Restorative justice.
Jul 16, 2010
From John Malkin's article in Good Times:
Downtown Santa Cruz, a high school student takes clothes from a store without paying and is caught in the act. Instead of going to jail, she agrees to meet with a store manager to discuss the act and mutually agree on what to do next.
An elementary school garden is destroyed by teenagers. During a restorative dialogue, the teenagers sob with sadness, realizing the affect they’ve had on the younger kids who put so much energy into growing their garden.
A math teacher’s car is broken into by a young man. They agree to discuss the event in a restorative meeting. The two come to understand each other’s perspective, forgiveness arises and the teacher ends up offering to help tutor the youth in math.
During a downtown May Day celebration, windows of 18 businesses are smashed. A sharing circle offers people the chance to discuss how they were affected by the property destruction, and to discover possible ways of building community.
These are examples of a growing trend in responding to harmful actions and building trust between individuals and communities called Restorative Justice. Restorative Justice (RJ) is a philosophy that incorporates a diversity of tools to restore safety and connection through voluntary dialogue and mutual agreement. Often these meetings lead to transformational changes in people’s lives.
...In the Brazilian favela shantytowns of Rio de Janeiro, Dominic Barter has helped to develop Restorative Circles (RC) for the past 15 years. In a city where murders take 5,000 lives a year, challenges have been formidable to find practical and productive ways to restore safety and trust. Barter has also brought the restorative philosophy into 120 Brazilian high schools and into courts. There are now urban areas where police have the option of offering Restorative Circles to people who have committed minor crimes instead of going to the police station; and some districts have seen a 50 percent reduction in referrals to juvenile courts. The UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts recently chose to highlight Barter's Restorative Circles in their "Radical Efficiency" report for "delivering much better public outcomes for much lower cost."
Barter views conflict as something to engage with and fully express rather than “resolve.” He explains the difference: “Implicit in the idea of conflict resolution is that conflict is a problem. I view conflict as a message and really the choice is to either receive the message or ignore it. If we label conflict or violence as bad, then politically that is so handy because what we do is condemn the frustrated expressions of anger and powerlessness by those who are most marginalized.”
Barter adds, “What we deal with in Restorative Circles is not conflict but painful conflict. If we ignore painful conflict then it becomes violence, raising its volume ‘generously’ so that we notice something that we haven’t paid attention to before.”
Restorative Circles are always voluntary and are a place for truth to be explored, from each person’s perspective. Barter says, “I want the circle to be a place where we can focus on: What is it that we’re capable of doing to each other? And is this really what we want to do? If we discovered our power by doing something which has stimulated pain in someone else then we can find out: Is that how we want to use our power? Do we want to use it any other way?
Read the full article.
