Today, the "box" of criminal justice is retribution, literally "paying back," beginning with the classical "eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth" retribution that matched the punishment to the crime at an individual level involving victim and offender. Over time, we have changed the object of the payback from the victim to the state. Virtually every crime hurts an individual or a community, but we have today made the state the victim instead of its people as individuals or collections of individuals (communities). In today's justice system, the injured party—the victim—only serves the state in its need for a payback. The perpetrator/offender also serves the state in its need for a payback. Relatively little good comes from this system, compared to the harm it perpetrates on its own victims in its need to punish people for breaking the laws that it writes. A growing consensus demands restoration of the wound, the hurt, to wholeness. A new form of justice has begun to appear in our consciousness over the last 25 years or so; a justice that will first involve the persons and their communities in the search for answers that restore relationships and only turns to the state for retribution in specific cases.

The age of reason, now some 300 years old, has led us to formularize reality as we seek the truth behind it. When it comes to studying the behavior of planets, formulas work, but the behavior of people cannot be reduced to a formula. Our present criminal justice system has tried to formularize crimes with standard punishments administered by the state. Indeed, crime, which used to be seen as something harmful that happened between people, became an offense against the state. Punishment, which was once meted out on a personal basis, has now become the province of the state. The old personal way of taking an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth to make retribution for the harm changed into making retribution to the political and legal institution known as the state. The working metaphor of the institution is "breaking." The state makes laws that it intends to help its citizens, and these laws are not to be "broken." When a law is "broken," we look for the person who "broke" it, and figuratively "break" that person in return. We used to break a person on the rack; we now break them in prisons.

The institutional system of justice has serious flaws. It claims to make individuals accountable for their actions by punishing them. In reality, accountability seldom results from the punishments used today. In treating itself as the injured party, the institution of the state neglects the personal injuries caused by the crime. It seeks to punish ("break") the offender by marginalizing that person, stripping him or her of feelings, and removing his or her identity... all by incarcerating that person in close association with others whom it has treated similarly (Zehr, pp 33-44). The injured parties have no way of recovering their losses through the institutionalized system of criminal courts. Ironically, the United States citizenry has turned for retribution to the civil courts and is having no small measure of success (witness the effectiveness of the O. J. Simpson civil trial and the successes of the Southern Poverty Law Center in bringing the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups to their knees). However, these successes do not restore wounds to wholeness; the offender remains in the situation out of which the offense came.

Compensation, education, and forgiveness are absent in both the criminal and civil courts. Accountability and responsibility are present in both forms of justice, but are qualitatively different, affected by the presence or absence of guilt and shame. Powerful and effective community functions of talking circles, dialogue, and mentoring play no role in courtroom proceedings. The Restorative Justice movement that began about 25 years ago has been able to demonstrate consistently remarkable success in using these concepts and methods in a wide variety of social situations in many areas of the globe. It has qualities that challenge the thinking of the Age of Reason, qualities of diversity, holism and integration, compassion, forgiveness, and love. It is not a cure-all but a powerful complement to the old system and institution of criminal and civil law.

Let us now explore these various concepts and themes.

The image of the state goes far back in human history. The biblical expression, "powers, and principalities" applies to the state and the power we gave it. Individuals have always been intimately involved with the functions of the state, but individual strength fades progressively as we evolve through time with the ultimate degradation of personality in the Russian and Chinese Communist states. The institution of state is so powerful that individual citizens have essentially no rights. Even in our country, which espouses civil rights, there is an ongoing struggle between the self-centered needs of the state and the individual, often wildly disparate, needs of the citizens.

Aided by Freud's concept of the super-ego, the state seems to want to take on a life of its own, regulating and controlling the misdemeanors and misbehaviors of its population without any attempt to come to an appreciative understanding of the motivation behind these actions. Out of this situation, one must expect the state to take offense at the attempt by any individual to step outside its box and challenge its authority. It writes laws and regulations that give voice to its belief in this power. It creates a system to assure the working of the laws and regulations. No matter how evolved the state may claim to be, it still uses ancient methods to achieve these ends.

It arms special people whom it designates to enforce the laws. They capture individuals suspected of breaking laws, incarcerate them in special buildings called prisons, and then take them to a special room, a courtroom, for judging and sentencing. In these rooms, the judge and sentencer sits behind a large desk with wall-like properties that is usually elevated to place the judge's eyes above the eyes of the accused. Everything that takes place in this room is meant to be objective, impersonal, and intimidating. The mindset of a courtroom is that someone is guilty and shame on that person for her or his crime! That shaming is supposed to be objective!

Once judged guilty and sentenced, the offender is taken away to prison for a prescribed length of time that the system hopes will change that person, but which seldom seems to have much, if any, beneficial effect at all.

The root word for community is common. There are many kinds of communities, the most common of which is the family. Family dynamics have been studied and analyzed for years. The "dysfunctional" family is a well-defined entity. The roles of the members of such a family have been clearly defined and named. Everyone knows the roles of the scapegoat, the rescuer, the joker, and the silent one. The dysfunctional family is a perfect example of human beings working in close relationship to each other. The relationships are clouded by a hidden agenda, usually some form of addictive abuse. Nevertheless, they are there, and they make cohabitation possible.

Service organizations and clubs are communities. They are less intimate than families, but are often effective in supporting individual members. Some organizations are devoted to supporting their members through all challenges of life.

Support groups are communities. There is a high level of intimacy in support groups, sometimes to excess, but commonly in a truly supportive way.

Towns and clusters of towns are communities. Towns that are well established for long periods are generally supportive of their citizenry. They have ways of coming together that help resolve conflicts and restore harmony in the community.

Tribes of Original People are communities. They generally have the patience to be able to work together to solve their problems and overcome their challenges.

People can come together to create communities for short terms and special reasons. Today, there is a broad interest in our ability to come together for special reasons in community. Two such gatherings occur commonly in Restorative Justice: community circles and dialogue.

In Restorative Justice, communities have responsibilities of directly confronting the problems of crime and mediating them. Crime erodes the fabric of a community and drains its resources. When a community chooses to address the root causes of crime, it can take on the responsibility of determining which causes it can deal with and how.

Originally called "family group conferencing," community conferencing is a return to an ancient wisdom of the Maori people. In 1989, the model became the standard way of a New Zealand community to respond to youthful criminal behavior. The Australians began to adopt this model in 1991. Canada has now begun to develop interest in this model that seems to give even greater power or through dialogue between offender, community, and victim.

Community conferencing recognized that both victim and offender needed support and reintegration, and that the reconciliation of the offender depended a great deal on his or her own support circle. The circles assume that the community must take responsibility for dealing with crime and that this process of dealing with crime goes beyond solving isolated criminal problems to actually building community.

Talking in a circle destroys hierarchy; no one can lead. The Original People of this continent knew the value of gathering in circles to discuss important affairs. Various forms of ritual became associated with the circles, e.g. the peace pipe and the talking stick. By agreement, the natural, ego-directed, human tendency to crosstalk took second place to spirit that spoke through the individual who held the pipe or stick. To hold the talking stick demands responsibility for thought and action because the traditions are that only that person holding the talking stick may speak. The other members of the circle share an equal responsibility to maintain respectful, listening silence.

The process is extremely powerful. Some communities use circles for sentencing. In these communities, the criminal justice/Retributive Justice system pays close attention to and respects the sentences that these community circles hand down. These sentences tend to keep offenders out of jail, to restore them to an effective level of function within the community, and to restore the damage resulting from the offender's behavior.

Going back to the Greek, dialogue means "through gathering or speaking." As developed by David Bohm, dialogue is a process of active listening that leads to the greater appreciation of all participants in the process. This process is similar to the Quaker practice of a "clearness committee," the purpose of which is to help an individual address a concern and find the answers within him or herself. The most profound implication in this process is that of acknowledging the existence of the unconditional relationship of all participating parties.

Restorative Justice is a value-based approach to criminal justice that strives to repair the damage caused by criminal behavior to the individual and community victims of crime. It is fundamentally different from retributive justice, focusing on what needs to be healed; what needs to be repaid, and the degree to which repayment is possible; and what needs to be learned in the wake of the crime. This emphasis elevates the role of crime victims and community members through more active involvement in the justice process, holding offenders directly accountable to those who may have harmed, restoring not only the material but also the emotional losses of the injured, and providing a range of opportunities for dialogue, negotiation, and problem solving. Restorative Justice offers offenders the opportunity to develop new skills and to become integrated into a productive life in the community. It builds communities and in so doing increases public safety. To achieve these ends, it maintains a balanced focus on the victim, the community, and the offender. The practice of Restorative Justice leads to a greater sense of harmony, peace, and safety in the community.

The fundamental concern of Restorative Justice is "restoration:" restoration of the victim, the offender, all forms of damage, and the community. In this context, restoration is as much if not more concerned with the future as with the past. In this same context, retributive justice focuses more on what was done in the past rather that what can be done to create a meaningful future.

Through restorative justice, victims, communities, and offenders are placed in active roles to work together to...

· Empower victims in their search for closure

· Impress upon offenders the real human impact of their   behavior

· Promote restitution to victims and communities
   (Umbright et al.).

Restorative Justice seeks balance between the legitimate needs of the victim, the community, and the offender. In this way, it enhances community protection, competency development in the offender, and direct accountability of the offender to the victim and victimized community.

Rather than punishing an offender to make his or her act unacceptable, or looking past that act in order to support the offender in counseling and treatment, Restorative Justice upholds the clear message that the act is unacceptable and the offender can be supported in a healing practice. This balance of justice and care create a completely new ethic based on balance.

Restorative Justice, regardless of the way in which it may be practiced, reflects a belief that justice should, to the greatest degree possible, do five things: (Sharpe, page 7)

1. Invite full participation and consensus through inclusive dialogue about what happened in the incident and why, and about what is needed to make things right. Victims must be able to speak for themselves, not as witnesses for the prosecution. The offenders must be able to explain their behavior and apologize for, not stand mute the sake of legal defense. Community members must say how they have been affected and how they can help, not just decide whether guilt has been proved.

2. Heal what has been broken because crime causes harm to its victims. The victim's needs must be acknowledged and met. This means reparation. Everyone affected must be included in the reparation.

3. Seek full and direct accountability. Sentencing, alone, does not create accountability; it does not bring the offender into a face-to-face meeting with the victim. Restorative Justice asks offenders to face those whom they have hurt and hear about the harm they have caused.

4. Reunite what has been divided. Crime separates and divides. Community is broken, causing its members pain. Reparation reunites.

5. Strengthen the community to prevent further harms. To the Mohawk, law means "the way to live most nicely together." Restorative Justice seeks those ways that restore our ability to live nicely together -- indeed an onerous standard (Patricia Monture-Okanee).

Restorative Justice as a concept was first introduced in the journal, Ethics, in 1977 by R. Barnett. He used it to refer to certain principles that could be found in American experiments that used mediation between victims and offenders. The idea caught on because many in the field of criminal justice were expressing deep frustrations with the traditional methods of criminal justice. These people, practitioners all, took the concepts and created a practical experience out of it. Out of this experience in turn have come further developments of the concepts of Restorative Justice. In other words, Restorative Justice is experience-based rather than theory-based. In this respect it follows the precedent of the system of instrument flight rules that the Federal Aviation Administration uses to move blind aircraft and crews through the weather systems of our nation and land them safely... imagine what it would be like if the system had been dreamed up by a bureaucrat sitting at a desk! In Restorative Justice, people are using their minds and their hearts to effective profound changes in the criminal justice system.

Because of the apparent revolutionary nature of its approach to justice, there are those who would like to make Restorative Justice a separate system. Most seem to fear that the retributive justice system would undermine and subvert Restorative Justice's aims and purposes. However, most practitioners and developers of the whole field see that the two systems must work together because they complement each other and are necessary approaches to the management of crime.

1. To attend to the needs of the victim: financial, material, social, and emotional.

2. To facilitate dialogue among all persons and communities involved.

3. To prevent offenders from becoming repeat offenders by reintegrating them into the community

4. To encourage, permit, and enable offenders to assume active responsibility for their actions.

5. To empower the community to come together supporting the healing of victims' wounds, rehabilitating offenders, and preventing crime.

6. To provide a means of avoiding escalation of legal justice and the associated costs and delays. (Marshall)

1. Crime has its origins in social conditions and relationships in the community.

2. Crime prevention is dependent on communities taking some responsibility for correcting those conditions that cause crime.

3. The aftermath of crime cannot be fully resolved for all parties without allowing them to become personally involved.

4. Justice measures must be flexible enough to be able to respond to the unique, particular human circumstances at work in each case.

5. Partnership and sharing objectives among justice agencies themselves and between them and the community they serve are essential to Restorative Justice's success.

6. Justice consists of a balanced approach in which a single objective is not allowed to dominate the others.

7. Restorative Justice, by its own design, cannot be expected to replace retributive justice. (Marshall)

Restorative Justice policies and programs can be found in almost every state and in numerous European countries, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Currently, hundreds of programs exist in the United States and in Europe.

1. Widening the Criminal Net: Restorative Justice has the potential to bring more people into the criminal justice system rather than keeping them out. It could preoccupy itself with cases that would likely not be in the system at all because restorative practices are appropriate to cases in which courtroom proceedings are not. The practice must be expanded without widening the criminal net. To avoid this pitfall, Restorative Justice must be held in the same light as other conflict resolution or community-building practices. It is also inappropriate to assume the Restorative Justice applies only to minor cases.

2. Shaming the offender must come from an inner choice of the offender to be accountable and not from the outside, which would have the same effect as a group of citizens choosing to stone an adulteress to death. Restorative Justice should not stigmatize an individual; this is disintegrative shaming -- and effective banishment. Shaming fosters recidivism, marginalizes offenders, and distances them from victims, and it drives them away from the community into the criminal subculture.

3. Domination by professionals: Though professional expertise can at times improve understanding, the professional is at risk of becoming an authority to and for whom the community abrogates its responsibility of authority. Professionals are prone to dominate a process that lies in their field of expertise. Professionals must assume roles of facilitators, not experts.

4. Routinization is a natural tendency in any repetitive function. Restorative Justice is not free of that risk. Facilitators are at risk of the tendency to anticipate a given result. This places them at risk of superficial responses to situations that might contain truly beneficial creative choices.

5. Overreaching the skill base: Stretching in striving is good for programs, but situations in Restorative Justice may lead to overextension. Premature offerings are risky as are any steps that increase the range of service or add special projects without increasing resources of support. The risk of taking on cases that require more specialization of knowledge and skill that is available is always real.

6. Sustaining Injustice -- the enemy within: A program can provide uneven access to Restorative Justice by limiting the type of cases with which it works, limiting itself to special geographical or ethnic areas, or excluding clients who require extra time and energy. It may discriminate against participants by choosing vocabulary and procedures that are more comfortable to one or the other party. It may get into a type of vigilantism of that finds "justice" for a specific criminal incident while ignoring the injustices that may have helped create it.

Restorative Justice depends entirely upon voluntary cooperation of all parties involved. Clearly, should this not take place, the case must be remanded to the more traditional system of justice. Communities are not as uniform and integrated as they once were so their resources and skills may be more sorely tested by the burden imposed by Restorative Justice, but once people begin to perceive the effectiveness of Restorative Justice both socially and economically, it is certain that any community will be willing to commit more resources to Restorative Justice. Finally, social injustice and inequality in and between communities create significant challenges to Restorative Justice's effectiveness. However, these are challenges, and it is in the nature of human beings to overcome them. Carefully expressed concerns for Restorative Justice's effectiveness in capital crimes and adult felony crimes point at another limitation, but even there the methodology has proven effective. Because of the strictness of its standards, Restorative Justice today certainly has a lower incidence of application in these crime areas. Who can tell what the future holds here?

Early studies have showed in many locations that victims would like to have the opportunity to meet their offender. Over 80 percent of the victims look back on the meeting experience as well worthwhile. There is a greater than 75 percent level of victim satisfaction with mediation of all kinds. Because of mediation, victims tend to feel less angry and fearful, feel personally vindicated, and experience a degree of emotional healing. They also come to appreciate that the offender has not been let off too lightly.

In two significant studies, victims who took part in mediation were only half as likely to fear re-victimization as those who did not. Other studies show that where reparation is decided on in the Restorative Justice process the completion rate for reparation is very high, ranging from 70 to 100 percent, compared to completion of court-mandated reparation, which is effective only from 40 to 60 percent of the time.

Restorative Justice positively affects the rate of recidivism, especially in first-time convictions. Offenders claim that the meetings with the community and the victim had considerable effect on them. They said that this was harder than going to court and, paradoxically, they felt more positive about themselves for having participated in the Restorative Justice process. Concerns persist about the effectiveness of Restorative Justice when offenders return to the environment out of which the harm arose. It is my sense that community involvement in the Restorative Justice process increases the likelihood that it will begin to design physical environments and nurture social environments that support healthy behavior. This holistic aspect of Restorative Justice was scattered throughout my readings. It is one that can probably not yet be accurately measured.

Restorative Justice is cost-effective. An audit of Restorative Justice mediation in England showed that each case cost less than 10 percent of the cost of prosecution in the traditional courts. With costs approaching $40,000 a year for each prison inmate in this country, it is hard to imagine that Restorative Justice would not be cost-effective.

The oldest and most widely developed forms of Restorative Justice comprise victim offender mediation and dialogue programs. Other examples of Restorative Justice include: crime repair crews, victim intervention programs, family group conferencing, victim offender mediation and dialogue, peacemaking circles, victim panels speaking to offenders, sentencing circles, community reparative boards, offender competency development programs, victim empathy classes for offenders, victim directed and citizen involved community service by the offender, community-based support groups for crime victims, and community-based support groups for offenders—many names, a few basic principles.

Three words crop up repeatedly: community, victim, and offender. A fundamental universal concept ties them together: all three are individuals caught up with each other in the travails of life. The concept has two subsets: the travails are simply lessons to be learned, and compassion transforms judgment into forgiveness.

For Restorative Justice to work at all, the offender must confess to having caused the harm, for the next step in the process is to bring the aggrieved party together with the offender. If the offender has not accepted the fact that he or she harmed the other, no dialogue can ever ensue. Restorative Justice only works through dialogue.

If a person confesses to doing harm in the retributive justice system, then punishment must follow. In the Restorative Justice system, confession is the opening to restoration of normal human relationships and correction of the harm, so punishment is not the result of the process.

In the Retributive Justice system, the offender, as an individual, is under judgment. In the Restorative Justice system, the offender's behavior is under examination, and the offender is a human being perceived as having made a mistake in behavior rather than having a deficiency of personality.

Examples of this approach to helping people solve their problems prevail in many fields of interaction and relationship in our country today. In fact, the emphasis is on helping people go into themselves for the answers to their problems, trusting that they have them. Quakers have conducted their pastoral affairs in this way for over 300 years. Original People have even older experiences with this belief system, but such belief does not belong to the Age of Reason or the mechanical problem solving that came out of the Age of Reason. Mechanical problem solving is an excellent way of dealing with most medical emergencies, but it begins to lose its effectiveness in chronic illnesses. More and more, those of us in the health professions are finding that the chronic problems respond better to relationships that explore those qualities and aspects of life that provide meaning to life. Such explorations help people find insights that reveal mistakes in their belief systems and provide encouragement for learning the lessons implied in the mistakes.

Indeed, what is at stake here is our ability to change an old belief that we are inherently flawed into a belief that we have the inherent ability to stride toward perfection and that every mistake is a lesson that helps us find perfection. We are at the threshold of a change in consciousness marked by a willingness to be in unconditional, positive, compassionate, and forgiving relationships with each other

Everybody wants to be "normal." After all, we know that to be normal is to belong to a very large percentage of any given population. The frequencies of any quality of a population follow (mathematically) a Gaussian distribution looking like a bell when laid out on a graph. What Carl Friedrich Gauss called "normal" was the central seventy-four percent of the population, leaving 13 percent at either side representing those who on the one hand had virtually all of the qualities and those who on the other had virtually none of the qualities. These two groups are at the margins of the population and it is the classical tendency to look askance at the members of the margins and to judge them as being deficient or abnormal. Criminal behavior was clearly marginal and so was the individual who caused it. Recidivism comes from a Latin root that means a falling back. Released felons tend to fall back into prison at an extraordinary rate. For many years now, the rate of recidivism has been close to 80 percent for all felonies. The term "revolving door" has been commonly used to describe the criminal justice system. Sadly, a lot of effort has been put into rehabilitating prisoners in prison and preparing them for their ultimate release at the end of the prison term. However, the ex-convict usually returns to the environment that nurtured the crime in the first place. That nurturance cannot help but stimulate the growth of the same noxious weed.

The environment of which I speak is the environment of marginalizing people. The marginalizing starts early in life because the individual has been judged inadequate by his or her immediate community. Virtually all roles in the so-called dysfunctional family are pejorative labels that marginalize people. Everyone wants to be loved, so a marginalized person will scoot around the margins of society looking for other marginalized people with whom she or he can identify and receive love. Consider this in the relationship of a prostitute to a pimp, the relationships of IV heroin users, the structure of neo-Nazi communities, hate groups of other kinds like the Ku Klux Klan, and last but not least, the populations of our prisons.

All of these communities have cult-like features-- extremely rigid hierarchical structures. Pimps dominate prostitutes; drug dealers dominate drug users; Hitlers rule neo-Nazi communities; the Ku Klux Klan creates feudal hierarchies, and every prison has its "boss con." Cults do not like their members to leave, so they create enticements that attract and threats that restrict in order to keep their members and to keep them in line. The cult respects and encourages repetition of the marginalized behavior that drew the individual to the cult in the first place. The challenge is clearly one of how to break the rule of hierarchy that identifies a cult. Part of the answer lies in rehabilitation.

The Latin root of rehabilitation means to enable again. To rehabilitate a criminal is certainly not to make it possible for him or her through repeat the injury; rather it is to enable an older practice within the individual. This implies a spiritual quality, for childhood traumas may have caused the psyche to put aside the older practice. Nature abhors a vacuum, so if we want to stop the harmful behavior, we must find one that satisfactorily replaces it. As the Tibetan Buddhist nun, Pema Chödrön, puts it: "First, do no harm. Second, do some good; benefit someone."

The following appeared on the morning news of Wednesday, Feb. 7 2001: About three years previously, an American Native in Florida drove his SUV into a deep swamp. He got out but his two sons did not. He was in an estranged relationship with the boys' mother; it was night; he said that he "missed a turn;" and he claimed that he did not know that the two boys were in the car. In the three years that elapsed since this tragic incident took place, the State of Florida built a case for murder, and they wanted to send this man to prison. In the meantime, the tribal community came together in their traditional ways of resolving such problems, and told the state to drop their case because they, the tribal community, had forgiven him, and appropriate corrective measures were in place. The state, bound by the laws of retributive justice, refused to accede to tribal, restorative justice customs.

It was still not clear (on May 18, 2001) how the Florida Bush was going to respond to this one. As our awareness of the effectiveness of the tribal customs grows, how deeply will the old institution dig in its heels in the face of the wisdom of an even older institution? How deeply will punishment-thinking dig in its heels in the face of forgiveness thinking? Restorative Justice today turns to the older institutions for their wisdom and experience with this kind of justice and for their understanding and appreciation of the meaning of forgiveness.

The practice of forgiveness is ancient. It is implied in Buddhism and frank in Christianity. However, it remains a conundrum because of implications of condoning harmful behavior. Indeed, one of the meanings of forgiveness is to excuse or pardon. However, another meaning of forgiveness is to renounce anger or resentment against someone or something. In any case, forgiveness is not possible without prior judgment. Its deepest meaning is to let go of that judgment.

The physiologic effects of forgiveness and compassion have been measured and found to be as beneficial to health as resentment and bitterness are detrimental to it. When a subject even thinks of a harm done to him or her, the stress response factors build up in the body. Nursing a grudge against the offender aggravates the stress response. Empathizing compassionately with the offender by the use of a simple phrase that wishes that person "well" produces a significant reduction in the stress response. Furthermore, the empathizing effect of forgiveness gave the subjects a sense of greater control, power, well-being, and resolution.

I think it is appropriate to consider that forgiveness is the key to the difference between Restorative Justice and Retributive Justice. In the example I give above, the potential for conflict between the two forms of justice is clear. The irony is that those who would practice forgiveness do not see themselves in conflict with those who practice judgment. The reverse is not true, nor is it likely to be.

Forgiveness is never easy. The physiologic change I referred to above causes a flood of challenging feelings. Old habits die hard, and this flood can seem overwhelming. In the face of the flood, one may choose to return to the old pattern of retributive justice. Obviously, the work requires trained facilitators. A lot of this work takes place throughout this country and many other places in the world today, and there is an excellent body of experience in training facilitators in the process. The facilitation required by this process is qualitatively no different from most other kinds of facilitation. Quantitatively, however, the demands can be far more challenging, especially when one considers that the process must bring offender and victim together and that the two may come from markedly different ethnic backgrounds with widely varying non-verbal means of communication.

Restorative Justice is not "new." It is an old form of justice used by societies, which other, younger, societies have put down, considering themselves "more advanced." The advancement of which we are so proud began around 300 years ago with the revolution in thinking that we call today the Age of Reason. Reason attempted to make the universe an objective phenomenon. Its tools are analysis and logic. Living systems defy logic. They suffer from analysis because they are, by nature, whole—they are the result of synthesis.

The modern criminal justice system is an example of rationalism and objectivism. Newtonian physics is an example of rationalism and objectivism. When quantum physics opened new vistas in science, the old rules did not work any longer; they created two problems for every question they answered. The present system of justice seems to be in the same quandary. Out of the confusion of a plethora of laws, courtroom conduct, and sentencing rules that deny the victim a restoration of healing, we have become aware that we must return to the subjective immeasurables of compassion, forgiveness, and community, and bring victim and offender together in a safe community of people that nurtures their relationship and fosters the healing of the wounds of all those involved.

Restorative Justice has caught on slowly and steadily. It is an experience-based, value-based system of restoring human relationships. It works human-to-human. It recognizes the need for judge-jury-accused relationships. It offers a cost-effective way of resolving a significant number of cases that fill our courts today. The results of Restorative Justice are consistently better than the results of retributive justice. It has limited application in capital crimes and in cases of repeat offenders. A significant effect of Restorative Justice may be that of having a favorable impact on the incidence of capital crimes and recidivism. That remains to be seen. Time will tell whether the last 25 years of experience will last another century or not.

I would like to acknowledge my various sources for learning about Restorative Justice (Restorative Justice). The Maine Council of Churches (http://www.mainecouncilofchurches.org) directed by Tom Ewell and his extremely competent and passionately committed staff person, Suzanne Rudalevige, introduced me to the topic. Suzanne loaned me a copy of Suzanne Sharpe's Restorative Justice: A Vision for Healing and Change, published by the Edmonton Victim Offender Mediation Society in 1998, and that led to me to a Web search where I found the work of Gordon Bazemore of Florida Atlantic University and his colleague, Mark S. Umbreit, Ph.D., of the University of Minnesota School of Social Work (http://ssw.che.umn.edu/rjp);
Tony F. Marshall (http://ssw.che.umn.edu/ctr4rjm);
Howard Zehr and Harry Mika of the Mennonite Central Committee (http://www.mennonitecc.ca/whatsnew/fp/fp004/index.html), and programs of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. These resources have introduced me to twenty or more other individuals and organizations working with Restorative Justice. As it is a relatively new field, a great deal of the references to it is on the World Wide Web accessed through such search engines as www.yahoo.com, searching for "restorative justice."

Reference: Zehr, H. Changing Lenses. Waterloo (Ont.): Herald Press, 1995

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