Spaces of justice

Abstract

The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world by far. Premised on punishment and isolation, incarceration most heavily affects vulnerable neighborhoods and individuals and creates a system of disenfranchised citizens. Incarceration makes it difficult for these individuals to earn jobs and income, receive necessary healthcare, and maintain social ties. In a move towards reform, the Massachusetts state legislature is currently proposing bills for the implementation of restorative justice and justice reinvestment practices. Restorative justice offers an opportunity for the offender, victim, and other affected parties to engage in a mediated discussion to understand and agree on how the harm done can be repaired. It promotes a healing rather than punitive response to crime. Justice reinvestment reassesses how funds spent on incarceration can be diverted to help vulnerable individuals and neighborhoods, through beneficial programs such as youth crime prevention and education. This thesis, Spaces of Justice, adopts these strategies of reform to propose a new place of community corrections that offers vocational training and restorative justice practices for minor offenders and returning citizens. Community corrections is where convicted individuals serve their sentence in society, such as probation, rather than locked in a facility. However, a report in Massachusetts found that, because judges lack faith in current community corrections programs, they choose to incarcerate people 85% of the time, even when community corrections would be a more appropriate sentence. Indeed, in Boston, the current facility that provides services to probationers is located across from the city prison, in an inaccessible area near the highway. As an inhospitable place, it discourages use by both judges and probationers, and thus detracts from the potential that community corrections has in decreasing incarceration and lifting neighborhoods out of the incarceration cycle. This thesis proposes an alternative model that, first and foremost, is actually located within the community it serves. In doing so, it reduces isolation and stigma associated with those involved in the criminal justice system by creating new relationships among spaces of justice, public space, and the neighborhood.