What are we doing in South Africa? - Restorative Justice 101

During our service in South Africa, we will be leading bible studies among established small groups of inmates in a few facilities in the Western Cape. We will also do our best to spoil Evelyn and Jonah rotten (don’t tell Andrew and Anne). However, the bulk of our ministry will be facilitating a restorative justice (RJ) at Drakenstein prison, which may require some introduction.

RJ - the theory

In retributive justice, the focus is on punishing the perpetrator for committing a crime. While questions of responsibility, proportionality, and aggravating and mitigating factors may come into consideration, the retributive justice system is primarily designed to identify the guilty and punish them accordingly. The path towards justice is considered a hostile action pitting the state against the offender; think the People of the State of California v. OJ Simpson, and note who goes nameless. While the victim may testify as to the guilt and and responsibility of the accused, and even provide an impact statement describing the extent of their suffering, in the end the system is designed to identify, isolate, punish, and monitor the offender. Any relief, healing, or sustained support the victim finds tends to occur outside of the criminal justice system.

In restorative justice, the focus is on repairing the damages caused by crime. As the victim is the primary sufferer of the harms of crime, they are central to the process of healing. Restorative justice calls on offenders to take responsibility for the damaged relationships they caused through their criminal activity, and to take the necessary steps to serve all their victims in the healing process. This process may include a victim-offender dialogue, in which the victim is given the opportunity to question the offender, to discover the truth regarding what happened and why, and to decide together how best to continue healing. And looking forward, RJ seeks to proactively reduce future harm by preventing crime on the part of the offender and in his community.

RJ - the practice

During the RJ at Drakenstein, we will be working in a week-long intensive with small groups of offenders to think expansively about the harm and damaged relationships that they’ve caused through crime. We discuss who has been harmed by their offense, not just the victim who they robbed, raped, or murder, but that person’s children, family, friends, neighbors, and so on - all of whom are suffering. Many offenders leave the scene of their crime without fully grasping the harm that they’ve caused, so through testimonies, stories, and pictures, we examine how victims of crime suffer, and continue to suffer, for years after the offense.

We continue the RJ with lessons on respect, responsibility, honesty, manliness, confession, and forgiveness. We remind them that they continue to have the power to make decisions that impact others around them, and we encourage them to make decisions that help and heal their communities. At the end of the week, we invite the families of the offenders to join us for our last session, and provide the guys with their first opportunity to work to repair relationships damaged by their crime, as their own family members have often suffered for their sake. During the emotional sessions of family day, many guys share honestly for the first time the extent of their criminal activities outside and inside prison, the details of the crime that led to their prison sentence, and their hope for a better future.

Our role during the RJ will be to serve as facilitators for the men at our table - encouraging them in word and in deed to share their personal stories, consider the choices that they’ve made, and look forward to a future with better choices. Sometimes, our role will be to prod them to share more deeply about a topic or story that they haven’t really addressed. Sometimes our role will be to share personal stories of our own, to demonstrate what honest sharing can look like and to show that we too are broken people with pain in our pasts. And sometimes our role will be to be quiet, either as someone else shares, or as we sit in a moment of silence together.

Prayer Requests

As we prepare to go, please pray that God will guide us, providing the words to say, and the wisdom to say nothing at all. Please pray that the Holy Spirit will begin working now to softening the hearts of our guys, so that they will be willing to share the stories of trauma from their past, both as victims and as victimizers. And please pray that they will have courage and conviction, so that when presented with a clear choice, they will chose to end the cycle of crime begetting crime, and to seek the healing of the harm that they have caused.

Last year, we had to leave Cape Town only two days after the conclusion of the RJ. Two days was not enough time to sit with the heavy aftereffects of the RJ before rushing to head back home. This year, we will continue our work in the country for five days after the RJ, in part to enable us to more fully process and debrief as a team. Please pray for us in this time of recovery and reflection, that God will use what we see and hear to build up our spirits to better serve Him.

Hope Prison Ministry has been conducting restorative justices and follow up sessions in South African prisons for many years. It is a privilege for us to come alongside their volunteers to assist them during an RJ this summer.

Ever onward!

-AT&T