Restorative Justice - A Little Bit Late

I went on vacation last week and had little to no access to E-mail while I was gone. By the time I finally checked my E-mail and found our blog topic there, Thursday's class had long gone by and the weekend was nearly over. Even though I didn't get the opportunity to talk about this week's blog topic in class, I would still like to say a couple of words about the topic, restorative justice.

Restorative justice has been the buzzword around the Dean of Students' Judicial Affairs Office for the last few weeks. Last month, the three staff members of the Judicial Affairs Office attended a conference where restorative justice was an agenda item. Since returning back to Ole Miss, they have been talking about embarking on a philosophical shift in their office to implement aspects of restorative justice into the office's everyday workings. I am particularly close to one Judicial Affairs staff member, and he has spoken to me numerous times about how much he is in favor of this philosophical shift to restorative justice and how good it could potentially be for the university.

I myself am in love with the concept of restorative justice. Slapping sanctions on students who do wrong on college campuses are just allowing them to do the bare minimum of what they need to do to clear their record, without teaching them that what they did was fundamentally wrong and without showing them who their actions hurt. If students can see who they affected by their actions - can really see who they hurt - their actions will become more real and they will be less likely to repeat them. In my opinion, an apology goes a long way, and restoring justice to those who justice was taken from is the perfect way to make up for the crime committed.

Let's say a student steals a composite from a fraternity house. (This is a situation that happens quite frequently, by the way.) Instead of sanctioning the student to ten hours of community service - which they will begrudgingly do and learn nothing from - it would be so much better for the student and for the members of the fraternity that student stole from if the student in trouble could publicly apologize to the chapter, express his remorse, return the composite, and then do something to better the fraternity. This could be anything as simple as taking care of the fraternity's lawn for a month to putting on a leadership program for new members of the chapter. Wouldn't that be so much better for all parties involved - the perpetrator and the victims - if everyone could learn something from the mistake?

So, in short, I am a proponent of restorative justice and I am excited to see Ole Miss hopefully implement it in our Judicial Affairs Office.