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Restorative Justice: A Local Practice

The Center for Applied and Professional Ethics (CAPE) joined with the Peace and Justice Center to sponsor a series of forums and workshops on restorative justice. At the first forum on Sept. 13, “Restorative Justice: A Local Practice,” Andrew Flescher, Religious Studies and CAPE director, explained that restorative justice seeks to restore victim and offender through dialogue, mediation, communication, and recovery. This contrasts with retributive justice, “the idea that people deserve punishment for the crimes they committed and justice occurs by way of punishing the perpetrators.” Restorative justice is more symmetrical, said Flescher, “just as it focuses on the restoration of the dignity and integrity of the victim, so does it focus on the reform of the perpetrator and, indeed, makes the controversial claim that that kind of remedy occurs by way of reform of the perpetrator.”

As an example, Flescher noted that the nation’s leaders are not talking about restorative justice after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; they’re focused on retributive justice. He said of the attackers, “If they’re smart enough to pull that off, they are certainly smart enough to anticipate the kind of response it would provoke, and, it seems to me, it behooves us to air these things, to deal with our anger, but when it comes time to think about how we’re going to respond internationally, to let cooler heads and reason prevail.”

The panel focused on local issues. The idea of restorative justice has recently expanded to include the environment and political issues. Amaera Baylaurel-Ceccone, director of the Peace and Justice Center, sees restorative justice as a holistic approach to the world. If you understand that everything is interconnected, “you recognize that we cannot affect one part of the system without changing another, and so you would want something that was healing for the whole community,” she said.

When she was asked to be on the panel, Jane Dolan, Butte County supervisor, said she didn’t do restorative justice. But as she thought about it, she decided “a lot of things that are done at the local level to try to improve physical space, or to plan for quality physical space, to protect the things that we want” are restorative. An example Dolan gave was her experience of asking the people of Chapman neighborhood, an unincorporated area of about 800 families (most of whom fall at or below the federal poverty guidelines), what they wanted. They said they liked their neighborhood but wanted it fixed up a bit.

Dolan noted that older neighborhoods are often ignored by governments and left to decline. She credited the Chapman neighborhood with tremendous patience to have tolerated conditions such as a lack of fire hydrants, lack of sewer system, and incompatible land uses, which would not have been tolerated in a middle-class neighborhood.

Dolan helped the neighborhood obtain grants to bring in fire hydrants, improve housing safety, plant about 225 trees, and help move an asphalt paving business from in front of the elementary school to a more suitable location. The neighborhood created the Chapman-Mulberry Zoning Plan, which defines land use and is the only plan within the county to include design guidelines. Dolan said, “The credit goes to the people in the neighborhood,” who kept at it until they got their neighborhood restored.

Jessica Rios works with the California Wild Heritage Campaign, a coalition of 150 groups, the four largest of which are The Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, the Friends of the River, and the California Wilderness Coalition. The campaign’s goal is to obtain federal wilderness designations and federal wild and scenic river designations for California’s wild places. Wilderness and wild and scenic river designations prohibit logging, mining, dams, and off-road vehicles. In California, only 2,000 of the 172,000 miles of river are protected from dams. California has “lost 97 acres of wilderness per day over the last two decades,” Rios said. The campaign wants to protect the remaining 3 million acres of roadless areas and about 2,800 miles of eligible wild and scenic rivers in California.

“What is being restored?” Rios asked. “Our realization, our awareness, and our sense of responsibility,” the realization of the need for wild places, the awareness of what still exists, and the responsibility to protect and respect the earth.

The next workshop in the CAPE series on restorative justice, “Power Shuffle,” is Wednesday, Oct. 24.

Barbara Alderson