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Christians and crime

Bob Harvey

In 1971, while I was a young reporter at the Edmonton Journal, I took on the task of starting a program for teens at a neighbourhood church. Before long, teens were packing the church hall on Friday nights. One of them confessed a dark secret – he and several other bored 13-and-14-year-olds had broken into several nearby homes. My co-leader and I met with these young offenders and suggested we go in a group to the homes they had broken into and apologize.

The homeowners had suffered damage to their homes, loss of property and a sense of violation, and the teens quickly realized it was not enough just to say they were sorry. Soon we were conducting bottle drives and car washes so the teens could at least pay back the cash they had stolen. Two burly detectives from Edmonton’s juvenile division also came over and spelled out what might have happened if the teens had not worked so hard to repair the damage – an appearance in juvenile court for all of them. That was the last crime committed by any of those teens, and their victims became some of their biggest supporters.

What we had done seemed like simple common sense, as well as an application of Christian principles: repent, make restitution for the damage, restore the relationships and change your ways. That was also my first lesson in what is now being called restorative justice, a fast-growing movement that is revolutionizing the criminal justice system in Canada and many other countries.

Fast forward to 1991, when I first met Pierre Allard, a Baptist minister, then head of the chaplaincy service of the Correctional Service of Canada, and a passionate advocate of what then seemed like a new concept: making inmates accountable to their victims and then re-integrating them into the community.

It took me years and at least two more interviews with Allard before the light dawned: The restorative justice he was working at on a large scale was exactly what we had done with the teens in 1971: seeking forgiveness and restoration of relationships.

“Crime is not primarily a breaking of the law. Crime is primarily a breaking of relationships in a community, where real people have hurt real people,” says Allard. “When something happens, there is a hurt, a brokenness. How we can repair harm is by first focusing on the relationships that can be broken, and by listening to all the parties: the families that have been hurt as well as the victim and the offender. The second thing is truth-telling. There can be no restorative justice if there is not an expression of hurt by the victim and an acknowledgement by the perpetrator of what he has done.”

Not universally popular

What Allard and many other Christians are doing is not universally popular or even well understood. Some of the strongest champions of punitive justice in Canada today are outspoken evangelical Christians such as Stockwell Day, who has advocated not only longer jail sentences and work camps for young offenders, but also capital punishment. Many devout Christians – within and outside the Alliance Party – find they resonate deeply with those convictions. The division between Christians roughly follows the division between Old and New Testaments. The many Christians in the tougher justice camp are more likely to quote Old Testament verses like Exodus 21: 23-25: “If there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.” Advocates of restorative justice, meanwhile, quote the New Testament instead, including the words of Jesus: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” (Matthew 9:13) and “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).

Allard says he is horrified that the emphasis on punishment as the primary model is strongest among people who take their Bibles most seriously. “The whole message of the Bible from Genesis to the end is that you are not allowed to punish someone unless at the same time there is a very clear message that we are not going to be at peace until you return to our community. You did something awful, and there is a punishment, but at the same time that punishment is intentioned towards a restoration, reintegration.”

“I wanted revenge”

Allard says that when he first began work in 1972 as a chaplain in one of Canada’s toughest prisons, Archambault Penitentiary in Montreal, the effect of crime on victims was something he barely considered. “If I had met you then, I would have talked with some enthusiasm about the work I was doing, about the fact that it was a world not well known, and when you come to listen to people, you understand their journey. The fact that there were victims out there did not influence my work at all.”

What turned him into an advocate of restorative justice was the murder of his brother Andre in 1980. He had been shot in the face and then dumped in a field outside Montreal. Allard went to see the frozen body “because I wanted to see the ugliness of evil”.

His brother’s killers were never found, and that experience almost drove Allard out of the chaplaincy. “I had been preaching so much about reconciliation, about forgiveness, but I wanted revenge.”

Yet he went back to his job at New Brunswick’s Dorchester Penitentiary and found himself alone one night in the chapel, looking at the cross. “I started crying. It was a real healing. The feelings of revenge just melted away.”

Allard started to reflect about the true meaning of justice and decided it must include both victim and offender. “I was on my way to restorative justice. That’s the trouble, in a sense, with Christianity. You don’t have the freedom to exclude anyone. Even if you become enemies, you’re challenged to love your enemies.” Today he says that he would like to meet those who killed his brother and tell them: “I forgive you.”

Many faces

After the murder, Allard and his wife Judy began opening their home to released prisoners, an idea that became a community chaplaincy program now involving hundreds of volunteers. He also launched Prisoners’ Sunday, an annual event in which hundreds of churches across Canada pray for prisoners every November.

The Correctional Service of Canada now has its own division of restorative justice. The RCMP and the Law Commission of Canada have endorsed it, and the Supreme Court of Canada has held that restorative justice is a watershed in the history of Canadian criminal law. Allard himself has been made Assistant Commissioner, Community Engagement for the Correctional Service of Canada.

Restorative justice now has many additional faces. In Ottawa, the Collaborative Justice Project brings together victims, offenders, families and lawyers involved in serious criminal cases – such as one involving the death of five teenagers in an auto accident caused by the impaired driving of one of their best friends. In several regions of the country, trained facilitators help family groups to deal with conflict and violence. Many church members also take part in support groups that help sexual offenders to re-enter the community and stay out of trouble after release from prison.

Some are advocating for restorative justice for purely practical reasons: Victim-offender reconciliation and community service are far cheaper than incarceration, which costs an average of more than $48,000 per inmate per year in federal institutions (and as much as $61,000 for serious offenders).

As well, many aboriginal groups are also taking part in traditional community healing circles such as the one in 1998 in which Catholic Bishop Hubert O’ Connor expressed his remorse for having had sex with young aboriginal women at a residential school.

Allard admits to being envious of aboriginal people. “The aboriginal community has always nurtured the restorative justice approach. They know that something has been taken away, but they are on the path to recovery because they know it was lost. For us, it’s much harder because we have had to look for something we didn’t know we had lost.”

Restorative justice, he says, was once part of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Augustine, the great 5th-century theologian, for example, wrote to a judge who was about to sentence the murderers of a Christian friend. He implored the judge not to avenge the death “by the infliction of precisely similar injuries in the way of retaliation. . . . Rather be moved by the wounds these thieves have inflicted on their own souls to exercise a desire to heal them.”

In the early church, says Allard, the community would gather around a victim and examine how the harm could be repaired. But that started to change in the 11th and 12th centuries, when the state began to have more power, laws became codified and crimes became offences against the Crown.

Professionals took over the realm of justice, and the punitive function of the law eclipsed the restorative aspect. By the 18th century, Charles Wesley, the great Methodist preacher and hymn writer, would rejoice at the execution of seven thieves because they had sought salvation on their way to the gallows. It was left to the newspapers of the time to ask the hard question: Why were they hanged when the worst crime among them was the theft of some cutlery?

Allard says, “Restorative justice is not some new flavour of ice cream. Restorative justice is a call for the Judeo-Christian to go back to the roots of what is the most fundamental approach to justice throughout the Bible.”

Now Allard and others are trying to resurrect the Judeo-Christian tradition of restorative justice by teaching courses on the subject at Queen’s University in Kingston, McMaster University in Hamilton, Canadian Theological College in Regina and St. Stephen’s College in Edmonton.

Bob Harvey is religion editor for the Ottawa Citizen. This article is reprinted, with permission, from the September/October 2000 issue of Faith Today.

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Last modified April 12, 2002.

© 2002 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
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