This article appeared in the July 2001 issue of Science of Mind. It won a 2001 PASS (Prevention for a Safer Society) Award from The National Council on Crime and Delinquency.

Pinned to the floor of your bedroom by a man’s foot and watching as his accomplices murder your husband and rape your teenage daughter is something most of us, thankfully, will never experience. Even more rare would be for that wife and mother to fight for the rehabilitation of the two offenders who will one day be released from prison and to fight for a life sentence, rather than execution, for the shooter. Yet all this happened to Cheryl Ward-Kaiser, who decided at the outset not to be revictimized by the criminal justice system and to fight for justice, not vengeance, for the people who wrecked her life. In the process, she has restored herself and helped her victims and their families begin their own restoration.

This, sadly, is a more common story: Joe Avila drove drunk one day in 1992 and killed 17-year-old Amy Wall. A man with self-described “acute alcoholism” whose drinking was sucking up one-third of his considerable income, Avila later joined the ranks of the uncommon when he pled guilty and took personal responsibility for his awful act. While serving six and a half years of a 12-year sentence, he converted to evangelical Protestantism and gave up his “life of lies.” Since his release in 1999, he has told his story hundreds of times – to prisoners, to community and church groups, to kids who get drunk – and though it never gets easier to admit that he killed someone, he continues to do it. “The greatest thing I can do to honor Amy is to live the life I’m living now,” he says. “I won’t sway from that.”

One is a victim of a horrific crime, the other an offender who caused a death. Yet Ward-Kaiser and Avila are linked through their participation in Restorative Justice (RJ), an umbrella term for specialized mediation programs that bring crime victims and offenders together for reconciliation and help to restore both them and their communities. Mediation is a growing new development in the field of law that provides a means of dealing with legal issues without the adversarial, divisive methods that the criminal justice system so often involves.

Begun within the Canadian Mennonite community in the 1970s, RJ programs share these characteristics: They invite full participation and consensus, seek to heal what is broken, seek full and direct accountability, and seek to reunite what has been divided. Participation is voluntary, and participants prepare with a trained mediator before meeting face-to-face, if a meeting is deemed appropriate. Everyone who has been touched by a crime or violation is invited to participate: victim, offenders, and their communities. The traditional criminal justice system does none of these things. In fact, it actively discourages them.

“Restorative Justice is a very fundamentally different approach to doing justice,” says Dr. Mark Umbreit, director of the Center for Restorative Justice and Peacemaking at the University of Minnesota. Unlike the current offender-driven system, “crime victims, offenders, and community folks are actively engaged in holding offenders accountable and having their needs met, but not in a vigilante way.”

Our traditional criminal justice system, he says, “alienates crime victims. They have no legal standing, and the process often revictimizes them.” As for the offenders, even with all the get-tough-on-crime talk, “we shield them from what they’ve done and from coming face-to-face with the victim,” he explains. “We focus on their weight-lifting needs in prison, but not their need to know what they did.”

A different way of doing justice
RJ is catching on. More than 45 states have developed 300 RJ programs. The American Bar Association has endorsed victim-offender mediation and recommends its development in all U.S. courts. Europe has more than 900 programs. RJ most often deals with first-time offenders and juveniles, usually for minor and property crimes. Empirical studies conducted by Umbreit and others show these programs are having measurable positive results in the form of much higher restitution and lower recidivism rates than the traditional criminal justice system. As the cases of Ward-Kaiser and Avila illustrate, RJ is also being used for more serious, even violent, crimes. Even when restitution or total repair of the damage is not possible, as with murder, rape, or drunk driving fatalities, victims typically come away satisfied with being able to have their concerns listened to and questions answered by the offender. For their part, offenders can find peace within themselves as they take personal responsibility for their actions and make amends as best they can.

Ward-Kaiser, who is Catholic, was unfamiliar with RJ during the trials of the five offenders and approached them from her religious perspective. When she went to court and looked at the four young men who had committed this crime and the 16-year-old girl who drove the getaway car, “I didn’t hate them,” she recalls. “You make the choice to hate. It’s wrong, it’s not what God told me to do.” With that realization, she says, “I got my power back” – a crucial aspect of a victim’s healing. After she learned about RJ in the form of the Victim Offender Reconciliation Program (VORP), she wanted to meet with some of the offenders, and two of them agreed to the VORP process. She helped the girl receive rehabilitation and schooling during her imprisonment and has told the man who kept her

BACK TO Selected Articles