Restorative Justice

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?