country in the world? The US is not even close to being on the top ten safest countries list. Why in the face of those facts among others do so many continue to insist that punishment is our protector?
I think it is because we can’t see past our deep attachment to the idea of punishment. Too often in western culture -- what some suggest is an essentially white or white supremacist culture -- our thinking is guided by individualism, separating ourselves from those we see as different, certainly from those we see as worthy of punishment. What better way to separate than to lock a person away?
South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu says the concept of Ubuntu is “very difficult to render into Western language.” That phrase, which Rev. Tutu has often repeated, is telling. Our very languages, those translators of culture, ideology and the character of a people, leave little room to consider that punishment is anathema to peace, that accountability, deep apology and reconnection offer paths to healing and change, to justice.
Despite the challenge, Rev. Tutu tries to explain Ubuntu to Western ears, “my humanity is caught up and inextricably bound up in yours," he says, "We are caught up in a bundle of life.” For many, perhaps for you – I know it was for me -- it is frightening to consider bundling together with those who have done great harm, and difficult to accept that that kind of connection offers a more clear path to liberatory change than punishment.
But punishment is not working. It is not keeping black and brown people safe from police shootings. It is not keeping first responders safe from violence. It is not supporting loving families, housing and food for children. It is not keeping disabled and trans people safe from beatings and worse. It has not made the lives of victims of violence more whole.
When I was on the faculty at Goddard College, a colleague often reminded us to “interrogate the dominant paradigm.” Punishment practically irrefutable in the systems and beliefs that dominate western cultures. If there ever has been a time for questioning ideas, especially ideas that have arguably never worked anyway, is it now.