On Punitive Restoration

  • There is a tension within the criminal justice system between reducing re-offense rates and instilling public confidence
  • Improvements to one can come at the expense of the other
    • Increasing severity of punishments can make reducing crime more difficult
    • Example: California’s 3-strikes law
      • Negligible deterrent effect
      • Huge increase in prison population
  • Our current model isn’t working
    • Current sentencing practices only apply to a handful of people, since most cases end in a plea bargain
    • This is unfair to victims, the offender, and to the public
      • Victims can’t publicly affirm their stories
      • Offender and public lose out because the court loses the ability to decide sentences - can only affirm or veto the punishment in the plea deal
    • Greater use of restorative justice can lead to a model of criminal justice that avoids the problems outlined above
  • Restorative Justice: A First Step
    • Two particular forms
      • Victim-offender mediation
      • Restorative conferencing
    • Goal is to “restore” the offender back to being a lawful citizen
    • Meetings held by a trained facilitator and only when the offender admits guilt
    • Provide an opportunity for constructive dialog
    • Participation must be voluntary
    • Meeting structure
      • Facilitator clarifies parameters and purpose of meeting
      • Victim has an opportunity to speak, address the offender and state how their crime impacted them
      • Offender speaks last, and accounts for their crime
      • Meeting ends with the participants confirming a restorative contract
    • Restorative justice is more effective than traditional punishment
      • Participants in restorative meetings confirm higher satisfaction in the process than in alternatives
      • Re-offense rates under restorative justice programs are up to 25% lower than re-offense rates in traditional sentencing
  • The need for a new model
    • Restorative justice is currently being held back from wider application because it doesn’t include the possibility of prison as part of a restorative contract
    • If prison can be recast as a way of providing more intensive interventions when other options are not feasible, prison can be made compatible with the tenets of restorative justice
    • This hybrid model can be termed “punitive restoration”
    • Expanding restorative justice to include some punitive options can lead to less punitive system overall
    • Can allow for more widespread use of restorative justice without undermining public confidence in the system

Anger and Trauma

  • Why is anger a common response to trauma
    • Anger is a core part of the survival response in human beings
    • Help people cope with stress by shifting focus toward the problem that has to be solved
    • However this anger can create problems after the trauma has ended
  • How can anger after trauma become a problem
    • Person’s response to extreme threat can become “stuck” and become their response to all challenges
    • Three key aspects of post-traumatic anger
      • Arousal - muscle tension, irritability, feeling of being “on edge”
      • Behavior - impulsiveness, only using aggressive responses
      • Thoughts and beliefs - belief that threat is all around, even when this is not true
  • How can someone get help with anger
    • CBT is a commonly used technique that helps with all three aspects
    • Arousal - learn skills, such as relaxation techniques, that lower the overall level of arousal
    • Behavior - expand on range of possible responses when confronted with stress
    • Thoughts/beliefs - come up with more positive thoughts to replace anger

Review: Sarah Schulman’s Conflict Is Not Abuse presents a shift in thinking about power relations, harm and social responsibility

  • Premise of book: we are conflating conflict with abuse
    • Conflict is “power struggle” and is a normal part of existence for individuals, groups and states
    • Abuse is “power over” and is characterized by lopsided domination of one side by another
  • Terms come from the social work community and are used at the interpersonal level, but can also be used to provide moral clarity when looking at group and state conflict
  • According to Schulman, we live in an era of “overreaction to conflict and underreaction to abuse”
  • Need to distinguish overstatement of harm from the harm itself
  • The danger of mischaracterizing conflict as abuse is that it lowers the bar for what we term abuse, allowing abusers to claim the position of victim