In a recent Restorative Justice Week organised by the UK Justice Ministry, it was surprisingly revealed that restorative justice reduces the frequency of criminals reoffending by 14 per cent. Research funded by the ministry also found that victims of all sorts of crime feel left out of the criminal justice process altogether and not given a chance to express their views and feelings.
Restorative justice facilitates contact between victims and offenders in a safe environment. It gives victims the chance to explain to the offender the real impact of their crime, to get answers to their questions and an apology. It holds offenders to account for what they have done, helps them understand the real consequences of their crime, take responsibility and make amends.
This echoes Pope Francis’s appeal to crime experts for a more humane justice system and that justice has to involve the offender’s redemption and avoid confusing punishment with reparation for the crime.
The Pontiff’s told participants of the 19th International Conference of the Association of Penal Law: “It seems to me that the big challenge we must all face is that the measures taken against evil do not stop with suppression, discouragement and isolation to those who caused it, but help them to reconsider, to walk in the paths of the good, to be genuine people far from their miseries, becoming merciful themselves.”
Restorative justice is not a substitute for punitive justice. It is intended to supplement it.
A growing body of evidence shows that punishment by means of isolation or detention without complementing the process with restorative justice programmes to address behavioural problems can only aggravate other issues and lead to relapse. It would be a mistake to identify reparation only with punishment, to confuse justice with revenge, which only helps to increase violence, even if it is institutionalised.
In our society we tend to think crimes are solved when the offender is captured and sentenced, without sufficient attention to victims’ situation. Restorative justice gives victims a voice.
On a local level, the Restorative Justice Act facilitates a progressive, inclusive and holistic approach towards providing restorative justice measures throughout the criminal justice process. It sets out to prevent reoffending though sustainable reintegration of offenders and to provide a better service to victims of crime.
The Act provides for victim-offender mediation proceedings, resulting in the negotiation of a reparation agreement between the parties. This may include the offender providing compensation for damages suffered by the victim, the offender performing community service work and the offender undertaking a relevant rehabilitation programme. But most of all it includes a formal apology by the offender to the victim.
The Church, in Pope Francis’ words, “recommends a justice that is humanising, genuinely reconciling, a justice that leads the offenders, through an educational way and through inspiring penance, to complete their rehabilitation and reintegration into the community”.
He said offenders must be helped to “recognise and regret” their faults with an attitude of confession, possibly direct to the victims themselves. “It is not infrequent that crime is rooted in economic and social inequalities, networks of corruption and organised crime whose agents seek accomplices among the most powerful and victims among the most vulnerable,” he added.
Criminal law requires a multidisciplinary approach, punitive if necessary but also engaging the disciplines of well-developed psychological fields and other methods of restorative justice aimed at helping individuals to be fully human, free, conscious and responsible.
Restorative justice is most prevalent for juvenile crime and minor adult crimes. It does not seek to diminish the requirement of rectification but goes further seeking to restore relationships and reintegrate people into society. It seeks an overall positive healing purpose for victims and communities as well as for offenders and their families.
The chief strength of restorative justice interventions does not lie in their rejection of punitiveness and retribution, but the empowerment of communities of care who are the most likely to respond effectively to both the causes and consequences of criminal wrongdoing.
We are all sinners, yet we are also children of the same God, a God who seeks to bring about healing in relationships, and restore offenders into His family.
gordon@atomserve.net
Gordon Vassallo is an accredited spiritual guide at the Centre of Ignatian Spirituality.