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Atkinson, Judy --- "Book Review - Restorative Justice: Healing the Effects of Crime" [1995] AboriginalLawB 66; (1995) 3(78) Aboriginal Law Bulletin 21


Book Review -

Restorative Justice: Healing the Effects of Crime

by Jim Consedine

Ploughshares Publishing, Wellington, 1995

Reviewed by Judy Atkinson

Recently I received a call from an Aboriginal community worker asking if I would be willing to work with a young man in his early teens going up on his third charge. 'This time', I was told, 'He'll be put away for sure. Once he goes inside, we'll lose him'. Further discussion revealed the young man had been acting up since his grandmother died twelve months previously, getting drunk, picking fights, senseless acts of violence on property and people. His mother was in an institution and he did not know where his father was, or even if he was still alive.

I met with him. The young man's story, past present and future, was: of childhood memories of seeing and hearing his mother getting bashed; the sick anxiety inside when he smelt alcohol on people; the feelings of safety and connectedness when he was living with his grandmother shattered at her death, so that (using alcohol/drugs himself now) he said he felt 'Lost in a world I cannot live in'; he couldn't see a future for himself or anyone else, but rather 'A wasted bombed-out planet, everything destroyed, dead earth, stinking water, no trees, mangled people'.

Jim Consedine writes of a society which has constructed such feelings and behaviours in many of our young. He describes a western legal system he labels as 'retributive justice', based on maintenance of hierarchal power, vengeance, punishment, and alienation. The crime is considered to be against the State, and the needs of the 'victim' are incidental to that. The system asks 'How do we punish this offender?'. Such a system perpetrates a high violent crime rate, and constructs embittered and angry people. Over the years, such a system has created 'the dispossessed, the poor, the vulnerable, the sick and the addicted', and it is they who fill the prisons built to enforce this retributive ideology. Such a system feeds itself.

For example, he points out that more public money is spent in the United States of America trying to deal with crime than is lost in criminal activity. In 1985, an estimated $10 billion was lost from crime, but more than $50 billion was spent on activities related to criminal justice enforcement. More than half the people imprisoned committed crimes involving less than $1,000 while $21 billion is spent each year in construction and maintenance of prisons to incarcerate people. It would be interesting to see if there are similar figures for Australia.

The book presents studies which show that: 1. the poor go to prison; 2. imprisonment increases crime rates; 3. imprisonment brutalises people; 4. imprisonment destroys relationships; 5. prisons are full of drugs; 6. prisons are recruitment grounds for more advanced criminal behaviour; 7. prisons are not a deterrent; 8. prisons are expensive; 9. high unemployment breeds increase in crime rates; 10. the prisons systems is selective (the poor, uneducated, young, unemployed, unskilled, and racially repressed minorities are more likely to be found in prison). The present criminal justice system maintains class, race, gender and age barriers.

Consedine presents a well-researched, carefully argued case for justice reform which is essential if we are to move to the situation where my young friend, and others like him, can feel they may have a future to which they can contribute. To change the future we need to listen and act on the vision and practice of restorative justice proposed in this, and other books similar to it.

Restorative justice comes from the philosophical base of reconciliation, and asks the question: 'How do we restore the well-being of the victim, the community and the offender?'. There are many layers to this question. It applies equally to the indigenous or non-indigenous individual in relationship to the Anglo-dominant society and its male-dominated criminal justice system, to the indigenous individual victim and/or offender in relationship to his or her own community, as well as the relationship of indigenous victims as a collective to the community in which we all live, and to the offenders, who invaded our lands in the context of colonisation, breaking their own laws as they did so.

Principles of restorative justice as presented in the book are based largely on Maori and other indigenous traditions. In contemporary Aotearoa, the process used is one of bringing families together when a juvenile offence has been committed, and talking the issues through until a resolution is reached between victim, offender and their respective families within the community. Jim Consedine claims this restorative process adopted with juvenile offenders in Aotearoa is the most important piece of social legislation adopted in a generation. Consedine calls it a 'gift to the world'.

While the book is recommended, it does have some shortcomings. The author is not as knowledgeable about Aboriginal Australian conflict management traditions, both in the contemporary sense and within customary practice, as he is about Maori processes. The chapter titled 'Aboriginal Australians: Betwixt and Between' is incomplete.

The book would also have been stronger by including some examples of restorative justice being explored and implemented by Aboriginal Canadian peoples. Some of these are particularly exciting and relevant to Aboriginal situations in Australia.

While Jim Consedine provides examples of Maori communities addressing child sexual abuse with restorative justice, it would have been good to have also provided examples of how such a process works with adult interpersonal violent crimes. I am aware of how restorative justice precepts have been used in Canada in domestic violence cases. In my work, I constantly hear Aboriginal people express the need to heal family relationships ruptured by intergenerational colonial impacts and the British/Australian legal system.

Recently on the ABC's 'Life Matters', Geraldine Doogue referred to both Aboriginal women and Aboriginal men as 'victims' of their colonial past. We can no longer afford to be 'victims'. We must find ways of moving beyond victim behaviours and experiences. Would restorative justice support the healing work started by some Aboriginal people, work that needs to happen in the area of offending patterns? Can we create the environment and the processes, using principles of restorative justice?


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