When Linda Stein moved from New York City to Newbury, an idyllic small town in Vermont,
she figured she'd seen the last of crime. During the past few years, though, she has spent one
evening a month with local lawbreakers.
Stein and other community volunteers meet regularly with adult nonviolent offenders (often
drunk drivers) to decide how they should repair the damage they have done to the community.
One month, they talked with someone who had driven off without paying for gas he had pumped.
"We had him interview the gas station owner to find out how the crime had affected him," Stein
says. Then he paid for the gas and wrote an essay about the crime's effects on other people and
the potential effect on his life if he were to repeat the crime.
About 30 miles east of Newbury, in Barre, Richard Jenny spends his Wednesday mornings this
way. He and several other members of the community reparative board, as the volunteer groups
are called, handle two or three cases in a sitting. One, which Jenny calls "the banged-up cow
story," involved a young man who, while drunk, drove into a cow that a farmer was taking across
a road. The driver was cited by the police, and the farmer presented a claim for payment.
"When the offender came before us," says Jenny, "we asked him what he thought about trying to
make amends to the farmer. He felt the [farmer's] claim was outrageous and that the accident was
partly the farmer's fault." The offender didn't seem very flexible about his position, so one of the
board members asked if he'd be willing to go with him to talk to the farmer. The meeting
occurred several days later, Jenny says, in the farmer's barn -- in front of the cow. When the
farmer stated his case, he pointed out the injury and said that, as a result, the cow had to be hand
milked, which cost extra money. Because the cow was no longer economically feasible to retain,
the farmer would have to sell it; and because it was injured, it was less valuable.
Then, says Jenny, the farmer and the offender talked with the community member about the
situation. "They talked about how much the farmer was losing in this. Then they negotiated what
would be reasonable for the young man, who didn't have a very good job, to pay."
Over in Bennington, Vt., a college town, Ron Cohen remembers an intense case tackled by the
board he joined in 1996. A teenage girl with an underage drinking offense came before the group.
When given an opportunity to speak, she was unresponsive, Cohen says. "There were probably
lots of reasons for this. Most of us were over 40 years old, and we must have looked like 80 to
her. All but one of us were men. She was embarrassed and her response sounded surly."
One of the board members, a father of two daughters, pointed a finger at the girl and insisted that
she look at board members when she spoke to them. When he pressed the matter and kept
pointing his finger at her, she broke into tears. After the girl left the room so the board could
discuss what it wanted to do, Cohen complained angrily that she had been mistreated.
The board talked about this for a while. When the girl rejoined the meeting, the finger pointing
board member apologized to her, and the board and the offender reached an agreement on her
restitution. When the board ended its meeting, the girl was sitting in a hallway waiting to see
someone in another office. Cohen remembers what happened next:
"There was one woman on the board, a retired kindergarten teacher. She went up to the girl and
said, 'How are you doing?' The kid just nodded her head. Then the woman said, 'You look like
you could use a hug.' The kid looked up and all of a sudden she just broke -- and they hugged
each other. And as the rest of us left, we said good luck to her."
Ron Cohen, Linda Stein, Richard Jenny, and hundreds of other volunteers serving on community
reparative boards in every county of Vermont are not lawyers or judges or jury members. Cohen
is a college professor. Members of his board have included an insurance agent, an artist, a
bartender, and a retired motel owner. They are not part of state or local government, yet they are
wielding government's power to determine what will happen to criminal offenders. They are part
of a radical experiment in criminal justice, launched in 1994, to shift government's power back
into the hands of community members. "This is democracy, this is people solving their
community's problems," says John Perry, one of the Vermont corrections officials who launched
the effort. "I get choked up watching the boards work."
By early 1999, Vermont's reparative boards had seen more than 3,000 low-risk adult offenders
who had committed the sorts of petty crimes that make up most of the workload for police,
prosecutors, courts, and prisons. These low-level crimes are on citizens' minds because they
wreck a community's quality of life, says Perry. "People care about shoplifting, vandalism,
disorderly conduct, noise at ... parties, and kids speeding on their streets -- because those things
happen thousands of times. You worry about murder if that happens in your town. But if there
are loud parties every damned Friday night and nothing gets done about it, first you get angry,
then you start getting afraid, and then you demand that legislators get tough on crime."
The offenders had been sentenced by a court, after pleading guilty to their crimes. Then, with the
offender's approval, the sentence had been suspended so the offender could work out a
"reparative contract" with a community board. This step is a big departure from the traditional
model of criminal justice in the United States. Under the centuries old "retributive" model, crime
is viewed as a wrong against the government. Justice is adversarial -- the state vs. the offender.
Once the state has established guilt, its method of balancing the scales of justice is to punish the
offender, to exact retribution by taking away something of value, such as the offender's freedom
or money. In contrast, the reparative model used in Vermont sees the community as another
victim; it achieves justice by having the offender repair the damage.
Vermont started using this model because the retributive model wasn't working well enough. In
1991, the state's prisons were extremely overcrowded. One of every four sentenced criminals was
on the streets because there was no prison space for them -- the highest percentage in the country.
The crime rate was down, and arrests and convictions had not increased. But the incarceration
rate -- the percentage of convictions leading to a prison sentence -- was up substantially. More
people were being sent to jail, with longer sentences, because legislators had responded to public
fear of crime by passing tougher laws.
This put impossible pressures on the corrections system. Because it didn't have enough prison
space, it became known as a "revolving door." Yet citizens didn't want new prisons built in their
communities, and the governor's budget office said too much money was already going to
corrections. In short, the public couldn't afford the retribution its elected officials demanded.
Furthermore, sending petty criminals to prison didn't work. When offenders got out, state records
showed, they were more likely to commit another crime than if they had been put on probation in
the community.
Faced with these problems, corrections officials started looking for alternatives to prison for
offenders who were not real risks to commit serious crimes. They used a series of focus groups
and then a scientific survey to ask the public what it thought. The results were a surprise, say
John Perry and John Gorczyk, the state corrections commissioner. "They did not want vengeance.
They wanted what everyone wants from their children when they violate the contract each family
has. They wanted a learning experience to occur."
Vermonters said they wanted nonviolent offenders to be held accountable for their crimes, but
not by being sent to prison. Instead, offenders should acknowledge their crime, say they were
sorry and mean it, and repair the damage they had done. And, a report on the findings said,
Vermonters wanted to participate in the process:
They want IN on the decisionmaking because they think they can help do a better job. They think
the criminal justice system isn't paying much attention to minor crime. They think we ignore the
crime that most immediately impacts their lives. ... They don't want that crime ignored, and they
are willing to spend time and effort to deal with it, if we let them.
In response, the corrections department started the first community reparative boards. In every
case they handle, board members and the offender must agree, in a written contract, how the
offender will repair the damage he or she did to the victim and the community. Making a contract
usually involves several steps: First, victims tell their story and say what they need to be restored;
next, offenders are encouraged to take responsibility for what they did and to understand that
their conduct hurt the community's well-being; and finally, offenders participate in a discussion
to decide how to make things right.
This is quite different from the typical sentencing process, in which the offender speaks through
an attorney. "In the traditional process," note Vermont corrections officials, "the offender can
continue to deny the reality of his offense ... and continue to see himself as the victim of the
system. With the reparative board, however, he has to talk about the offense, and when a whole
group of his neighbors just doesn't buy his bill of goods, he has to begin to acknowledge the
reality of his offense, and at least begin to recognize his responsibility."
Through the boards, Perry says, "the community gets to face its citizens -- both the victims and
the offenders -- and understand the dynamic of crime on the individual level." He describes the
potential power of the process.
The community gets an apology, an acknowledgment of a violation of the rules, and a
recognition on the part of the offender that he belongs to the social contract. The offender gets to
sign the social contract and gets to make amends for his crime. He gets to add value to the
community and, more important, he gets to demonstrate that he can add value. As a result, the
offender is seen as a positive force. And the community gets to embrace the victim and the
offender as members of the society, rather than as pariahs.
By 1999, every court in Vermont was using reparative boards as an alternative to sentencing.
There were 41 boards. Early concerns about the program had faded. Originally, criminal justice
professionals were skeptical, according to Gorczyk and Perry. "The fundamental criticism of all
of these justice professionals was egocentric -- how could untrained, mere citizens do the
complicated job of justice?" But after four years of experience, "these criticisms have largely
been muted." In 1998, the program not only earned a budget increase, it also won a prestigious
Innovations in American Government award from the Ford Foundation.
The reparative boards are clearly having positive effects. In 85 percent of their cases, according
to corrections officials, the offender has reached a contract with the board and then fulfilled it. (In
the rest, a contract could not be reached or the offender failed to fulfill the contract; either way,
offenders were returned to court for sentencing.) When the department followed up with 154
offenders who had completed the process, it found they had an 8.2 percent recidivism rate after
six months, compared to an 11.6 percent rate for those on regular probation. The program also
relieves the crunch in the prison system. Based on historical patterns, Perry estimates, as many as
half of the offenders sent to the boards might have ended up in prison.
In responses to surveys, about 90 percent of the offenders have expressed satisfaction about the
reparative experience. Board members also report that the experience is a positive one for
themselves and their communities. "For me, it's personally fulfilling," says Richard Jenny. "It
involves working with people, the offenders, so many of whom seem to be young and
uneducated, from backgrounds with psychological and social impoverishment."
In some communities, the boards have become far more involved than corrections officials
expected. One board negotiated with the local prosecutor to get him to send drunk driving cases
to them. It also recruited local businesses to hire offenders so they could pay their restitution.
Several boards have created panels to help victims and mentoring processes for offenders after
they fulfill their contracts.
Serving on a board changes the way you think about crime in your community, says Jenny. "It
hammers home the fact that people who end up in our courts tend to be the people at the bottom
of the social hierarchy. This is painfully evident."
"The experience gives board members a better understanding of things in their community," adds
Ron Cohen. He tells the story of a local woman who was guilty of about $4,000 in welfare fraud.
When the board asked her what had happened, Cohen recalls, she said she had three children, one
of whom had a chronic illness; she needed very expensive medicine and decided to get the
money even though it wasn't legal.
"Then," says Cohen, "she looked at us and said, 'What would you have done?' We looked at each
other and said we would have done the same thing. That really affected people's thinking about
who was in front of them and why they might have done what they did."
The bottom line for Linda Stein is that the reparative process is building her community. "It helps
make offenders more a part of the community," she explains. "I would like to think that offenders
who go through the program and succeed feel some caring from the community. And there's
actual physical work that has been done for the community; the offenders give back to the
community. This makes Newbury a better place to live."
