For my youngest child's spring break we went and looked at colleges that had interested her. Without naming names, I want to talk about one of those colleges very briefly. Most of what this college had to say for itself was very positive and seemed like a good match for Aislynn. They talked about being inclusive and aware, though aparently one of their professors had made an inappropriate comment in a fit of anger that was caught on video and was being shown all over the place.
This college also talked about using a restorative model for justice on campus rather than a retributive model. I've written about this before, but to explain again: In a retributive model for justice, misdeeds, mistakes, errors are dealt with by punishing the person who made the error. Those who use this method seek revenge on the person, often an escalated revenge of what was done in the first place. This model has many problems with it, beginning with the fact that punishment simply does not work to effectively change behavior. In fact, the extremely high rate of recidivism in the United States prisons, for example, shows that the punishment we exact on our prisoners ends up cementing their identity as criminals most of the time. They then have extremely little chance of changing, doing better, or choosing a different way of life. We also make it almost impossible for those who've been incarcerated to find housing, jobs, or a way of getting out of that system. We make them into criminals, even if they weren't actually criminals before. It is also estimated that at least 10% of those who end up incarcerated are not actually guilty of the crimes they were incarcerated for. Additionally, our retributive system does not provide healing for the victims either. In our legal system, in fact, our retributive justice system usually ends up revictimizing the victims as they must tell their story in a court of law and have that story attacked and dismantled by lawyers seeking to defend the accused.
In contrast to the restributive justice system, a restorative model seeks to understand and provide healing for both victims and those who have done wrong. There are still consequences for the offenders. But the consequences tend of be logical or natural consequences: ways for the offenders to correct their mistakes, fix them, look at their own issues that caused the offenders to behave badly in the first place, and invites them to choose to start on a different path.
Many of our native tribes (throughout the world! New Zealand has a wonderful restorative justic program based on the methods of the Maori) have used a restorative model rather than a retributive model with great success. It sees everyone involved as people not "bad guys" and "good guys" but human beings, all in need of growth and healing.
Our child development strategies are tending more and more towards a restorative model as we learn that children act out when there is something that needs healing, something that needs training, something that needs help. It has moved from identifying kids as simply "bad" or "good" into recognizing that all of us are mixes of bad and good and are all on a path of growth. Many of our schools are also learning and moving more towards a restorative rather than a retributive model. For example, rather than expelling a child who has done wrong, many schools now work with the child, their family, the victims, and the school system to try to understand what wrong has happened and to do the work to make sure the offenders are not continuing in their behavior. They are also working more to help the victims obtain healing help. Expulsion, for many kids, was not only an uneffective punishment, but sometimes was experienced by kids to be a kind of backwards reward. It encouraged further "bad" behavior rather than correcting what was wrong, teaching more fully about empathy, and helping everyone involved in these situations to heal, grow and do better.
So, this college we visited prided itself on teaching and using a restorative model of justice. It proclaimed that when something happened that was "wrong" that it was explored, analyzed, and addressed individually, working with those who made the mistakes to correct them, to learn from them, and to fix the mistakes rather than to simply be punished, expelled or thrown out as "bad".
That's awesome. I believe deeply in restorative justice and was very excited to find a school that declared its commitment to that system at the outset.
HOWEVER, many students at the school were protesting, demanding for the firing of the above mentioned professor. The firing of a teacher follows a retributive model of justice. It does nothing to correct the problem or even address it. It does nothing towards healing the victims. It also simply dismisses the professor, leaving him and his family without income or without a way to correct the problems. It responds to an error (or even a series of errors) by adding to the list of what is harmful, destructive and angry, rather than offering a way forward that teaches, heals and restores relationships. It stops conversation, rather than exploring, learning together and working together to truly address the issues in productive and constructive ways. It also entrenches the professor in a place of simply defending his comments rather than inviting him to do the self-reflection a more restorative process would encourage.
I continue to be amazed at the lack of compassion that humans show to one another. I continue to be deeply saddened by the ease with which people choose to label, categorize and "other" those around them. This professor stopped being a person to these students. He is just a "bad guy" now to throw out, another person to be "gotten rid of," to punish, to condemn. It was obvious that for all the rhetoric at the school claiming to follow and teach a restorative justice model that they have not been able to actually instill that value into the student body. We have a long way to go.
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