ABSTRACT
When a fellow researcher heard about my research, she scrunched her face up in hesitation. “One criticism I’ve heard about restorative justice is that it puts the onus of responsibility for actions completely on individuals,” she said, “without acknowledging the structures that impact those behaviors.” I thought about her comment and why I dismissed it. As practiced at Equity and BHS, restorative justice was employed to keep both individuals and institutions accountable; teachers were very explicit in teaching their students about the school-to-prison pipeline and how alternative forms of punishment could disrupt the phenomenon. Restorative practitioners aiming to reduce racial disparities in school discipline must be familiar with the institutions in which they are operating to create lasting, system-wide change. After all, as Hereth, Kaba, Meiners, and Wallace (2012) state, skeptics often wonder “whether harm can ever truly be healed or restored in a context where structural inequality is the pervasive norm” (p. 257). At BHS and Equity, practitioners were motivated to reduce this inequality by educating and inspiring students to act against phenomena such as the school-to-prison pipeline.
