Justice project focuses on healing, not punishment

Helping improve criminal justice may be as basic as changing the perspective from which crime is viewed, says law professor Walter Dickey.

Dickey, the faculty director of the Law School’s Frank J. Remington Center, which focuses on improving the criminal justice system, has witnessed the growth and numerous effects of the center’s Restorative Justice Project since its inception 14 years ago.

While crime has traditionally been viewed from a retributive perspective, restorative justice focuses primarily on healing and restoring losses. Instead of defining crime by the violation of the state, it asserts that crime violates people and relationships, and searches for solutions to promote repair and restoration on an individual level.

The Restorative Justice Project began after the simple assessment of the role of apology in criminal law. “We learned that apology was basically unknown and viewed by the defense as an admission,” says Dickey, who is also a former head of the Wisconsin prison system. “Therefore, what we found was defense lawyers saying “never say you’re sorry’ to their clients, with the mistaken belief that this was good for defendants.”

These findings led to the project and the specific implementation of victim offender conferencing, an opportunity for victims and offenders to participate in mediated dialogue. Most cases involve adult offenders in the Wisconsin prison system or post-conviction cases, a fact that makes the UW project unlike any other restorative justice endeavor in the country.

Dickey acknowledges that although apology and forgiveness are not often associated with criminal law, understanding their connection is crucial to allowing for healing and justice, a fact that was apparent from the very beginning of the project.

“We had defendants who seemed very sincere in their desire to apologize, and we had victims who had all kinds of needs that weren’t being met,” Dickey says. He points to achieving a greater sense of understanding of both the motivations and consequences of a crime as a primary component of restorative justice. These efforts are especially aimed at helping the offender understand what the victim is feeling and aiding the victim’s recovery toward closure.

“I’ve been a little surprised at how so many offenders make their victims into objects that don’t have feelings and don’t suffer in human ways that we understand,” he says. “We thought it would be a good thing for [offenders] to understand and experience more of what the human consequences were. Empathy usually brings some understanding, and understanding might play a role in their not doing these things again.”

Law students who participate in the project benefit from the multiple perspectives that are taken into account, something that Dickey believes can help produce better-educated lawyers and, in effect, help remedy the deficiencies of the current criminal justice system.

“People who claim to talk for victims often hold up vengeance and greater severity as the things that make victims happy,” he says. “Once you start to enlarge the things you offer to victims, all of a sudden this thing called vengeance may become less significant. Society is telling us it’s severity that victims want, and our experience is victims are diverse and want diverse things, and when you offer them diverse things, they make diverse choices.”

The complexity of aiding victims and offenders is one key to a larger and more complicated process, which can involve up to a year of preparation prior to the meeting. The project includes both victim-and offender-initiated cases, but all participation must be entirely voluntary. And the offender must meet several criteria, including displaying remorse and accepting the victim’s version of key facts. The offender also must understand that participating in the project does not allow for leveraging an apology into something more for the offender.

The seriousness and sensitivity required by restorative justice project cases is tied to the relationship between victim and offender. Dickey says the victim and the offender know each other in the majority of cases. “The idea that they’re never going to see each other again is unrealistic, so bringing some sort of closure to this can allow them to go on in ways that make life more livable for everybody,” he says.

The project averages 20 cases each year, but Dickey says he expects it to spread and become more accepted as more people realize their desire for closure. “I think that this is a welcome addition to the system,” Dickey says. “The idea that this is going to bring a fundamental alteration to the system seems unlikely to me, and that’s not what we’re about. We’re trying to add value where we can.”