Cooperation
Times
Volume 15, No. 3 ~
June-July 2001
A
New Day: Restorative Justice in Topeka Part I
The CENTER's Victim Offender Mediation Project continues to move forward with a vision of restorative justice for the Topeka community. The Project uses trained volunteer mediators to facilitate meetings between victims and juvenile offenders where they express their feelings, discuss the harm done during the crime, and negotiate an agreement of restitution, community service or hours of work.
The Project has most recently been involved with helping to form the Shawnee County Mediation Association and a Kansas City Regional Victim Offender Mediation (VOM) Association. It has provided VOM–specific training, partnered with the Douglas County Victim Offender Reconciliation Program to offer Core training to volunteers and has been asked to help make a VOM presentation at the Governor’s Conference on Juvenile Justice. The Project is working with the Shawnee County District Attorney’s Office and the Third Judicial District Court Services' Juvenile Department to ensure a steady flow of case referrals.
Restorative justice is a victim-centered response to crimes that provides opportunities for those most affected by crime—the victim, the offender, their families, and representatives of the community—to be directly involved in responding to the harm caused by the crime. (See the related article, "Mediating Roles," on page 2.) Restorative justice is based upon values which emphasize the importance of providing opportunities for more active involvement in the process of: 1) holding offenders directly accountable to the people and communities they have harmed; 2) offering support and assistance to crime victims; 3) restoring the emotional and material losses of victims (to the degree possible); and 4) providing a range of opportunities for dialogue and problem solving among interested crime victims, offenders, families and other support persons. The VOM model offers offenders opportunities for competency development and reintegration into productive community life while strengthening public safety through community building.
Restorative justice policies and programs are known to be developing all over the United States, including a growing number of state and county justice systems that are undergoing major systemic change. The principles of restorative justice draw upon the wisdom of many indigenous cultures from throughout the world, most notably Native American culture within the U.S. and Aboriginal/First Nation culture in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
The model views crime as harm done to people and communities. The U.S. legal system, with its focus on rules and laws, often loses sight of this reality. Consequently it makes victims, at best, a secondary concern of justice. A harm focus implies a central concern for victims’ needs and roles. Restorative justice begins with a concern for victims and how to meet their needs for repairing the harm done as much as possible, both concretely and symbolically.
Focusing on harm also creates an emphasis on offender accountability and responsibility—in concrete, not abstract terms. Traditional retributive justice sees accountability as punishment—pain administered to offenders for the pain they have caused. Little in the current system encourages offenders to understand the consequences of their actions or to empathize with their victims. On the contrary, the adversarial nature of retributive justice causes offenders to look out for themselves, regardless of the manner or the consequence. The sense of alienation from society experienced by many offenders, the feeling that they themselves are victims, is only heightened by the current legal process and the prison experience.
If crime is about harm, accountability means being encouraged to understand the consequences of harm. Moreover, it means taking responsibility to make things right, both concretely and symbolically. As parents teach children early in life, wrong creates obligations. Taking responsibility for those obligations is the beginning of genuine accountability.
All of this is not to say that there is such a thing as "pure" restorative or retributive justice. Rather, justice should be seen as a continuum between the two types. The strengths of the Western legal system—such as the encouragement of human rights—are substantial and necessary. Yet it is flawed. Criminal justice tends to be punitive, conflictual, impersonal, and state centered. It encourages the denial of responsibility and empathy on the part of the offenders. It leaves victims out, ignoring their needs. Instead of discouraging wrongdoing, it often encourages it. It exacerbates rather than heals wounds.
On the other hand is the restorative option. Victims’ needs and rights are central, not peripheral. Offenders are encouraged to understand the harm they have caused and to take responsibility for it. Dialogue—direct or indirect—is encouraged. Communities play important roles and victims are part of the solution. Restorative justice assumes that justice can and should promote healing, both on an individual and community level.
In the next issue of COOPERATION TIMES we will look at how our community can move further toward a process that puts victims, offenders, and members of the community, and their respective needs and roles, at the center of our search for a justice that heals.
If anyone is interested in becoming a volunteer mediator (or helping the Project in any fashion) please contact Kent Reed at 785-232-4144.
(Kent Reed is the Project Coordinator for the CENTER's Victim Offender Mediation Project.)
Peace in Our Environment: Peace Camps 2001
Children from across Topeka and Shawnee County are invited to attend either of this year's two Peace Camps. Peace Camp will be held during the week of July 23-27 and again during July 30-August 3. The theme will be Peace In Our Environment.
Jené Yoder, this year's Coordinator, has pulled together a good group of planners from past Peace Camps and is looking forward to a busy two weeks. She is recruiting teen and adult volunteers to again keep the ratio of teachers and assistants to kids at a very high level. Peace Camp has four to five adult and teen volunteers to every 10 kids. If you are interested in helping with either of this year's Peace Camps or in registering your child, grandchild or neighborhood kids, please call the CENTER's office (785-232-4388) for a registration form as soon as possible.
In addition to the many volunteers, Peace Camp needs cash contributions for its scholarships. It also needs other miscellaneous items for this year. If you have any of the following that you would be willing to donate please let the CENTER know: construction paper, TV dinner trays, needles and thread, yarn and ribbons, wood dowel rods, dried flowers, plants and potting soil, terra cotta pots, pine cones, fabric scraps, acrylic paint, acrylic gloss, wood glue, string, bird seed and peanut butter, clean plastic recyclables like pop bottles, and any art materials.
Organically grown vegetables, fruit and fresh farm eggs from the farms of the Sundog CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) is being offered in a subscription service. The service starts during the month of June. Working cooperatively, four women farmers from just south of Topeka are offering this wide selection and providing urban residents with a direct connection to the family farm and the source of the city's food.
Subscribers receive a bag each week filled with seasonal produce from the fields and gardens of the producers' farms. The bag will contain a variety of vegetables, berries, herbs and fruits. The price of the weekly bag is $11.00. A $40.00 deposit is asked for operating costs of the CSA and will be applied to the last month's bill.
Delivery is at Grace Episcopal Cathedral Church, 701 SW 8th, Topeka, on Tuesday afternoons from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. Call Teresa (785-654-2313) or Deana (785-589-2553) with any questions or to sign up.
Mediating
Roles: Criminals versus Citizens
by
George S. Thompson
Roles are powerful. In one famous experiment, psychologists asked some people to administer electric shocks to other people. The "shockers" thought that they were participating in a study to see how much pain that the other people could stand. Instead, the "shockers" were being studied. The "shocked" were more psychologists pretending to experience pain. The real question in the study was how much pain one person would inflict on another in the name of science.
Since the "shockers" were playing the part of "researchers," they could easily rationalize inflicting pain on others; it was all in the name of science. These were people who did not normally cause others pain. Assuming a new role had a dramatic impact on their behavior.
Convicts have well-defined roles in our society. We expect them to be dangerous, unpredictable—even predatory. We eye them suspiciously, keep our distance, stay on our toes. We may even be aggressive toward them, trying to head off the attacks that we fear from them. We are responding to the criminal role. With some criminals, that’s appropriate. Other times it’s not.
Moreover we sometimes have an impact on how they act. And we can even impact their self-perception.
Roles are not only descriptive; they are predictive. A person seen as a criminal is likely to act like one. Remember the people who thought they were researchers? They were willing to inflict pain. Just so, if I see myself as a criminal, I am more likely to focus on possible criminal responses in any situation. I am more likely to act like a criminal.
What can be done to shift a person into a more desirable role (both for him/her and for us)? We can set new expectations for behavior. We can expect a person to behave in socially responsible ways. And our expectations will make change easier.
In the CENTER's Victim Offender Mediation Program (VOMP), offenders are treated as people who have committed crimes. (See article on page 1.) That’s why they have to be in the mediation process. On the other hand, this process assumes that they can take on a different role. Mediation assumes that they have the capacity to admit their wrong, to feel remorse, to empathize with the person they have injured, and to make amends for what they have done. They are actually offered a new role. It is assumed that they can become responsible. A responsible community member acknowledges mistakes, even when they are deliberate, and then makes up for them.
Given all this, it seems sensible to assume a person will be socially responsible, not criminal. Some people may say, "But this person really is a criminal!" And that is certainly true. But: is this criminal only a criminal, or does he or she have a capacity to take on other roles? And which role do we want the person to assume? The VOMP encourages offenders to take the socially responsible role.
Victim offender mediation treats the victim differently as well. In the traditional system, victims remain helpless. They are not really able to do much to change their situation. In mediation with the offender, they can regain some power. They can tell the offender specifically how they have been injured. And they can decide what kind of restitution makes up for the crime.
When the process is successful, the victim also can see that the offender has changed, or has become more responsible. The victim, in this case, doesn’t have to fear that the offender will re-offend. The whole community gets to experience a bit of healing.
We have decisions to make. If we don’t want socially responsible citizens, we’ve got a mechanism in place to do that. Continue to offer offenders only one option: the criminal role. If we follow this path, we’ll find out just how much pain we can tolerate—as did the pseudo-researchers in the classical psychological experiment.
It seems wiser counsel, though, to offer roles that allow people to increase their responsibility. Victim offender mediation does just that.
(George S. Thompson, MD is Associate Dean and Director of Residency Training for the Karl Menninger School of Psychiatry. He is also Chairman of the Juvenile Corrections Advisory Board for Shawnee County.)
Kansas
PRIDE 2001 Debuts
by Jim Ploger
Nine days and more than 15 scheduled activities have been announced by the organizers of Kansas PRIDE 2001.
During the past year, organizers expanded the previous Unity & Pride Alliance of Topeka into a statewide organization, known as Kansas Unity and Pride Alliance (KUPA). KUPA's mission is to form a network of individuals, allies, and organizations committed to educate Kansans on the diversity of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered (GLBT) community, and to give a voice to secure their full rights throughout Kansas.
Encompassing two weekends and the week between, Kansas PRIDE 2001 activities include many popular events of the past and some new activities. Events being repeated this year include a Monday (June 11) evening theater production, an educational panel on Tuesday, literature readings on Wednesday evening and a prom/dance on Friday evening (June14). The Kansas PRIDE Prom is featured in a special PRIDE section of the June 2001 issues of OUT Magazine and The Advocate, two national publications.
A major new event added this year is a free Pride Festival on Saturday (June 16) leading up to the traditional and popular PRIDE Picnic. The new Pride Festival begins at 2:00 p.m. with a co-ed volleyball tournament along with a number of exhibits and booths. At 6:00 p.m. the ever popular free picnic will be held, this year featuring a professional DJ and music for all. The Festival and Picnic will be held at Lake Shawnee's Reynold's Lodge on the east side of Topeka (just south of 29th Street on Croco Road).
Following the picnic, at about 7:00 p.m., a short rally will feature remarks from prominent members of the GLBT community, both locally and nationally. Mark Willis of Houston, Texas, a director of InterPride, will address the attendees. InterPride is an international organization supporting Pride activities and events throughout the world. Cheryl Fields of the Kansas Human Rights Commission is also a featured guest. Well-known in the gay community, Dr. Robert Minor, professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas, will also make remarks.
Both weekends are filled with pre and post events of interest to the gay, lesbian, bi and transgendered community, including social events at area clubs and worship services at the Metropolitan Community Church of Topeka.
The complete schedule is available on the new Kansas Pride website www.kansaspride.org or by calling Jim Ploger at 785-273-3088.
(Jim Ploger is a Program Manager at the Kansas Corporation Commission and is the Co-Chair of the Kansas Unity and Pride Alliance, the primary organizer of Pride Week.)