“RJ hubs have trained staff and physical spaces where youth and families can heal, reconnect and build healthy relationships and help resolve conflicts through dialogue instead of punitive measures.”
In August, the NJ Institute for Social Justice got legislation passed to shift $8.4 million of New Jersey’s budget for youth incarceration to restorative justice (RJ) hubs. Their work offers a vision of how to shift dollars from a punitive to supportive approach. RJ hubs also hold promise as an approach to family challenges. They are places “youth and families can heal, reconnect and build healthy relationships and help resolve local conflicts through dialogue instead of punitive measures.” Here, Ashanti Jones, community engagement manager, explains the Institute’s process of learning about community needs and RJ and advocating for the bill.
Q: What is the NJ Institute for Social Justice and how do you center community policymaking in your work?
A: We are a “Think and Do Tank.” We do the full spectrum: talking to people, doing research, solution development, advocacy, ensuring effective implementation, accountability.
Our theory of change centers on community engagement first. We talk with community members to learn how they experience social issues at their front door, empower them to find solutions and develop policies to make change.
Across all of our pillars—economic justice, criminal justice reform, and democracy and justice—we empower communities to develop solutions to their own problems. We’re a legislative organization that takes a look at the historical issues, makes sure the solutions are reflective of the community, writes a report or goes straight to policy recommendations and mobilization, and does advocacy work. You have to be involved at implementation and accountability too. That way, the regs reflect the needs of the community, not just systems.
Q: How did you begin your campaign to end youth incarceration?
A: Our goal is taking away incarceration as a primary method of responding to youth. In phase 1, starting in 2018, we held conversations. We went into the communities most impacted by youth being incarcerated: Atlantic City, New Brunswick, Camden, Paterson and Trenton. We gathered community stakeholders—impacted young people, teachers, parents, everyone with a stake in youth incarceration—and got them together to talk about why it’s such an issue for our youth.
New Jersey has the highest racial disparity in youth incarceration in the country, the worst recidivism rate and the most expensive incarceration of youth per child per year. Young people exit without resources, and 70% of them are entering back in three years. This is loss of potential, loss of education, loss of employment.
We also are allowing our systems to exacerbate youth criminality. Our school structure promotes racial division, and then there’s the expulsion rate and police in school. We are not centering the whole person. We are not having conversations to help young people about their behavior. We have not established an equitable narrative around whose behavior should be considered youth behavior and whose is criminal.
When we discussed possible solutions, it was overwhelmingly restorative justice. NYC does RJ very well. Oakland, Baltimore and Chicago have effective RJ programs. They’ve had seven “RJ hubs” in Chicago for 15 years! So we trained with them. We went in and broke down their programs, what worked for them, the makeup of the kids, the communities, people’s economic background, race, with a goal to develop something here to mirror that for our communities.
Q: Can you give us a better understanding of “RJ hubs” and the difference between restoration and punishment?
A: You may have a young person who stole something from a bodega, and this store is run by someone in their community, but the youth is not understanding the impact. The owner can come in as a person who is harmed to give context. The harmed person can also hear the motivations behind that young person’s actions. That creates relationships between the person harmed and the person who committed the harm. They each play an active part in what the resolution will be.
By understanding the impact and motivations, we can come to a mutual agreement about what can take place. It could even be, “You have to volunteer at my store so you build a sense of responsibility and accountability.” You’re giving back and putting back something you basically broke.
RJ hubs are physical spaces within the community where those conversations can take place. RJ hubs have trained staff and physical spaces where youth and families can heal, reconnect and build healthy relationships and help resolve conflicts through dialogue instead of punitive measures.
The RJ hubs will, at first, primarily provide space for those who need reentry. They are not exactly moving toward the community-based continuum to prevent incarceration, but young people in reentry can use them in that way, and that can help us make a case for RJ as a primary response in communities.
Fostering community connections is important. You’re more likely to take care of people in your community if you understand the issues. RJ also gets at root causes. If you see over time that a lot of thefts are hunger-related, we need to do something about hunger.
Q: How did the community’s passion for restorative justice become a new law and funding?
A: Our second phase was putting together a community-led toolkit. People were sitting at the table setting up a solution. The toolkit covers: what is an RJ hub, what are the components, who would be eligible. We have a grant template and a template for a proposed budget, and how-to’s for all the components, and with community members we looked at, “How is this possible, with or without government funding?”
Phase 3 was legislation. We started with the Youth Justice Transformation Act in January 2020, which called for closure timelines for all youth prisons, and a lockbox fund of $100 million for community alternatives. Previously the state gave $100 million for opioid issues. We said, “Let’s do this for kids.” Then, when COVID hit, we knew we couldn’t reasonably ask for $100 million, but we could still strategically move small chunks. We set a goal to move 20% of one year’s youth carceral budget to restorative justice.
The legislation passed in August establishes the “Restorative and Transformative Justice for Youths and Communities” pilot program, which will operate in Camden, Newark, Paterson and Trenton. The pilots are $4.2 million each year for two years to offer enhanced community-based reentry services, such as employment help and mentoring, and restorative justice hubs.
What moved us from the toolkit to finding sponsors for the legislation was that we also developed an evidence-based document that included program evaluations of all the programs we talked to. We sent it out to legislators, and we heard “We should do this.”
We were able to get sponsors, and we did advocacy work, youth videos, letters to the governor, campaign events, and eventually the bill passed in August. The hope is that we can make the case in two years to further move funding away from incarceration, and to not just tackle recidivism but do prevention.
Q: How will you ensure that the RJ hubs turn out as the community hopes?
A: Now we’re working with the state Juvenile Justice Commission (JJC), which runs the state youth justice work and has the pool of money, on regulations to determine who will access these funds and what implementation should entail. We’ll develop and hold a public hearing within four months from when the bill was signed. We’re not a direct service organization so we won’t lead implementation but we will certainly be invested in the regulations that get set in place and will work with partners to make sure the implementation can run smoothly.
Throughout the campaign, we partnered with an organization, Salvation and Social Justice, that is more hands on in the community. They will keep JJC accountable. They will make sure people understand the legislation and the process of how to apply for the RFP, and they will have check-ins with organizations that receive the funding. They are the beacon in the community. We also placed money in the legislative budget for an evaluator, and all the RFPs that are submitted have an external evaluator so we can see what the actual evaluation says versus what the JJC says.