Transformative Justice - 25/02/25

Transitional justice

• Transitional Justice => is needed in two main situations—either after an armed conflict (post-conflict justice) or when addressing past human rights violations committed by dictatorships or authoritarian regimes.

• The phrase refers to efforts undertaken in societies that have experienced widespread human rights abuses and are undergoing a transition towards peace and democracy. The core aim is to foster a healing process forthe traumatised community.

• Key Mechanisms => truth commissions, reparations, institutional reforms, and memorialisation.

• …refers to a form of justice that seeks deep, structural change by addressing the root causes of injustice and inequality. It prioritises local agency, community-driven solutions, and the use of existing resources to foster long-term, sustainable change. Rather than focusing solely on predefined outcomes, transformative justice emphasises inclusive, participatory processes. It actively challenges intersecting power hierarchies and systemic structures of exclusion at both local and global levels, aiming to create more just and equitable societies.

  Gready, P. and Robins, S., 2014.

  
  

A summary

• Emancipatory peace-building and transformation

• Conflict transformation

• Human rights based approaches to development

• Intersectional analysis

• Agency and an actor-oriented approach

Structural Violence

• Structural violence, a concept developed by Johan Galtung and liberation theologians in the 1960s, refers to social structures—economic, political, legal, religious, and cultural—that systematically prevent individuals, groups, and societies fro realising their full potential.

• Galtung describes structural violence as deeply embedded in enduring social systems, normalised by institutions, and reinforced through everyday experiences. Because these inequalities are ingrained in how societies function, they often go unnoticed or appear natural (Farmer, Nizeye, Stulac, & Keshavjee, 2006).

Atructural Inequality

• Social norms => Gendered expectations in leadership—women are often perceived as less authoritative than men, leading to fewer leadership opportunities.

• Economic & Political Incentive => Tax policies favouring the wealthy—low capital gains taxes, offshore accounts, and trusts benefit those with generational wealth, exacerbating economic inequality.

• Stereotypes Affecting Opportunities & Treatment => Racial bias in hiring—studies show that identical resumes with ‘white-sounding’ names receive more callbacks than those with ‘black-sounding’ names.

  
  

Legacies of European Colonialism and Empire

• Commercial - Many firms that benefited from slavery reinvested their compensation payments into new industries, banking, and infrastructure, shaping modern capitalism (Barclays Bank).

• Cultural - British slave-owners played key roles as collectors, patrons, and philanthropists, funding museums, galleries, and elite institutions that still exist today (Tate Gallery).

• Historical - Slave-owning families and their descendants shaped public memory by writing histories that downplayed or justified slavery, influencing national narratives (History of Jamaica by E. Long).

• Physical - The legacy of slavery is etched into the landscape, from grand country estates and urban mansions to public statues and memorials honoring those who profit (Harewood House).

• Political - Slave-owners and their heirs played active roles in national and local governance, influencing policies that extended inequality and economic control (British PMs).

Reparations

• Reparations aim to address historical injustices—not simply as a symbolic gesture, but as a means of restoring what was wrongfully taken and repairing the harm that continues today:

• Imagine that your ancestors cultivated a land for generations, building homes, growing food, and creating a thriving community. Then, one day, outsiders arrive, forcibly take the land, and claim it as their own. They seize your family’s harvest, wealth, and labour to enrich themselves while imposing new laws that forbid you from returning. If you attempt to reclaim what was stolen, you risk imprisonment or even death. Meanwhile, those who benefit from this theft continue to prosper, passing their wealth down through generations, while your descendants struggle under the weight of systemic barriers designed to keep them at a disadvantage.

Changing laws and reparations

• Once an act is mafe unjust and criminal victims of the previous laws should be compensated by the perpetrators (reparations).

• After the abolition of slavery, what happened instead was that perpetrators were compensated and victims left in precarious positions. Slave owners were compensated for the loss of their “property” (enslaved people).

• Abolition of slavery was not a “gift” to enslaved black people. Enslaved black people and abolitionists of various races fought tirelessly for freedom that should have always been theirs.

Implementing reparations

• Material reparations

  1. Return of Stolen Land or Art Ex. British government, 2005, enabled the restitution of looted art from 1939-1945 to return art stolen from Jewish peoples

  2. Monetary Payments Ex. American government, 1971, granted $1 billion and 44 million acres of land to Alaskan Natives

  3. Construction of Material Infrastructure (buildings, facilities)

• Immaterial reparations

  1. Address mental and cultural legacy of slavery and colonialism

  2. Acknowledge historic injustice

  3. Search for truth

  4. Efforts to repair cultural and psychological damage of enslavement and colonialism

  5. Acts of decolonisation: Reclaiming names or rejecting the colonisers’ names

Historical legacies and prison abolitionism

Dismantling the legacies of colonialism

1. During colonial rule, European powers used legal systems to criminalise Indigenous resistance, enslaved people, and colonised populations.

   • Laws against vagrancy and trespassing were used to control and police formerly enslaved and colonised people, ensuring they remained in exploitative labour systems. The British Empire used prison labour in India,
     Africa, and the Caribbean to maintain colonial economies.

2. From Slavery to Prisons: The Legacy of Forced Labour

   • In the US, the 13th Amendment (1865) abolished slavery but allowed forced labour as punishment for a crime, leading to Black Codes and convict leasing—policies that kept formerly enslaved people trapped in the economy through imprisonment. The British Empire used the prison system to force labour from Indigenous and colonised subjects, much like how the US used convict leasing to replace plantation slavery.

Prison Aboitionism

• Transformative justice is an experimental set of practices designed in large part by feminists who seek to address and transform harm, through accountability and healing that avoid reproducing the harms associated with the punitive justice system.

• The essence of abolitionism is the construction of a society
  without imprisonment and policing. It is about dismantling
  institutions and systems like prisons, jails, detention centres,
  psychiatric institutions, immigration restriction, state surveillance,
  and so on.

• Prison abolitionists follow those activists who imagined an end to
  the slave economy and settler colonialism on which the US was
  founded. They imagine what would be required for a society
  without prisons, and propose different means to support collective
  thriving and more effective ways to address harms.

  
  

Key thinker

• Angela Davis argues that prisons are not about justice but serve as tools of racial, economic, and social control, disproportionately
  targeting Black, Indigenous, and poor communities.

• She critiques prison reform as insufficient, as it often expands rather than dismantles the system. Instead, she advocates for
  abolition, emphasising that many incarcerated people are criminalised due to poverty, mental illness, and lack of social
  resources.

• Davis promotes restorative and transformative justice, calling for
  investments in education, healthcare, and housing instead of
  policing and incarceration. For her, abolition is a long-term struggle that requires dismantling capitalism, racism, and patriarchy to create a society where harm is addressed through
  healing rather than punishment.

Slavery and the US prison connections

• The 13th Amendment in 1865 legally abolished the slave economy in the US.

  • FreThe Black Codes were a series of laws passed in the Southern States after the Civil War (1865–1866) to restrict the rights and freedoms of newly emancipated Black people. These laws were designed to maintain white supremacy and control Black labour, effectively recreating conditions similar to slavery

Key features of the Black Codes

1. Labour Control – Many laws forced Black people to sign annual labour contracts, and if they refused, they could be arrested and forced into unpaid labor (often through convict leasing).

2. Vagrancy Laws – Black people who were unemployed or "loitering" could be fined, jailed, or put into forced labour.

3. Limited Civil Rights – Black people were denied rights such as serving on juries, testifying against white people in court, or voting.

4. Restrictions on Land and Property Ownership – Many Black people were barred from owning land or starting businesses, keeping them economically dependent on white employers.

From black codes to Jim Crow

• The Black Codes helped lay the foundation for mass incarceration and the use of the criminal legal system to control Black communities. The convict leasing system, which allowed states to lease prisoners to private businesses, became a way to exploit Black labour after slavery was abolished. This system was a direct precursor to modern racial disparities in policing and imprisonment.

• After the Black Codes were repealed during Reconstruction, many of their principles reappeared in Jim Crow laws, which continued racial segregation and disenfranchisement well into the 20th century.

  
  

Prisons as a continuation of colonial violence

• Prison Abolition tells us that prisons today disproportionately incarcerate Black, Indigenous, and formerly colonised people, continuing colonial patterns of racial control:

  • In the UK, Black people are more than four times as likely to be imprisoned as white people. In the US, Black and Indigenous people are vastly overrepresented in prisons, reflecting historical patterns of racialized policing.

• Political & economic ties to Empire

  • The logic of profiting from containment and forced labour persists in today's prison- industrial complex, where corporations benefit from mass incarceration.

  • G4S, one of the world’s largest security firms, has roots in policing and now runs private prisons, immigration detention centres, and security forces globally.

Prison abolition as a decolonial project

To sum up: The prison abolition movement argues that incarceration is not about justice but about maintaining social control, particularly over racialised and poor communities.

• Abolitionists see prisons as a continuation of colonial oppression and advocate for alternatives like restorative justice, community-led safety, and economic justice.

• Example => In places like South Africa and Australia, activists link the fight against mass incarceration with decolonisation, calling for an end to the imprisonment of Indigenous people.