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