New York City’s Commission for Human Rights defines restorative justice as “an approach to acts of bias and discrimination that centers the experience of the harmed person and involves all stakeholders to decide what should be done to repair harm, create accountability, and reduce the likelihood of future harm.” Cutting through the jargon, a more humane policy shift is revealed: a greater emphasis on creating dialogues between offenders and victims. This presents with opportunities for those currently or formerly convicted of crimes to return to society. As with many social issues, the pandemic represented a unique opportunity for the city to implement real change. And, as with most issues, the efforts undertaken thus far have not been commensurate to the suffering the current criminal-justice system creates.
In the immediate wake of the pandemic, New York City and communities across the country reduced incarcerated populations, freeing those convicted of non-violent offenses and reducing penalties for newly processed offenses. The justifications for such steps were manifold, ranging from greater awareness of the exploitative nature of industrialized prison complexes, and of racial biases which resulted in the over-representation of ethnic minorities, and especially African Americans, therein, to fears that prisons, by their very nature restrictive spaces, could serve as vectors of infection, both within their own confines and in the neighborhoods which host them.
Despite the lingering threat of Omicron, the world continues to reopen, resuming some form of the bygone “normalcy” of the pre-pandemic years. As the world prepares for a new future, wherein an endemic COVID-19 becomes an immutable presence in our lives, it is worthwhile to reflect on the criminal justice reforms that have been made since March 2020. In many respects, the “normal” we had grown accustomed to is not necessarily one we should return to. More so than most events within living memory, the epidemic has exposed the vulnerabilities and inequities ingrained in every walk of life, for both current and former inmates, highlighting discrimination in employment, policing, industry and, especially, in healthcare.
The repercussions of incarceration on public health, and the reciprocal influence of public health policy on the general well-being of the imprisoned, have been a concern wherever prisons have come to exist, but especially in America, wherein the incarcerated represent an entirely outsize proportion of the general population. Increasingly, COVID-19 serves as the impetus for us to evaluate more humane approaches to justice, and particularly our collective treatment of the offenders.
A collective desire to embrace restorative, rather than punitive, justice predates the pandemic. The City especially has been forced to confront its complicity in abusive conditions, especially in the wake of an early-2019 scandal, wherein a federal prison in Brooklyn was left without power or heat during frigid conditions. The suffering and illness sustained throughout by inmates, and the evocative image of hundreds desperately banging objects to attract attention to their conditions, galvanized efforts to shutter prisons and embrace efforts to reintegrate those convicted of a crime back into society. These efforts have accelerated in the past two years, as inmates across the country, without options to social distance, experienced particularly high rates of infection. In New York City, at first, it seemed as though more radical change could finally be achieved: within a year of March 2020, the city’s prison population had fallen to their lowest levels in 50 years. However, the waning pandemic, coupled with a resurgent wave of violent crime, has rendered all progress moot: we’re functionally back where we started, at a time when infection with COVID-19 remains a persistent threat. There are now over 5,500 people incarcerated throughout the city, and infection data suggests that prisons remain the hotspots they were always going to be. We now risk not only erasing years of progress towards a more humane approach to justice but also of continuing to endanger those who are already uniquely vulnerable, without access to those resources that most of us take for granted. There is a path for progress to be made towards a more racially-sensitive and humane approach to sentencing, wherein crime is addressed without infringing on the dignity or rights of those who perpetrate it. At a time when the city has lost thousands of lives, continuing to sacrifice others in the squalor of prisons is not only abusive, but cruel. No longer can prisons and their inhabitants be treated as “out of sight, out of mind.” If we are truly committed to a universal return to the health and prosperity we once enjoyed, it is time we reevaluate our priorities. Do we merely want to punish, or to help?
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