Restorative Justice Today

Practical Applications

Katherine S. van Wormer, Lorenn Walker

• Editorial: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781452287478
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Criminology

Restorative Justice Today: Applications of Restorative Interventions takes a hard look at the issues and concepts surrounding restorative justice and current restorative practices used in a broad range of areas today. In a time when the cost of prisons and jails is on the rise resulting in more offenders being kept out of the community, this timely and contemporary book exposes readers to a range of restorative practices that can be implemented. The authors, renowned experts in the area of restorative justice, provide information not found in other restorative justice texts.

PART I

Overview: Introduction to Restorative Justice

The chapters in this section view restorative justice theory and practices yesterday as well as today. First, to provide a theoretical and historical context, we consider the contributions for this book from Howard Zehr, a pioneer of modern restorative justice. Then, in Chapter 2, we hear from another pioneer, Kay Pranis, who discusses the early adoption of restorative practices by the Minnesota Department of Corrections, a history that is not widely known. Box 2, which follows, recalls more of this history—this time from Burt Galaway, one of the founders of the Minnesota Restitution Center. While conducting research on the history of restorative justice in its contemporary form for the book, we learned that Minnesota can lay claim to having established the first victim-offender dialogue program in North America, although most writers on restorative justice trace its contemporary origins to victim-offender meetings held in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, in 1974. The focus of both of these pioneering programs was on restitution.

A boxed reading, Box 3, is taken directly from the restorative justice website of the Iowa Department of Corrections. This selection offers a step-by-step description of the process from the point of view of the victim of crime who seeks face-to-face dialogue with the offender.

Chapter 3 describes a unique program at Bluffton University, a Mennonite college in Ohio, that consistent with pacifist traditions has integrated restorative justice principles within the criminal justice and social work curricula. The final chapter in this section by law professor David Wexler, cofounder of therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ), draws parallels between TJ (exemplified in drug and mental health courts) and restorative justice. TJ is geared more toward the needs of the offender to take responsibility for the crime while RJ focuses more on victims’ needs to receive some form of reparation for the harm done to him or her. Both TJ and RJ approaches are about reconciliation and healing.

1

Restorative Justice: Definition and Purpose

Lorenn Walker

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This introductory chapter by Lorenn Walker, which includes a contribution by restorative justice pioneer Howard Zehr, describes the basic values, purpose, and philosophy of RJ practices. The starting point is the history of this form of justice, which is now seen as an alternative to standard justice, yet has its roots in traditional settlements of disputes between warring parties. How the principles of this more informal form of justice shaped restorative justice as we know it today throughout North America is chronicled in this essay, which includes little known facts on the early role played by Zehr in the development of contemporary restorative practices.

“I came home, and someone had broken my back kitchen window. They went in my bedroom and stole my jewelry. I didn’t really care about most of it, except my grandmother’s wedding ring. It was too small and I never got around to getting it fitted for me,” says Jane, whose home was burglarized. A few days later, Jane’s 19-year-old neighbor is arrested. A web camera that Jane uses to keep an eye on her dogs while she is at work records her young neighbor taking things out of her jewelry box. When confronted by the police, the young woman quickly confesses and is arrested. Jane eventually gets her grandmother’s wedding ring back, but not for many months. “Sorry, we need it for evidence,” the police tell Jane.

The young woman pleads guilty in court as part of a plea bargain with the prosecutor after consulting with Jane who agrees to the sentencing terms.

Jane has known the young woman since she was 4 years old when Jane moved into the house next door. Jane and the young woman’s parents are good friends. Jane knows the young woman has a drug problem. She wants her to get help, and she wants to keep her neighborhood safe.

This is the first criminal offense committed by the 19-year-old. The judge sentences her to probation for a few years and requires her to stay drug-free and maintain employment. She must also complete a residential drug treatment program as recommended by a substance abuse counselor who gave her an assessment before sentencing. The judge also suggests that the woman consider participating in a restorative justice meeting with a nonprofit organization that provides a facilitator who will arrange and conduct it.

The young woman, Jane, and a few of each of their family members, all participate in a restorative meeting a few weeks later. Jane explains why she wants to participate. “We live next to each other. I care about her and her parents. I can’t just pretend nothing happened. I want us all to talk about what happened. Hopefully, we can move on.”

The meeting takes about three hours. Everyone describes how the young woman’s theft affected him or her. “It’s horrible knowing someone went through my things and took my grandmother’s ring. I felt trampled on, violated. It was like I didn’t matter as a person to someone else, someone who I babysat for and sang happy birthday to for the last 15 years. I thought we cared about each other, loved each other, and looked out for each other. Crazy me, thinking she would protect my house. Then this. I wondered if my friendship with her parents was even over. It’s been just awful,” says Jane.

The young woman’s mother said, “I worry it’s my fault she got into drugs. I can’t help thinking I was a bad parent. I worked full time when she was little. I should have stayed home with her more. And that she did it to Jane, who’s been so close to us. That really hurt.”

Later, the group discusses what they need to repair the harm. Jane talks about the material loss she suffered with her kitchen window broken, and also her emotional pain. Besides worrying about her friendship with the young woman’s parents, she worried about her grandmother’s ring while the police had it. She says she couldn’t stop thinking, “If only I had gotten the ring fixed, I would have been wearing it, and it wouldn’t have been stolen.” Her anxiety kept her awake at night. It was hard for her to concentrate at work.

To repair the harm, Jane asked the young woman to pay the cost of repairing Jane’s window and to “stay clean and sober,” which she readily agreed to do. After the meeting everyone felt better and believed that they could continue being friends and neighbors. This restorative meeting, loosely based on real incidents, illustrates how restorative justice can improve the criminal justice system and justice outcomes for a community.

Restorative Justice Development

Modern restorative justice developed from experiments in the 1970s that brought people who committed crimes together with the people whom they had hurt¹ (See Box 3 by Galaway, “Reflections of a Founder,” in Chapter 2). Restorative justice provided a new focus on individuals and communities asking what people needed to heal from incidents of wrongdoing. People connected by crimes, those who committed them and those who were the targets of them, met for discussions. They talked about accountability for the crime, how people were harmed, and how the harm might be repaired. This kind of response to crime is radically different from the criminal justice system’s main focus on identifying and punishing offenders.

We say modern restorative justice because since ancient times many indigenous cultures have continued to apply principles that embody restorative justice philosophy. Ancient Western cultures too applied restorative principles prior to the Norman Conquest about a thousand years ago when kings began representing individuals. Today, in place of kings, governments prosecute wrongdoers for the state and community, and have assumed the role of aggrieved individuals. This was a major shift in dealing with crime. Individuals no longer represented themselves, and lost “any meaningful place in the justice process” (Van Ness & Strong, 2002, p. 10). With government representing people, the individuals harmed by crime no longer had a primary role, and the focus was no longer on accountability and how the harm might be repaired.

Only the government and the people accused of committing crimes, with their lawyers and any witnesses they choose to testify, have the right to participate in criminal trials. Punishment has taken center stage away from the hurt party. Instead of considering reparations and healing for those harmed, the government punishes the convicted and collects fines for its general funds. This shift also altered personal accountability for individuals who committed crimes. Concern about how their behavior affected others shifted to defending themselves against government punishment.

The need to return to commonsense problem solving toward crime helped motivate resurgence of restorative justice (RJ). “RJ was brought back not by politicians or policymakers, but by passionate practitioners working in the voluntary and community sector in the hope of bringing balance and justice where the traditional criminal justice system failed” (Gavrielides, 2007, p. 267).

Restorative justice considers crime more holistically than the mainstream criminal justice system does. RJ recognizes that crime can cause both physical and emotional harms for people, and that crime affects different groups of people. RJ addresses any kind of harm and what may be needed to repair it. RJ gives people opportunities to heal (Zehr, 1990).

People harmed by crime include those directly targeted and hurt by the crime (e.g., a family whose house is burglarized); the loved ones of those harmed, (e.g., family members who do not live in the burglarized home who were negatively affected because their loved ones were burglarized); and the person who committed the crime, and their loved ones (e.g., the burglar and her or his loved ones). Restorative justice also provides those who caused the crime the opportunity to be accountable for their behavior, which can also be healing them² (Eglash, 1977).

Since 1975, when psychologist Albert Eglash first used the term restorative justice (Bazemore, 1999) it has been an evolving philosophy. Eglash’s use of the term restorative justice developed out of his work with criminal offenders, not for the concern of victims. He originally believed “restorative justice and restitution, like its two alternatives, punishment and treatment, is concerned primarily with offenders. Any benefit to victims is a bonus, gravy, but not the meat and potatoes of the process” (Eglash, 1977, p. 99). As RJ developed, it has become well-accepted that the concern for victims is a central theme in the movement (Zehr, 1990). RJ was originally only used for criminal cases while today it is recognized as useful for a wide range of situations including civil matters (Braithwaite, 2002). RJ is also expected to continue evolving (UN, 2007).

Howard Zehr is one of the world’s most recognized restorative justice pioneers. In 1978, he was the director of a small halfway house for formerly incarcerated people in northern Indiana. One day the halfway house was burned down and destroyed. The nonprofit that owned the halfway house, which also employed Zehr, did not have the funds to rebuild. Instead, Zehr was asked to work with probationers by bringing them together with the people that they hurt in “victim-offender reconciliation” meetings. Today, Zehr (2011) says “The only connection with RJ and the halfway house fire is that it forced me out of my one-sided advocacy mode.”

Up until this point Zehr’s experience was advocating for people being prosecuted in court. Until he conducted a restorative meeting, he did not appreciate the value of bringing people harmed by crime together with those who caused it to address the injustice. Nor did he understand how crime impacted the people harmed by it, and how much they were part of the “crime equation.”

The first restorative meeting Zehr facilitated was a transformative experience that completely shifted his focus. “I began then to facilitate court-referred meetings between victims and offenders, and that’s when my vision changed.” Not only did he become a strong advocate for restorative meetings, but he also believed strongly in “empowering and including the community” (Zehr, 2011). His first experiences with the restorative meetings set the course for the next 30 years of his professional life, and guided the important contributions he has made in restorative justice.

For the restorative meetings that took place in 1978, there were no written directions available to assist him in providing and facilitating the process. Recognizing the need for assistance and guidance, in 1980 Zehr wrote a handbook on how to facilitate meetings between victims and offenders based on his experiences. Thus began Zehr’s long and prolific history of describing how restorative justice works and its rationale. He believes he first heard Eglash use the restorative justice term and recalls Eglash did not believe victims needed to be involved. Zehr adopted restorative justice to describe the work he was doing, bringing harmed people together with those who caused the harm to discuss how they were affected, to take accountability for themselves, and to address ways the harm might be repaired (Zehr, 2011).

In 1990, Zehr’s seminal book on restorative justice, Changing Lenses: A New Focus for Crime and Justice, was published. He was surprised with the positive response that the book received (Zehr, 2011), and like the evolutionary restorative justice movement itself, Zehr’s ideas about what restorative justice means today have changed since he wrote Changing Lenses (Zehr, 2002).

Box 1

Restorative Justice? What’s That?

by Howard Zehr, Professor of Restorative Justice, Eastern Mennonite University

Do a Google search for the phrase “restorative justice” and you will get over a million hits for a term that was virtually nonexistent 25 years ago. Ask what it means and you may get a variety of answers.

For many, it implies a meeting between victims of crime and those who have committed those crimes. A family meets with the teenagers who burglarized their home, expressing their feelings and negotiating a plan for repayment. Parents meet with the man who murdered their daughter to tell him the impact and get answers to their questions. A school principal and his family meet with the boys who exploded a pipe bomb in their front yard, narrowly missing the principal and his infant child. The family’s and the neighbors’ fears of a recurrence are ...