You’ve been caught shoplifting. A cop has cuffed you and the angry shopkeeper is in your face. Next stop, a courtroom and a criminal record.
You’re under arrest for driving drunk, and not for the first time. You didn’t run anyone over—yet—but you could be looking at jail time.
But maybe not.
Every year, about 80 youth and adult offenders in southern Vermont participate in alternatives to the penal system run by the Brattleboro Community Justice Center. In the process known as restorative justice, non-violent offenders, sometimes face-to-face with their victims, come to terms with their actions and their effect on those involved. In this approach, crime is viewed as a violation of individuals and civic relationships rather than an offense against the state, and the emphasis is placed on reparation rather than punishment.
Last week and this, the CJC is celebrating the annual International Restorative Justice Week in a collaboration with the Brattleboro-based New England Youth Theatre. The Quality of Mercy, running through this weekend, is a theatrical potpourri of scenes, monologues and songs on issues of justice and the kinds of personal and social situations that lead to crimes. The show seeks to spread the word about what restorative justice is and what it does for offenders, victims and their communities.
The Brattleboro center is one of 11 state-supported programs in Vermont. In the Valley, Reinventing Justice programs in Franklin and Hampshire counties employ the same strategy. The approach is applied in many judicial and conflict situations around the world, not only in criminal and juvenile justice programs but in national tribunals such as South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
“It’s an old, old practice,” says the CJC’s director Larry Hames, pointing out that Native Americans and the Maori of New Zealand developed similar procedures long ago and still use them. “It makes all kinds of sense. It’s a different way of looking at justice than the case-law system we inherited from the British.”
Instead of saying, “You’ve done something wrong and you’re going to be punished,” restorative justice asks, “How can you make reparation?” As Hames sees it, “We have a public trust, a moral obligation to our communities, to say, for example, we’re going to be sober—and not texting—when we drive our vehicles, because that puts our community at risk. And if you’re putting your community at risk, you’re in violation of the public trust that we’ve developed with each other.”
The Community Justice Center occupies a suite of four comfortably furnished rooms on the top floor of the Brattleboro police station—a symbolic three floors away from the holding cells in the basement. In the conference room, half a dozen armchairs circle a round coffee table. On an easel in one corner, a whiteboard is divided into three columns, headed “What was the harm?”, “Who was harmed?” and “What can be done to repair it?”
These three questions guide the work of what are known as reparative panels, convened by the center with offenders who voluntarily participate in the program as a condition of probation. Each panel is composed of four or five trained volunteers from the community, who meet with the offender four times over a three-month period. Together, sometimes with the victim participating as well, they explore those questions, working toward an agreement on appropriate reparations, as well as practical steps the offender can take to avoid re-offending.
Sometimes the CJC’s intervention can bypass the penal system altogether. For certain first-offense misdemeanors, for example shoplifting, the police can refer a case that would otherwise end up in court to the center’s Justice Alternatives program. There, victim and offender meet with a facilitator to work out a mutually agreeable way to repair the harm done. When the process is successful, says Hames, “the complaint will be torn up and the prosecutor never deals with it. It’s a way for the offender’s name to avoid being recorded in the court.” It’s also a means of clearing the docket of minor cases that can be more efficiently, and in many cases more effectively, dealt with outside the system.
“Some people look at restorative justice, making repairs for criminal events, as a slap on the wrist, an easy way out,” Hames observes. “But talk to many of the people who’ve come to the reparative panel, and they’ll tell you how difficult it was, to meet a jury of their peers in this situation and have to—not defend themselves, because no one’s attacking them,” but they’re being challenged to dig deep: “What was going through your mind? What was going on with you then? Who did you hurt, and how?” and then, “What changes have you made?”
Among the other services the center offers are mediation and conflict resolution of disputes between neighbors, co-workers, landlords and tenants, even citizens and police. And for people coming back to town from prison, there’s a Restorative Reentry Program which forms a “circle of support and accountability” that facilitates reintegration into the community and helps break the cycle of recidivism.
Restorative justice isn’t in opposition to the adversarial court system, says Hames. “It can be complementary. It’s just a different way, a more humanitarian way, of looking at crime. Their job is to put people in jail, and our mission is to do reparations in the local community.” He adds, “No one wants a rapist or a murderer to be walking around free, but there are non-violent crimes that really can be adjudicated better in this community forum, and have more meaningful and lasting results.”
Twice blessed
Restorative justice is a widespread but surprisingly little-known practice, even in the communities where it’s employed, due in part to the necessary confidentiality of the process. The annual Restorative Justice Week is an opportunity to make the theory and practice more widely known and understood. The New England Youth Theatre’s production of The Quality of Mercy, a first-time collaboration for the two organizations, provides a new audience for the CJC’s message. Likewise, it brings the center’s supporters to the 12-year-old theater’s facility on Flat Street, where children of all ages, as well as adults, train in a variety of performance disciplines—which, not incidentally, translate into life skills—and perform in the company’s annual season of plays and musicals.
The current show’s title, of course, comes from one of the most celebrated Shakespearean monologues—Portia’s plea, in The Merchant of Venice, to the moneylender Shylock to refrain from extracting a literal “pound of flesh” from his defaulted debtor. The quality of mercy, Portia says, “is twice blessed: it blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”
The speech is performed by high school senior Moriah Martel. On a recent afternoon, wearing the character’s Elizabethan cloak, she rehearsed it with the show’s director, Rebecca Waxman. Together, they went over and over a crucial three-word passage in the speech, “…mercy seasons justice,” leading into Portia’s final entreaty, beginning, “Therefore, Jew…”
“Make us feel the urgency,” Waxman urged. “Portia’s saying, ‘Please, listen to me, we don’t have a lot of time, please listen and understand.’ And emphasize each of those three words in the previous line. They are all equally important.”
During a break, Martel said she was glad of the opportunity to get really familiar with the speech, which she had previously known only by its opening line, “The quality of mercy is not strained,” and its reputation as a cornerstone of the Shakespeare canon. “It’s pretty amazing,” she said. “It perfectly sums up the ideas of restorative justice. It’s like a mission statement for the whole show, right here in the speech.”
The performance assembles excerpts from dramatic and literary works with things to say about justice, revenge and mercy, including To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies and Saint Joan. There are also vignettes that dramatize perilous situations for young people—parental abuse, conflict with peers, dangerous temptations—the kinds of things that can lead to violence or self-destructive behavior. One of these, from the collage play Runaways, by Elizabeth Swados, was being rehearsed by 15-year-old Zoe Perra. It depicts a teenage girl who gets her unresponsive parents’ attention by breaking things and screaming insults, and is rewarded with hideous physical punishment.
“It’s really intense,” Perra said afterward. “I think one of the things that’s powerful about it is that everybody knows, or knows of, someone who’s been through this kind of thing.” Including it in this show serves “to get a bit of an awareness, to get it out in the open. You need to embrace everybody in order to help people who are going through this.”
Waxman, who has taught at NEYT since its inception 12 years ago and is now its executive director, said the opportunity of creating this show inspired the theater to form its entire fall season around the idea of restorative justice. “So all of our classes, from the littles to the 19-year-olds, are geared toward the themes that come up in restorative justice: forgiveness, compassion, crisis, choices. The same things you’re going to deal with in theater anyway, but with those parameters.”
The performance includes adults as well as youth, plus members of the outside community. One of Waxman’s goals was to involve other organizations in Brattleboro, and she came up trumps for one of the numbers. Five members of the Brattleboro Police Department are performing “Gee, Officer Krupke” from West Side Story.
Community members are also involved in the talkbacks that follow each performance, facilitated by volunteers from the CJC’s reparative panels. This and other aspects of the collaboration are coordinated by Erin Ruitenberg, one of the center’s four staff members. A recent graduate of Springfield College’s master’s program in Industrial and Organizational Psychology, she’s on a one-year assignment to CJC as an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer.
“I’ve really bought into the whole restorative justice model,” she says. “It seems to make sense, and I like thinking about people’s behaviors and motivations for what they do, without just applying general rules for everyone. It’s a good application of my psychology training, making things right based on those principles.”
“Many people will never be involved in any kind of justice-system scenario,” says Larry Hames. “But chances are they know someone or have a loved one who has been.” He hopes the NEYT show will introduce more people to the potential of restorative justice. His philosophy of restoration, not punishment, is summed up by a bumper sticker on the back of his pickup truck, a saying attributed to Confucius: “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.”
The Quality of Mercy: Nov. 19-21, $6-10, New England Youth Theatre, 100 Flat St., Brattleboro, (802) 246-NEYT (6398), neyt.org.
