SPRING 99

Instead Of Prisons: Restorative Justice

Prisons have become a highly profitable growth industy in the US, and to a lesser extent in Canada too. In the Summer, 1998, issue of Women’space, now available at:
www.womenspace.ca/vol34a.html
we talked about websites that reveal and challenge the prison-industrial complex, which: whips up hysteria about crime rates (which have in fact dropped in the last decade); lobbies for ever-harsher prison sentences; and siphons off significant amounts of funding that could otherwise go to social services. California and New York, for instance, now spend more on prisons than on public education-an equation whose backwardness seems blindingly obvious.

The prison industrial complex is meeting with resistence from many sides. In January 1999, Amnesty International announced a new campaign would kick off on International Women’s Day: a report on women in U.S. prisons and jails.
www.amnesty.se/women/
AI identifies three main issues: "Rape, sexual assault and other sexual misconduct by correctional officers against female inmates; shackling of pregnant inmates, especially during labor and delivery; and lack of appropriate or adequate medical care, including reproductive health services, for female prisoners."

The Winter 1999 issue of On The Issues magazine
www.echonyc.com/~onissues/
ran a lengthy article on "War on Drugs, War on Women" which started with the bald statistics: "Since 1986 the number of women in prison has increased 400%. For black women the rise is 800%."

While women represent a small fraction of all penitentiary inmates, as the total number of prisoners has increased, the number of women prisoners has doubled and quadrupled. And prison seems particularly inappropriate for women-who are usually convicted of non-violent crimes, often single parents, and generally have problems with health, literacy and substance abuse.

One way to maintain momentum to build more prisons is to portray criminals as barely human, even juveniles and women. Challenging that portrayal is the Restorative Justice movement. The Campaign for Equity-Restorative Justice motto says, "Crime wounds...justice heals." CERJ says that not only are prisons expensive and ineffective in changing criminal behaviour, they also fail to restore what the victim lost, much less what the offender never had. According to the website at http://www.cerj.org
CERJ advocates alternative methods including:

• VORPs (Victim-Offender Reconciliation Programs),
• Victim-Offender Mediation (VOM),
• Community Diversion Programs,
• Community Justice Conference (an outgrowth of Family Group Conferencing),
• Aboriginal Sentencing Circles,
• Family-Group Conferencing,
• Peer Mediation,
• the Alternatives to Violence Project (AVP)
• Victim Impact and Empathy Panels.

CERJ links to websites from around the world: New Zealand Family Group Conferences, South Africa’s restorative justice commission, and-through the NonViolence Web at
www.nonviolence.org/
-peacemongers in Kosovo, Israel, and Iraq. While CERJ recognizes that peacebuilding within the local community strengthens peacebuilding in the international community, the focus of this website is definitely in finding ways to persuade offenders to compensate their victims and change their behaviour to avoid future conflicts with the law.

Another valuable resource is The Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice
www.cjcj.org
which identifies itself as: "A private non-profit organization whose mission is to reduce society’s reliance on the use of institutionalization as a solution to social problems." CJCJ lists seven programs it operates, starting with an Alternative Sentencing program in San Francisco-and notes that CJCJ staff also consult with justice departments and other organizations that want to set up non-prison methods for resolving conflicts with the law.

CJCJ has published a number of reports that compare the growth in state expenditures on incarceration with the decrease in spending on education, in various states. One alternative to prison featured in several websites is the Family Group Conference that originated in the New Zealand Maori tradition. The Conference is a scripted process, according to the RealJustice website at
www.realjustice.org

Think of the protected confrontations that some sexual assault centres arrange, so that an assault survivor can hand guilt back to her assailant, without the ordeal of a formal trial. Except that RealJustice meetings always involve the consent of both parties-offender as well as offended.

"Neither a counseling nor a mediation process, conferencing is a straightforward problem-solving method that demonstrates how citizens can resolve their own problems when provided with a constructive forum to do so," explains the RealJustice website.

"Conferences provide victims and others an opportunity to confront the offender, express their feelings, ask questions and have a say in the outcome. Offenders hear firsthand how their behavior has affected people. They may begin to repair the harm by apologizing, making amends and agreeing to financial restitution or personal or community service work. Conferences hold offenders accountable while providing them an opportunity to discard the 'offender' label and be reintegrated into their community, school or workplace."

Initially designed for juvenile offenders, the"conference" technique has seen proved its worth in a variety of settings, from school to workplace. After all parties involved take turns talking about how they saw the incident in question, the victim has an opportunity to say what outcome she or he would like to see from the meeting. The facilitator draws up a contract for all to sign, and (RealJustice claims) 94 percent of offenders comply with the contract.

More information on RealJustice is available from:
P.O. Box 229, Bethlehem, PA, USA 18016-0229
Phone: (610) 807-9221, FAX: (610) 807-0423
usa@realjustice.org
or P.O. Box 426, Station F, Toronto, ON Canada M4Y 2L8
Phone: (416) 944-8705, FAX: (416) 944-3278
canada@realjustice.org

An annotated and apparently regularly updated list of links about prison and RJ is available at:
members.tripod.com/~gmoses/prison/plinks.htm

A major conference on Restorative Justice and other alternatives to prison is scheduled for this spring:

"Prison to Community: Sharing the Vision" will be held April 29- May 1, 1999 in Chicago, Illinois. For more information contact Jacki Belile, Associate Director, The Institute for World Spirituality at 5757 S. University Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637. Tel 773.752.5757 ext 273 (kairos@worldspirit.org ).

Email Penney at: kome@shaw.wave.ca

Another Recommended web site:
The Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press
www.igc.org/wifp/
"Thanks to new communication technology, we can now envision for the first time in modern history the political equality that is the definition of democracy -- and even hasten its arrival by vigorously expanding our use of the new media technology."

WIFP Website includes several Recent Reports, such as
Women News: 'Half the population isn't adequately served by traditional media'
By: Dr. Donna Allen
www.igc.org/wifp/report-womennews.html [link no longer valid]

Penney Kome writes: "This is the clearest enunciation I have seen of the differences between women's news media & men's news media."

The Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press
3306 Ross Place, Washington, DC 20008
Phone/Fax: (202) 966-7783

Email contact: wifponline@igc.apc.org

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