Eye on the Courts: Neighborhood Court Program is a Step in the Right Direction

You will not find many more critical of this District Attorney’s office than this site.  However, we believe that the District Attorney’s office deserves real credit for taking a program that has worked successfully in San Francisco, adding true restorative justice components to it, and then planning to implement it in the city of Davis, for starters, as a pilot program.

“Rather than charging a case for prosecution, the District Attorney’s Office will refer certain misdemeanors and infractions to Neighborhood Court,” the DA explained in a press release.  “In Neighborhood Court, a panel of trained volunteers from the community hears the case.  All hearings are confidential, and participation by the offender is completely voluntary.”

Both sides must agree to this program – it requires both the victim and the offender to agree or the matter will be handled more traditionally.

The program will start at pretty low level offenses, things like public intoxication, perhaps some DUIs and some other cases where there may not be clear victims, but where the community members will act as though they were the victims.

The indication we have gotten from people who have met with the District Attorney’s office about this program is that if it proves successful at the low levels, the DA’s office will be inclined to expand it beyond Davis and also beyond low-level misdemeanor cases.

That makes sense for a number of reasons.  For one, it irons out any wrinkles in the system on cases where the stakes are relatively low.  And by building confidence and awareness, it will be easier to expand.

But, make no mistake, this is a bold and innovative move, and the DA deserves a lot of credit for starting to think outside of the box.  We believe that this reflects the reality that people across the country are figuring out that the system of crime and punishment, based on locking people away for as long as possible depending on the offense, is not working.

The approach has led to crowded jails with people who are in there for relatively minor offenses with a high recidivism rate.

From our perspective, there are two components to this that are promising.

The first is that, in our system, neither victim nor offender are well served by the process.  This week, the DA’s office honors victims of crime, but after guiding the victims through the criminal justice and providing some levels of support, at some point victims are on their own.

Many have emotional scars, some have physical scars, and many are never the same again.  Simply locking someone away often does not resolve the issues that remain for the victim.

By the same token, most offenders are also poorly served.  Locking someone away may protect society, but the lack of resources we put into treatment, psychological services, job training and education, leaves offenders in a position where they lack the skills and experience to obtain employment upon release.  They are stigmatized by their criminal offenses, and they end up in a vicious circle from which many never escape.

That recidivism rate is alarming.  70% of released offenders will re-offend within a relatively short period of time.

This approach can help deal with both of those issues.

As the DA notes in the press release, “Recidivism can be reduced by keeping low-level offenders out of the criminal justice system and keeping convictions off their record.  Through the community panel driven process, participants will gain a much greater understanding of the impacts their crimes have had on their victims and the community, making them less likely to reoffend.”

The restorative approach is “a process focused on the harm to the victim caused by crime and the offender’s obligation to repair that harm.”  They continue, “This process empowers those most affected by the crime. Neighborhood Court outcomes, to the extent possible, repair the harm done to the victim, emphasize offender accountability and responsibility while addressing the reasons for the offense.”

To look at this a different way, we recall the talk that Sujatha Baliga gave at the City of Davis MLK Day.

Today when there’s a crime, she said, we think in terms of “What law was broken?  Who broke it?  And how do we punish that person?”

“Restorative justice asks a very different set of questions,” she continued.  “It asks what harm was done, what needs have arisen, and whose obligation is it to meet those needs?”

She said that, rather than state-centered, it focuses on the mending of human relations and begins with the victims being asked their needs and how we would go about healing that.

“It posits that crime is a violation of people and interpersonal relationships,” she said.  “Those violations create obligations.  And that central obligation is to do right by the people that you have harmed.”

Recently I read a book entitled Killing McVeigh, which chronicled the Oklahoma City Bombing by studying the impact of the crime on the victims – whether they were people injured in the bombing who survived or families members of those killed.  Prior to his execution, many of those victims had requested a victim-offender session, but were denied by authorities.

Even in a crime as horrific as the Oklahoma City Bombing, some of the victims saw value in reaching out to the perpetrator and getting answers to their questions, believing maybe that could provide a degree of closure.

Some have erroneously viewed the restorative justice process as a way for criminals to escape accountability.  In fact, I would argue it is the very opposite.  The current system allows criminals to escape accountability because, while they serve time, they never have to admit to wrongdoing and they never have to take steps to rectify the situation.

In short, they are not held accountable for their actions.

The DA here understands this dilemma and believes that, as the offenders becomes more aware and gain a greater understanding of the impact that their crimes have on the victims and the community, it will make them less likely to reoffend.

It is also important to understand that the victim must agree to the remedy.  As the DA notes, “In order to repair the harm caused by the crime and to resolve the case, panel members will work with the offenders to reach a mutual agreement which may include restitution, community service and counseling.”

The key is agreement.  The victim’s desires and needs in this sort of an approach take center stage, whereas even with victims’ rights legislation, in the criminal justice system as a whole, victims’ needs are secondary to the law.

We have powerful examples where this process can work.

The current system is not working.  It is fraught with errors.  It creates this revolving door where offenders commit crimes and go to prison, but when they are released they are in the same place that they were before and they naturally reoffend.  We need to change that cycle, and by restoring them, making them actually earn redemption and heal the victims and the community.  That can be a start.

Starting with low-level offenses, we have nothing to lose.  So, as much as we may criticize many of the DA’s policies, Mr. Reisig, and Chris Bulkeley who is running this program, deserve both credit and community support as they embark on this project.

—David M. Greenwald reporting

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