Victim and Offender Awareness
This quotation from Zehr,s The Little Book of Restorative Justice indicates the original aims of restorative justice. The criminal justice focuses on what laws were broken by offenders, and do offenders get the deserved punishments. It does not really care much about interrelationship within the stakeholders of the crime or what effect will the crime and incarceration will bring to stakeholders. However, restorative justice addresses needs ans obligations on every stakeholders. It aims to disclose the truth and real reasons behind a crime. Instead of preventing the similar situation by punishment, restorative justice starts from inside and repairs the relationships between related parties.The restorative justice movement originally began as an effort to rethink the needs which crimes create, as well as the roles implicit in crimes. (Zehr, 14)
The most directly linked parties in a crime are victim and offender. Relationships among them should be repaired in the first place.
The harmd party in a crime is often ignored. They should be cared with priority as they have taken the harm and even been damaged probably both inside and outside. As vulnerable groups, victims just want equality and their rights, including access to information and truth, sense of empowerment, and restitution&vindication. Simply sending offenders into prison is not what they want. Their true desires are fairness for now and guarantee for future.Victims often feel ignored, neglected, or even abused by the justice process. This results in part from the legal definition of crime, which does not include victims. (Zehr, 15)
Under criminal justice, people who made mistakes will all end up incarceration, no matter how innocent the truth can be. Once someone made a mistake, he or she should be accountable for this mistake. Sentencing to prison seems like helping offenders to escape from their responsibilities. To really make things right, offenders should aware the harm they brought and understand the impact of their behavior. Once when they notice that the actions done by them brought troubles to others and to society, they will truly want to fix it by acting good and provide benefit to offset what they have done.Little in the process encourages offenders to understand the consequences of their actions or to empathize with victims. ...... Offenders are discouraged from acknowledging their responsibility and are given little opportunity to act on this responsibility in concrete ways (Zehr, 16)
