We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice

Kaba is hopeful that the emergence of #MeToo can shift the focus from punishment of wrongdoers to community-based solutions for transformative justice. The sheer pervasiveness of sexual violence that the #MeToo movement has helped to reveal shows that it is a structural problem, not something that can be dealt with by punishing individuals. In addition to these systems being pervasive in society, they affect individuals so that people internalize the logic of these systems without necessarily realizing it.

Kaba shares that her experiences as an activist have typically focused on those who have endured harm, but through that work she was approached by those who had inflicted harm. Through that experience, Kaba learned that “you can never actually make anybody accountable. People have to be accountable” (140), a fact that is often frustrating to those who look to punishment as a way to compel accountability. This can only happen, however, once someone truly comes to terms with the fact that they have done harm. Kaba adds that it is also useful to keep in mind that a survivor of sexual assault “is not a fragile China doll who is going to crack under any pressure” (142), and so they can be relied upon to state what happened to them and doing so is in fact part of asserting agency.

According to Kaba, healing and accountability cannot be plugged into a standard process, as individuals have a vast range of different needs. It is also important to distinguish healing and accountability from conflict resolution, as healing has a much more restorative purpose than simply eliminating grounds of contention. Kaba writes that people are not dealing with disputes, but rather pain, and working through that pain is an essential part of the healing process. There can be no “resolution,” only a process by which the person is better able to process what has happened to them or what they have done to others.

Kaba notes that her experience in this space has been transformative for her as well, reaffirming her commitment to dismantling systems of punishment without losing a sense of the consequences that people need to face for their actions. She distinguishes between consequences and punishment, noting that consequences involve a loss of power and privilege, whereas punishment “means inflicting cruelty and suffering on people” (146). Depriving someone of the right to live a fully human life practically ensures that they will never have the moral or material resources to withstand the full process of accountability.

Kaba began her career as an activist with an interest in restorative justice, which is focused on repairing broken relationships in a communal setting. Over time, she came to feel that such an approach was overly individualistic, and she has accordingly shifted to transformative justice, which “takes as a starting point the idea that what happens in our interpersonal relationships is mirrored and reinforced by the larger systems” (148-49). Kaba writes that transformative justice breaks down the duality of victim and perpetrator and seeks as much as possible to redress violence without reliance on the state.

Kaba reflects that so much of contemporary culture reinforces the desire for punishment, of returning hurt for hurt, and so those who seek out alternatives through transformative justice are often viewed as transgressing against core social norms. With respect to violent crime, Kaba finds that various forms of social violence, such as pollution and war, go unpunished while individuals are held up as “the pinnacle of violence” (151). At the same time, the state runs roughshod over individual victims, whose preferences (such as opposition to capital punishment) are never taken into account. It may be difficult for a person to separate their policy preferences from their individual feelings, but it is of critical importance that policy is not a question of satisfying feelings.

Locating accountability within the community is an important way to move justice beyond the realm of individual emotions. Communities are particularly able to work with gender nonconforming people or communities of color that the state ignores when it is not repressing them. Over half of violent crime victims never contact law enforcement, and so it is vital for there to be community-based resources beyond the state that such people can trust, especially when most of those who actually do contact law enforcement never see the judicial process brought to a conclusion. The actual process of communal accountability is difficult to define and can be very arduous, but it is a necessary alternative for those whom the state has demonstrably failed.

This story is from the perspective of a girl named Addie who dies at 16. She lives in a town called Small Place (SP), lush with green and near the water. It is governed by peace-holders, a position for which all adults are eligible, affirming a commitment to resolving all intracommunal conflict. Everyone is a “circle-keeper” (158), meaning that they discuss all important communal issues in a social setting.

It is then revealed that SP is on another planet, as they receive a visitor from Earth who walks around terrified of potential danger, despite the fact that SP is peaceful and plentiful. From this visitor, Addie learns about what it means to be afraid or dangerous, and on the internet she discovers a folktale about a goose accused of a crime when the entire judicial process is under the control of foxes. The visitor from Earth (EV) asks where the prisons are and is shocked to learn that there aren’t any, but she also cannot explain how Earth prisons provide healing to their inhabitants.

One day, Addie goes swimming and EV, “who couldn’t believe that there were no prisons in SP” (160), murders her. The entire community comes together to grieve, fully incorporating the killer into this process. EV thus came to feel remorse for her actions, and then the community goes into a deep exploration of her life and the causes of her actions. Then, in the Justice Ritual, she is tied up and dropped in the ocean, with Addie’s parents given the option of saving her, which they do. EV takes on the “debt for the life taken for however long the harmed parties deem necessary” (162).