Today, I read an article from the print edition of Sunday's (August 24, 2014) Deseret News titled "What Kind of Prison Might the Inmates Design?" by Lee Romney. The article describes how inmates at San Francisco's County Jail No. 5 worked with Deanna VanBuren, an architect, and Barb Toews, an academic and fellow workshop leader, to create schematics of a jail/prison that would help them be accountable for the crimes that they had committed and heal themselves and their victims. It is based on the concept of restorative justice which I have only heard a little about. However, the idea intrigues me because it focuses more on helping inmates change than on exacting retribution for crimes committed. The article mentions that the idea of restorative justice is controversial, in part because the same crime could receive widely different treatments.
Recently, I have been interested in the punitiveness not only of the criminal justice system but of society on those who go through the system and then are released after paying fines and/or doing jail time. It seems like it is very difficult for those people to get jobs and integrate back into society. I wonder how a restorative justice model might deal with the issue of reintegrating former criminals into society. Romney notes in his article that more and more people are realizing that the traditional criminal justice system has a poor track record of preventing recidivism. So one of my question is how effective is restorative justice at reducing recidivism rates among former inmates? how does a restorative justice model compare to a traditional criminal justice model?
The question that Toews posed at the end of the article is only one of the questions that I think is worth exploring. She asks, "If we treated it as a potential for something literal, if the environment were different, how might that change how we do justice?" I'm not sure what Toews means by it, but she might mean justice or even the space that the inmates that she worked with created.
Additional questions include what exactly is restorative justice? how would society have to change to accept a restorative justice model? what does the general population know about restorative justice? how does the general population feel about restorative justice compared to the traditional criminal justice system?
