by Bryn Starbird
“If one set out by design to devise a system for provoking intrusive post-traumatic symptoms, one could not do better than a court of law.”
― Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence
According to psychiatrist Arnon Bentovim, a trauma-organized system is one that perpetuates the very trauma it is designed to help. A system becomes trauma-organized when the method it uses in trying to reach its goals becomes a barrier to those goals — compounding and multiplying harm in its attempts to right a wrong. Our current criminal justice system traumatizes and re-traumatizes those that are affected by criminal violence, police investigations, trials, and incarceration.
We see this happening through the violence of our criminal justice system, which perpetuates fundamental problems we face in society at large. By responding to criminal violence with state-sanctioned counter-violence, such as police brutality, mass incarceration, and capital punishment, our system further disrupts individuals and communities that are already at a disadvantage socially, economically, and politically.
Under the guise of problem-solving, we create a cycle of traumatic repetition. Research shows that children with an incarcerated parent are more likely to grow up without the resources needed to keep them in school or even maintain basic needs. After release from incarceration, people are less likely to be able to afford schooling, find work, or secure housing. In theses ways and others, the criminal justice system generates and then perpetuates suffering and upheaval.
Derrek Brooks, whose father was executed by the State of Texas in 1983, offers a first-hand account of what he saw happening in his own community, which was one of many targeted by structural racism, over-policing, and mass-incarceration: “If you look at the families where the father is gone, you’ve got problems. Mom is working one job, maybe two, to hold everything down. In our community, there aren’t a lot of jobs right now…These kids gotta have money. Just like, you want to take your girl out to the moviesYou gotta buy pampers for your baby. And if you don’t have a job and you don’t have money, you have to go out and get it. What are you going to do? You’re going to sell drugs. You’re going to rob somebody. All that’s going to do is spiral out of control. You’re going to be in prison, so you’re not going to be there for your son. Your son’s going to grow up — no daddy. He’s going to do the same thing. His son’s going to do the same thing. So, it’s just spiraling out of control, generation after generation.”
There is overwhelming evidence to show that our criminal justice system does more to oppress people of color than it does to provide victims with what they need. Voices from survivors of crime tell us that the adversarial and retributive elements of the criminal justice system are not leading toward victim and community healing. One example comes from Linda White, whose daughter, Cathy O’Daniel, was killed by two fifteen year-old boys in 1986. During the aftermath of her daughter’s murder, White became frustrated with the focus on retribution. In an oral history interview with the Texas After Violence Project, she remarked,“I realized that everything we talked about in terms of the criminal justice system, things we’d like to see changed, or anything we did, they were always about doing something violent to answer the violence that had been done to us.” She found that fixation on revenge only prolonged her pain and disrupted her healing. White also recognized the ripples of harm that reactions like the death penalty cause. “It creates another grieving family,” she said. “Why would I want some other mother to feel like I felt? …you end up with more victims than before.” At the time of her interview with TAVP, White was invested in fighting against the death penalty and working toward the rehabilitation of the man that killed her daughter.
Far beyond those directly involved in a crime, other populations are affected by their own participation or exposure to the system: attorneys, jury members, prison personnel and others have all been shown to experience trauma related to their role in the criminal justice system. Adding to the victims of a crime or the parties of a lawsuit, the organization of our system is spreading harm beyond those already traumatized. Susannah Sheffer is a mental health counselor and TAVP board member researching and writing about trauma and the impact of the death penalty. In her book, Fighting For Their Lives: Inside the Experience of Capital Defense Attorneys, she writes: “The key question, it seems to me, is not who is most harmed, but how are people harmed, and what might anyone do about it? If there’s no shortage of pain to go around when terrible tragedies occur, maybe there need not be a scarcity of attention paid to the range of that pain, either. Maybe we — as a society and as individuals — can afford to consider the variety of people who are affected by a societal practice. Maybe we actually have a responsibility to look at those effects.”
For examples of this more expansive approach, we can look to existing models that are working to achieve safety, accountability, and healing while challenging trauma-organized justice systems. The Bronx Public Defenders Office practices “holistic defense,” which aims to take into account the needs of the client, their families, and community. This approach addresses the realities of the consequences of involvement with justice systems, such as immigration status, employment and housing rights, and child custody, and involves nonlegal support staff to help with issues such as mental health or drug addiction. Another example is Common Justice, an alternative-to-prison and victim-service program in New York City, which aims to elevate the voices of those directly impacted by violence with the recognition that safe, accountable communities are built on equity and restorative justice, not incarceration. Holistic methods might also include perpetrator-survivor mediations, which opens a dialogue between an offender and a person they have harmed, or participatory defense, where community members are actively engaged in the judicial process.
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To learn more about how our criminal justice system is trauma-organized and what we can do about it, check out our CLE training, “Breaking the Cycle of a Trauma-Informed Legal System: What role do attorneys play?” To access this training and learn more about other trainings, please visit our trainings page.
