Praise for Community Restorative Justice

Andersonstown News

by Evan Short

25/01/2007

In a week that began with the Police Ombudsman’s report into RUC collusion and will end with the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis on policing, a law report issued by Queen’s University has praised Community Restorative Justice schemes.

The report concludes that they have had an impact in reducing punishment beatings, shootings and exclusions in the areas where they operate.

Written by Professor Harry Mika from the Central Michigan University over six years, the report is based on the monitoring of two projects – CRJ based in West Belfast and Northern Ireland Alternatives who work in loyalist areas.

In both cases Professor Mika says that the schemes have made a “significant" difference through interventions, using a blend of community-based activities and facilitated meetings and negotiations.

The professor said he had seen real improvements on the ground.
“Over the six year period in two specific phases, I verified and assessed a total of 498 cases where young people were in real danger of being attacked or excluded by the paramilitaries for their alleged behaviour.

“This represented around three to four per cent of the work being carried out by the organisations in these specific areas.

“The results showed that in Phase II of the project CRJI activity stopped some 82 per cent of potential paramilitary punishments from happening in its impact area, while Northern Ireland Alternatives’ comparable figure was 71 pert cent.

“Beatings and shootings also fell to zero in all but one project site by 2005."
He also concluded that the future of the CRJ scheme lay in consultation with statutory agencies and government bodies.

“There is little disagreement amongst the broad spectrum of individuals consulted over the course of this evaluation that what is desperately needed in all working class areas of Northern Ireland is cooperation and collaboration between Government, statutory organisations and properly resourced community counterparts.”

Welcoming the report, Jim Auld from Andersonstown CRJ said it reaffirmed what was known in the areas where such schemes operate.

“We welcome this report and I think that it confirms what we already know.
“CRJ has had a significant impact on a range of criminal and anti-social behaviour in the area and that we are dealing effectively with the range of problems faced by the community.

“We would now call on Government to withdraw the political ban on us and fund us to implement what is clearly an excellent scheme," said Mr Auld.

Community Restorative Justice pleased with outcome of poll

READERS voted overwhelmingly in favour of Community Restorative Justice (CRJ) in last week's Newry Democrat poll. (October 25, 2005)

Over 120 text message votes were recorded with 96.8 per cent of those in favour of Community Restorative Justice and just 3.2 per cent against.

Ewan Morgan, a development worker with Barcroft CRJ, said he was pleased with the outcome of the poll but warned that actions were louder than words.

"That's a resounding response and a positive response," he said.

"But it's action that counts and CRJ is about action. We've been up and running in the greater Barcroft area for over two and half years, and in that time we've been involved in 88 cases in Newry and South Armagh involving over 450 people, and that's 450 people that came through our mediation service and came out the other end in a win-win situation, and that's what CRJ is about."

Mr Morgan said those opposed to CRJ had misconceived perceptions about the organisation.

"The majority of people that are sceptical of CRJ are people that don't know what the concept of CRJ is about," he added.

"We have a power point presentation about the means and methods of CRJ and this was presented to various groups over the last year, from Kilkeel to Cullyhanna, and anybody who has listened to it has embraced it.

"But we find that the majority of people that are opposed to CRJ don't know what it's about. They have a perceived view of it and have never seen it in action, but if they did they would actually realise it's not what they though it was. "CRJ is a non-violent, non-confrontational way of solving problems in communities. We're not a fire brigade, we're certainly not a police service, we're not an alternative to anything. We are all about community empowerment." 

Blowing the myths about CRJ

“The SDLP did not accept the B-Specials. We will not accept the RA-Specials either,” he said. The attack was part of a fusillade of criticism of CRJ by the SDLP.
The allegations have irked Tony O’Doherty. The sprightly 58-year-old Creggan man has never been a member of a political party and has never been involved in a paramilitary group.

Instead, he is known as a former International soccer player, part of the management team that saw Derry City FC revived in the mid-1980s and a tireless community worker. He is a married father of four. O’Doherty, whose energy is apparent in his naturally demonstrative manner, is keen to talk about his work in CRJ and the myths that he sees as blurring the ethos of the organisation.

Creggan, the sprawling nationalist estate where O’Doherty has lived for most of his life, has had its problems. At the outset of the Troubles, the estate was part of what became known as Free Derry. On Bloody Sunday, the majority of those shot and killed were from the estate. In recent years, as the North began to emerge from conflict, the transition to a more peaceful environment posed its own problems. With a policing void threatening the very social fabric of an estate that had endured many tragedies during the conflict, O’Doherty and others set about organising at a grass-roots level to address issues that affected the “quality of life” of the community.

He says those issues are ones the criminal justice system is unable to deal with. They are largely social issues – on-street drinking, drugs concerns, housing issues and disputes. Local knowledge comes into its own in such situation and O’Doherty and his fellow CRJ volunteers see themselves as facilitators rather than enforcers. He is hurt and offended by allegations that CRJ is simply another manifestation of the punishment squads of the Troubles.

In a typical week O’Doherty holds down a 38-hour a week job. When he finishes, his mobile seldom stops. On an average week his work with CRJ eats into another 20 hours of his daily life. It is time readily given.

“I would welcome any criticism or critique of CRJ that is based on the facts of the matter,” he says, “There has been a lot of hysterical name calling that has been purely political. The most important people to me are the victims and potential victims within our community and this has somehow been ignored as the political snowballs are being thrown.”

O’Doherty is stung by criticism that the organisation is answerable only to Sinn Féin and republicans. His response is emphatic: “If I thought for one moment that CRJ was a political organisation, or run by a political organisation, I would resign immediately. That’s the proof in the pudding. I would challenge anyone to find one incident, one event, in which we tried to modify someone’s political thinking or how they voted.
“A victim is a victim – pure and simple. Most of the criticism has come from the SDLP, but I don’t want to enter an argument, there are many tremendous and forward-thinking people within the SDLP, but I think that some in the party are emotionally blinkered when it comes to the issue of Community Restorative Justice.”

O’Doherty says CRJ volunteers will be in the Creggan area “night after night”.
“It is impossible to define a typical night. We don’t go into Creggan with a set agenda. We do a lot of outreach work, organise youth groups, soccer tournaments and local festivals. These are hardly the activities of some specialist paramilitary unit.”
O’Doherty firmly believes that, even if the policing debate was resolved to every political party’s satisfaction, CRJ projects across the North will still have a major role to play in communities.

“No police service in the world could provide such a service – it is just impossible because of the resources it would take.” This argument is the one that O’Doherty focuses on most passionately. “We are not trying to be the criminal justice system, or a new criminal justice system. We deliver social justice along the lines of the old Irish tribal systems with a strong ‘look after’ community view. This community view prevails in CRJ.”

O’Doherty says he has lost count of the occasions he has personally invited local members of the SDLP to join CRJ on the streets and observe the nature of its work.
His respect in his community is not up for debate. O’Doherty featured in the Northern Ireland squad for two seasons, 1969-70 and 1970-71. He played with, among others, George Best and Pat Jennings.

“If somebody can find that we deal only with republican clientelle or a particular political ethos then I challenge them to do so. We don’t. That just doesn’t happen. I would love to see the SDLP represented on our neighbourhood boards. What we deal with is items that affect the quality of life within our community. A proper policeman deals in crime.”
O’Doherty terms CRJ cases as “referrals”. “In a two-sided dispute, if the people do not want our service then we respect that. We don’t impose our solutions on them. A lot of people are not best served by the British criminal justice system – that hasn’t properly served the people of England, never mind here.”

O’Doherty takes a long view of the CRJ’s future role. “We are not about quick fixes. A lot of people give us respect because we do this on a voluntary basis. We can’t be used as a political football and we are not going to disappear. CRJ has a role for a long time to come, but we don’t believe that we are the only people. Political sound bites do not help this debate, we deliver for our own people. We deal with people across the social spectrum and don’t categorise anyone.”

That former political prisoners are among those who carry out CRJ work, is not surprising given the areas that the projects operate in. “As chairperson, former political prisoners take directions from me, not the other way around. Decisions are taken either on behalf of the community or the victim. It will never be any other way,” O’Doherty says.

“People often say to me ‘how do you do it’ and I always ask ‘why aren’t you doing it’. These are your sons, brothers and sisters and they will have the children and grandchildren of the future.”

Building a radical alternative to Punitive Justice.

BY ROISIN DE ROSA AP/RN (roisinderosa@hotmail.com)

Empowering the people

Thirty years of conflict have brought in their wake deep, revolutionary changes in society. Sometimes change has come consciously, deliberately, as a result of long fought-for changes by the combatants who have been the agents of change. Others have come about almost unconsciously, driven by necessity, almost by sleight of hand. Whatever their origin, there are seeds of radical and exciting change, which add up to creating the new dispensation talked about by republicans.

One of these exciting developments is Community Restorative Justice (CRJ). It represents a way forward from punishment beatings and shootings, which, as is widely recognised, are neither a solution to anti-social activity nor an acceptable way of dealing with it.

CRJ in the Six Counties has emerged in the context of a policing vacuum, given the unacceptability of the RUC in nationalist areas, but the concept goes beyond the particular circumstances of a conflict zone.

CRJ comes out of an entirely different theoretical approach to crime, which imports a method of dealing with it and places the community and its empowerment centre stage, both in the manner of dealing with anti-social behaviour' and changing the conditions that have led to it.

The necessity arises

``We had 6,000 logged complaints of anti-social behaviour over a year in West Belfast alone,'' says Tommy Holland from Upper Springfield Road CRJ. ``That means, on the basis that only one in four get reported, that there were at least 24,000 incidents in the community. People were crying out, in outrage and fury, for punishment, for retribution.

``This had to stop. We had to get away from punishment beatings. We had to get away from communities watching and waiting as a child grows up, until he is old enough to beat or imprison. The community itself, like it or not, is involved and had to get involved in dealing with this problem, which is tearing our communities apart.

``There are now 14 CRJ projects across the Six Counties, seven in Belfast, five in Derry and three in the Armagh area. New projects are springing up in Beechmount, the Falls, Craigavon, Lurgan and Newry, and some 700 people are already trained. CRJ exists and is multiplying.''

Colonial formal justice system

CRJ is a deep and revolutionary challenge to that system of justice imposed by colonialism across Ireland. Their formal system of justice is punitive and retributive. It looks for punishment of the `wrongdoer' and seeks retribution in the form of imprisonment, violence and physical punishment. It's called `paying your debt to society'.

The notions that lie behind this formal justice system, which we have enjoyed in this country over the last two or three hundred years, are based on a definition of `crime' as a contravention of socially agreed norms of behaviour. Where individuals do not conform they become `wrongdoers' or `evil doers', who require punishment for deterrence and retribution. The impersonal arm of the law and state courts of justice administer the punishment. Crime is somebody else's problem, done by somebody else's child, on somebody else in the community. But all of these real people could have been us.

The Law and Order Brigade

In the late `70s and the 1980s, a monster reared its head which fed on the horror stories greedily purveyed by gutter press tabloids. That was the `law and order' brigade. Reagan and Thatcher got elected on the strong, media backed ticket of hang `em and flog `em, based on carefully purveyed deepening fears of widespread crime amongst `hoodlum' youth. The government in the 26 Counties has not been far behind, with Justice Minister John O'Donoghue happy to leap on the plank of `zero tolerance' of crime.

Mirroring establishment rhetoric, nationalists and republicans in the Six Counties, under severe pressures from communities suffering growing problems of anti-social activity, found themselves, in a paler image of the same thinking, forced into punishment beatings and shootings, if only for the lack of alternative.

Accompanying these punishments was the notion that these kids were `hoods', or in the South `scumbags', anti-social elements who had to be dealt with severely and repeatedly until they stopped. The trouble is, they don't stop.

Communities cried out for punishment not because, in most cases, anyone liked it, but because the communities demanded that something be done, and that is all people could think of.

Punitive formal justice

The punitive retributive model for dealing with crime is ineffective, unfair and expensive. Research has proven its negative effect on rates of recidivism. Research has also shown that it is the poor, the disadvantaged, the poorly educated, those who have drug or alcohol dependency, low levels of self esteem, who come of abusive and often violent background, the minority groups, who suffer disproportionately the execution of this punitive system. The property owners may get the protection, but the poor get the punishment.

Nor does the system pay great regard to the suffering of the victim. It is a system of naked revenge, which only in the craziest of aberrations of human values could be seen as a palliative or satisfactory outcome for the injustice and harm done to the victim.

And the expense of the punitive system provides a yet stronger argument for the state to look more kindly on alternatives. For EU governments, dedicated as they are to reducing expenditure on state services, prisons represent a heavy drain on both capital and current accounts. The annual cost of incarcerating offenders is between £50,000 and £80,000 per annum. Privatisation of prisons, as has been widespread in England, brings an inevitable loss of legitimacy. Paying a private company to make profit from punshing people is the ultimate in social degradation.

So punishment has a poor return, especially when most tend to return to these institutions. The state is looking for cheaper methods of control. So it is not for exclusively humanitarian motives that the Dublin government has recently introduced special courts and sentencing of offenders with drug dependency to drug recovery programmes. It's the cash argument, which speaks loudly to those wedded to law and order doctrines and strict monetarist policies.

Damage of `Punishment'

The formal justice system has most damaging effects on offenders. Their relationships with partners and children are destroyed. Through prison, offenders are driven further from their community and into a closer dependence on peer groups of other offenders. Worse, they are brutalised by a macho violent, sensorily deprived environment, where control of your own life and self-responsibility is immediately taken away to be replaced by obedience, bullying and dog-eat-dog survival.

From the victim's point of view, the formal justice system rarely pays much attention to the suffering, which is often more emotional than physical. Retribution in the form of imprisonment of an offender is little but a sick response of a sick society to the pain and suffering of those who are the victims of anti-social activity.

Community Restorative Justice

Community Restorative Justice is a viable non-violent system of community-based justice which offers an alternative to punishment beatings and shootings, which empowers a community, and proposes a way forward beyond the philosophy of punishment, retribution and violence against other human beings. It is the stuff of revolution within the community.

Restorative justice is a way of dealing with the harm of anti-social crime, which it sees pre-eminently as a breakdown of relationships between people. CRJ seeks to repair these relationships and `heal' the injuries to the three categories of people involved: the victims of crime, the offenders, and the community in which the victim or offender lives.

And what are the needs of the victim to which the formal justice system pays so little regard? The harms the victim of crime suffer are not simply material; they are social and emotional. Common issues identified by victims as harms caused by crime include loss of control, feelings of helplessness, an inability to understand what has happened to them or why, a feeling of injustice perpetrated without recompense, recognition, or a convincing commitment by anyone to prevent its recurrence.

A discussion document drawn up four years ago when academics and community activists first started to look at methods of Restorative Justice here in Ireland points out that these harms are often at least as damaging as any physical injury or material loss suffered through crime. Victims need vindication that what has happened to them was wrong and undeserved. They need the opportunity to have their anger and pain expressed and validated. They need restored to them a sense of control and a feeling of safety. They may need to feel that the offender understands and acknowledges the injury that has been caused to them, their family and their friends.

Restorative Justice through mediation

Practical ways of doing this are common in many countries, across the USA, Canada, Europe, and New Zealand. They commonly work through victim/offender mediation, where participation is voluntary and resolution is by consent; the offender admits culpability and the community at large supports and legitimises the mediation process.

Restorative Justice in the case of the offender works within an entirely different paradigm. Rather than concentrating on punishment, RJ places the emphasis on the offender being accountable for the crime committed and acknowledging responsibility for the harm caused. The offender should seek to repair the damage and above all, be offered a pathway to return to a meaningful role within the community. Mediated outcomes may involve restitution, community work, participation in a social programme or a support package for the offender and even perhaps his or her family.

Whereas the punitive system leads to further estrangement from the community and tends to focus the offender upon the hurt inflicted upon him or her, CRJ works in a precisely opposite direction. Where punitive justice encourages a state of denial of responsibility for the suffering caused, CRJ works through a process of mediation to get an offender to take responsibility for what he or she has done.

Community Involvement

But the third and key aspect of CRJ is that it aims to give local communities a sense of ownership and responsibility over the process of justice. Under the formal justice system, the process of dealing with offenders is shuffled off onto others, be it the police, the courts and prisons, or even the IRA. Anti-social activity and crime split and divide communities, often filling people with fear and anger.

The community at large, the business sector, Church, schoolteachers, shopkeepers, solicitors, doctors, political parties, residents and tenants associations, but also youth groups, elderly people's groups, women's groups, and statutory agencies all need to be involved, because all are involved.

The first step to setting up a CRJ scheme is for such groups to meet and discuss the notion of CRJ, its standards and values. This stage is followed by the promotion of a Community Charter door to door. Endorsement of the charter, the support and participation of the whole community, is what lends CRJ its legitimacy but it also provides the step of empowering the community to take responsibility for itself.

Above all, the process of discussing and signing up to the charter carries an educational role. In this sense, CRJ proferrs the very alternative that allows people to resist the law and order game that the media and conservative parties love so dearly. Instead, a community can look at the causes of crime and take on ways to end them, be it for the individuals who live within it or for the community as a whole.

Not so new In fact, of course, CRJ is not a new departure at all. Throughout our history and the history of other countries, there have been alternatives to the colonial justice system which itself only became entrenched in 17th century Ireland, when the Brehon system was suppressed by the coloniser. The Brehon system relied on the solidarity of the Tuath or Clann, where communities policed themselves, where the individual victim of crime and the offender are both seen in the context of their community. In this model, judgement is about restoring the community rather than retaliation and retribution imposed from outside by superior agents of a centralised state. Equally, the Sinn Féin arbitration courts of 1919 offer another example of alternative justice systems. They were intended to deal with land disputes with the consent of both parties but soon began taking on `criminal' cases. Subsequently, the Dáil Courts, established in 1920, dealt with a wide range of offences and disputes, from rowdyism, larceny, property damage, to bank and post office robberies and assaults. These courts operated at Parish, District and Supreme Court level. The three justices at the Parish level, who comprised the parish panel, were elected from a parish convention comprising Sinn Féin, Volunteers, Trade Councils and Cumann na mBan. At parish level, these courts operated on a basis of conciliation, a reflection of the pre-eminent need to build solidarity within communities and neighbourliness. The higher courts required a legitimate means of coercion to enforce sanctions. Inevitably, the IRA was called upon to impose the sentence of the courts. At the lower levels, disposals handed out by judges tended to be the return of stolen property, restitution, making good the damage, fines, banishment. Exile to England was common in cases dealing with `incorrigibly unsavoury persons'. Deportation to England became sufficiently prevalent to cause objections in the House of Commons to the numbers of undesirable people deported and on ``the use of England as a sort of convict settlement to men deported by Sinn Féin''. So to speak, the boot, for once, was on the other foot.

The Charter that CRJ asks all in a community to sign: We the Residents of .... commit ourselves to the promotion of a new spirit and infrastructure designed to build a better community. The individual rights and associated responsibilities of all the members of our community is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace for all of us and acknowledging the need to consistently promote and advance supportive social and physical environment. Commitment We believe that everyone in our community has the right to: Shelter, warmth and basic living necessities Freedom from fear and anxiety Privacy, rest and leisure Appropriate care and support Safety and care of property and the environment Education and learning opportunities and resources Open expression or celebration of their religious, cultural and political affiliation Equal and unconditional protection under the law Equality of access to public service To share in the life of the community

We also hold that we each have a responsibility to ensure that we do not create or enhance any condition, relationship or situation which may prevent our neighbours from exercising or enjoying their rights as outlined. Each signatory to this charter pledges to respect the rights of his/her neighbours in the community and appropriately to exercise his/her own responsibilities.

In keeping with this pledge we reject violence as a tool for resolving disagreement between families or individuals and as an alternative we will initiate and cooperate in any agreed community systems or processes involving informal or formal mediation to resolve disputes or respond to crime and to criminal or anti-social behaviour within our community.

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