Abstract
The history of American policing, behavior criminalization, and carceral justice is rooted in racist practice dating back to the 1700s. In addition to racially disproportionate punishment doled out by these systems, they are not designed to support behavioral punishment of harm or reinforcement of prosocial behavior for socially significant change. One alternative to this retributive carceral justice system is restorative justice. This article offers a conceptually systematic examination of restorative justice for behavior change, an examination of the functional utility of various restorative approaches, alignment of restorative justice with behavior analytic ethics, and suggestions for incorporating anti-oppressive practices.
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Notes
It is of note that Latine/Latinx people of all races may be misrepresented in the data, with Afro-Latinx people often coded as Black and non-Black Latinx people coded as white. As noted by the ACLU (2020), “This miscoding likely leads to an underestimation of the true rate of racial disparities experienced by people of color at the hands of police. Arrests of Latinx individuals coded as white in the data likely artificially inflate the number of white arrests, leading to an underestimation of the disparity between Black and white arrest rates.” In addition, although not directly captured in these data, the ACLU notes that “in addition to Black and Latinx groups, racial bias in policing and drug enforcement may negatively affect other racial or ethnic groups, such as Native and Indigenous populations, Arab and Middle Eastern populations, Asian populations, Pacific Islander populations, and those with multiple racial/ethnic identities (e.g., biracial), among others. The UCR (2020) data classifies individuals’ race as “Black,” “white,” “Asian,” “American Indian or Alaska Native,” “Native Hawaiian,” or “unknown.”
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This article is being published on an expedited basis, as part of a series of emergency publications designed to help practitioners of applied behavior analysis take immediate action to address police brutality and systemic racism. The journal would like to especially thank Robin Williams for their review of this article. The views and strategies suggested by the articles in this series do not represent the positions of the Association for Behavior Analysis, International or Springer Nature.
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Leland, W., Stockwell, A. Anti-Oppressive Restorative Justice: Behavior Analysis in Alternatives to Policing. Behav Analysis Practice 15, 1232–1236 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-021-00633-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-021-00633-0