In a week when the Chief Inspector of Prisons published an Urgent Notification detailing the horrors of HMP Wandsworth, I found myself revisiting memories of being jailed there for the crime of fraud. Clanging doors, rattling chains, men screaming at night in anguish or despair or because their cellmate was assaulting them. No help coming. Emergencies unattended for far too long, and people dead as a result. No purpose, no hope, not even the possibility of redemption. Wandsworth is a miserable prison, one which does as much as possible to brutalise, punish and hurt those it jails, and nothing to heal or change them for the better.
The process does provide a different model, where victims and offenders recognise one another as people
My mind full of memories of pain, I then travelled to Nottingham to see James Graham’s new play, Punch, an adaptation of Jacob Dunne’s memoir, Right From Wrong. Aged 19, Jacob threw a single punch at a stranger, James Hodgkinson. James fell to the ground, struck his head and died in hospital nine days later.
Jacob went to prison for manslaughter. In that environment, surrounded by drugs and angry young men, where staff and other prisoners ‘just reinforced… negative feelings’, he might have continued down the path of crime after release. But something changed; Jacob is now a married father of two who campaigns for healthier cultures in and outside of prison. He credits restorative justice with changing the direction of his life. This process offers victims the opportunity to contact the person responsible, with the intent of asking them questions and expressing the harm caused.
Jacob was put in touch with James Hodgkinson’s parents, David and Joan, via Remedi, a restorative justice organisation. They eventually met, and ultimately Jacob worked with Joan to raise awareness of the risks of throwing even one punch. Jacob described restorative justice to me as ‘all about questions… it’s about getting to the bottom of what people’s needs are’.
Punch dramatises this painful, difficult and powerful story with sensitivity. Graham’s dialogue is astonishingly real. In the second act, when we finally see the meeting between James’s parents and Jacob, I forgot I was watching a dramatisation.
I knew little about restorative justice until I started speaking to people who had participated in these schemes. ‘Michael’, for instance, suffered a particularly traumatising robbery. After the offenders had been sentenced to three years, a probation officer approached him to see whether he’d be open to restorative justice, as an opportunity to ask questions and to allow the perpetrators to explain. Michael thought it sounded useful and he hoped he’d get some answers.
More than 75 per cent of all criminal prosecutions in England and Wales result in a guilty plea. This means there’s no trial and little or no explanation of what happened or why. Victims I spoke to found this very hard. They often feel the criminal process focuses on the offender; at the end, the victim still has no idea why the crime happened. ‘Matt’ is a probation worker I spoke to who has also experienced a restorative process as a victim. He believes ‘most victims have questions which don’t get answered in a normal justice process, such as “Why me? Was I unlucky? What’s happening to the offender now?”’
Michael’s restorative process began with him writing a letter to one of the offenders, via an intermediary. The offender’s explanation and apology helped, although Michael acknowledges: ‘I keep changing my mind – what he did was terrible.’ Even so, he likes to think the man has ‘moved on with his life’.
Nicola Fowler has worked for Remedi since 2005. She was the restorative justice practitioner who worked with Jacob, David and Joan. She told me that good restorative justice must be ‘focused on the needs of all participants’ and ‘entirely voluntary and informed’. There is no requirement for victims to meet those who have wronged them. They may simply wish to have messages or letters passed back and forth.
The data supports Remedi’s approach: almost all the victims who participated said it helped them feel safer and recover from the offence, and that it increased their satisfaction with the criminal justice system. If this was all restorative justice did, it would be enough. But it can also help offenders change.
As Jacob explained to me, the power of restorative justice is ‘it doesn’t allow you to remain ignorant’. For most offenders, it increases their understanding of the harm they’ve done and motivates them not to re-offend. And as Graham remarked, restorative justice is far from the ‘soft, liberal and woolly’ process people might imagine. In fact, to go into a room with your victim, or with the person who has hurt you, is – as he put it – ‘hard… muscular and robust’.
Fowler says that the best way to understand restorative justice is to sit in and watch it take place. That is unlikely to be possible for most people, and Punch may be the closest most of us will come to experiencing the power of the processes. I’ve often wondered how a post-Christian society could build a mechanism for forgiveness and reconciliation when even many Christians struggle with these acts. Punch shows us the power of forgiveness, and of the better world we could make.
The process isn’t always smooth, though, and the play doesn’t shy away from that; while Joan managed to forgive Jacob, David didn’t. It is not a panacea, but it does provide a different model, where victims and offenders recognise one another as people, in all their complexity.
The play made me think about my own crime and my victims. Victims of fraud may be less obvious than someone who is punched or robbed, but they suffer all the same. I waited 18 months between confessing all to the police and being sentenced. In that time, I often thought about how much I wanted to pick up the phone or send an email trying to explain. Perhaps restorative justice would have helped both my victims and me heal. Perhaps it still could.
The power of restorative justice
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16.05.2024
In a week when the Chief Inspector of Prisons published an Urgent Notification detailing the horrors of HMP Wandsworth, I found myself revisiting memories of being jailed there for the crime of fraud. Clanging doors, rattling chains, men screaming at night in anguish or despair or because their cellmate was assaulting them. No help coming. Emergencies unattended for far too long, and people dead as a result. No purpose, no hope, not even the possibility of redemption. Wandsworth is a miserable prison, one which does as much as possible to brutalise, punish and hurt those it jails, and nothing to heal or change them for the better.
The process does provide a different model, where victims and offenders recognise one another as people
My mind full of memories of pain, I then travelled to Nottingham to see James Graham’s new play, Punch, an adaptation of Jacob Dunne’s memoir, Right From Wrong. Aged 19, Jacob threw a single punch at a stranger, James Hodgkinson. James fell to the ground, struck his head and died in hospital nine days later.
Jacob went to prison for manslaughter. In that environment, surrounded by drugs and angry young men, where staff and other prisoners ‘just reinforced… negative feelings’, he might have continued down the path of crime after release. But something changed; Jacob is now a married father of two who campaigns for healthier cultures in and outside of prison. He credits restorative justice with changing the direction of his life. This process offers victims the opportunity........
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