Text Only Version

What Is Restorative Justice?

by Peggy Hutchison
and Harmon Wray

New World Outlook: July - August, 1999.
A member of the feared Kaibil counterinsurgency squad of Guatemala's army. Photo by Paul Jeffrey. A member of the feared Kaibil counterinsurgency squad of Guatemala's army. Photo by Paul Jeffrey.

Questions That Restorative Justice Asks

Answers That Restorative Justice Gives

Examples in the United States

International Examples

Unresolved Conflicts

The Role of Religion

Sometimes it seems that everywhere in our world--in our homes, our streets, the halls of government, and even our religious institutions--people are continually at one another's throats, each wanting what another has. Individually and collectively, we always seem to want more...of something. We are stressed out; we are hostile; and too many of us are armed. Conflict--internal or external, on the surface or just barely hidden--seems to define our lives.

In our world, both greed and violence seem ever present. Sometimes we experience them in the form of impulses we can still control. At other times, we recognize violence in the form of a threat, used by some to seek or to maintain disproportionate power over others. Or, most terribly, violence can be a hard, bloody reality. Often coupled with greed, it devastates and threatens to destroy both the violated and the violator.

To guard against our human tendencies toward greed and violence, we've established dogmatic theologies and moral codes. We have civil and criminal laws, courts, police, and prisons within nations as well as treaties and protocols among nations. Yet, all too often, many of these established institutions--which the Bible calls "principalities and powers"--take on some of the same characteristics as the evils they were meant to counter. This is no accident, because our institutional greed and violence are no doubt rooted in the same fear, anxiety, pride, and desire for revenge that give rise to our personal greed and violence.

In the face of these grim realities, there is hope. A wide-ranging movement called restorative justice is seeking to transform the systems that are in place to deal with interpersonal and intergroup conflict. Restorative justice is rooted in older traditions of community justice, in Christian ideals drawn from the Sermon on the Mount, and in earlier biblical concepts, such as Jubilee (a year of freedom, restoration, and forgiveness) and shalom (from Hebrew) or salaam (from Arabic), meaning "peace with justice." Rooted in right relationships, not vengeance, restorative justice refocuses our gaze and reshapes the assumptions that underlie our systems for dealing with conflict.

The theoretical framework of restorative justice has developed in the United States as an alternative to its traditional, vengeance-oriented criminal-justice system. But the basic principles of restorative justice also apply to other interpersonal disputes and to larger conflicts, ranging from those between labor and management or between political factions to those between racial or ethnic groups and between nations.

Questions That Restorative Justice Asks

Here are some questions that restorative justice asks:
  • Who is the real victim of a crime? Is it the state, as in our present criminal-justice system? Or is it the person whose body, soul, or property was violated?
  • What is real accountability? Is it "taking your punishment," or is it taking responsibility for restitution--for making the situation right, insofar as possible?
  • Can a people who have been violated and oppressed "forgive and forget"? Or does true healing and reconciliation require remembering, truth telling, repenting, and forgiving?
  • Can we change people by intentionally inflicting pain upon them? (The words punish and pain are from the same Greek root, meaning "payment" or "penalty.") Can we change them by literally "scaring the hell out of them" (the theory behind deterrence)? Or will they change if they have reason to hope for a better life?
  • Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong?
  • What socioeconomic conditions help generate crime and violence in our communities and result in many offenders being victims as well? How can we transform our poor communities and erase economic inequality?
  • Who has the most at stake in determining what it takes to make things right after a crime has been committed? Should the decision-makers be a group of lawyers or the victim and the victimizer?
  • How do we want criminals to change? Do we want them to be determined not to get caught next time (the likeliest result of a punitive approach)? Or do we want them to develop an internal self-discipline to control their behavior?
  • Where violations of human rights have been committed by those in power, how can this truth be told and publicly acknowledged?

Answers That Restorative Justice Gives

Restorative justice encourages dialogue and negotiations between individuals or groups that are in conflict with one another. It encourages them to deal with one another directly, not just through proxy professionals, such as lawyers or diplomats. It promotes a problem-solving approach, not an adversarial one. It is not content with fixing blame and punishing someone but rather fosters truth telling, repentance, reconciliation, and healing for all parties in a given situation.

Restorative justice advocates restitution to the victim by the offender rather than retribution by the state against the offender. Instead of continuing and escalating the cycle of violence, it tries to stop the violence. Rather than separating legal or criminal justice from the larger picture of distributive justice--the way in which wealth, power, and status are proportioned out in society--restorative justice has a more holistic approach. To determine how the law should be applied most fairly, it focuses on the needs of the victim, the offender, and the community, taking social, economic, and political factors into consideration. In learning from the past, it tries to build a foundation for the future--one which challenges us to examine the root causes of violence and crime in order that these cycles might be broken.

Examples in the United States

What does restorative justice look like in practice? In this issue of New World Outlook, you will see examples of restorative justice--either in action or absent but desperately needed. There are 300 or so Victim-Offender Reconciliation Programs (VORPs) in communities across the United States. In court-referred cases where crime victims agree, these VORPs use trained volunteer mediators to facilitate face-to-face dialogue between victims and victimizers. The offenders must take responsibility for the offense. Both parties ask questions of one another, express their feelings to each other, and struggle together, with the mediators' help, to come to an agreement on a fair resolution. It may involve direct financial restitution, community service, drug or alcohol treatment, or many other options. The final agreement is reported to the court and may become all or part of the sentence or the conditions for probation. Compliance with the agreement is monitored by the VORP staff or the court.

Restorative justice comes into play locally when decisions are made affecting offenders, victims, and the community. It encompasses prison ministry, ministry with crime victims, ministry with the families of both victims and offenders, and ministry with those who work within the criminal-justice system. It offers support and accountability, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. It attempts to be, in Jesus' words, both "wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove."

International Examples

What does restorative justice look like when the victimizer is the state and the victims are church leaders, union leaders and members, teachers and professors, students, and leaders or members of indigenous groups? Across the globe, dictatorial and totalitarian governments are slowly being replaced by more participatory ones. In the midst of these transitions, religious leaders, victims and survivors, and human-rights activists are asking serious questions about the past in an effort to avoid false reconciliation and to realize true restorative justice. They firmly believe that the first step toward restorative justice is taken when governments tell the truth about past atrocities carried out by the state. As Lucia Ann McSpadden has written about peacemaking worldwide, perpetrators must "admit their sin and ask for pardon and...provide the evidence for appropriate prosecution within judicial processes."

During the past 25 years, there have been more than 20 truth commissions around the world. Perhaps the best known example of restorative justice on the national level is South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which Peter Storey discusses in this issue. As Storey has said: "Without memory, there is no healing. Without forgiveness, there is no future." However, even South Africa's TRC has received some criticism. Some critics have noted that there was a lack of direct victim-offender encounter during the life of the TRC and that very little restitution was carried out by the offenders.

The designers of the TRC in South Africa first studied the truth commissions that preceded it in Latin America, including those in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and El Salvador. They learned that many of these truth commissions had not been successful in getting the cooperation of the perpetrators of crimes. In Chile, for example, the TRC (also known as the Rettig Commission) had no judicial powers. It could neither establish culpability nor impose penalties. Many of the crimes carried out by the Pinochet regime, including torture and exile, were not mentioned in the "official history of the repression" that the Rettig Commission was to write. There was no repentance by the perpetrators of the crimes because they did not feel remorse, believing that their actions had military justification. (See Tomás Moulian in NACLA, Sept.-Oct 1998, 17-19.) Nevertheless, the Rettig Report printed the names of those who had been killed or "disappeared" during the Pinochet dictatorship. Many in Chile believe this was extremely significant in proving to the skeptics that such atrocities had taken place.

Unresolved Conflicts

What role can restorative justice play in a long-standing conflict that has not yet been resolved? Examples occur when the victim and the victimizer are not on equal ground, as in cases of domestic violence or as in some long-standing political conflicts. Specifically, what role can restorative justice play in the case of Palestine and Israel? There, the Oslo Peace Process has brought only more terror, poverty, human-rights violations, oppression, and hopelessness to Palestinians in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

 Palestinian children living in an Israeli world.

Palestinian children living in an Israeli world. Photo by Mike DuBose, UMCom.

Zoughbi Zoughbi is a Palestinian Christian who founded Wi'am Palestinian Conflict Resolution Center in Bethlehem in 1995. This center helps resolve disputes within the Palestinian community by complementing the traditional Arab form of mediation, called sulha, with Western models of conflict resolution. Zoughbi says that those committed to restorative justice must be committed to "minimizing the gap between the victim and the oppressor." In the context of Palestine and Israel, he says, this means supporting projects aimed at empowering the Palestinian community and helping the Israelis extricate themselves from the role of occupier.

The Role of Religion

What role can Christian churches and other religious communities play in the reconciliatory process of restoring memory, truth telling, repenting, and forgiving? Religious communities have both an opportunity and a responsibility to provide the spiritual leadership required of restorative justice. This is not easy, for, as Lucia Ann McSpadden has observed, "the church is enmeshed in the very same problematic social structure that it is being called upon to criticize and change if reconciliation is to come about."

Recovering memory and telling the truth can even be life-threatening. In Guatemala, Bishop Juan Gerardi--head of the Catholic Church's Project to Recover Historical Memory, which documents the facts of Guatemala's genocide--was brutally murdered outside his home two days after publicly presenting the final report in April 1998.

The painful history of the genocide in Rwanda is another case in point. The Rev. Ngoy Daniel Mulunda-Nyanga is a United Methodist elder who has played a critical role in providing leadership in conflict resolution and restorative justice in Africa through the All Africa Conference of Churches in Nairobi, Kenya. In his book, The Reconstruction of Africa: Faith and Freedom for a Conflicted Continent, he writes the following: "It is important to understand that the churches in Rwanda face a very troubling situation because they and the government are all survivors of the genocide. They share the same history and traumatizing experience. In Rwanda, the situation is particularly devastating because almost every Rwandan lost at least one relative in the war, in the exodus of the refugees, or in the tragic genocide. To talk about reconciliation in the face of such suffering requires utmost faith in God. To embark on the ministry of peacemaking and conflict resolution is to respond to the call to carry the cross of Jesus and to follow him."

This issue of New World Outlook offers us an opportunity to reflect upon paradigms for restorative justice: restoring memory, truth telling, repenting, forgiving, and healing. Thinking about restorative justice is an occasion to reflect again upon Jesus' challenge to the community when he lifted up the two and greatest commandments: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind...You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Matthew 22: 36-40).

Peggy Hutchison is assistant general secretary for Global Networks and Ecumenical Relations in the Mission Contexts and Relationships (MCR) program area of the General Board of Global Ministries. Harmon Wray is executive director for Restorative Justice Ministries, a General Conference mandate of The United Methodist Church.

Text and photographs copyright 1999 by New World Outlook: The Mission Magazine of The United Methodist Church. Used by Permission. Visit New World Outlook Online at http://gbgm-umc.org/nwo/.

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