THIS IS A HOPEFUL JUSTICE AREA
The Hopeful Justice Collective is a collaboration between residents of Stoke on Trent, a group of academics (in Social Work, Criminology, Health, Theatre), Restoke, and the Ministry of Justice. The aim of the project is to explore Transformative Justice with community members and people with experience of the justice system in Stoke-on-Trent.
Installation at Fenton Town Hall. Autumn 2023
Transformative Justice :
• Is built on the premise that state responses to violence reproduce violence and traumatize people criminal justice agencies fail to advance individual and collective justice thereby perpetuating cycles of abuse.
• Situates individual justice and collective liberation as equally fundamentally intertwined.
• Aims to develop community accountability and engagement to challenge unequal and intersecting power relationships.
• Promotes a bottom-up understanding of the lives and needs of populations without relying on the state.
• Cultivates accountability, healing, and safety by transforming conditions that enable harm.
This is a Hopeful Justice Area
This piece draws upon the UK community-led initiative Neighbourhood Watch which aims to reduce crime through resident observation and intervention. This well-established scheme encourages neighbours to be on the look-out for potential threats while potentially overlooking the root cause of criminal activity.
'Neighbourhood Watch aims to help people protect themselves and their properties and to reduce the fear of crime by means of improved home security, greater vigilance, accurate reporting of suspicious incidents and fostering a community spirit as well as tackling new forms of crime such as cybercrime.' *
'This is a Hopeful Justice Area' asks its audience, 'if citizens sought to change the conditions that enable harm in the community, what would a compassionate, transparent, and accountable neighbourhood watch look like?'.
