For Kif, re: theory into practice

In her comment, Kif said:

> If it's just where you live, and that can't change, then you deal,
> and fear is only something you realize once you're "out"...

Yup. If you just don't have the power to make yourself safer, you get on with your life the best you can and don't spend a lot of time being afraid. If it happens, it happens. Nothing I can do about it. And any one individual has pretty seriously limited ability to do anything about crime.

But let's play what-if for a minute. Imagine that those arseholes banging on your door at 4am went on to get arrested that night, for disorderly conduct or drug possession or something. Imagine that someone saw them at your door, so the police know they were bugging you. And for the bit that's probably most unrealistic at this point, imagine that Montreal had Community Accountability Boards set up when it happened.

How would you feel if a CAB member contacted you, and asked you to come to the meeting where it would be decided what those guys would have to do, to repair whatever harm they did? To tell them, in as much or as little detail as you wanted to discuss, exactly how they affected you?

Just makin' stuff up here... maybe that 4am was 5 hours before an interview for a job you really really wanted, and you were all shaken up and underslept, and you blew the interview. Maybe one of your kids woke up and got scared when they came to the door, and had nightmares after that. Maybe other folks started knocking on your door because they saw these guys doing it and thought you were selling. Maybe this was the last straw on top of a bunch of little things in the neighborhood making you feel mad and unsafe, and you started to feel really powerless because you didn't have the money to move, and you started to get depressed about it. Or WHATEVER the actual effects were for you and your family.

You would have the chance to tell those guys, in a safe setting where they are obliged to listen and understand and recognize what this event meant to you. And you would be asked, what would these guys have to do, to regain good standing in YOUR eyes as members of your community? So you would feel fine about them being your next-door neighbors? And your answer to that (in combination with the input of the other affected people present) would be what they would have to do, or else go back to court.

Would you want to do that if you were asked? Some people take to the idea immediately, and a lot of others want nothing to do with it.

The fact that probably none of us have ever been asked, though, points up what I think is a pretty big gap in the way Western traditional criminal justice works. We pretty much punish the offenders and ignore the victims. If you're the victim of something "serious" it can be really socially isolating, because nobody quite knows what to say to you... and if whatever it was wasn't that "serious" we're pretty much expected to suck it up, maybe complain about it a bit but basically just deal. Most of the time, the people affected by a crime never get offered any support to work through what the experience meant for them, or heal from it. So by ourselves we do what we can, and chalk up the rest to "the way the world is."

My hope is that on the level of towns and cities and states and provinces, we're starting to do a little better at this, with these restorative justice practices, and we can get a whole lot better at it. But in the meantime, this work is mostly just being done in bits and pieces. It's even something you can do with kids. The simplest version is just to ask them:

-- What happened?
-- Who was affected?
-- How were they affected?
-- What are you willing to do to make it right?