For the past three years, the Center for Court Innovation has run restorative justice programs in five Brooklyn high schools. All five schools are overwhelmingly Black, and all five had some of the highest suspension rates in New York City. These restorative justice programs have demonstrated the connection between restorative justice and racial justice.

The programs' staff are embedded full-time in the schools. Their small offices have become outposts—where students drop in unannounced to talk about their problems. When the staff walk the halls between classes, it can feel like they’re exchanging greetings with everyone they pass, stopping to check in with teachers, as much as students.

The approach has paid off. As will soon be documented by Center for Court Innovation researchers, over the project's three years, the number of incidents reported by the schools plummeted, as did suspensions. Along with improving the overall culture of a school, that goes a long way toward interrupting what is often called the school-to-prison pipeline—the relationship between suspensions and later justice-involvement.

But the project had even bigger ambitions. Restorative justice is about accountability and repairing harm. What about accountability for the system that has produced these underserved and essentially segregated schools, and then punishes the kids for reacting to that neglect?

The work was also motivated by a feeling that, with all of the buzz over restorative justice, the challenge of its insistence on everyone’s humanity risks being lost—much as the radical King is often forgotten on Martin Luther King Day. For Black Americans, and for the students at these five high schools, what is there to be restored to?

To talk about why there is no restorative justice without racial justice, eight of the members of a very close-knit team sat down with host Matt Watkins for what became a very special episode of New Thinking.

Kellsie Sayers: Our five schools would be classified as underserved schools, so a really high-needs population. A lot of our schools had a lot of students with high levels of IEP, so students who need additional support in order to academically thrive in a standard school.

Read the full article about restorative justice and racial justice at Center for Justice Innovation.