More than half of victims of violent crime don't even call the police in the first place. They prefer nothing to everything we have to offer. The vast majority of crime survivors pain goes unhealed.
What the existence of restorative justice means is that we can no longer pretend we don't know what else to do. As a country, we're really good at punishment. It's passive.
It doesn't require people to act, to think. It certainly doesn't require them to change. When we lock people up, we excuse them from their responsibility to answer for what they've done.
Restorative justice is a process to hold them accountable. It's a tool. People take turns answering questions like, What happened?
What needs arise? Whose responsibility is it to meet those needs? And how is that person going to do it?
It requires someone to take responsibility, to repair things as much as possible, and to never commit that harm again. This isn't about feeling sorry, it's about doing sorry. Things like go to school, get a job, pay restitution, apologize, do community service. Restorative justice practices have been used to address low-level infractions like vandalism, up to addressing the impact of murders on the surviving family members. Restorative justice processes are first and foremost about meeting the needs of people who are hurt.
Sometimes the person who can make the greatest contribution to a survivor's healing is the person who harmed them. To come through trauma, we need answers to our questions. To say, my life was never the same after you hurt me like that. Crime survivors want the most safety possibly available.
So if incarceration actually produced safety, we would have the safest country in human history. That's not what we have. Core drivers of violence are shame, isolation, and inability to meet one's economic needs, and exposure to violence.
And we dig those into prisons to try and keep people from committing further violence. Incarceration exposes people to exactly the things that increase the likelihood that they'll go on to harm others. People who are hurt deserve a process that will help them heal.
People who are responsible for crime have an obligation to be accountable for that. All of us deserve responses to crime that actually make us safer. Our current criminal justice system doesn't deliver any of those, and restorative justice at its best delivers them all.