Transcripts

CATHERINE WINTER: One day Rich Crawford got fed up. Crawford supervises probation agents in Bemidji for the Minnesota Department of Corrections. He was frustrated with the huge caseloads the probation agents had to shoulder, and he was tired of hearing that his town, Bemidji, had one of the highest crime rates in the state.

RICH CRAWFORD: What dawned on me one day actually when I was sitting in a fish house and listening to the radio was that the crime reports just kept on coming and coming and coming.

And I was real frustrated thinking, something is wrong with the way our community handles this crime problem, something is probably inadequate in terms of how we address it, in terms of criminal justice system.

CATHERINE WINTER: Crawford wanted to come up with a new approach that would have more impact on people who commit crimes, something that would make them stop and think about what they were doing.

RICH CRAWFORD: What gets people to stop most effectively in my experience as a probation officer, and then I also had some family experience, was probably the chemical dependency intervention model, where you bring people together who are concerned and you overwhelm a person with information about what their behavior is doing to you. And in this case, I wondered, could that same model work with the criminal justice system?

CATHERINE WINTER: Crawford wondered if he could pull together a group of people from the community who would sit down with a criminal and explain how the crime affected them. Crawford didn't pull that idea out of thin air. He had attended a conference on something called restorative justice.

Restorative justice is a relatively new concept in corrections, though, the idea is ancient. The idea is to stop thinking of crime simply as an offense against the state. To bear in mind that crime hurts victims and communities, and to look for ways to repair that harm. Kay Pranis is the restorative justice planner for the Minnesota Department of Corrections.

KAY PRANIS: The current system actually insulates offenders from thinking about the victim, their own family, the community, and how they were all impacted by the incident because the system focuses them in thinking about themselves, how are they threatened now by what the system will do to them.

And there are all kinds of ways to rationalize the behavior for property offenses. It's things like it was covered by insurance, I didn't really hurt anything, I didn't really do anything to anybody.

CATHERINE WINTER: Pranis says Minnesota's on the cutting edge when it comes to restorative justice. Courts, schools, and law enforcement agencies around the state are starting to use restorative justice ideas.

In Carver and Martin counties, some victims who choose to sit down with the criminal and both their families to talk and the victim has a say in what the offender has to do to make up for the crime.

Dakota County has some offenders take part in a crew that repairs damage done by criminals. In Bemidji, a panel that includes clergy, businesspeople, social service professionals, and other community members confronts offenders. Joe Osmundson, a professor at Bemidji State University, sat on a panel that dealt with a young burglar.

JOE OSMUNDSON: The scary part was he looks like every kid who sits in my college classroom. Clean, cut young man, didn't fit any of the stereotypes anybody would hold.

CATHERINE WINTER: Osmundson says the panel members took turns talking to the young man.

JOE OSMUNDSON: And so I said to him things that I thought affected me by his behavior. Things like, I'm afraid when I go home at night and see that my house doesn't look quite like it did when I left. Has somebody been here? When I hear strange sounds at night, is somebody coming in?

So I just tried to tell him articulately as I could and as emotionally as I could that what he did mattered to me. Although, he'd never seen me before. I'd never seen him before. And so while it wasn't done to me personally, it did make a difference.

CATHERINE WINTER: So far, only two offenders have been through the Bemidji program, both of them burglars. One has stayed clean, but he declined to talk to NPR, and the other ran away from a treatment program.

But backers of restorative justice say that doesn't necessarily mean the program failed in his case. They say changing a criminal's behavior is only half the equation. The other half is to get community members involved in fighting crime. Sheryl Ristvedt, who runs a sex abuse treatment program in Bemidji, sat on one of the panels.

SHERYL RISTVEDT: I think a community working together and doing something that is constructive and not just saying ain't it awful is very empowering. It feels good to a group of people to say, gee, we stood up and did something about this crime.

CATHERINE WINTER: Probation agents in Bemidji are excited about restorative justice. Agent Lynn Schrader talks to community groups about the program and recruits panel members on her own time. Schrader says, if it changes one person's behavior, she'll think of it as a success.

LYNN SCHRADER: We're willing to admit that what corrections across the entire state is doing is not really working, and that we need some new ideas. And everybody is in agreement with that. And I think this is a more realistic approach in that we as taxpayers can't afford to lock everybody up.

CATHERINE WINTER: Schrader says people are surprisingly receptive to the idea despite the current trend toward harsher punish punishment for crime. She says many people want to do something about crime, but haven't known what to do.

Her boss, Rich Crawford, says the public has to stop thinking of crime as something someone else will deal with. Criminals arise out of communities and communities have to get involved in dealing with them.

RICH CRAWFORD: It's so frustrating as a corrections person to see the public want to jump at the idea that if you simply send these people away, they're going to be safe because there is another wave coming behind them that's going to be the same or worse until we begin to look back at what it that is lending this whole society to have crime and violence as a way of solving problems.

CATHERINE WINTER: Probation agents in Bemidji plan to hold at least half a dozen more panels over the next few months to confront criminals with how their behavior affects the community.

They say they'll know better after a few more runthroughs whether the program will be effective at preventing criminals from committing new crimes and at getting the community involved in stopping crime. I'm Catherine Winter, Mainstreet Radio.