In 2021, writer Mari Cohen was hit by a car in Brooklyn. The driver fled the scene, leaving Cohen with injuries including several broken ribs and a collapsed lung. In this essay, Cohen asks whether restorative justice can offer crash victims and the drivers who harmed them the healing they need:

Prison abolitionists often speak of violence as a social problem, born of systemic factors, like poverty and disenfranchisement. They argue that our response to it also reflects a social deficit: Our reliance on locking away harm-doers is the flip side of our failure to consider the context for their actions, and the conditions that would enable them to change their behavior and make amends—factors we must confront if we’re ever to move toward a world without prisons. In a forth­coming conversation on abolition in the Radical History Review, the organizer and law professor Dean Spade argues that “the existing criminal punishment system . . . wants us to be as passive as possible and not solve our own problems with each other.” This, he said, is why envisioning a prison-free world is “hard for a lot of people who are new to the analysis . . . It’s a tall order to actually know our neighbors, to care about each other, to get better at having hard conversations.” Though I don’t necessarily consider myself “new” to the analysis—I first began reading the work of abolitionists almost a decade ago—I recognize myself at least partially in Spade’s description. After the crash, I wanted to believe another world was possible, but I still found it hard to envision, concretely, what a just response to R.’s actions might look like—or what I might want from him to help me heal.

A year and a half after my crash, I started speaking to the people who had built and participated in Circles for Safe Streets, the new restorative justice program for traffic violence in New York City, to learn about its efforts to address serious crashes without resorting to incarceration. Meanwhile, I went looking for the man who hit me. I wanted to know why he did what he did, so I might more easily understand his actions in a social context, rather than as one person’s irreparable cruelty. I wanted to ask him why he drove away.

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