On June 1, Sylvia Clute gave a talk at RFM on “Friends, Unitive Justice, Ending Mass Incarceration.” Below is a brief introduction to her talk and a description of unitive justice.

Common phrases, like “the punishment must fit the crime,” “I want to get even,” or “an eye for an eye” actually describe proportional revenge, the moral principle that underpins the punitive western model of justice. Answering harm with more harm is deemed moral, so long as the harm you do is proportional to the harm done to you. Two moral standards are required for proportional revenge to work, one that says the harm done by us, the “good” people, is moral, while condemning the harm done by those whom we have deemed “evil” or “immoral”—even when both are doing essentially the same thing, giving rise to complexity and inconsistency. But as Quakers know, there is another way. The work Sylvia Clute is doing involves implementing another way that she calls unitive justice. Unitive justice is based on the moral principle of loving kindness. Whatever the circumstances, harm to another is not condoned as moral. The power of unitive justice lies in this internal moral consistency, a power demonstrated in the movements led by Gandhi, King and Mandela. This discussion will consider the differences between punitive and unitive justice, and the ways in which unitive justice is presently being implemented as an answer to the broken punitive system and the mass incarceration that now pervades the U.S. criminal system. Sylvia Clute, Program Coordinator for the Alliance for Unitive Justice, is a former trial attorney and author. For over twenty five years she has been researching and developing “unitive justice” as a parallel model of justice and a structure for community organization. Recently, she spent two years implementing a restorative justice program based on unitive justice principles at a Richmond, Va. high school, and is now implementing the program in a middle school. She is drawn to the Friends because of their application of these principles to a spiritual community.