When I opened my email account yesterday morning, I received a letter claiming I’d “shown interest in our Restorative Justice resources.” It offered up a free book: Where Love & Justice Meet. It went on to talk about how “justice and love originate in and from God, especially through the cross and sacrifice of Jesus.” I don’t know a Laura LaRock and can’t imagine why she’d think I was interested in restorative justice. And, for a staunch atheist, it would be the height of hypocrisy to look to Jesus as a role model. But Ms. LaRock, through the magic of metrics, pegged me as someone in need of consoling. That piece the data got right.
According to Scientific American “face-to-face meetings between victim and perpetrator bring relief to both parties.” Whoa, that’s a grand claim. Really? All victims and perpetrators? Apparently more victims experience post-traumatic stress when they go through the criminal justice system than when they partake in a restorative justice group. Big caveat. These studies looked at victims of robbery and burglary. Not victims of homicide.
“Restorative justice gives victims that chance to reframe the story and heal in the process,” one of the experts claimed. I get how important reframing stories is. I am doing just that in my own reckoning with my friendship with Patty. I am moving away from casting it through my normal knee-jerk black and white frame. She made both good and bad choices. How could I claim she was either a bad or good person? She was, like us all, a composite. She was less than commendable at times, and yet solidly stand-up at others.
Seeing that email in my inbox brought up all my mixed feelings when I first encountered the term restorative justice. I was pulling up in front of the office at Holy Cross in Daly City. It was my first trip to the cemetery where Patty is buried. Inside the office two women were ahead of me, so I seated myself in the waiting area. I picked up a copy of the Catholic San Francisco newspaper, and spread it across my knee. A half-page photograph of greeting cards children had sent to inmates at San Quentin was splashed across the front page to commemorate The Year of Mercy. “Prison Pen Pals Offer Youth a Lesson in Mercy and Restorative Justice” read the headline.
Students had cut hearts from construction paper and scribbled the words “God” and “faith” in crayon. “Don’t Lose Hope,” was the message on one. “Never Give Up,” on another. They were all signed to maintain anonymity by this eighth-grade Catholic girl, or that seventh grader. The article described restorative justice as distinct from criminal justice. The idea was to hold the offender accountable, but also to join the victim and community in the process. If offenders took responsibility for their actions, understood the harm they had caused. Ideally that would discourage them from causing further harm. The article concluded with “someone will always love you,” taken from one of the greeting cards.
I folded the newspaper into my purse. My head was swimming with references to mercy and calls to action. I thought of those pen pal kids, of my years in Catholic school. My early training in unconditional forgiveness never stuck. Restorative justice — what a crock. The last thing I planned on doing was giving the person who killed my friend a pass. My notion of forgiveness was by definition conditional. Besides, how would the “victim” participate? She was long gone.
