Coming Home: Restoration After State Violence

Abstract

For over twenty years, former Commander Jon Burge of the Chicago Police Department
used methods of torture to coerce confessions from men and women of color on the
South Side of Chicago. With the cooperation of the state’s attorney’s office and the
courts, over 100 people of color were sentenced to prison, some even to death row, for
crimes they had not committed. This gross violation of state power continued a long
history of police, state, institutional, and racialized violence perpetrated against the Black
community in Chicago. Engaging a qualitative case study methodology, this research
examines how individuals and communities “come home” in the aftermath of stateperpetrated violence.  The data collected from an examination of archival materials, interviews, and focus groups revealed four themes: the need to integrate social justice work with psychological work, the need for psycho-social redress of historical harms in the community, the need to acknowledge and engage the ontologies and temporalities that emerge in the wake of violence, and the need to witness the site of rupture caused by state violence as a dialectal opportunity rather than a pathological problem. The research engages psychosocial accompaniment, liberation psychology, and decolonial studies as
critical lenses to guide the visioning of a robust, just, and liberatory response from the
field of psychology to victims of state and racialized violence.