The question nobody asks
The first mediation I ever facilitated, the victim — a woman whose house had been broken into — looked at the nineteen-year-old kid across the table and said, I just want to know why my house.
He stared at the table for a long time. Then he said he’d watched her leave for work from the bus stop and thought nobody was home. That was it. That was the whole reason. She started crying. He started crying. I’m not going to pretend I understood what happened in that room, but something shifted between them that a courtroom couldn’t have touched.
I’ve done about 400 of these now. Not all of them work. But 97 percent of federal cases end in plea bargains, and nobody in that process — not the defendant, not the victim, not the judge — would call it justice. It’s processing. It’s throughput.
It actually scales
People hear restorative justice
and think small. Church basements. Juvenile shoplifters. New Zealand restructured its entire youth justice system around it in 1989. Youth incarceration dropped to a fraction of the US rate. Rwanda used community gacaca courts for over a million genocide cases. Imperfect, but the only thing that could have held.
The retributivists need the courtroom to draw a line. I get it. But the line they draw doesn’t include the victim’s actual question, which is almost never how many years
and almost always why.
The distributive camp says fix the conditions first. I agree. But the person across from me in the circle has already been hurt. I work in the meanwhile. The meanwhile is where people live.
Where we concede ground: Some people weaponize the circle. We don’t have an answer for the psychopath.
What would change our mind: Victims in restorative programs reporting worse outcomes than adversarial prosecution.
Read the full synthesis: What is justice for?