Restorative justice is a way of thinking about how we should deal with crime victims, criminals and the overall impact of crime on communities. The idea is that justice should be a process that victims, criminals and the community can participate in, while respecting the dignity of all parties. The process should bring about as much recovery as possible for the victim and community, while rehabilitating the criminal. That rehabilitation would include making reparation to the victim and community, while facing up to what they did and planning what they will do to avoid getting into trouble in the future.
The fact that restorative justice is a fairly novel idea shows just how estranged our system has gotten from a basic concept of justice. The system has focused on retribution, the punishment of criminals, at the expense of resolving the underlying causes of crimes. To do that, you have to deal with the relationships between the criminals, their victims and the community. In some cases, this is impossible due to the nature of the crime, but it's simply foolish to treat every criminal as a social pariah. All that does is guarantee that once a person has been through the system, they'll have difficulty functioning in a society that they have come to see as an adversary.
By nature, the American people are very forgiving. After World War II, the United States invested billions of dollars to rebuild Japan and Germany. This, despite the war crimes and terrible costs in both human and financial terms that the world incurred as a result of these nations' aggressions. How long did it take before Americans were buying German and Japanese products again? Germany's Volkswagen buses and bugs were quite popular in the 1960's. In the 1970's Toyota and Honda started making a name for themselves with their fuel efficient vehicles during the oil crisis. The war had just ended in 1945!
So, between 15 and 25 years was how long Americans held a grudge for Pearl Harbor, Auschwitz, the Bataan Death March, the Battle of the Bulge, etc... Whole books have been written on their war crimes. Yet, more criminals are executed each year in the United States than were hung after the Nuremberg trials. In comparison with some of the short prison sentences that war criminals were getting, today's American criminals are getting prison sentences that in some cases defy belief. How can a legal system give what amounts to life sentences for just about any crime imaginable?
In the case of World War II, it made sense to rehabilitate Germany and Japan. Their prosperity would help promote the overall prosperity of the world economy. Today, nobody would think twice of buying a BMW, or owning a Sony Play Station. If we can realize that kind of potential overseas, what does it say about contemporary America that we can't see any potential amongst our own? Is it such a courageous act to throw away people's lives for a mistake?
The real test of a justice system is whether it's beneficial. Does it provide a working structure to solve a social problem? While we, imperfect beings that we are, will never be able to create a system that provides complete justice, we should always strive for that ideal. By being humble and understanding our limitations, we might come fairly close to providing the ideal atmosphere for a justice system to operate.
What we label our justice system, punitive or restorative, is not as important as the underlying attitude of those who are in authority and have the awesome responsibility of measuring out justice. At the same time, different systems have different benefits and we need to weigh the overall consequences of a system to determine if we need to make changes. However you want to categorize the current system, it doesn't seem to be working.
Since a justice system should address the wrong that one party has committed to another, an attempt should be made to right the wrong. The problem is that in most felonies the wrong can never be completely righted. This is because the experience that the victim went through can never be taken back, and the change in the victim's perceptions cannot be totally undone.
Attempting to undo what really can't be undone is frustrating. It's much easier to skip the idea of resolving a problem and using the punishment as a way to appear concerned about the victim. Justice has often been sold as a way to control or fix a situation. The quicker and easier the better. There is no quick fix to crime however, and it is insulting to crime victims to pretend otherwise.
There are two options in life, conflict and resolution. One would have to live a very sheltered life not to experience some insult, outrage, provocation or crime every now and then. Do we deal with that by going to war? When it's a crime, do we want the government to go to war on our behalf? Some people do, and in some cases it's understandable due to the nature of the crime. Most of the time, it's not necessary to go that far. We can resolve a lot of problems without all the theatrics of our current system.
Justice acknowledges the importance of people and the value we place on their rights. Pursuing justice doesn't justify being destructive or cruel. Destroying people to show how much we value laws is a strange form of justice. A little restraint on the part of our government would go a long way towards restoring a justice system that benefits all parties.
