Restorative Justice provides a new vision of justice that holds out much promise as a positive response to crime. It has been a journey of hope and discovery as I have learned about the incredible strength of those who have been victimized, the capacity of many who have caused harm to reclaim their lives and give back to their communities after decades of destruction and despair, and the wisdom of regular folks in the community who are teaching us how to wrap those who have been victimized in arms of loving comfort and protection and wrap those who have offended in arms of loving discipline and limits. The cycle of despair concerning crime, fed by anger and fear, can become a cycle of hope when we create processes in which every participant is valued and every voice the victim, the community, the offender is heard in its pain, anger, fear, remorse, anguish or hope. Need To Change Our Way of Thinking As a society, we have been caught in thinking errors similar to those of the typical offender. Offenders will frequently assert that they had no choice, they had to steal something because they needed it, or they had to hit someone because that person had offended them.
Offenders often have difficulty identifying other behavioral options.
As a society, we have been thinking that the only choice we have in responding to crime is to get meaner and meaner until we frighten people into behaving as we wish. But that is not the only choice we have for managing behavior, and fear is not the most powerful motivator. We now know from years of research that positive forces are more powerful motivators than negative forces, that relationships shape behavior more than fear. We have changed the way we raise children and the way we run the workplace based on that research. It is time to apply that knowledge to the way we discipline community members who violate our rules.