Restorative Justice

Is there a real alternative to the criminal justice system? Is there a way to make victims whole, make offenders responsible, and create communities of care? The answer may be restorative justice? I say "may be" because it really depends on how well the program is run, the protections, the process, the goals, and the ways it is implemented.

A good restorative justice program can result in less offenders in prison, victims of nonviolent crimes getting made whole quicker, and levels of pain, guilt and shame reduced for all. Not everyone agrees with this type of program, though. It's a voluntary program. It's usually used with juveniles. The idea is that all the victims and the offender come together with a facilitator and everyone gets to speak in a very systematic question and answer way. It's about release of pain, forgiveness, hearing everyones voice, apologies, understanding why's, agreeing on punishments, etc. It's a little feely type of justice, but it does work in some contexts.

In my class tonight, one of my classmates mentioned that he thought it would be good to have victims get a chance to try a process after prison to tell the offender how much harm they caused. This is the opposite of restorative justice and I just couldn't keep my mouth shut. I said that so many of us carry way too much shame and guilt into prison and we work so hard to be able to move forward in our lives after doing our time. At our sentencing, we hear everyone's story of how much harm we did. Why would it do any good to put us in front of another firing squad after releasing us from prison. Well, that silenced my class...

I guess being out about my experiences allows me to be a little more emotional in class now too... for better or worse.

In much better news, I officially have my thesis topic and I'm writing on it ... well, kinda. My thesis Chair (he agreed to Chair today) loved my idea of turning my blogs from the time I was in Carswell into an autoethnography. So, between now and end of summer, I will be tearing apart all those writings and writing about 1-2 themes based in criminal justice. The goal will be to provide usable information that can be used to study female and federal prison issues. I'm excited that my experiences may be used in classrooms in the future!