From Abstraction to Practice: What “Community” Means in Restorative Justice Diversion
November 10, 2025
People
Joshua Adler
ERI/PS2 Public Research Fellow
Joshua Adler‘s work explores the deep impacts of the criminal legal system, tensions in justice reform efforts, and how community groups advance alternative approaches to care and safety. He has worked on numerous campaigns between reform and abolition, bridging activism and research. He strives for research to be an accessible, useful, and collaborative practice. Joshua is a 2025 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellow.
My dissertation explores how recent efforts are reshaping justice in the United States by expanding community-held restorative justice diversion (RJD). I examine how nine counties across the country are testing new approaches that move oversight and power away from courts and prosecutors and toward local BIPOC-led, justice-oriented community groups. These efforts grow out of broader movements for racial, economic, housing, Indigenous, and migrant justice.
What makes such efforts unique is their design: many are led by anti-carceral organizations, funded through resources shifted away from traditional legal agencies, and willing to address even serious forms of harm that have long been excluded from state-associated restorative processes. They also center the needs of communities of color who are most impacted by the legal system. These efforts set out to achieve something transformative. However, in a climate of carceral retrenchment, it is essential to ask if such efforts have truly made possible and where obstacles remain.
The ERI/PS2 fellowship enabled me to interview and compensate over 30 practitioners involved in these community-based programs. Using ethnographic interviewing—a method that weaves together deep knowledge of people’s stories, histories, and local contexts—I was able to hear how they reimagine and practice justice.
A theme that quickly emerged from the interviews is the central, yet slippery, idea of “community.” In restorative justice, community is often described as a motivation, recipient, and accountability group all at once. The notion or role of community in restorative justice can be quite panacean. But what does it actually mean? My participants named many different “communities”: neighborhood groups, geographies, an amorphous public, racial and ethnic collectives, activist networks, and movements for abolition. These definitions are not always aligned—sometimes they sit in tension, forcing practitioners to navigate competing values and expectations. One participant, Rafael, used artworks hanging on the walls of a favorite café to visualize his own understanding of “community” as a movement-based ontology.
As I move forward, I am tracing how practitioners translate their visions of community into practice: how they build relationships, make values concrete, and struggle against the ways legal institutions may undermine, co-opt, and interrupt their work. My hope is we develop a better understanding of the possibilities and limits of community-held restorative justice diversion. Ultimately, I also aim to support broader work of building systems of justice rooted not in punishment, but in collective care and accountability.
A Visualization of Community with Rafael
Interview with Rafael — RJ leader in Lee County (June 2025)
A movement ontology of “community” in RJ, per Rafael
Rafael: 10 years in this movement, most of the time “community” is taken as a given, and part of that is because the modern, post-neoconservative, our generation’s post-civil rights movement orientation…. community is its own institution within that movement ontology. That artwork on the wall is what I mean, right? The title of that artwork could be called community and it would fit within what I would call the modern movement ecology/framework/ontology of how we how we make sense of the world as progressive people, as advocates. And part of that is because of our shared values, particular as people of color, but a lot of people who are marginalized or who are not the elites within this American hierarchical society, those people are being fragmented in their relationships, their relations. The ways that they organize there is somewhat romanticized, in a sense, but I think when we’re talking about community, we’re talking about that primarily in terms of a general ontology.
