What comes before safety? Accountability, connection, stability. For many, that begins with restorative justice.
By Carla Sinclair, Senior Communications Associate, Nathalie Lebrón, Senior Policy Associate, and Finda Kofuma, Senior Policy Associate
Across New York City, community organizations work with people involved with the criminal legal system, providing them with the tools to earn a living, reach mental and physical wellbeing, and ultimately avoid future system involvement. Restorative justice is increasingly playing an important role in reaching these goals—and increasingly being recognized as how to reach true accountability for actions that have hurt others.
Safety is a common political talking point, as well as a common goal and metric for government-funded services. But it’s also an innate feeling you can identify within your own body. And what is often missing from the political or funding conversation is how to create long-term, sustainable community safety—meaning safety that comes from addressing root causes of violence, that creates that innate sense of safety, and doesn’t exclusively rely on incarceration.
In America, at least for the past few decades, the answer has been to punish those deemed to make us less safe. To punish the person who harmed another person or property by removing them from society. The intention has been to punish and make an example of the person who commits the harm, to discourage similar incidents.
On a basic level, this may make sense short-term: the person is no longer among the general public. But does this form of punishment address the root cause that led to the incident, repair the harm that was committed, or just show negligible impacts on safety? Does it require real accountability, or mostly shame that compounds with reduced opportunity after release? Does it involve the larger community to understand—without excusing—why it happened, and how to prevent it from happening again?
In New York City, policymakers and community organizations that work with people impacted by the legal system have been contending with these questions. Last year, around 2,000 people entered the City’s jail system every month, with nearly the same number released. Tens of thousands more were redirected through alternative-to-incarceration (ATI) programs in the community. The breadth of these systems beg even more questions: How do public systems and services prevent crimes from happening? How do they ensure responses to crime hold people accountable, yet don’t add to cycles of violence and incarceration?
Embedding Restorative Justice in Public Services
Restorative justice (RJ) has been used to find these answers. Though there are many different definitions, RJ can be described as a framework—often in the shape of expert-facilitated conversations—used “both reactively in response to conflict and/or harm, and proactively to strengthen community by fostering communication and empathy.”
In 2024, the NYC Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice (MOCJ) partnered with CUNY ISLG to launch the Community-Based Restorative Justice Initiative (CBRJ). Since, CBRJ has invested over $10M in 16 community organizations across the city to incorporate RJ into their services, as well as to build up their operational, strategic, and programmatic capacity. ISLG’s staff work with these organizations to do this through tailored training and technical assistance (TTA), grant management, performance measurement, and staff training. These organizations have many different scopes, from youth and education programming to health and wellbeing support to court-mandated services.
CBRJ has invested over $10M in 16 community organizations across the city to incorporate RJ into their services, as well as to build up their operational, strategic, and programmatic capacity.
But through all these services is the underlying promise of safety. How is that achieved?
Safety Starts with Stability
“If a young person can’t trust anyone, how can they have safety?”
Erika Sasson is an attorney who designs and facilitates restorative justice processes. Through CBRJ, she embeds with community organization staff to develop RJ programming tailored to their specific populations, which include survivors of domestic violence and sexual harm, young people impacted by the criminal legal system, and other impacted communities.
Working alongside staff and participants, Sasson helps them design and implement new approaches. This included helping them plan circles with trauma survivors and people who have caused harm; this also includes guiding staff to activate the “micro communities” around participants, opening up lines of communication that lead to understanding the impact of their actions. It is through this stability and these networks, she says, that real safety is found.
“We have to first meet people’s basic needs,” she said. “They need access to housing. They need food. They need stability. But once you are stabilized, how do you maintain that? It’s really hard to maintain safety without connection. To achieve long-term safety, strong relationships are integral, which requires learning how to communicate with others in a safe way.”
One of the organizations she works with is Getting Out and Staying Out (GOSO), which serves 16–24-year-olds in New York City impacted by the criminal legal system. Its programs range from education to employment to violence prevention, and they are all tied together by a restorative justice framework that emphasizes accountability.
“Everyone thinks restorative justice is only about peace and healing. It’s not,” said Yenia Vasquez, GOSO’s Vice President of Community Programs. “You need accountability. Before you have peace, there’s so many things you need to accomplish: understanding, accountability, and consequences. But it doesn’t have to be punitive.”
“Everyone thinks restorative justice is only about peace and healing. It’s not. You need accountability.
Before you have peace, there’s so many things you need to accomplish: understanding, accountability, and consequences. But it doesn’t have to be punitive.”
- Yenia Vasquez, Vice President of Community Programs, GOSO
“This is our typical participant: formerly incarcerated, still dealing with the legal system. Mental health issues. History of foster care. Poverty. Trauma. Racism. Limited education. Health issues. Community violence. And they’re stuck in a developmental phase because of the amount of trauma they’ve been through,” she said. “Layer on layer on layer of complicatedness. Unraveling all of that, you need to be an Avenger. RJ is thinking outside the box, and with it, we’re thinking outside of the box.”
These “outside of the box” services include wraparound support that encompass court advocacy, transition plans, education, and employment. It also includes one-on-one therapy, traditional group therapy, and peacemaking circles that can both celebrate accomplishments and respond to incidents of harm. GOSO’s manager of reentry services, Yarelis Leonardo, said participating in these conversations provides them with a new way of communicating.
“We’re meeting people on Rikers and at Horizon [Juvenile Center], working with people who have a certain mindset on how they handle conflict,” Leonardo said. “RJ builds a safer community within GOSO and out. These individuals are now in these circles having direct conversations, rather than them going out and acting out with their emotions. They’re more regulated and can talk to someone instead of just bottling things up and exploding.”
Through this approach, Leonardo said that participants are more willing to accessing services, which she described as focusing “on the three ‘E’s’: emotional wellbeing, education, employment.”
“And then there’s the fourth ‘E’: exposure,” added Joi Gillespie, GOSO’s director of education. “That’s where RJ fits in. We expose staff and participants with another way of doing things. We have all been harmed by the educational system. It's law and order. RJ allows us to be exposed to a different way.”
“It is hard. It is not easy,” Gillespie said. “What’s important about it is community. Staff, too, need to be vulnerable and open to learn something different.”
The Cascading Impact of a Restorative Framework
Gillespie, herself a former Department of Education teacher for decades, noted the importance of staff “being vulnerable, about having uncomfortable conversations with young people,” and themselves buying into restorative principles. Vasquez agrees.
“We were all doubters at first. Everyone on my team. We're from New York City. We know it’s not kumbaya on the streets. RJ is slow. It’s intentional. It takes a beat. It’s humanistic. For all those things, it feels against the fast-paced nature of NYC. But it’s not. The work speaks for itself,” she said.
“We're from New York City. We know it’s not kumbaya on the streets. RJ is slow. It’s intentional. It takes a beat. It’s humanistic. For all those things, it feels against the fast-paced nature of NYC. But it’s not. The work speaks for itself.”
- Yenia Vasquez, Vice President of Community Programs, GOSO
“Our superpower had been executive leadership modeling RJ in our own work,” Vasquez continued. “We do circles with staff, respecting everyone as humans who need time and space so they can work to the best of their ability. For leadership, restorative justice has been a way to alleviate exhaustion and burnout. When you pour into leadership, they can pour into their staff, who pour into their participants, and get a good flow of energy going.”
These ripple effects of RJ then flow into the greater community. “You help that one young person start to be more stable at home, and it improves quality of life for their whole network,” Vasquez described. “I have one kid who is doing better and making more money, so he’s fighting less with his family. That impacts the parents, the siblings, and brings the temperature down for everyone around them. There are thousands of stories like that.”
“It's taught all of us to slow down a little bit, to deescalate, to bring the crises down. And that allows kids to complete their goals. Even spending a couple hours a day when you feel like your life isn’t in danger, it helps you focus on your goals.”
While GOSO works with youth at risk of, currently in, or leaving incarceration, other CBRJ organizations are working with those diverted from the criminal legal system—but still grappling with the circumstances that got them there.
From Passive Accountability to Healing the Whole Community
Working out of the Midtown Community Justice Center, the Center for Justice Innovation (CJI)’s Youth Positively Advancing in Community Together (PACT) is a 90-day diversion program for young people aged 14-17 who have been arrested for weapons possession. Staff work with participants, bringing their families and networks together so the young person can take ownership of their decisions, build a stronger support system, and get on track to accomplish their goals, whether it be school, employment, or something else.
“The State putting a charge to punish people is such a passive form of accountability. A judge telling them what is wrong with them teaches them absolutely nothing and creates a corrosive shame. It’s harder to sit across from your grandmother than from someone you don’t know like a judge,” said Jenn Gil Vinueza, CJI’s Senior Program Manager of Restorative Justice Programs. “The young person cannot process what they did wrong because they’re processing being in jail. When does it become about the people they’ve harmed? What is actually being learned?”
“The State putting a charge to punish people is such a passive form of accountability. A judge telling them what is wrong with them teaches them absolutely nothing and creates a corrosive shame. It’s harder to sit across from your grandmother than from someone you don’t know like a judge.”
- Jenn Gil Vinueza, Senior Program Manager of Restorative Justice Programs, CJI
When those real conversations about harm happen, the young person can acknowledge the full scale of their actions and take accountability for how those actions impacted others. “There’s multiple victims of a youth carrying a gun,” said Kristina Singleton, formerly CJI’s Community Liaison for Diversion Programs. “Your neighborhood, your family, your safety, your freedom.”
Barbara* is one of those people. Her teenaged son was arrested for carrying a gun and placed in Youth PACT.
“As parents, we want our children to be accountable, we want them to be disciplined. We try to teach that in the home, but somewhere along the way—because they have to go to school, they have to go on the bus—sometimes, distractions end up overpowering what we're able to instill in our children,” she said.
These sorts of distractions are exactly why involving the larger community can help heal. Prior to Youth PACT, Barbara worried her son would not graduate high school. Now, he is in his second semester of college.
“Youth PACT was able to really focus on helping him to be accountable. He's way more disciplined,” she said. “They provided a safe space for my son and my family to express ourselves in a safe space where we don't feel judged, and we can just get the issues out so they can be addressed. They've provided a space where he was able to consider the impact of his actions on others, and what can be done to prevent anything like that from happening again.”
“[Youth PACT] provided a safe space for my son and my family to express ourselves in a safe space where we don't feel judged, and we can just get the issues out so they can be addressed.
They've provided a space where he was able to consider the impact of his actions on others, and what can be done to prevent anything like that from happening again.”
- Barbara, Parent of a CJI Youth PACT Participant
Providing this space to speak, listen, and actually understand how others are affected by your actions is what restorative justice is. Within a criminal legal system that is overburdened, wrought with inequality, and has proven to be ineffective at creating long-term safety, it’s clear that new tools are necessary to foster a sense of safety, for individuals as well as their larger networks and the communities in which they live.
Doing so is the ultimate goal of all CBRJ programs, whether they primarily focus on criminal legal services or something else. Singleton said she saw these benefits on the ground every day.
“What we do well is helping young people understand who is in their circle: who is closest, who can they rely on to trust to show up, to have a conversation in the different moments they might need it.”
Photo by Bradley Andrews on Unsplash.
*Name changed.