A forgiving justice system

A recent article in the New York Times, Can forgiveness play a role in the criminal justice system?, has recently brought out some discussion about the nature of our justice system.

The article is based around the story of Conor McBride, who, when he was 19 shot and killed his girlfriend Ann in a fit of rage. The article goes through how Conor, his family, and Ann’s family, the Grosmaires went through a process of mutual grieving, and then forgiveness in the aftermath of the murder. I’ll let you read the story and article yourself, as there is no way I could do it justice in this post (be prepared to take a little time, and potentially shed a few tears – but it’s worth it).

One of the most interesting elements of this piece outside the story itself, is the way in which the McBride’s and the Grosmaires used a process called “restorative justice” to deal with the crime. The author, Vera Tirunik, describes it like this:

Most modern justice systems focus on a crime, a lawbreaker and a punishment. But a concept called “restorative justice” considers harm done and strives for agreement from all concerned — the victims, the offender and the community — on making amends. And it allows victims, who often feel shut out of the prosecutorial process, a way to be heard and participate. In this country, restorative justice takes a number of forms, but perhaps the most prominent is restorative-justice diversion. There are not many of these programs — a few exist on the margins of the justice system in communities like Baltimore, Minneapolis and Oakland, Calif. — but, according to a University of Pennsylvania study in 2007, they have been effective at reducing recidivism. Typically, a facilitator meets separately with the accused and the victim, and if both are willing to meet face to face without animosity and the offender is deemed willing and able to complete restitution, then the case shifts out of the adversarial legal system and into a parallel restorative-justice process. All parties — the offender, victim, facilitator and law enforcement — come together in a forum sometimes called a restorative-community conference. Each person speaks, one at a time and without interruption, about the crime and its effects, and the participants come to a consensus about how to repair the harm done.

The methods are mostly applied in less serious crimes, like property offenses in which the wrong can be clearly righted — stolen property returned, vandalized material replaced. The processes are designed to be flexible enough to handle violent crime like assault, but they are rarely used in those situations. And no one I spoke to had ever heard of restorative justice applied for anything as serious as murder.

Reading this really made me think about the role punishment, and forgiveness plays in our justice system. There are obviously many goals behind our justice system; punishment for offenders, retribution and maybe closure for those who have had a crime committed against them and in the end ‘rehabilitation’ for those who have committed a crime.

In reading this article however (noting it is based in the US, and Australia would be different), it becomes really easy to start to question how good we are at achieving any of these goals, even at the most basic level. Our system almost seems to be devoid of any sort of emotional healing for anyone involved in the process. It is based on rationality – we collect the ‘facts’ about a crime and then, based largely on decisions taken outside of the specific instance, we dictate a punishment.

In doing so we remove emotions, and people, from the justice process. It stops victims and criminals from being able to tell their story, it takes away the capacity for there to be any emotional retribution or healing, and it gets rid of any chance we would ever have at forgiveness for a crime. In the end this eliminates the final goal of justice system – that of ‘rehabilitation’. Instead of finding ways to forgive people, we spend all our time punishing them, casting them as criminals for the rest of their life, never letting them back into a world of ‘non-criminality’.

In the end we have to ask ourselves, what happened to our ability to forgive? When did we get so angry, so focused on punishing everyone who has ever done something wrong to the maximum of our ability? Maybe the Grosmaires and McBrides could be an inspiration. If, even for such a horrible crime, they could find away to forgive, and eventually to heal, then we could do so too.

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