Book by Jonathan Burnside and Nicola Baker (Editors)
(The Relationships Foundation, 1994)
Reviewed by Tim Montgomerie on 30 October 2001
KEY POINTS
· Social skills and an awareness of others are taught primarily in the family. Relationships within the family and other social institutions are essential if people are to feel obligated to be peaceful, constructive and law-abiding members of society.
· During the Victorian era Britain's response to industrialisation was to form institutions such as friendly societies that created new personal networks of accountability and support. Today impersonal, statist institutions that pick up the pieces of relational failure prove to be no substitute; particularly insofar as their existence and mode of operation further undermines the independence of families and other civil society (gemeinschaft) institutions.
· If prisoners are not treated with respect and not given the possibility of maintaining or building relationships with family and other strategic sources of support and teaching after they leave prison, they will not respect the society to which they eventually return and the consequences will be serious for everyone.
· Imaginative and flexible mediation and reparation programmes are essential ways of reintroducing a direct relationship between the essential players in the crime drama: offender and victim.
Review of individual essays
What is Relational Justice?
Dr Michael Schluter
Noting that the rise in recorded crime in 1991 was greater than the total level of crime in 1950; Schluter argues that Britain has a serious crime problem.
Family relationships are crucial to civilising young children. "Sympathy for strangers is a by-product of sympathy for one's kin," Schluter writes. Family relationships teach children how to balance their own personal needs against group needs and to hold freedom and obligation in healthy balance. Communication skills, how to resolve conflict and self-esteem depend upon relationships with - and modeled by - parents. The poor life chances of children who have been 'in statutory care' demonstrates the sad reality when these relationships are absent.
Schluter suggests five indicators of healthy relationships:
· Directness: ideally people need to meet face-to-face;
· Continuity: people should meet frequently, regularly and over a sustained period of time;
· Multiplexity: people should meet in more than one role or context;
· Parity; good adult relationships should not be based on role or status;
· Commonality; common ends and experience are the basis of solid relationships.
[One could add a sixth factor covering the sustainability of relationships and the need for extended family and other support networks to help absorb difficulties.]
Crime and the rise and decline of a relational society
Professor Christie Davies
Davies writes:
"The factors that ensure that most people are law-abiding most of the time are not the impersonal threats of the law, but the disapproval of other individuals who know them and their own conscience which has been developed through such personal contact in the past. Everyday life consists of government by men, not laws."
Davies, a sociologist, draws on the teachings of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber to show that this view has long academic standing. Durkheim talked of egoism in modern societies where individuals are only weakly attached to groups and anomie where lives are not regulated by values-generating institutions and norms. Weber argued that through processes of industrialisation where employers found cheap and efficient technical ways of regulating staff members without such qualities as diligence, reliability, probity and self-control. If these qualities become less important for employment then families and communities have less incentive to inculcate them in children.
In the early stages of British industrialisation Davies contends that church, friendly societies and other Victorian institutions compensated for the loosening of family and village bonds. Friendly societies were based on encounter relationships that minimised false claims and the relationships were close enough for effective policing of deserving and undeserving cases. Davies writes:
"Whereas in Britain in the last half of the nineteenth century people responded to urban anonymity and uncertainty by the spontaneous creation of institutions that provided new personal relationships and a stronger personal moral ethic, in the twentieth century all British institutions and moral thinking have become permeated with an impersonal ethos."
Tension and tradition in the pursuit of justice
Jonathan Burnside
Burnside describes a tension between an "antiseptic" construal of justice that emphasises objectivity, impartiality and the fair application of rules with a "passionate" conception that emphasises love, compassion and a concern for the weak. These conflicting conceptions, he contends, represent a vital tension and care needs to be taken to ensure that neither eclipses the other. Relational justice may be a way of helping this tension evolve positively.
Burnside also promotes relationalism as an alternative to liberalism. A number of beliefs central to liberalism are: freedom of the individual from arbitrary external authority; the individual as the source of his or her values; the regulation of social life by universal and impersonal laws; and equal opportunity for all. Although bringing many benefits this worldview undermines those relationships which nurture well-being. Relational Justice talks about the person rather than the individual. Burnside: "The word 'individual' emphasises the separateness of the person, whereas 'person' underscores the fact that we are constituted by relationships; that is, our identity, even our being, is dependent upon the fact of relationship".
Avoiding injustice, promoting legitimacy and relationships
Anthony Bottoms
In promoting legitimacy Bottoms emphasises the need to help offenders, in particular, understand the legitimacy of justice arrangements. Lord Justice Woolf's landmark report following the 1990 prison disturbances warned:
"A recurring theme in the evidence from prisoners who may have instigated, and who were involved in, the riots was that their actions were a response to the manner in which they were treated by the prison system. Although they did not always use these terms, they felt a lack of justice. If what they say is true, the failure of the Prison Service to fulfil its responsibilities to act with justice created in April 1990 serious difficulties in maintaining security and control in prisons". In his conclusion to the report Woolf restated this view: "the achievement of justice will itself enhance security and control".
Most people in prison are vulnerable people with unstable home backgrounds and difficult life experiences. If, in prison, they find a system that disrespects them and treats them capriciously they have no encouragement to return any respect to society after they leave prison. Woolf again: "It is obvious if prisoners are treated like animals, sworn at, degraded and psychologically toyed with week after week, they in turn lose respect, not only for their tormentors, but for society at large". Legitimacy of prison arrangements doesn't need to mean an easy life. Hard work can be an essential part of a legitimate prison regime.
Bottoms emphasises some 'popular' injustices which any legitimate system will also attempt to avoid:
· Too much punishment for particular offences;
· Too little punishment for particular offences;
· Very different punishments for similar crimes committed by similar kinds of offenders;
· Inhumane punishments;
· Insufficient consideration of the victim;
· Punishment without prior just procedures.
Mediation, reparation and justice
Nicola Baker
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Justice in the community: the New Zealand experience
Fred McElrea
Baker contends:
"The more that a society relies on coercion by professional agencies to engender law-abiding behaviour, the less likely it is that communities and individuals will assume social responsibility and the more likely it is than an overall increase in fear and anonymity will result".
Baker's solution is imaginative extension of models of mediation from civil disputes (family law suits, industrial relations, and neighbourhood conflicts) to criminal cases. The key aims should be to assure the victim of repentance by the offender and open up the possibility of reparation (which does not have to be financial). Reparation offers the offender an opportunity to deal with any guilt and - through a relational encounter - to understand the human cost of his or her criminal actions. Mediation can take place in group settings with a number of offenders and victims present. Mediation and reparation could be an alternative to court action or could be taken into consideration in any court action. The current legal system is predicated on a state-criminal relationship. Mediation and reparation's key advantage is the recognition that "the victim and offender are the principal players in the drama of crime":
In another essay Fred McElrea discusses the New Zealand experience of Family Group Conferences. McElrea quotes a letter from a young offender who had been through an FGC meeting to his elderly victim: "...I wish I could turn back the hand of time and go back to that day and help you with your bag to the top of the hill instead of snatching it from your hands. I would have had the chance to know you and talk to you. I am so sorry for hurting you." The FGCs gather family members and community peers and leaders together to agree with the offender a course of reform that they will monitor and help the offender to maintain.
McElrea: "Facing a victim is commonly said to be far harder than facing a court. FGC plans are often both tougher and more imaginative than court-imposed sentences. An acceptance of responsibility for one's own actions is an ideal that few would oppose. The strengthening of family and community-based relationships could not be politically unpopular. A much better deal for victims is what the public has long sought. A lesser role for the state and a greater role for local communities is consistent with reforms underway in many Western countries. There is also the prospect of fiscal savings from the reduced use of courts and prisons, although offset against this must be the cost of putting more resources into the community".
In this story from an essay on the work of Prison Fellowship UK, Peter Walker shows how relationship breakdown can be at the root of crime: "A 19-year-old who claims to have carried out many hundreds of burglaries confessed that, on entering a house, if there were pictures of the family on the wall or standing on the mantelpiece, he would deliberately turn them around - or lay them down - so that he did not have to see the faces of the people he was stealing from. In a bizarre way, he recognized that he was creating victims, but he tried to avoid facing up to the full realization of his actions against these people".
Local justice: a personal view
Judge Christopher Compston
Compston makes a number of recommendations:
· Whilst judges do not necessarily have to live in certain localities they need to know the local neighbourhood, its key leaders and its problems.
· There should be a committee of local leaders (councillors, police officers, magistrates, probation officers, religious people, head teachers, doctors, business folk) who meet periodically, both formally and informally, to discuss local issues and share intelligence. This committee could be used to address issues that arise in court cases: badly lit areas that become crime blackspots; weak publicans allowing drug-dealing or underage consumption etc.
· Judges could appoint 'defendant's friends' - a young offender with a drink problem could be assigned a local person of goodwill with experience of addiction problems - perhaps from Alcoholics Anonymous.
· If a prison sentence is necessary the jail must be within reasonable distance of home in order for family relationships to be maintainable. Local people should be involved in local prisons - helping in resettlement and tackling the anomie issue.
Prisoners' children: symptom of a failing justice system
Roger Shaw
Over 100,000 children experience the incarceration of their father. Between 5 and 10% of the child population experiences a parent being imprisoned (97% of prisoners are men). Shaw: "The foundation of our system is that the innocent are not punished, only the guilty.... what alternative have we for ensuring that the children of prisoners are not made victims by the very system which upholds the law? ....The criminal justice system is operating in a way which ignores the importance of relationships. Its very activities help to sever one of the most important human relationships, that between a child and its parent."
In a powerful quote on the prison system in general, he writes: "If an Intelligence with no knowledge of earthly things came down from Outer-space and viewed the justice systems of the developed nations and saw how we gathered the vulnerable, those with poor social skills and little education but with some experience of delinquency and herded them together in institutions with other disadvantaged people and a sprinkling of serious criminals, then to release them at a later date, possibly to no home, probably to no job and definitely to be labeled by the outside world as jailbirds and criminals, the Intelligence might be forgiven for thinking we were actually trying to increase crime, rather than reduce it. He, she or it would not have to engage in very much serious research to demonstrate that this is exactly what we are doing."
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In summary, the following key policy conclusions emerge from the book:
1. All services, institutions and professions involved in the criminal justice system should treat people with courtesy, dignity and respect. There needs to be an end to the barbarism that only breeds further barbarism and a recognition that in every offender there is a possibility of change.
2. There should be compensation (not only or necessarily in financial form) for victims of crime.
3. Sentences of imprisonment should be the last resort - particularly for offenders with children - and people should go to local prisons.
4. A top priority should be a recognition by government of the potential contribution of networks of families and concerned citizens in first preventing crime and then avoiding reoffending.
5. The police should refocus on crime prevention and restoring peace to neighbourhoods - alongside essentially reactive enforcement responsibilities.
6. Courts should be more accessible, and locally accountable.
7. Mediation and reparation mechanisms should be investigated as both an alternative to court action or as something to be at least considered in any court punishment.
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