Okay, at this point I really need to acknowledge something I have not so far: people cause other people real harm and victims and survivors deserve justice. People’s lives are forever changed by violence, financial, and property crimes all the time. It is undeserved and terrible.

My focus tends to be on those that have caused harm and I don’t ever want that to minimize the experience of those who have been on the receiving end. I also don’t think that our current approach – which emphasizes punishment and leads to dehumanization – achieves justice for anyone.

So what’s the alternative? For starters, you’ll notice I’ve been using the words “harm” and “violence” here and not “crime.” That is intentional.

To commit a crime means to violate a law. We need laws to organize ourselves into functioning societies. Because laws are created by humans, they are not without flaws. Because they have been mostly developed and written by humans with economic, educational, and racial privilege, they are also not without bias and discrimination. Indeed, many of our criminal code laws were designed by white people to contain and constrain Black people after they were technically “freed” by 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. If you sit in a courtroom for a bit and watch hearings play out, there is a lot you will not understand. If you do it for a long while (or you go to law school) you will eventually come to understand that our enforcement of laws is a highly technical process of identifying how a person’s specific action at a specific time ran afoul of a rule as it is written in legislation and interpreted by prior courts. The ultimate point of the process is to determine if and how the person violated a law, not how they violated of a specific person. (There is good reason for that, but that’s a whole other story for another day.)

To commit harm or violence means to hurt another person. The system we have uses punishment in hopes of deterring people from committing crimes. It does almost nothing to facilitate whatever healing might be available to the victim. When we use the words harm and violence, we are personalizing what actually happened. We are acknowledging that someone was hurt, not just that a law was broken.

What happens right now is this: someone seriously harms someone else, and that harm violates a law. The person is charged for breaking the law, and the victim is given minimal opportunities to provide input to the courts about what they think should happen. In some cases, they are connected with staff members in prosecutors’ offices who specialize in communicating with victims as the case plays out. They provide updates about the cases and help the victims understand their rights; they may provide information about resources available to them in the community to support their healing process. They listen compassionately.

The court process proceeds and most of it is made up of legal discussion and negotiations between defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges. The person who committed a crime is convicted and sent to jail or prison, where they are often treated as less than human. The vast majority will be released at some point. As I shared in an earlier post, over half of them will end up being convicted for another crime and be incarcerated again. Meanwhile, the victims will have to seek healing in whatever ways they can, outside of the criminal “justice” system.

If we truly want to reduce violence and harm in our communities, we have to do a better job of connecting the dots between crime, harm, and violence. We have to shift the focus from punishment to healing, and healing has to include both the harm-doer and those harmed.

There are people working to build systems that connect those dots, that focus on ways of addressing harm by focusing on accountability, not punishment. Punishment is a result of, but not actually related to the original act – it’s more or less the same for everyone who goes to prison. It does not require that the person understand what they did or why they did it. Accountability does. Accountability means taking responsibility for one’s actions and making steps toward repair. It means unpacking how you came to cause harm to another person, and considering what you need so that you do not cause harm in the future. It means seeing the person or persons you harmed as real living human beings.

Doesn’t that sound better? Doesn’t that sound more effective?

There are people working toward building systems like this. And guess who has done a great deal of the work to envision and research and start developing actual ways of doing this? Survivors. We owe a huge debt to some survivors of sexual assault and those who support them who have looked at this system and said “This isn’t good enough. This isn’t making us whole.” Despite the pain they experienced and the work they had to do to recover, they also looked outward and said “We can do more.”

This video is about 15 minutes, and I urge you to watch it at some point. It provides a much better articulation of how people who cause harm can be supported in accountability than I am doing. It doesn’t minimize the difficulty, but shows the promise of doing things differently.

We will not see the end of mass incarceration in my lifetime. But I think we can start to change direction. We need more people to be willing to adjust how they think about crime and punishment, resist easy tough on crime solutions, and demand something better. As a starting point, we just need to understand that there are more and better options than the status quo.