Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair

Until We Reckon begins with the question prison-abolition arguments most often evade: if not prison, what should happen when someone commits serious violence? More than half of people in U.S. state prisons were convicted of violent offenses. Reform limited to low-level drug cases or “nonviolent offenders” therefore cannot end mass incarceration; it also recreates a moral boundary between sympathetic people and those deemed disposable. Danielle Sered argues that a credible politics of safety must take survivors’ losses, responsible action by those who harmed them, and the material prevention of future violence equally seriously.

Her case grows from practice rather than hypothetical ethics. Sered leads Common Justice, a New York program that diverts eligible cases involving serious violence from prosecution into an intensive, long-term accountability process, but only with the survivor’s consent. Participants must confront the harm they caused, complete agreed obligations, and remain engaged with support and supervision. The case histories refuse simple saints and monsters: victimization, perpetration, poverty, racialized enforcement, and prior trauma can inhabit one life, yet having been harmed never cancels responsibility for harming another person.

Sered’s sharpest challenge is to ask what prison actually requires a person to account for. Plea bargains compress facts and consequences; attorneys speak in court; a sentence chiefly requires someone to endure a designated number of years in a designated place. Survivors may want to know why they were targeted, whether the responsible person understands the impact, and what will prevent recurrence. They may need health care, income, housing, or restored relationships. Confinement rarely supplies those answers or resources. By equating punishment with accountability, the state substitutes inflicted pain for acknowledgment, repair, and change.

The book defines accountability as five observable tasks: acknowledging what one did; recognizing its impact on others; expressing genuine remorse rather than performing regret for leniency; making amends as far as possible under the guidance of those harmed; and building a life in which the harm is not repeated. This is more demanding than an apology and does not require forgiveness or reconciliation. It extends responsibility beyond a verdict into sustained behavioral change while locating the measure of repair in survivors’ needs rather than the state’s desire for retribution.

Sered also identifies four conditions that commonly drive violence: shame, isolation, exposure to violence, and an inability to meet basic needs. Prison concentrates all four. It humiliates, severs sustaining relationships, normalizes violence, and restricts housing and work after release. Even when confinement separates a person temporarily, it can cultivate conditions for future harm. Effective safety therefore needs stable homes, income, treatment, education, and trustworthy relationships alongside rigorous processes for harm already done. That is not leniency toward violence; it makes prevention structural rather than rhetorical.

The framework matters to feminism because survivors of sexual and intimate-partner violence are not a single constituency. Some want the harm to stop without wanting a partner, relative, or community member killed by police, deported, or imprisoned for decades. Black, immigrant, poor, queer, and disabled survivors may face state violence at the same time as interpersonal violence. Carceral feminism often treats harsher punishment as the only language in which suffering will be believed. Sered instead asks whether resources reach survivors, whether participation is informed and revocable, and whether alternatives can confront power imbalances rather than romanticize “community” as naturally safe.

This is not a universal protocol ready for effortless scaling. Common Justice selects cases and participants, has trained staff, and operates within a resource-rich city; one program’s outcomes cannot prove that a national replacement system is complete. With sustained coercive control, sexual violence, severe intimate-partner abuse, or shared community dependence, a restorative process can pressure a survivor again unless it guarantees independent advocacy, exit, confidentiality, and long-term protection. The book’s U.S. criminal-law focus also needs comparison with welfare systems, family law, and non-state justice traditions elsewhere.

Read with two tests in view: what does existing punishment tangibly provide survivors, and how would an alternative demonstrate both less repeated harm and fewer disposable people? Pair it with Beyond Survival for community-accountability cases, Fumbling Towards Repair for practical conversations, and No More Police and Arrested Justice for the conflict between state violence and anti-gender-violence politics. The book’s achievement is not a promise that every repair succeeds. It raises abolition’s standard at its hardest point: refusing to evade violence without reducing a person forever to the worst thing they have done.