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TALES...BEHIND THE BARS

© Coy Holley

occurred, also told participants about a experience of James Thomas, the District Attorney in Littleton, CO, who presided over the case of the Columbine High School shooting. Earle noted this, "He said that in the aftermath of Columbine, there wasn't anybody to blame. The perpetrators killed themselves...And so, the community had no choice but to look at self....The power is not in the criminal justice system; the power is in the people; the power is in the relationships between people--that's where the power is."

Earle notes that current conditions in our society have forced police officers and social workers to take on and play the roles that fellow family members, pastors, and other significant people in the community used to perform in the past. "Now, you know, when I was a kid, nobody ever called the cops, nobody ever called the social workers. If you had a problem in your family, you went down the road and you talked with Uncle John or Aunt Mary--and if they had a problem, they came over and talked to you. And that's the way we did things. But the law--nobody ever called the law. The law was just a backstop. The law just caught those few people who made it through that team of mommas and daddies and aunts and uncles and teachers and preachers and neighbors and cousins and friends--that's what regulated behavior, it wasn't the law. We've come to the point where the police have become our symbolic Uncle John and the social workers have become our symbolic Aunt Marys--and we've got to change that."

In this, Earle says that restorative justice aims to bring this team of the past back together and help bring back what his definition of community is: "Community is a network of relationships that share joy and things. Now if it's a healthy community, they also share power. So a healthy community is one that shares joy, things, and power...Restorative justice is a way to share stories. It's a way to make the community a partner in protection. It's a way to make victims' pain and public anger count for something. We have to apply it where it belongs--to victim healing, to offender change, and through community awareness."

But how does this system work? Earle says that this is done in the area of juvenile sentencing by way of what he calls "neighborhood conference committees" where a panel of neighbors gets to know the juvenile offender and his/her family and sets punishment for that juvenile offender. And some of the proof of this is already in for Travis County-- the rate of juvenile recidivism for those offenders who go