Victim and Offender Awareness
The quotation above from Zehr's The Little Book of Restorative Justice: A Bestselling Book by One of the Founders of the Movement indicates the original goal of restorative justice. The criminal justice system focuses mainly on assuring offenders receive deserved punishments. The criminal justice system and the system of mass incarceration do not fully consider the interrelationships between all stakeholders that have been harmed or the greater suffering and victimization that incarceration will bring to stakeholders."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).
Restorative justice addresses the needs and obligations of every stakeholder and aims to disclose the true stories and reasonings behind crime. Instead of quickly trying to resolve a crime using punishment, restorative justice repairs the relationships between related parties that have been harmed by crime in order to truly prevent future events from occurring.
Directly harmed parties of crime are often ignored in the justice process. Victims can be most vulnerable in times immediately after a crime has occurred and their concerns deserve recognition. Those harmed by crime should be given the opportunity for their needs to be heard. The criminal justice system tends to eliminate victims from the process and limits their access to information and communication with parties involved in the crime. Restorative justice offers victims a sense of empowerment and restitution. In most cases, victims do not feel safe or fulfilled by simply sending offenders into prison. Those harmed by crime want to understand why the event against them happened and want reassurance that actions are being taken to prevent future occurrences of the crime from happening to someone else."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).
Mass incarceration is not real accountability. Locking individuals in prison with no means of taking responsibility for their actions will inhibit offenders from recognizing the extent of their crime and who it impacted. In order to repair the harm caused by crime, offenders must first be aware of this harm and understand the impact of their behavior on individual victims and entire communities."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).
References:
Zehr, Howard. The Little Book of Restorative Justice: A Bestselling Book by One of the Founders of the Movement. Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2014.
