A Deeper Understanding of Restorative Justice
In our brief reading in this course on Restorative Justice (RJ), we received a surface-level definition appropriate to the scope of the course itself. It is the purpose of this blog post to provide a greater level of understanding of the principles and practices of RJ, highlighting two key points: origins (relating to principles) and process (relating to practices). I will also bring in my own experience practicing RJ where appropriate.
First, the origins of RJ. It is paramount to recognize that RJ is a fundamentally indigenous practice. Howard Zehr (a white man), referenced in our reading, is certainly aware of this, himself trained by indigenous peoples in Canada. He is additionally attuned to the difficulties this creates in attempting to practice RJ. He states that a primary concern of RJ is “whether in articulating and practicing restorative justice we are replicating patterns of racial and economic disparities that are prevalent in society” (Zehr, 2015, 11). In the circles we practice in the federal RJ program, this is a point we frequently touch on. One of our circle leaders is a federal prosecutor (AUSA James Herbert), who could likely be perceived as the “bad guy” by our participants. Each of them has been prosecuted by one of his colleagues; for each of them, someone like him is responsible for how much time they are spending in prison. There is a power dynamic at play there, no matter how hard we try to remove it. This power dynamic has the potential to exert undue influence on our participants, just as the power dynamic inherent in the criminal legal system has the potential to completely erase the roots of RJ, or worse, to use it for its benefit. Yet in our circles, we attempt to subvert those power structures by two affirmations: 1. Affirming that all members of the circle are equal, and in group decisions (if they arise) nobody’s vote means less than another; and 2. Affirming that we do not own the practices, as they are indigenous in nature, we simply practice them and thank the indigenous cultures in which they originated. A recent publication, Colorizing Restorative Justice, is an excellent work that explores what heeding the indigenous roots and practicing RJ in a trauma-informed and racially-sensitive manner might look like.
Second, the process. In an optional NYT article for our class, we read about the story of the parents of Conor McBride and his girlfriend Ann, whose parents (Conor’s and Ann’s) came together in the aftermath of Conor fatally shooting Ann in the head, that the five of them might undergo a kind of RJ process. While it is an incredibly powerful story, this is certainly an anomaly within the RJ world. It also included a story of forgiveness that is not typical of every RJ process. Ann’s mother, Kate, said, “Conor owed us a debt he could never repay. And releasing him from that debt would release us from expecting that anything in this world could satisfy us” (Tullis, 2013). This is, again, an anomaly, though the anomalous nature here is perhaps due in part to the fact that it was a murder case. An important part of RJ is for the victim to define what they need from the offender in order to right the wrong that was done. RJ emphasizes that harms create needs, and needs create obligations on behalf of the offender. In this case, Kate did not feel as though there was anything that Conor could do in order to right the loss of the death of her daughter – aside from, perhaps, seeing Conor show remorse and initiative as well as being able to tell him, to his face, how she was effected by the loss of her daughter.
Conversely, in the federal RJ program, most of the people we work with have been convicted of drug charges, not murder charges. Often, we set up victim-offender conferences between former drug dealers and former drug addicts. This commonplace occurrence in our program differs from Conor’s situation in two ways. First, there is no loss of life involved, and thus reparations are perhaps more quantifiable. One of the men formerly convicted of drug distribution in particular, after meeting with former drug addicts in the setting of a restorative conference (we call these people “surrogate victims;” people who were not directly harmed by the offender but who have suffered harm similar to the kind the offender inflicted), decided that the way in which he could right the wrongs of his past was to become a social worker, and work with drug addicts. This kind of concrete change is a more typical outcome of the RJ process. Second, we as a program team need to seek people out to participate in our victim-offender conferences – in Conor’s case, it was the other way around, as Ann’s parents reached out first to his parents and then directly to him. This process involves lengthy one-on-one discussions between us (the facilitators) and both the victims (surrogate or actual) and offenders we seek to involve. The hours of prep-work outnumber the hours of actual conferencing by a significant margin. In other words, it is a long process.
What the NYT article was helpful in outlining, however, is that ideally, RJ is an ongoing practice that is applied not just to the circumstances of a particular harm but to one’s entire view of the world. In this way, RJ becomes not just a trauma response, but a preventative measure. While it is not an outright goal of our program, those who participate in our program have a significantly lower recidivism rate than the national average. Overall, RJ invites us to consider that we are more fundamentally communal creatures than our individualistic society might have us believe. It is my hope that this post furthered not just knowledge, but also interest, in restorative justice.
Works Cited
Tullis, P. (2013, January 6). Can Forgiveness Play a Role in Criminal Justice? New York Times.
Valandra, E. C., Ed. (2020). Colorizing Restorative Justice: Voicing Our Realities. Living Justice Press.
Zehr, H. (2015). The Little Book of Restorative Justice: Revised and Updated. In H. Zehr, L. S. Amstutz, A. MacRae, & K. Pranis (Eds.), The Big Book of Restorative Justice (pp. 1-108). Good Books.