Vol. 73, No. 5, May 2000

Legislative Watch

Restorative Justice in Crime Prevention and Rehabilitation

Assembly Bill 533 is the recommendation of the Special Legislative Council Committee on Faith-based Approaches to Crime Prevention and Justice. One of the bill's innovative recommendations would allow three counties to test a restorative justice approach to rehabilitation.

by Scott R. Jensen

The scene is repeated every day in Wisconsin. A crime is committed. A victim is harmed. Our criminal justice system responds with law enforcement apprehending the criminal, our court system trying and sentencing the criminal, and our prison system locking away the criminal. Once that criminal has served a sentence, we return the criminal to the street and hope for the best.

Unfortunately, today's best is not very good. For a distressingly large percentage of the inmates in our Wisconsin corrections system, their release papers are a round-trip ticket. Upon release, they revert to their old ways, repeat the same old patterns of criminal behavior, and end up right back in prison.

Looking for new ways to break this depressing cycle was the goal of the Special Legislative Council Committee on Faith-based Approaches to Crime Prevention and Justice. This committee, which I chaired, was commissioned to look at innovative efforts in Wisconsin and around the nation that might hold promise in reducing the level of crime and the level of recidivism in our state.

The committee featured an eclectic mix of public and private members, liberals and conservatives, prosecutors and defense attorneys, Christians, Jews, Muslims, and agnostics. Over the course of our deliberations, we heard from people of all faiths, every political stripe, every walk of life, and from all across Wisconsin and the United States.

In the end, the committee made a series of recommendations including:

• prohibiting discrimination against faith-based providers of crime prevention programs;
• establishing an around-the-clock, faith-based drug treatment program in the Milwaukee corrections facility now under construction;
• requiring performance evaluations for organizations that are awarded state drug and alcohol treatment grants; and
• assisting faith-based providers of social services in working with the bureaucracy and meeting the clear legal standards of church-state separation.

Restorative Justice

While all of these proposals hold great promise, I believe that one of the most intriguing possibilities from the committee's work lies in another area. In addition to these other proposals, the bill forwarded by the committee - Assembly Bill 533 - would allow three counties to test a "restorative justice" approach to crime prevention. This approach works to develop sentences and create relationships that help criminals, their victims, and the larger community start to mend the tears in our social fabric caused by crime.

For hundreds of years, crime has been treated as merely an issue between the state and the criminal. Crimes and their punishments have been based on the offense committed against the state's system of law, not the offense committed in interpersonal terms against a crime victim. In punishment for these crimes against the state, our criminal code traditionally has prescribed locking criminals up, away from society in general and their victims in particular.

Restorative justice turns this equation on its head. Restorative justice creates an avenue to bring criminals and their victims together rather than keep them apart. It asserts that to right the wrong that crimes have done to victims, criminals must be confronted with the actual human consequences of their actions and acknowledge the harm caused by their wrongdoing. It gives crime victims the opportunity to meet with the criminals who harmed them - to discuss the pain and disruption crime has caused their lives. It also allows sentencing options that require criminals to make some form of restitution to the specific person or persons their crime has victimized.

Ironically, by encouraging criminals and their victims to get together rather than keeping them apart, restorative justice proponents assert that both criminals and victims gain.
Confronting criminals with the consequences of their actions and making them take responsibility for them is the first step towards true rehabilitation. Allowing them the opportunity to make some form of restitution gives them a way to begin healing the rift they have caused between themselves, their victims, and society at large. It also helps criminals to feel that they can once again become full and productive members of society.

Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen (Rep.), representing the 32nd Assembly District, plays a key role in the direction of the state Assembly and the state Legislature. Jensen graduated magna cum laude from Drake University and earned his Masters in Public Policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Allowing victims to participate in this process helps them come to grips with the violence done to them and move beyond the fear and anger caused by the crime. Further, they begin to see the person who committed the crime as a human being and not as an impersonal "offender." This change in perspective makes it easier for victims to accept criminals' reintegration into society after release.

Finally, restorative justice recognizes the damage done to our communities by the disrupting effect of crime and works to repair that damage as well. Simply warehousing criminals in prisons until they are once again released to our streets and neighborhoods creates a fractured community of "us" and "them." By creating avenues for dialogue, forgiveness, restitution, and reintegration of criminals into law-abiding society, we restore the communal "we" essential to a whole and healthy society.

Restorative justice is not a panacea. To work, it requires voluntary participation by both criminals and their victims. In some cases, neither party is willing or able to make the emotional investment necessary for restoration to begin. In many cases, however, restorative justice can be a worthwhile tool for repairing the breech in our civil society caused by crime. As recognized by the Legislative Council Committee on Faith-Based Approaches to Crime Prevention and Justice, it is an approach that should at the very least be given a chance to work in Wisconsin.

Wisconsin Lawyer