ABSTRACT
This chapter describes three sites of participatory innovation: schools, non-governmental community organizations, and prisons. Drawing from interviews with reformers in each area, it discusses motivations for encouraging citizen participation, barriers to change, and resources available to sustain and expand innovation. While still far from common, the innovative practices help challenge the common normative assumption that criminal justice institutions are inherently undemocratic and must involve coercive power, systematic imposition of rigid hierarchies, and glaring inequalities throughout the process. Sociologists and others who study institutions think of them as stable arrangements that guide action and comport with communal values. Now the sobering point: community justice organizations, democratic schools, prison-college programmes and deliberative forums in prison are the exception rather than the rule in current American institutional environment. Children in more participatory schools, neighbours taking part in inclusionary community justice efforts and prisoners enabled by deliberative forums to interact as citizens can improve their well-being at the very moment they conduct their work.
