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

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