Moral education in victim offender conferencing

Abstract

Introduction If every crime represents a failure in moral learning-- on the part of the offender, his/her community, and possibly the surrounding society -- then every crime also presents an opportunity for moral learning. Just as the child accepting a treat is caught before running away and admonished to say thank you, the offender is caught in the act of turning away from moral and legal norms and punished. This analogy between moral learning and punishment breaks down, of course, if punishment is narrowly understood as excising an evil from the social body. The analogy holds, however, over a broad range of aims in criminal justice: correcting the offender, restoring social order and security, repairing harm to the victim, reaffirming moral values or rectifying a moral imbalance, and reminding all observers of the public will. All these aims are moral for morality includes both person and society, intention and act, correcting and healing, and values and goods. To the extent that moral aims are achieved -- incorporated into individual and/or communal life--some kind of moral learning is also accomplished. This paper argues that victim offender conferencing offers an opportunity to reevaluate and expand the educational potential of criminal justice. The reevaluation depends on the expansion: if the public response to crime can be more effective educationally, then the educational aims of criminal justice can be more reasonably and directly pursued. If victim offender conferencing offers more effective educational practice than does punishment alone, then the aims listed above can be reaffirmed more clearly as educational aims. That is, moral learning--in its various forms--can have more priority as an outcome of the criminal justice system. Victim Offender Conferencing and Restorative Justice Victim offender conferencing is part of the larger movement of restorative justice, which draws its inspiration from a wide variety of responses to conflict, all of which aim above all to restore what the conflict has damaged or threatened, to the extent possible. Thus, divorce mediation cannot restore the marriage, but it can restore the ability of parents to cooperate for the good of their children. Labor dispute mediation cannot restore all lost corporate profits or employees' health, but it can restore enough trust to resume operations and correct unjust conditions. Likewise, victim offender conferencing cannot completely erase the trauma of crime, but it can restore a sense of physical and emotional security, replace the value of material goods, and provide a pathway for reintegrating offenders. As Aristotle says, justice is a complex term meaning several things: complete virtue, legal order, transactional equity, political equality, proportional distribution of goods, rectification of harms, and equity as a modification where the letter of law would be too rigid.(1) Responding to crime with the aim of restorative justice incorporates elements of all of these. Crime is addressed as a violation of the legal order, but also as a violation of persons. Political equality and rights are reaffirmed, but in a context of personal conversation and even confrontation. The proportion between crime and consequences is maintained, but according to the perceptions of those most directly involved more than by the impersonal hand of the state. Harms are rectified in proportion to the damage done but especially in light of what is important to those harmed. Contracts are negotiated by consensus. Above all--and most pertinent to this paper--crime is addressed in a manner consistent with what Aristotle calls complete justice: an overall sense of what is right and good for individuals as well as the commonwealth, the combination of all the virtues of public life in the good person. It is this element of justice that especially marks the various forms of victim offender conferencing. Victim offender conferencing is a process of dialogue, negotiation, and problem solving involving those most directly affected by the crime. …