Previous | Next 

A second chance

John Longhurst

Let me tell you about a man I know. I’ll call him Paul. In his younger days, he was a violent criminal.

But then one day he was confronted about his criminal behaviour and decided to turn his life around. Instead of going to prison, he was given a chance to meet his former victims, take responsibility for his actions and work out a plan for restitution. A local church took him in and helped him find faith in God. As a result, he became a missionary, leading many to Christ.

Does this story sound familiar? It should – it’s the story of the apostle Paul, as recorded in the book of Acts. You could say that his experience is one of the earliest recorded cases of what we today call restorative justice, a way of dealing with criminals that seeks to restore them to society – not remove them from it by sending them to jail. Through restorative justice, offenders are held accountable for their crimes and are required to make things right to their victims, often through some form of restitution.

The idea of restoring people to the community may be as old as the Bible, but in terms of the Canadian and US criminal justice systems, it’s really pretty new. It began back in the 1970s, when Mennonites in Ontario pioneered North America’s first restorative justice program. Since that time, the idea that there are better ways to deal with offenders than sending them to prison has caught on around the world – in Manitoba, where I live, about 20% of young offenders and 5% of adult offenders are dealt with through alternatives to the courts, while in Quebec, New Zealand and Australia about two-thirds of young people face their neighbours instead of appearing before a judge. Hundreds of Canadian and US communities offer some form of alternative to prison for offenders.

As well, many other church groups are advocating this unique approach to crime. On the World Wide Web, there are 10,700 sites dedicated to the subject. Meanwhile, the idea of restorative justice is being seriously discussed at the highest levels of the US criminal justice system and by the Correctional Service of Canada, which has sponsored conferences and consultations on the subject for several years.

Given all this success, you’d think that Canadian Mennonites would be pretty supportive of restorative justice. You would be wrong. Or, at least, that’s how it appears from a 1995 Mennonite Central Committee Canada survey of Manitoba Mennonites (the most recent research on this subject). The survey found that 68% of respondents believed that “more severe punishment for criminals is a way to reduce the level of crime”. Fifty-six per cent of respondents supported capital punishment – the most severe way of dealing with crime.

The figures are old, and they may vary from province to province, but my guess is that they would not be far off the mark for Mennonites in Canada generally. You would think that a church that places a high degree of emphasis on God’s forgiving nature would find the idea of restorative justice to be a good fit. For some reason, the opposite is true for many Mennonites.

Why is this the case? I think there are several reasons.

1. Human nature

Revenge – the desire to hurt people who hurt us – is deeply ingrained in human beings. In my head, I know that there has to be a better way to deal with offenders than locking them up in jails. In my gut, I sometimes feel the opposite. In the mid-1980s, when I directed an inner-city peace and justice centre in a large American city, my office was broken into three times in two years. After the first break-in, I tried to find comfort in the idea that I was sharing an experience with the poor, for whom being victims of crime is a normal way of life. After the second break-in, I tried to see it as a way to come to terms with my relationship to possessions. By the third break-in, however, I just wanted to string the offenders up by their thumbs and let them twist for a while. I was very angry.

I’d guess that others who have experienced crime have had similar feelings. Even those who haven’t been touched by it personally, feel anger welling up when they learn about the senseless violence, destruction and other crimes which occur today. It’s normal to feel that way – a fact the Bible acknowledges when, in the Old Testament, the Israelites are instructed to keep their retribution proportional to the crime (an “eye for an eye”). In other words, if you steal my car, I can’t take your house.

But Jesus takes this a step farther, saying that the point is not just to try to keep a desire for revenge in perspective, but to give it up altogether. Said Jesus: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Matthew 5:38-39). Further, through His death, He restored the world to a right relationship with God by offering Himself as a substitute for all the penalties richly deserved by all the sinners in the sinful world. To paraphrase the familiar old verse in the Gospel of John, God so loved the world that God didn’t destroy it.

2. A misunderstanding of what restorative justice really means

To some people, restorative justice is synonymous with words such as “weak” or “bleeding heart”. They see it as nothing more than a slap on the wrist, a hug and a promise to be a better boy next time. But restorative justice is nothing like that. It’s about being accountable to the people who have been wronged and taking responsibility for harmful actions. Any alternatives to the court system that fail to emphasize this are weak substitutes for the real thing. Offenders who participate in programs that take restoration and justice seriously are not “getting out of it”; meeting the people they have hurt, hearing the victims’ pain and taking responsibility for their actions is a very hard thing to do. (Think of how hard it can be for you to apologize to someone you’ve wronged!)

A second misunderstanding about restorative justice is that it means abolishing prisons. There are some in the restorative justice movement who may call for exactly that, but serious advocates of alternative forms of dealing with crime acknowledge that prisons are still necessary. The fact of the matter is that there are some people for whom restorative justice simply will not work, for one reason or another – they don’t want to take responsibility, be accountable or make things right with their victims; they don’t want to change their behaviour. Society needs to be protected from these people. They cannot, at that particular time, be restored to society – they need to be removed from it.

That said, virtually nobody agrees that prisons are a good way to rehabilitate offenders. There must certainly be better ways to deal with these kinds of people than locking them away with other hopeless, marginalized and bitter individuals, in the vain hope that they will miraculously experience a change of life and become model citizens. We’ve come a long way since the Quakers created the modern penitentiary movement in the 1800s as a more humane alternative to the severe punishments of the day. (The Quakers believed that the ideal way to reform criminals was to lock them in cells, treat them kindly and leave them time to consider and repent of their crimes – to become penitent, in other words.) Today only the most naive optimists believe that modern prisons can reform criminals.

3. An unbalanced image of God

Finally, I wonder if the desire of many Mennonites for even harsher punishments for crime may flow out of an unbalanced image of God. God is just, but God is also love. Unfortunately, sometimes more emphasis is placed on God’s justice, with the result that God is mainly portrayed as harsh, strict, demanding and punitive. I know that’s the image of God that was taught to me as a child growing up in an evangelical church in the 1960s – if you step out of line, watch out! This was a God who was quick to anger, eager to count my trespasses and only too happy to punish me for them.

Later, after joining the Mennonite Brethren Church, I found that this tendency to highlight God’s justice and minimize God’s love was not unique to my evangelical upbringing – many friends who grew up in Mennonite churches say they had the same experience. Today, though, many of us are recovering a sense of balance – God is just, but God also is merciful. As a verse from the much-loved hymn “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy” puts it:

“But we make His love too narrow by false limits of our own; and we magnify His strictness with a zeal He will not own.”

Maybe if we focused more on God’s love and forgiveness, we might be more inclined to extend a wider mercy to people who commit crimes but who want to change their behaviour and become productive members of the community.

Two thousand years ago, the apostle Paul was given a second chance by a God who specializes in second, third and more chances, by a God who specializes in never giving up on human beings. Restorative justice isn’t a magic solution to the problem of crime, and it won’t work for everyone, but for those who want to change – those who want a second chance – it can bring life, healing and hope.

Maybe more of us could give it a second chance, too.

John Longhurst is a member of River East MB Church in Winnipeg.

Previous | Next 

Last modified April 12, 2002.

© 2002 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
Masthead and usage information.