2006 International Peace Award Keynote

Restorative Justice: Promise and Challenge
Dr. Howard Zehr

I am very honored tonight. I doubt I deserve this award, but it is probably not very gracious to argue about that right now. I do want to acknowledge two people who are here tonight. I’d like to acknowledge my wife, Ruby, for making sure that I don’t believe everything that is said about me, and Ruth Zimmerman, the co-director of the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding with me, who makes sure I don’t have to do too much real work. Thank you all.

I’m going to begin with several vignettes, so come with me.

Vignette number 1: We’re sitting in a small room inside a maximum security prison. On one side of the table is Jim. He’s been called one of the state’s most notorious serial rapists. On the other side are Shirley and her sister. Shirley is the last of the fourteen young women under the age of 18 Jim attacked and raped in the course of a single year, 22 years ago, when she was 14 years old. She wants to know what made him do this terrible thing. Even more, she wants to tell him what he did to her life. She wants to chronicle for him her descent into drugs, the loss of her employment, the break up of her marriage. Several hours into the conversation she says to him, “You stole my childhood.” For the first time, he begins to cry. Later he tells me that that’s when he finally got it, when he finally understood what he had done, because he had lost his as well. As the session draws to a close I say to Shirley, “You’ve come a long way, you’ve waited many years for this, are you getting what you want?” She had made a list. She looks at it and say, “I’ve gotten everything I want. I’m at peace now.” Later Jim tells me that this is the hardest thing he ever did in his life, yet he feels better about himself than he has in a long time. And yes, he’s ready to meet the next of those he victimized.

Vignette number 2: It’s been an inexpressibly brutal murder. A young naturalist, loved by many people all over the world, has been killed by a man who is certifiably crazy. This is not the only murder he has committed, but this one took place inside a national park and so is a federal case. The Attorney General of the United States has authorized the death penalty and told the prosecutors that they cannot plead this out without the permission of the AG's office. Tammy Krause, a victim outreach specialist, a graduate of our program, the person who has pioneered this work, is asked into the case by the defense team. She is invited in not to work with them but to work with the victim’s family, to help them figure out what they need and how those needs might be met. Part of her job is to help the family realize that they do have some choices. While she’s working with the family, she tells the attorneys, “You’d better start getting your client ready to take responsibility, because they’re going to want that.”

Eventually thirteen members of the victim’s family write to the Attorney General saying something like this: “Some of us would prefer the death penalty, but we also know what that is going to cost us, and there are some things we want more.” They say that they want him to take responsibility for what he did and to be kept away from society. They want to make sure he doesn’t make any profit from his story. They want him to stop talking to the press all the time. The extended family wants him to agree that if they should ever want to meet him, that he will be willing to do so. Almost point by point, the needs that they lay out in this letter become the basis of a plea agreement that spares this man's life while achieving what they need. Unexpectedly, in the sentencing hearing that follows, the man - and his attorneys had no idea that he was capable of this - turns to the family with tears flowing down his face and says, “I am just so sorry.” Later the mother of the woman who was murdered says of the process, “I was able to focus on my needs and I was relieved of the moral obligation to sort out what I believed about the death penalty.”

One more vignette for now: We’re in a juvenile correctional facility in New York state, surrounded by high razor ribbon fences. It’s a prison for young men, and contains members of various local gangs. Kamal Tipu, a Fulbright Student in our program, is a police official from Pakistan. At home he oversees thousands of personnel in the border patrol. But now he has been here studying with us, and he’s been particularly taken by circle processes because he finds that they connect with his own indigenous tradition. For the required practicum in our program he has gone to New York to work with the police but he also ends up working in this correctional facility. Drawing on what he has learned, he begins to bring these young men together in a circle to begin talking with each other. The staff are highly skeptical, standing around making snide comments, until they begin to realize that these gang members are talking with each other - they’re beginning to take responsibility, they’re beginning to apologize to each other. And suddenly the staff begin to realize they want to be in the circle too. His supervisor later wrote to me, “Kamal introduced restorative justice circles to one of the most challenging settings in the juvenile justice system. He restored the circle native to us all to the lives of youth who can claim its power and with us restore justice in our communities.”

These are just three stories. There are many, many more stories that could be told from this growing field, this international field, of restorative justice. When I wrote Changing Lenses, I really expected to be laughed at. I never would have suspected the book would be translated into a variety of languages, that for example there would be interest in Iran in translating a book like that. I never imagined that there would be programs in Russia and South Africa and South Korea and Japan and Israel and Eastern Europe ... and the list goes on. I never would have imagined that the European Community would be requiring its members to start implementing restorative justice programs, as they have this year. I never would have imagined that it could be the basis for an entire legal system, as it is in New Zealand. I never imagined that police would be doing it, that prosecutors and judges might be routinely offering it, as you have heard today. Or that a whole prison wing would be trying to live restoratively together. Or that 18 states would today have programs for facilitating encounters on severe violence. I never expected that it might have the potential to impact reform in China, or that it could be used to help end an ethnic conflict in Ghana. Or that schools would be adopting it for a disciplinary process, or that there would be all kinds of conferences and literatures and academics making their careers from it. I didn’t realize either how profoundly it would resonate with so many traditions, but I’ll come back to that topic.

Another piece I didn't anticipate was the way it would intersect with peacebuilding and trauma work, as it has in our program at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding: we have brought these fields together in our work and teaching and learned much from each other.

So the trickle has turned into a river in a very short time. In some ways it all started in one place, in 1974, in Elmira, Ontario, when two somewhat crazy young men suggested to a judge that two young men who had vandalized 22 properties ought to go back and face their victims. We have one of those men here tonight, one who helped facilitate that first case, Mark Yantzi. Mark will you stand up? Mark was one of the mediators in that first case. So I hope you’ll collar him and get his version of the story.

My topic tonight is the promise of restorative justice but also but also the challenges it faces. I want to talk about three of each: three promises, three challenges.

One of the promises of restorative justice is that it will meet some of the needs of victims, offenders and communities that are not met by the legal process. It’s a needs-based approach to justice as opposed to a deserts-based approach to justice.

Victims have many needs in the aftermath of a crime or other experience of victimization. However, there is a series of needs that I call “judicial needs,” needs that often must be addressed to assist them on their journeys. These needs include having information about what really happened, chances to tell their story, chances to right the balance, opportunities to be empowered, and so forth. Restorative justice was designed to address such needs.

Offenders need to be held accountable, but restorative justice has taken issue with the way we as a society normally define accountability. We define accountability as making sure you get your punishment, making sure you get what you deserve. Restorative justice has said that real accountability would be having to face up to what you did, understanding what you did, taking some responsibility for it, doing something to make it right.

Communities also have needs. Communities are victims. They need to have opportunities to solve problems and talk about what matters. And communities need opportunities to take responsibility for their members

Restorative justice promises to address those kinds of needs, and there are a variety of programs to do that. Victim-offender mediation, family group conferencing and circle processes are just some of them. Many of those programs involve face-to-face encounters between victims and offenders, but some do not. The case that I began with here, the death penalty case, is a kind of new work called Defense Initiated Victim Outreach. It does not involve victim-offender meetings, but rather tries to find ways to insert victims' needs into the legal process while increasing the options available to surviving family members.

So far the research on restorative justice is very promising. Victims who participate in these programs are highly satisfied, as are offenders. Research suggests recidivism rates are lower and so forth.

There is a second promise: Restorative justice claims to resonate better with our religious and cultural traditions. When I look at my own journey, as I became involved in this work, I began to go back to my own tradition as a Christian. I became increasingly aware of how often we have misinterpreted that tradition. We so often see the punitive, retributive themes in the Bible but if you look carefully, the real theme is a restorative one: God does not give up, no matter how much we mess up. God does not give up on us. A friend of mine, Ted Grimsrud, has written a small book called God’s Healing Strategy in which he clearly traces that healing strategy throughout the New Testament and the Old. In fact, biblical justice looks a lot more like restorative justice than retributive justice.

I’m also an historian. My Ph.D. was in European history so I went to that tradition. I began to realize how the emerging legal system, and emerging Christian theology, interacted with one another, each distorting the other. The result reinforced a very punitive culture and a legalistic, punitive interpretation of the Bible, a punitively-oriented theology.

What I didn’t realize when I was writing Changing Lenses, but have discovered through my students who come from different traditions and different faiths, is how much restorative justice resonates with other religious and cultural traditions. About half way into the semester of my introductory restorative justice class, I require students to explain restorative justice to someone who doesn’t know anything about it, and see what happens. As you can imagine, I get some very interesting, and sometimes very funny, stories. One student had come from Rwanda where his family had all died in the genocide. He was Muslim and had recently married a Catholic woman from Rwanda. He decided to do his presentation on restorative justice to her. He was about half way into his speech when she started laughing. “Why are you laughing?” he asked? “You came all the way over here,” she asked, “and paid all this money to learn what every African already knows?” Many of my students find it resonates like that.

In the mid 90’s I was invited to New Zealand to talk about restorative justice. I traveled up and down the islands, speaking on radio and television and in a variety of public forums. New Zealand's juvenile justice system has restorative justice as the core and the courts as the backup to it; it is the first and perhaps only system-wide restorative justice system in the western world. But at that time it was fairly new, having just been legislated in 1989. When I got done with the tour I met with Mick Brown, then principal youth judge, who was Maori. He said, “You don’t know how good it is to turn on the radio, or turn on the TV, and see you explaining this from a western standpoint. People want to write off what we’re doing as an indigenous Maori way. What you’ve done is articulate it in a way that westerners can understand.” I’ve come to understand that is really what restorative justice is: the re-articulation of what many of our indigenous traditions are all about.

One more promise: Restorative justice aims to provide a more holistic and peaceable way to think about wrongdoing, to think about justice, to think about how we ought to live together. As a photographer, I like to use the metaphor of a different lens. Restorative justice gives us a different lens with which to look at wrongdoing. This lens says it does not matter so much that rules are broken. Rather, it’s the harm that was done that matters. And whenever we harm someone, we create an obligation. That obligation is to make things right, to the extent we can. Also, the people who have been involved or affected, those who have been impacted, ought to be part of the solution. In other words, restorative justice requires us to name wrongdoing (it is important to say when wrong happens), then to address the harms, to take responsibility and to make amends for the wrong we have done.

I took my students to Muncy prison in Pennsylvania last spring. Muncy is a women’s prison in Pennsylvania where a group of prisoners, and especially lifers, have been studying restorative justice together for several years. We discovered that they were supporting and holding each other accountable through a very simple phrase. If someone seemed to be having trouble making the right decision or was going off track, the others in the group would ask, “Is that the RJ way?” And several years ago I ran into a whole prison wing in Alabama that was using Changing Lenses to figure out how to live together restoratively as prisoners in this prison wing. These stories suggest something about restorative justice to me, but more on that a bit later.

Three promises, three challenges. With every promise, there comes a challenge. I tell my students that all interventions have unintended consequences. Everything we do, no matter how well we intend it, will be misused, will go astray. It is our responsibility to be on the lookout for that.

So the first challenge is to be aware of and to resist inevitable pressures for co-optation. It is so easy to do the same old things in new clothes or new language, and I hear that often with restorative justice. Someone says, “I’m doing restorative justice.” And then you find out that it doesn’t sound very restorative at all. I’ve even heard the death penalty called restorative justice. Once, in Northern Ireland, I heard a revenge shooting called restorative justice. That’s getting fairly far afield, I think, from what I've had in mind!

The way to resist distortion and co-optation is to be very clear about our values and principles. So we have to keep returning to principles. And we have to tell what one of my former students calls bullfrog stories as well as butterfly stories.

Our critics sometimes accuse us of telling butterfly stories. A butterfly collector collects the best specimens, and we restorative justice advocates often do that. Well, we need to tell that kind, but we also need to tell the other kind. Several years ago I was in a workshop where the group decided they wanted to sit in a circle and tell stories about restorative justice. We were going around the circle and everyone had these wonderful stories. So I told the story of a circle in which we did everything wrong. We had to do repair work after this circle. Nobody in this workshop wanted to hear it. They looked at me like I was – to use a phrase that came up later at the same conference - a skunk at a garden party, and went on with their happy stories.

We have to have both kinds of stories: bullfrog stories as well as butterfly stories.

My second challenge is actually a specific application of the first challenge: the challenge of living up to our promise to victims. Victim services providers as well as victims sometimes say, “Restorative justice is the first effort to change the justice system that puts the victim at the center. But is it really going to do that? Or is it just going to be one more way to do something with or for offenders?” So much of the justice system is organized around offenders. So many of the people who work in the justice process have been trained and are oriented to work with offenders. Are we really going to be victim oriented? I think that’s a real challenge, and is one that worries me a lot. So I’m spending quite a bit of time these days talking to restorative justice groups about their responsibilities to victims. I also talk to victims about what restorative justice can offer them and how to hold us to our promises.

The third challenge the most difficult, to practice what we preach, to actually do what we say. I had a student, Dave Dyck, who came to our program with a long history as a mediator. People would say to him, “You know, you must have a great marriage, with all that mediation background.” He'd reply, “Oh I never take my work home with me.” Too often, I think, we just don’t take our work home with us. So many conflicts go on in the peacebuilding field and restorative justice fields - too often we don't practice what we preach.

In over 25 years in this field of work, I’ve heard a lot of positive feedback about restorative justice. There's one kind, however, that I often hear that always mystifies me: People say things like “Restorative justice changed my life.” Or even more mysteriously, “Restorative justice is a way of life.”

I can understand when someone who has been through a restorative justice process tells me what a huge difference it has made in her or his life. When a victim tells me that, due to restorative justice, she or he no longer experiences the same trauma they did, it makes sense. When a survivor tells me that after meeting the killer of her brother, her life is no longer ruled by anger and fear, I understand. I've watched these things happen. But what do people mean when they say, “Restorative justice is a way of life?”

Here’s what I have concluded: I think it has to do with the ethical system that restorative justice embodies. Some argue that restorative justice reflects some universal values, values that are true of most of our cultures and religious faiths. I think there is some truth to that. But beyond that, I suspect what people mean when they say that restorative justice is a way of life is that it seems to embody a coherent, internally consistent, positive value system. Let me explore that a bit.

Our criminal justice system tries to promote important positive values. It teaches that each of us has rights, that there are social boundaries, that some things are acceptable, and some things are not. It tries to impress upon us the importance of our rights and the rights of others. But it does so in a way that is largely negative. It says, “You do this, or we’ll do that to you.” It says, “We will do to you what you do to others. So if you harm others, we’re going to harm you.” In other words, it causes us as a society to act in a way which we normally think is bad. In order to keep what we do humane, we have to import other values to try to mitigate the negative consequences of the approach.

What people mean when they say that restorative justice is a way of life, I would argue, is that restorative justice inherently offers a vision of the good. It offers a vision of how we should live towards each other, of a positive value system. For example, restorative justice is based on a common assumption that we are all interconnected. What I do affects you; what you do affects me. In the Christian and Jewish tradition, the word Shalom captures that. In the Arabic tradition the word Salaam points in that direction. I’ve found that almost all traditions have a word that reminds us of our interconnectedness.

Restorative justice reminds us of some other principles that we want to live by in everyday life. It reminds us that our behavior has consequences. It reminds us of the obligations that our actions entail. It reminds us of the importance of relationships.

I recently facilitated a wedding for one of my former graduate students. The couple decided they wanted to have their wedding in a circle. We went around the circle with a talking piece and each person got to say something to the couple. The first person to speak was Nathan Barge, another former student who had directed a local restorative justice program. He said “I want you to have a restorative marriage. That means when we do something wrong, we acknowledge it and we try to do something to make it right.” I thought: That's it! That's restorative justice as a way of life.

So restorative justice is about values. There are three values that I want to explore here briefly as I move toward a close. These are so important, I think, that they have come a kind of mantra with which I end many of my presentations.

One of these values is respect. I have come to think that the word respect is very profound. If you unpack that word, that’s what restorative justice is: respect. I’m convinced that many offenders commit their offenses as an effort to get respect in some way. And I’m convinced that the reason the criminal justice system so often fails is that we perpetuate the cycle of disrespect by disrespecting offenders further.

I’m also convinced that much victim trauma has to do with the disrespect they feel at the hands of the offender, at the hands of the criminal justice system, and all too often at the hands of those who love them.

Respect and disrespect, I think, are at the heart of victims’ and offenders' experiences. Restorative justice, in a word, is about respect.

There’s a second word, and that’s the word humility. Now, I have worked with my friend and colleague Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz for over 20 years. She always hates it when I talk about humility; she says, “Mennonite women have had humility pushed down their throats, and I wish you didn’t talk about it.” And she’s probably right. But I think I have to talk about it, but differently than we often do.

By humility I do mean the usual idea of not taking undue credit – that’s one dimension. For instance, I tell mediators that when they do their job right, the participants are likely to leave the room thinking they did the hard work. They are probably not going to recognize the important role the mediator played. Mediators have to be able to live with that lack of recognition.

But that’s not really what I’m talking about here. What I mean by humility is a profound recognition of the limits of what we know. With that comes an acknowledgment that who I am shapes what I “know.” The fact that I am a white male, a Mennonite from a European background, influences what I know, no matter how hard I try to overcome that. Humility requires me to have a great deal of caution, then, about generalizing from what I know to what you know. It means we must have a deep appreciation for others' realities and for others' truths. Only if we are humble in this sense, only if we recognize the limits of what we know and are open to others' realities, only then can we keep restorative justice from becoming a burden on others, a weapon that is used against others, as has happened in so many so-called reforms.

There’s one more value or word that has come to mean a lot to me, and that’s the word ‘wonder,’ as in ‘awe.' In one of my first philosophy classes, at the beginning of the course, my teacher said, “You’re all westerners and you’ve all grown up in a knowledge system that was shaped by Descartes. Descartes said, 'I’m going to doubt everything. Only what I really can know am I going to believe.” My professor went on to say that way of knowing has some uses, but it is not the place to start philosophy. “We’re going to start in wonder,” he said. That stance has become really important to me.

I led a workshop in Montana a few years ago and the person who hosted it gave me a book by David James Duncan, My Story Told as Water. Duncan defines wonder this way: “Wonder is unknowing experienced as pleasure.” If we take that seriously, in the field of restorative justice we’re in for a lot of pleasure - there’s an awful lot we just don’t yet know.

Here is a story that demonstrates wonder for me. I had a student named Fathi, a Fulbright student from the Muslim country of Tunisia. He was Arab and had gotten here just after the war broke out so he was not in a good space. He was in my restorative justice class but sat there for the first weeks and scowled. He’d mutter things like, “I don’t know why I’m in this class, it has nothing to do with me.”

At the end of the semester he came to me, though, and said, “I don’t know if you’re playing games with my head or what, but this is what I want to do. I want to do restorative justice. I want to do a practicum in restorative justice.” So I sent him to work with a Jewish prosecutor. He eventually played an instrumental role in a circle process that brought together a victim of clergy sexual abuse and the Archbishop of the diocese that had been covering up this abuse for years. I talked to the victim later and he told me this was a turning point in his life. So here you have this fellow from a Muslim country, working with a Jewish prosecutor, helping the Catholic Church through its problems. That I think is wonder.

One final story: A number of years ago our program helped a group in Russia start programs in eight cities. When we finished, they brought representatives from all the sites together for a conference. They had a question and answer session with me and one fellow asked, “When you were first starting this work, what did your prosecutors say?”
I said, “Well, I heard he said it was a communist plot.” They laughed for a while and when the laughter died down, he said, “That’s funny, our prosecutors said it is a CIA plot.” And we all realized the world is the same everywhere we go.

Well, I want to assure you tonight that restorative justice is not a KGB plot and its not a CIA plot. Nor is it an attempt to do away with the legal system. It is, though, an effort to address some of the weaknesses of that legal system. Restorative justice has grown out of the efforts of ordinary people trying to meet their needs, trying to draw on their own values and traditions.

It is not a plot. But staying the course is not a given. Only if we keep our eyes on the goal that is expressed in shalom and salaam; only if we keep our eyes on the goal of a society where we live in right relationship with each other, with our creator, with our environment; only if we do that will we stay on track. Only then will we be truly restorative.

Thank you.