Law Notes is the School of Law Newsletter, published twice a year for alumni and friends of St. Mary's University School of Law.

Law Notes Spring 2009
Law Notes Fall 2008
Law Notes Spring 2008

St. Mary’s Students Work to Change Justice System

Restorative justice is a process to involve, to the extent possible, those who have a stake in a specific offense and to collectively identify and address harms, needs, and obligations, in order to heal and put things as right as possible." —Howard Zehr, The Little Book of Restorative Justice

A couple of years ago, a few St. Mary’s University School of Law students became interested in the lofty ideal of restorative justice. Since then, the Restorative Justice Initiative (RJI) at St. Mary’s has become a premier student organization whose members are deeply involved in community service and a goal to change the culture of the justice system.

The students first became actively involved in restorative justice by participating in the Bridges To Life Program at the Ney Unit, a state jail located in Hondo, Texas. Bridges To Life is a program whose mission is to reduce crime by reducing the recidivism rate of released inmates. In this program, volunteers work directly with inmates one night a week for 14 weeks, following a curriculum that moves both the victim and the offender through the grief and healing process.

It is a huge time commitment for law students; but to date, St. Mary’s students have facilitated the program three times — each time with a different set of volunteers. That level of interest and dedication caught the eye of law school administrators and other law students. This past year, the Restorative Justice Initiative was awarded the prestigious St. Thomas More Award for work which reflects the pursuit of social justice and a grant by the San Antonio Bar Foundation for community service. The program was also chosen as the Student Bar Association Organization of the Year by student peers. Randy Langford, a founding member of St. Mary’s Restorative Justice Initiative, has been asked to join the planning committee for the 2009 National Restorative Justice Conference scheduled to be held in San Antonio next spring. And if you ask any of the Restorative Justice Initiative’s students, this is only the beginning.

“I worked for a criminal defense attorney. I had never heard of restorative justice before, but I could see that no one benefited from the current process,” said Langford. “People were still injured, and were run through the mill. I became interested when I started with the jail program and I saw the change before my very eyes.”

Two groups of St. Mary’s students traveled to Wisconsin this past summer to visit Marquette University School of Law, home to the premier restorative justice program in the country. At Marquette, theory has been put into action with the help of former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Janine Geske. Under Geske’s leadership, the Marquette program was not only put on the map, but it has also permeated society and become the preferred practice in Wisconsin.

Throughout the state, the district attorneys’ offices, courts, police and community work closely together to heal victims and resolve disputes through restorative justice tactics. One such tactic –called peacemaking circles – brings together victims, offenders and family members of both sides, who sit with law enforcement and mediators to work through the crime and its effect on all involved.

Restorative justice is victim-centered response to crime that focuses on the harm caused by offenders, as well as the need for healing of victims and community. By also requiring the offenders to take responsibility for their actions, restorative justice views criminal acts more comprehensively than the current judicial system because it recognizes how offenders harm victims, communities, and even themselves by their actions.

St. Mary’s students returned from Marquette with a new spark and a deepened conviction that the restorative justice model can successfully be implemented in Texas. Each student that studied at Marquette has been assigned a particular research area and will write a publishable paper on the subject. Once completed, the papers will be compiled into a manual to give to judges, administrators, faculty, police departments and the District Attorney’s Office as a guide on implementing the process in San Antonio. The students hope this will be the catalyst to jump-start the program.

While inspired by the Marquette program and what they have done, St. Mary’s students want to take it a couple steps further by designing a more structured program with more available resources.

“We want St. Mary’s to become the hub in Texas and the Southwest. We could really gain some notoriety and stand out from other law schools with a new way of thinking, and restoring justice speaks to St. Mary’s mission,” said Langford. “We need to recruit a superstar champion like Justice Geske in Wisconsin, who can really get this initiative off the ground in Texas.”

“That’s what happened at Marquette – solving local problems gave them notoriety worldwide,” said Mark Laneman, an RJI student who learned a lot from the Marquette sessions.

“Restoring the victim to wholeness – healing the victim – is the underlying goal in this process. It just happens to have the same results on the offender,” said Langford. “In the conventional punitive system, no one is satisfied.”

“Texas is a weird place for social justice, in that it was one of the first states to implement the programs in specialty courts and drug treatment, but there is no central place to pull the efforts together and get organized. Lots of people are doing it here, but not enough people know what it is to really get behind it,” said Laneman. “The idea in Texas seems to be the longer the lockup, the better. The irony is the punitive model produces more crime.”

In the United States, close to 90 percent of juvenile offenders go on to prison. According to a 1994 Department of Justice recidivism study, it was estimated that within three years of their release, nearly 52 percent of prisoners were back in prison either because of a new crime or because of a parole violation. The existing penal system in the U.S. is not working.

“Today’s offenders are yesterday’s victims. We don’t want to give them time off their sentences, we just want to change their mindset for when they are released,” said Jessi Sprague, another RJI member.

Restorative justice techniques have had a great impact in the communities were they are used. The groups cite the “Boston Miracle”, where no homicides occurred in a year after implementing restorative justice programs in the community. In Milwaukee, one gang was completely eliminated from the city.

St. Mary’s students envision a restorative justice program at the law school’s Center for Legal and Social Justice by adding a full time faculty member and a community justice coordinator.Already the St. Mary’s group has begun working with some local schools, facilitating peacemaking circles and dispute resolution, and they hope to begin doing the same thing in communities around the city. They have also been asked to lead some workshops for faculty at other schools to train teachers to be facilitators of victim-offender dialogue when school fights and disputes occur.

“I believe that everyone can change. A lot of people come to law school with lofty ideals of helping people and community service through justice, but those ideals get suppressed. This is the first thing I’ve been a part of since starting law school that gives me a feeling that I can make a difference,” said Ben Farish, another member of the team.

“I’ve always wanted to help people. I’ve always wanted to be a defense attorney,” said Sprague. “Through the Restorative Justice Initiative, I’ve developed the philosophy that by helping the offender, it in turn helps the victim, their family and the community — and that is something I want to be a part of.”