LEWISTON — It is in a community’s best interest to learn new ways to respond to crime, restorative justice advocate Margaret Micolichek told about 30 people Thursday afternoon at the Great Falls Forum at the Lewiston Public Library.
“How can we pull people into a support system, rather than just charging them with a crime and sending them away?” she asked. “Because we have to remember that they are coming back; 95 percent of our prison population is coming back home at some point.”
Micolichek is the former director of the Restorative Justice Project in Belfast and is working at the Long Creek Youth Development Center in South Portland.
Restorative justice is a third way to think about responding to crime and wrongdoing, an alternative to both revenge and retribution, she said. Our modern court system is built on retribution, punishing wrongdoers for breaking laws. Restorative justice seeks to focus on repairing the damage done, whether it’s to one person or an entire community.
“There is a lot that happens when wrongdoing, harm and crime happens,” Micolichek said. “That is the focus of restorative justice work.”
The idea is to bring the willing offender and victims together, letting victims confront offenders to hold them accountable and to try to bring about some measure of closure.
“It could be any number of people impacted by a person’s action — and that’s often the piece that gets left out by our traditional justice system,” she said. “One of the key pieces that (is) unaddressed is the community. When a crime happens in our community, we are all impacted by that, whether it’s direct or indirect.”
But closure is not guaranteed: Victims are not required to forgive the offenders, and some offenders never show remorse. In the best cases, it’s an opportunity for offenders to come to terms not just with what they’ve done, but why they did it.
“One of the first things we do is understand where in their lives they have been victims and how they are survivors and acknowledge that they need healing for the things that have been done to them,” she said. “Once you can feel that people acknowledge the wrongs done to you, you can admit the wrongs that you have committed and to begin to heal and move forward.”
It’s an idea that’s growing in popularity nationally and here in Maine.
Bates College in Lewiston, Lewiston Middle School, School Administrative District 17 in Oxford Hills and a growing number of other schools and colleges use restorative justice to deal with student conflicts and behavior problems. The philosophy is especially well-suited to schools, she said.
“We really are looking for ways to eliminate detention, eliminate out-of-classroom time, office referrals, suspensions and expulsions,” she said.
Juvenile justice systems use it to hold youths accountable for minor offenses while keeping them out of the regular court system and adult corrections are using it as well, she said.
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