RESTORATIVE JUSTICE
For victims and their families, the best form of justice is not always a prison sentence. That is why restorative justice — an alternative response to crime — puts the needs of survivors first, prioritizing individual healing over mass incarceration. It is time that Manhattan does the same and makes restorative justice an everyday practice. Sign on if you agree!
To build a restorative justice practice Lucy will:
Develop a full time staff dedicated to the implementation of restorative justice practices.
Expand the scope of offenses eligible for restorative justice.
Provide restorative justice training as a core component of prosecutorial training.
Work with community partners to design the Office’s first-of-its-kind restorative justice program.
Restorative justice, with its origins in indigenous peoples’ cultures, is an alternative response to crime that prioritizes healing, accountability, and the needs of the crime survivor. In a restorative justice practice, a person who has been harmed speaks with the person who committed that harm in the presence of a professional moderator facilitating the conversation. Under Lucy’s leadership, restorative justice will be expanded broadly — but carefully — to reduce the Office’s reliance on lengthy prison sentences in dangerous facilities, reduce the impact mass incarceration has on Manhattan’s families and communities and provide healing not offered through conventional case processing to survivors of crime.
Crucially, the tenets of restorative justice find support in neuroscience and behavioral research. This research aligns with the developing field of “positive criminology,” which focuses on the identification of positive personal and social factors within an individual that discourage or prevent criminal conduct. Social scientists have suggested that positive social bonds and emotional transformations can be vital components of desistance, and that positive human relationships can stimulate prosocial emotions; in effect, a kind of social rehabilitation for a fundamentally anti-social act.
While restorative justice has been used sparingly for serious offenses in New York City, 90% of victims in NYC availed themselves of a restorative justice process instead of seeking incarceration for the person who harmed them when offered the opportunity. The expansion of restorative justice represents an important step towards a system that prioritizes healing for people who are harmed and accountability for those who have hurt them. Such practices can actually give a greater sense of resolution to crime victims while at the same time acting as a critical tool in the battle to dismantle mass incarceration. Many victims and their families find restorative justice more empowering than a retributive, purely incarceratory process because it satisfies their need to understand how and why harm befell them in a way traditional prosecutorial approaches cannot.
The evidence supporting the expansion of restorative justice practices is clear: in addition to improved victim satisfaction, the offending party is more likely to comply with restitution mandates and is less likely to recidivate. Critically, early indications suggest that the positive results of restorative justice hold even for serious offenses.