Changing Lenses: Restorative Justice for Our Times

Howard Zehr is insightful as he guides readers through the power of restorative justice and shows us why we need a new way forward.

—Leymah Gbowee, winner of 2011 Nobel Peace Prize

"Twenty-five years ago, Howard Zehr’s Changing Lenses started changing the world. This new edition demonstrates the timelessness of its original insights. New material brings it up to date. Especially valuable are Howard’s reflections in the final chapter on the movement he helped launch."

—Daniel Van Ness, executive director, Centre for Justice and Reconciliation at Prison Fellowship International

This is such a needed book in a time when ‘justice’ is under so much review. This books points to not only a better system but a better self. It is perceptive, healing, and instructive. It gets at the spirit of improving our systems and the soul of justice.

—Joel C. Hunter, senior pastor, Northland, A Church Distributed

"I first read Changing Lenses as a young prosecutor in 1991. It changed my life both personally and professionally. The metaphor and the principles continue to inspire and guide me. This edition is a wonderful and much-needed gift for a new generation."

—Fred Van Liew, lawyer, mediator, and author of The Justice Diary

A needed book with many suggestions for moving toward a more just criminal system.

—National Catholic Reporter

"Changing Lenses has done more to shape my understanding of justice and peacemaking and to define my scholarly career and sense of vocation than any other. It remains my first choice when people ask me what they should read to learn more about restorative justice."

—Chris Marshall, professor of restorative justice, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

This book will get you thinking in new ways. It’s the best book on criminal justice I have ever read. Profound and thoughtful, yet written in plain language.

—Jim Mustin, founder, Family and Corrections Network

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Zehr, Howard, author.

Changing lenses: restorative justice for our times / Howard Zehr. --

Twenty-fifth anniversary edition.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8361-9947-5 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Restorative justice. 2. Restorative justice--Religious aspects. 3. Victims of crimes. 4. Punishment. 5. Reconciliation. I. Title.

HV8688.Z437 2015

364.6’8--dc23

2015005821

All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from Holy Bible, New International Version ®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

CHANGING LENSES:

TWENTY-FIFTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

© 1990, 1995, 2005, 2015 by Herald Press, Harrisonburg, Virginia 22802

Released simultaneously in Canada by Herald Press,

Kitchener, Ontario N2G 3R1. All rights reserved.

First published 1990. Second edition 1995. Third edition 2005.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015005821

International Standard Book Number: 978-0-8361-9947-5

Printed in United States of America

Cover and interior design by Merrill Miller

All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in whole or in part, in any form, by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior permission of the copyright owners.

To order or request information, please call 1-800-245-7894

or visit www.heraldpress.com

19 18 17 16 15                10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

God is merciful and gracious,

slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

God will not always accuse,

and will not be angry forever.

God does not deal with us according to our sins,

nor repay us according to our iniquities.

—Psalm 103:8-10, The New Testament and Psalms,

An Inclusive Version

CONTENTS

Foreword

Preface to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition

PART I: The Experience of Crime

1 A Vignette

2 The Victim

3 The Offender

4 Some Common Themes

PART II: The Justice Paradigm

5 Retributive Justice

6 Justice as Paradigm

PART III: Roots and Signposts

7 Community Justice: The Historical Alternative

8 Covenant Justice: The Biblical Alternative

9 VORP and Beyond: Emerging Practices

PART IV: A New Lens

10 A Restorative Lens

11 Implementing a Restorative System

12 Reflections Twenty-Five Years Later

Resources

Essays

Group Study and Teaching Suggestions

Additional Group Exercises

Bibliographic Essay

Acknowledgments

The Author

Foreword

I MET HOWARD ZEHR in 2007, when I invited him to speak at a conference on crime victims at Stanford Law School’s Criminal Justice Center. As Howard finished his talk, Robert Weisburg, the center’s long-time faculty director, excitedly whispered, I’ve discovered what I want to be when I grow up! Howard Zehr!

I was in complete agreement with Professor Weisburg that day. In the years that followed, I’ve taken every opportunity to learn from Howard, in the hopes that his prodigious heart and intellect would somehow be contagious.

It’s no exaggeration to say that by asking us to change lenses, Howard Zehr has changed countless lives. Mine is among them. As a former victim advocate turned public defender, my heart was painfully pulled in different directions by our legal system. Reforms for one side always came at the expense of the other, and none addressed the inefficacy of punishment as a strategy for reducing crime. Changing Lenses offered the sole, true paradigm shift I had encountered in the realm of criminal justice reform. By centralizing crime victims’ self-identified needs, Howard reframed accountability as an empowering reprise of the golden rule: do unto others as they would have you do unto them.

Here was a view of justice that could better meet crime victims’ needs, while simultaneously ending our addiction to punitive confinement by believing in the power of communities to support their members when things go wrong. Howard’s vision was so compelling that shortly after meeting him, I left the practice of law to see how his ideas could be operationalized in Oakland, California. Howard has been a friend and mentor to my work at every step of the way.

In the pages that follow, Howard writes, Our understandings of what is possible and impossible are based on our constructions of reality. These constructs can and do change. Changing these constructs requires fearlessly replacing entrenched views that no longer serve us with new ones that do. Howard Zehr is such a thinker. It speaks volumes that Howard transferred to Morehouse College in the early 1960s and became the first white man to graduate from the historically black college. This act was an early expression of Howard’s deep commitment to changing lenses, to walking with people who have been historically marginalized, and to placing himself in uncomfortable situations that would force him to learn, grow, and ultimately be of benefit to those whose lived experiences differ from his own. As you will see in the pages that follow, these personal commitments are reflected in his theory of justice.

It is these experiences that likely drove Howard to engage in the direct practice in the field he helped create. Howard is a rare academic with significant hands-on experience. In the years since the original publication of this book, he has personally facilitated dialogues between crime victims and those who harmed them, and has sat in countless restorative justice circles with communities across this country. Howard’s commitment to continued learning—particularly about the racialized nature of punishment in the United States—is reflected in this twenty-fifth anniversary edition.

Yet this edition retains the timeless messages Howard offered twenty-five years ago. Most importantly, Changing Lenses continues to lay the deep, theological basis for Howard’s more concrete offerings that guide today’s restorative justice practitioners found in later publications. And while the text is Christian in its framing, as a Buddhist and atheist, I find Changing Lenses to be a universal call for equal compassion for those who have experienced harm and those who caused it.

Howard’s capacity to see things from different angles is no doubt born of his eclectic personal and professional interests. First and foremost is his photography, followed closely by his love of pickup trucks, restoring vintage AM radios, a foray into beekeeping, and many other curious things. He brings what he learns from myriad sources to his justice work, and this is reflected in his writing. Equally present in Howard’s work are his wry, understated sense of humor, his open heart, and his consummate storytelling skills. But above all, Howard’s humility makes his work accessible—his writing feels like a dialogue with the reader. He remains open to new ways of seeing things every day. So when I find myself too wedded to Howard’s framing of restorative justice, he gently reminds me that restorative justice is a compass, not a map.

I offer a deep bow of love and gratitude to Howard for the compass he began to construct with this timeless text, and for delivering on his aspiration to a paradigm shift away from the binary view of justice, away from the notion of us / them, victor / vanquished, winner / loser. Away from a justice of sides toward a justice that heals.

—sujatha baliga

Restorative Justice Project

Oakland, California

Preface to the Twenty-Fifth

Anniversary Edition

SOON AFTER MY fortieth birthday, I remember walking along the beach, looking over Lake Michigan at the distant horizon, contemplating this book. Like the indistinct shapes on the lake’s horizon, the book seemed a kind of mirage, an idea shimmering in the distance, not actually real.

A friend and I were spending a few days at a nearby cabin to get away from work and ponder the writing projects each of us was anticipating. I was trying to envision the kind of book I wanted to write. Who was I writing for, what I was I trying to accomplish, what might it look like physically? One dimension was clear: I wanted to produce a book that did what Nils Christie’s little book Limits to Pain had done for me on the issue of punishment. I thought of his book as a provocative essay, and that’s what I wanted to write: a book that would encourage us to identify and rethink some of the assumptions we rarely examine and that would help us begin to dream of other possibilities. When I try to understand a new field, I look first for a good journalist who is interpreting the field. I wanted to approach this emerging book with a journalistic sensibility and to write accessibly, from an insider/outsider perspective, about the big-picture issues of crime and justice today.

By the early 1980s, the small victim-offender reconciliation programs in Kitchener, Ontario, and Elkhart, Indiana, had some years of experience, and the idea had spread to many other communities even beyond North America. The concerns for victims, offenders, and communities that had led to the approach in the first place remained central, but we had no real integrating conceptual framework for what we were doing. During this time, I began to put together the components of a framework, presenting this first to a national group of Catholic priests and nuns who were engaged in prison ministry. I began to use the term restorative justice, and with an inclination to alliteration, contrasted it with retributive justice. The first full publication of this framework was in a small book entitled Retributive Justice, Restorative Justice, published by Mennonite Central Committee in 1985.

Later, although I knew I hadn’t invented it, I could not recall where the term restorative justice originated. Then some years ago attorney Ann Skelton from South Africa was working on the history of restorative justice for her doctoral dissertation and came to visit. I turned her loose in my office, and she found a book that included an essay by Albert Eglash.¹ Several times in that essay he mentioned the term restorative justice. The phrase is underlined in my book, and I remembered then that I had first encountered the term there. Anne later traced the term to the work of a German theologian in the 1950s.

I had found Eglash’s essay somewhat helpful, but his vision certainly wasn’t for restorative justice as I came to understand it. Eglash called for guided or creative restitution as a focus for justice. However, he put little emphasis upon victims’ needs or roles. In fact, he concluded the essay like this: Any benefit to victims is a bonus, gravy, but not the meat and potatoes of the process.

As this suggests, Changing Lenses, and the concept of restorative justice as I have articulated it, owes much to many sources and discussions. The preface from the earlier editions said it well: It is a work of synthesis more than invention. This is especially true of this twenty-fifth anniversary edition, as the acknowledgements and citations make clear.

If I were writing Changing Lenses today, I would say some things differently. Nevertheless, rereading the book for this edition, I am struck by how current most remains. For this reason, and because the book has come to be viewed as a kind of classic, I have made only minor changes to the primary text except for chapter 9, which has been updated to include more recent developments. Also, I have added some notes and moved some material from appendixes into chapters, in the process adding a chapter 12. Finally, the resources section has been updated and expanded to include a variety of new teaching and study material.

I wrote Changing Lenses from a Christian perspective, but I had hoped to write it in such a way that it would resonate and be used much more widely. That has, in fact, been the case. I am honored that my friend sujatha baliga (she prefers her name uncapitalized), a practicing Buddhist whose creativity, experience, and wisdom I deeply value, has contributed the foreword.

A note about terminology: In recent years, many of us in the restorative justice field have become uncomfortable with labels such as victim and offender. Although they provide handy terms for criminal justice applications and cannot be avoided there, they are often not appropriate when applied in school settings. More importantly, as noted above, they are labels that oversimplify and categorize people. In fact, they can become self-fulfilling. As labeling theory in criminology points out, people tend to become what they are labeled. Alternatives such as the person harmed or the person causing harm are more awkward, but were I writing this book today, I would use such terms more often. Later in this edition I also raise some cautions about the term retributive and the retributive/restorative dichotomy around which my argument is structured.

Earlier versions of this book began with a case story. I introduced the central metaphor of the book—changing our lenses—much later. Now that this metaphor is so established in the restorative justice field, I introduce this metaphor first, before the story. So let’s begin there: with the lenses we use to view crime and justice.

—Howard Zehr

1 Albert Eglash, Beyond Restitution—Creative Restitution, in Restitution in Criminal Justice, ed. Burt Galaway and Joe Hudson (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1977), 91–99.

1

A Vignette

I HAVE BEEN INVOLVED in photography for many years. One of the lessons I have learned is how profoundly the lens I look through affects the outcome. My choice of lens determines in what circumstances I can work and how I see. If I choose a slow lens with a small maximum aperture, the image will be dim, and good-quality photographs may be hard to obtain under low light levels.

The focal length of the lens also makes a difference. A wide-angle lens is highly inclusive. It incorporates within the frame a multitude of subjects, but it does so at the cost of a certain distortion. Objects that are nearer become large, leaving objects in the background small. Also, the shapes of objects at the corners of the frame are altered. Circles become ellipses.

A telephoto lens is more selective. The scope of its vision is narrower, incorporating fewer objects within the frame. It too distorts, but in a different way than a wide-angle lens. With a telephoto lens, objects are larger but distances are compressed. Objects appear closer to the camera—and closer to one another—than they are to the naked eye.

The choice of lens, then, affects what is in the picture. It also determines the relationships and proportions of the elements included. Similarly, the lens we use to examine crime and justice affects what we include as relevant variables, what we consider their relative importance to be, and what we consider proper outcomes.

We in the West view crime through a particular lens. The criminal justice process that uses that lens fails to meet many of the needs of either victim or offender. The process neglects victims while failing to meet its expressed goals of holding offenders accountable and deterring crime.

Such failures have led to the widespread sense of crisis today. An array of reforms to the criminal justice system has been attempted. The fads of today, such as electronic monitoring and intensive supervision, are simply the most recent of a long line of solutions. Yet this system has shown itself remarkably resistant to significant improvement, absorbing and subverting efforts at reform. A French proverb seems true: The more things change, the more they remain the same.

The reason for such failure, I will argue in this book, lies in our choice of lens—that is, in the assumptions we make about crime and justice. These assumptions, which govern our responses to wrongdoing, are in fact out of step with the experience of crime. Furthermore, they are out of step with Christian roots and even with much of our own history in the West. To find our way out of this maze, we will have to look beyond alternative punishments and even beyond alternatives to punishment. We will have to look to alternative ways of viewing both problem and solution. Indeed, the lens we look through determines how we frame both the problem and the solution. This book is about changing the lenses through which we view criminal justice.

This book is about principles and ideals. It seeks—perhaps presumptuously—to identify and evaluate some of the basic assumptions we make about crime, about justice, about how we live together. It attempts to outline briefly how we came to have these assumptions and to suggest some alternatives.

Such an effort involves abstractions, but it cannot be limited to them. We must begin by entering into the actual experience of crime and of justice as deeply as we can. Only with a firm footing in such reality can we begin to understand what we do, why we do it, and, hopefully, what we might do differently.

But an understanding of the experience of crime is not an easy undertaking, and it is not one that most of us approach willingly. To confront what it means to victimize or to be victimized by another person sparks intense emotions that are often frightening and that we would rather ignore. Unless we have experienced crime directly, we may find it difficult to empathize fully. Nevertheless, we must try, realizing that the attempt will be incomplete and perhaps painful.

This book, then, begins at that point.

THE STORY

Many years ago, I sat with a seventeen-year-old defendant in a courtroom in a small American town. A colleague and I had been asked to prepare a sentencing proposal to submit to the court. We were now there, awaiting sentencing by the judge.

The events leading up to this point make a sorry story. When he was sixteen, this young man used a knife to confront a young woman in a dark hallway. In the ensuing scuffle, she lost an eye. Now his fate was to be decided.

Although details are uncertain, something like this seems to have unfolded. The young man, who came from an unhappy—probably abusive—home situation had decided to run away with his girlfriend but lacked the necessary money. He had no record of violence. But television apparently convinced him that if he threatened someone, she or he would hand over money and his problem would be solved.

In choosing a victim, he picked a young woman he sometimes saw around town. On several occasions, he had attempted to talk with her but had been rebuffed. Since he assumed her to be well off, she seemed a logical choice.

So he waited in the hallway of her apartment with a knife in his hand, his face masked. (He claims he had deliberately picked a small knife.) When she entered, he grabbed her from behind. But instead of passively handing over her money as he had expected, the young woman panicked—as most of us would—and began to scream and struggle. The young man’s mother later mentioned that he never could stand to have voices raised against him and that he tended to get irrational when that happened. Perhaps this explains his behavior, then, because when she struggled, he too panicked, stabbing her a number of times, including in the eye.

They entered her apartment. Here their stories differ as to whether he held her captive or was attempting to help. He claims that he was taking her for help and that she was cooperating. At the time of arrest, he was reported to have said, I didn’t mean it; I didn’t mean it. I didn’t want to hurt nobody. Tell her I’m sorry. At any rate, he was arrested as they were leaving the apartment. Eventually he was convicted and now was awaiting sentence.

In the tiny courtroom in this small community, he sat with his attorney at a table facing the judge. Behind him sat his family. In the back row sat the family and relatives of the victim. Scattered through the room were a few interested onlookers and criminal justice professionals.

Before he was sentenced, I presented my sentencing proposal, which called for a limited prison term, supervision, restitution to the victim, restitution to the community, counseling, education, structured living, and employment. He was asked whether he had anything to say.

He talked about his sorrow for what he had done and of his attempt to understand what it meant for the young woman. I realize, he said, I have caused a lot of pain. Miss —— lost something she will never get back. I would gladly give her my eye to see through. I am sorry for what I have done, and I ask that I be forgiven. I don’t wish to cause [her] family any harm in later years, no matter how long it will be.

Then came time for sentencing. Before pronouncing the sentence, however, the judge methodically enumerated the usual goals of sentences: the need for retribution, the need to isolate offenders from society, the need to rehabilitate, the need to deter. He noted the need for offenders to be held accountable for their actions.

The judge also discussed this young man’s intent in committing the crime. He had been charged with armed robbery and assault with intent to kill. The judge appeared to agree with the offender’s version, that he did not intend to kill when he undertook the robbery. However, it was the judge’s inference that he had formed the intent during the course of the struggle and thus that the charge was both accurate and serious.

Then he pronounced sentence. The young man was given a sentence of twenty to eighty-five years in prison with no possibility of parole or good time before the minimum was served. He would be at least thirty-seven when he emerged. I trust, the judge admonished this youth as he pronounced this sentence, that there you will forget the patterns of behavior which led to this violent offense.

That this story is a tragedy can hardly be denied. It is, however, a tragedy that was soon abstracted into a different kind of drama. Instead of a tragic confrontation between two individuals, the legal process and the media transformed it into a crime involving a criminal and—it is only secondarily remembered—a victim. The drama was between two abstractions. The event was mystified and mythologized until the actual experiences and motivations were lost.

Let us begin, therefore, by changing our lenses. Let’s demythologize and demystify this all-too-typical tragedy. Let’s try to unravel the experience, viewing it as a human tragedy involving real people—people who are in many ways much like us.

2

The Victim

I NEVER MET THIS young woman. I was discouraged from doing so by the adversarial nature of the legal process, by the circumstances of my involvement in the case, and by my own uncertainty about how to proceed. In retrospect, I probably should have risked the attempt. However, let me try to project, on the basis of other victims’ experiences, something of what she has gone through.¹

THE EXPERIENCE

When she entered her hallway and was assaulted by a man with a knife wearing a mask, she was terrified. Her first reaction was one of shock and disbelief: This cannot be happening to me. Some victims report that they are paralyzed initially, unable to act. She, however, screamed and struggled. She reported later that she was certain she was going to die.

A common reaction of victims is what psychologists have called frozen-fear compliance. Confronted by such a terrifying, overpowering situation, victims of violent crime (like victims of hijackings) frequently seem to cooperate with their oppressor. In some crimes such as rape, this natural psychological reaction may be misinterpreted by courts as willing collaboration. In actuality, however, such compliance is rooted in terror.

Once the