And Justice for All
A new "restorative justice" program brings juvenile offenders and their victims face to face--not only for restitution, but for understanding.
"Giving voice. Repairing harm. Providing balance"--that's the slogan of the Restorative Justice Program of Southwestern New Mexico, launched in July in Grant County with funding from the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department. It's only the second such program in the state, and Luchini hopes to expand it to the rest of the 6th Judicial District, adding Luna and Hidalgo counties. Although the program focuses on juvenile offenders, elsewhere restorative justice has also brought together adult criminals and their victims--even in serious cases such as rape and murder.
Luchini, who's the coordinator of the new program as well as its initial mediator, originally set out to be a community organizer, tackling social issues, violence and war. A few years ago, though, he went to a mediation training. "I immediately got it," he recalls. "I saw how powerful mediation can be."
Years removed from that childhood shoplifting incident, Luchini looks a bit like those portraits of a mild-mannered Jesus--bearded, with longish brown hair. He's slender, soft-spoken, but with eyes that fix on you when he's practicing "active listening." Between the licorice-gum incident and now, he's been both a victim of crime and an offender--a teenage prank that got out of control. So it was perhaps only natural that he quickly made the leap between mediation and the ordinarily adversarial criminal-justice system. Just days after completing mediation training, he was volunteering for a victim-offender mediation program run by the New Mexico Center for Dispute Resolution, serving three counties around Albuquerque.
Such "restorative-justice" programs have been around for about 30 years, with some 1,400 examples throughout North America and Europe. But the concept is much older, Luchini says, dating to ancient practices of indigenous peoples and small communities that didn't have prisons. The Maori people of New Zealand and the aboriginal people of northern Canada, he says, have "talking circles" in which the whole community comes together and a criminal faces the person he's injured. "The offender isn't kicked out of the tribe or turned into an evil person; they must take accountability for what they've done. Then they have to follow through on making it good. And the whole community gets involved in making sure the offender has what they need to succeed."
Luchini spent 18 months as a volunteer in the restorative-justice program, then took a job with the program, coordinating volunteer mediators. That program was also funded by a grant from the state children, youth and families office, so Luchini was a logical choice to "transplant" restorative justice to southwestern New Mexico this summer. The "soil" here had already been "cultivated," he says, by a speaker from Taos and by Curtis Hayes, a criminal-justice professor at WNMU, and Gary Stailey, the 6th Judicial District's chief juvenile probation and parole officer.
"It's here because I was ready to come," says Luchini, "and people were ready to receive it."
"The probation office gets a police report," Luchini explains. "They try to look at needs. When kids are in trouble, usually something else is going on in their lives or families. The probation officer may decide that if a kid goes to mediation and successfully completes it, they won't have to go to court.
"The kids think they have to do it, and that gets them in the door. I immediately change that, though, when I make the initial phone call: This is a choice they have. Here's their chance to be heard. It's not them versus the system, 'getting away with' something versus the law instead of making things right. That adversarial system doesn't lend itself to people taking responsibility for their actions."
Luchini will talk with the offender and his or her parent or guardian, lay out the process and seek an agreement to go to mediation. At first, the young offenders often deny culpability--they didn't do it, or didn't do the worst of it. Their parents may spring angrily to their defense, blaming other kids. "But slowly the kids warm up," Luchini says. "I'm not an officer with power over them. They open up and let on to things. Mostly it's without their parents present, because they may have told their parents a different story. It's really about truth-telling."
He'll also contact the victim of the crime, explain the mediation process and ask for participation. The mediation can't work without both parties. Some victims--maybe a quarter of them--say no. They just want restitution and have no interest in meeting with the youngster who victimized them.
Even when the victim declines, Luchini sees value in his pre-mediation conversation with the offender. "I repeat what they tell me back to them in a way they may not have thought of," he says. "I try to get them to take responsibility for their own actions, to start them doing consequential thinking."
If a victim does agree to participate, Luchini will then meet separately with him or her as well. "I give them a chance to tell their story. Often it's the first time they've heard from anyone since they filed a police report. Here they are, stuck with a $500 insurance deductible, and they're angry. I let them vent to me before we get to the mediation."
When the victim and offender actually sit down with Luchini at the long conference table at the Southwest Advocates for Kids office in Silver City, he gently probes for common ground. A mediator rather than an arbitrator, Luchini isn't looking to impose anything on the two parties. Most of the session--typically about an hour--might be taken up by the victim and offender giving their points of view, with Luchini feeding back to them what he's heard or asking questions:
"I'm hearing that you feel angry about what happened…"
"How did that make you feel?"
"So you're saying that…"
"When you hear him say he's sorry, what's your reaction?"
Luchini describes his goal as "transformative mediation--a change in people's view of what happened." He recalls a case from his experiences in the Albuquerque area where a group of kids had thrown rocks through a family's windows. He brought one of the young criminals face to face with a member of the family, to "look them in the eye." The youngster learned that one of the rocks had landed on a pillow next to a child's head, that the child had awakened and run screaming from the room through the broken glass from the window. "The kid had no idea he'd almost killed somebody," Luchini says. "Suddenly he realized the impact of what he'd done and started crying at the thought of what could have happened. That changes a person. Maybe the next time he's out with a bunch of kids who are getting drunk and stupid, that will change how he thinks and what he does."
With his questions and repetitive feedback, Luchini explains, "I try to bring out common needs the victim and offender may not realize they share--the need to be safe, to be valued, to have self-esteem. A kid may talk about his need for friendship, or the need for safety that leads him to join a gang. An old man whose wall he's spray-painted may say it's important to feel safe in his neighborhood. I'll say, 'It sounds like you both have a need for safety.'"
Uncomfortable silences sometimes follow, out of which eventually grows an agreement. Maybe a young gang member will agree to repaint the wall he damaged, or to get a job and pay $10 a week toward the victim's losses. Luchini pushes for a written agreement that both parties sign. He also serves as a "reality check"--how realistic is it that the youngster can find a job or pay that much money?--and tries to make sure the agreement stipulates measurable results.
Sometimes the victim will come around so far that he no longer wants restitution. The victim may say, "I don't need your money. I want to know you won't get in trouble again. There's this neighbor who was also affected by this--why don't you mow her grass to make up for what you did instead."
When the offender and victim aren't strangers but rather have an ongoing relationship--fighting family members, for example--mediation may stretch over several sessions. Luchini tries to give them tools to talk to each other differently, to teach them how to listen to one another. An entire session might be consumed with resolving some small family squabble--what in a more functional family would just be a routine disagreement, but here might escalate to violence. Even within families, Luchini presses for a written agreement, signed and dated.
If young offenders fail to live up to the agreements forged in mediation, the consequences can land them in court. And some kids do fail, particularly if they have problems with substance abuse or are around those who do. "We're not solving all the world's problems here," Luchini says. "Some things are out of our control. Resources are limited. It doesn't always stick.
"What you can do is try to make sure they have an experience here that's about meaning-making. It's about taking them from someone who's done something bad to someone who takes responsibility. It's important to fix the damages."
"Is it working? Do we feel safer?" He shakes his head. "How much does that punishment paradigm cost? How much are taxpayers paying for inmates in New Mexico? You'd pay less to put people through college than we pay to keep them in prison."
Despite the creation of victims-services agencies, Luchini goes on, victims aren't much better served by the current system than are taxpayers. Such agencies have enough staff only for the most severe cases, leaving most victims feeling left out of and let down by the criminal-justice system.
"People are looking for other alternatives that better address the needs of the community and of victims," he says. "Restorative justice is not a replacement for the criminal-justice system--it's another approach that tries to better provide for the needs of everybody concerned."
Luchini cites studies that have found when an offender faces his victim, the criminal is more likely to take accountability for his actions. When both parties agree on restitution, the criminal is more likely to follow through than if restitution is simply imposed by a judge. A series of studies in the late 1990s found a 32 percent drop in recidivism among juvenile offenders who'd gone through victim-offender mediation.
"It's not about getting kids off," he insists, tapping the glass tabletop for emphasis. "It's about taking responsibility and holding them accountable for their actions. With the punishment paradigm, if you do the crime, you do the time--then go back out and do another crime. I don't want people to be victims again. I want to change the cycle of violence and harm, so every crime is not seen as just against the state, but as another victim. Restorative justice is about changing people so they don't hurt other people again."
Luchini is so passionate about restorative justice in part because he's seen it work. He tells about a case he mediated in the Albuquerque area where a pair of youngsters, the oldest only 13, came across a tractor sitting on a ballfield. A man who'd volunteered to scrape off the goatheads on the field--taking precious weekend time--had left the tractor there while he went for gas. When the man returned, the kids had broken the dipstick, smashed the taillights and strewn tractor pieces around the field. In mediation, the 13-year-old said he didn't have anything to do. The man shared that he was volunteering his time so kids like the young offender would have something to do, would be able to play ball.
A light bulb went on: "The kid realized the man was trying to help kids like him," Luchini says. "The kid agreed to pay $75 for parts, and the man, the kid and the kid's father worked to fix the tractor. The man taught the kid how to do the repairs, how to use tools and install the parts."
Training will involve at least 48 hours of instruction and role playing, followed by sitting in on mediations with Luchini. Besides passing an interview, screening and a background check necessitated by the nature of the program, Luchini says applicants should be good at self-evaluation, want to learn the skills of listening and be willing to forego judgment in the cases they mediate. That last is the hardest: "It's not about coming in here and telling kids to straighten up. It's about letting people do the work themselves."
Beyond that, Luchini would like to involve others in the community as observers (all signing a confidentiality agreement, as do the participants). This might include retailers who've had merchandise stolen, sitting in on a similar case, or people with experience as gang members, talking to kids about getting out.
Given both additional financial support and community interest, Luchini also wants to expand the program to include Hidalgo and Luna counties and to adult offenders. "My larger vision is: What would it be like to transform, to work within an entire judicial district, to make a restorative approach available throughout the area?" Though Dona Ana County is outside the Sixth Judicial District to which he's been assigned, he'd nonetheless love to help spark a similar initiative in Las Cruces.
"I believe that to significantly reduce crime, to make people feel safer, when crime happens things need to be better restored," Luchini says. "When offenders and victims are able to face each other, you get some truly amazing stories."
A new "restorative justice" program brings juvenile offenders and their victims face to face--not only for restitution, but for understanding.
By David A. Fryxell
Stephane Luchini still can't stand the taste of licorice gum. When he was five years old, growing up in Las Cruces, he and a friend went down to the corner store and swiped some candy. Luchini's parents found out he'd stolen a pack of licorice gum and made him apologize to the store owner. Suddenly, it wasn't just some faceless store he'd shoplifted from--it was a human being. The lesson stuck, as did an aversion to licorice gum.
That childhood epiphany encapsulates pretty well the idea of "restorative justice," a program Luchini is now bringing to southwest New Mexico's juvenile justice system: Put youthful criminals face to face with their victims and, with the help of a trained mediator, work out restitution. When it clicks, restorative justice can leave crime victims feeling that their pain has been understood, the wrong done them at least partly righted. And young offenders may learn a teenage version of Luchini's aversion to licorice gum, making them think twice before getting in a fight, throwing a rock at a window or graffiti-painting a wall.
"Giving voice. Repairing harm. Providing balance"--that's the slogan of the Restorative Justice Program of Southwestern New Mexico, launched in July in Grant County with funding from the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department. It's only the second such program in the state, and Luchini hopes to expand it to the rest of the 6th Judicial District, adding Luna and Hidalgo counties. Although the program focuses on juvenile offenders, elsewhere restorative justice has also brought together adult criminals and their victims--even in serious cases such as rape and murder.
Luchini, who's the coordinator of the new program as well as its initial mediator, originally set out to be a community organizer, tackling social issues, violence and war. A few years ago, though, he went to a mediation training. "I immediately got it," he recalls. "I saw how powerful mediation can be."
Years removed from that childhood shoplifting incident, Luchini looks a bit like those portraits of a mild-mannered Jesus--bearded, with longish brown hair. He's slender, soft-spoken, but with eyes that fix on you when he's practicing "active listening." Between the licorice-gum incident and now, he's been both a victim of crime and an offender--a teenage prank that got out of control. So it was perhaps only natural that he quickly made the leap between mediation and the ordinarily adversarial criminal-justice system. Just days after completing mediation training, he was volunteering for a victim-offender mediation program run by the New Mexico Center for Dispute Resolution, serving three counties around Albuquerque.
Such "restorative-justice" programs have been around for about 30 years, with some 1,400 examples throughout North America and Europe. But the concept is much older, Luchini says, dating to ancient practices of indigenous peoples and small communities that didn't have prisons. The Maori people of New Zealand and the aboriginal people of northern Canada, he says, have "talking circles" in which the whole community comes together and a criminal faces the person he's injured. "The offender isn't kicked out of the tribe or turned into an evil person; they must take accountability for what they've done. Then they have to follow through on making it good. And the whole community gets involved in making sure the offender has what they need to succeed."
Luchini spent 18 months as a volunteer in the restorative-justice program, then took a job with the program, coordinating volunteer mediators. That program was also funded by a grant from the state children, youth and families office, so Luchini was a logical choice to "transplant" restorative justice to southwestern New Mexico this summer. The "soil" here had already been "cultivated," he says, by a speaker from Taos and by Curtis Hayes, a criminal-justice professor at WNMU, and Gary Stailey, the 6th Judicial District's chief juvenile probation and parole officer.
"It's here because I was ready to come," says Luchini, "and people were ready to receive it."
In the first two months of the restorative-justice program, Grant County's four juvenile probation and parole officers referred about a dozen offenders, all of whom were under age 18 at the time of the incident. Not all have gone to mediation--both victim and offender have a choice whether to participate, though in the case of young criminals the alternative usually is prosecution in the regular juvenile-justice system. In Grant County the referrals come only from property crimes and lesser cases of violence.
"The probation office gets a police report," Luchini explains. "They try to look at needs. When kids are in trouble, usually something else is going on in their lives or families. The probation officer may decide that if a kid goes to mediation and successfully completes it, they won't have to go to court.
"The kids think they have to do it, and that gets them in the door. I immediately change that, though, when I make the initial phone call: This is a choice they have. Here's their chance to be heard. It's not them versus the system, 'getting away with' something versus the law instead of making things right. That adversarial system doesn't lend itself to people taking responsibility for their actions."
Luchini will talk with the offender and his or her parent or guardian, lay out the process and seek an agreement to go to mediation. At first, the young offenders often deny culpability--they didn't do it, or didn't do the worst of it. Their parents may spring angrily to their defense, blaming other kids. "But slowly the kids warm up," Luchini says. "I'm not an officer with power over them. They open up and let on to things. Mostly it's without their parents present, because they may have told their parents a different story. It's really about truth-telling."
He'll also contact the victim of the crime, explain the mediation process and ask for participation. The mediation can't work without both parties. Some victims--maybe a quarter of them--say no. They just want restitution and have no interest in meeting with the youngster who victimized them.
Even when the victim declines, Luchini sees value in his pre-mediation conversation with the offender. "I repeat what they tell me back to them in a way they may not have thought of," he says. "I try to get them to take responsibility for their own actions, to start them doing consequential thinking."
If a victim does agree to participate, Luchini will then meet separately with him or her as well. "I give them a chance to tell their story. Often it's the first time they've heard from anyone since they filed a police report. Here they are, stuck with a $500 insurance deductible, and they're angry. I let them vent to me before we get to the mediation."
When the victim and offender actually sit down with Luchini at the long conference table at the Southwest Advocates for Kids office in Silver City, he gently probes for common ground. A mediator rather than an arbitrator, Luchini isn't looking to impose anything on the two parties. Most of the session--typically about an hour--might be taken up by the victim and offender giving their points of view, with Luchini feeding back to them what he's heard or asking questions:
"I'm hearing that you feel angry about what happened…"
"How did that make you feel?"
"So you're saying that…"
"When you hear him say he's sorry, what's your reaction?"
Luchini describes his goal as "transformative mediation--a change in people's view of what happened." He recalls a case from his experiences in the Albuquerque area where a group of kids had thrown rocks through a family's windows. He brought one of the young criminals face to face with a member of the family, to "look them in the eye." The youngster learned that one of the rocks had landed on a pillow next to a child's head, that the child had awakened and run screaming from the room through the broken glass from the window. "The kid had no idea he'd almost killed somebody," Luchini says. "Suddenly he realized the impact of what he'd done and started crying at the thought of what could have happened. That changes a person. Maybe the next time he's out with a bunch of kids who are getting drunk and stupid, that will change how he thinks and what he does."
With his questions and repetitive feedback, Luchini explains, "I try to bring out common needs the victim and offender may not realize they share--the need to be safe, to be valued, to have self-esteem. A kid may talk about his need for friendship, or the need for safety that leads him to join a gang. An old man whose wall he's spray-painted may say it's important to feel safe in his neighborhood. I'll say, 'It sounds like you both have a need for safety.'"
Uncomfortable silences sometimes follow, out of which eventually grows an agreement. Maybe a young gang member will agree to repaint the wall he damaged, or to get a job and pay $10 a week toward the victim's losses. Luchini pushes for a written agreement that both parties sign. He also serves as a "reality check"--how realistic is it that the youngster can find a job or pay that much money?--and tries to make sure the agreement stipulates measurable results.
Sometimes the victim will come around so far that he no longer wants restitution. The victim may say, "I don't need your money. I want to know you won't get in trouble again. There's this neighbor who was also affected by this--why don't you mow her grass to make up for what you did instead."
When the offender and victim aren't strangers but rather have an ongoing relationship--fighting family members, for example--mediation may stretch over several sessions. Luchini tries to give them tools to talk to each other differently, to teach them how to listen to one another. An entire session might be consumed with resolving some small family squabble--what in a more functional family would just be a routine disagreement, but here might escalate to violence. Even within families, Luchini presses for a written agreement, signed and dated.
If young offenders fail to live up to the agreements forged in mediation, the consequences can land them in court. And some kids do fail, particularly if they have problems with substance abuse or are around those who do. "We're not solving all the world's problems here," Luchini says. "Some things are out of our control. Resources are limited. It doesn't always stick.
"What you can do is try to make sure they have an experience here that's about meaning-making. It's about taking them from someone who's done something bad to someone who takes responsibility. It's important to fix the damages."
The traditional criminal-justice system, with its focus on punishment, doesn't do that, Luchini says. "We pour a lot of resources and money into responding to crime, but it's all focused on the offender--pursue, apprehend, incarcerate. The United States incarcerates more people per capita than any other country in the world.
"Is it working? Do we feel safer?" He shakes his head. "How much does that punishment paradigm cost? How much are taxpayers paying for inmates in New Mexico? You'd pay less to put people through college than we pay to keep them in prison."
Despite the creation of victims-services agencies, Luchini goes on, victims aren't much better served by the current system than are taxpayers. Such agencies have enough staff only for the most severe cases, leaving most victims feeling left out of and let down by the criminal-justice system.
"People are looking for other alternatives that better address the needs of the community and of victims," he says. "Restorative justice is not a replacement for the criminal-justice system--it's another approach that tries to better provide for the needs of everybody concerned."
Luchini cites studies that have found when an offender faces his victim, the criminal is more likely to take accountability for his actions. When both parties agree on restitution, the criminal is more likely to follow through than if restitution is simply imposed by a judge. A series of studies in the late 1990s found a 32 percent drop in recidivism among juvenile offenders who'd gone through victim-offender mediation.
"It's not about getting kids off," he insists, tapping the glass tabletop for emphasis. "It's about taking responsibility and holding them accountable for their actions. With the punishment paradigm, if you do the crime, you do the time--then go back out and do another crime. I don't want people to be victims again. I want to change the cycle of violence and harm, so every crime is not seen as just against the state, but as another victim. Restorative justice is about changing people so they don't hurt other people again."
Luchini is so passionate about restorative justice in part because he's seen it work. He tells about a case he mediated in the Albuquerque area where a pair of youngsters, the oldest only 13, came across a tractor sitting on a ballfield. A man who'd volunteered to scrape off the goatheads on the field--taking precious weekend time--had left the tractor there while he went for gas. When the man returned, the kids had broken the dipstick, smashed the taillights and strewn tractor pieces around the field. In mediation, the 13-year-old said he didn't have anything to do. The man shared that he was volunteering his time so kids like the young offender would have something to do, would be able to play ball.
A light bulb went on: "The kid realized the man was trying to help kids like him," Luchini says. "The kid agreed to pay $75 for parts, and the man, the kid and the kid's father worked to fix the tractor. The man taught the kid how to do the repairs, how to use tools and install the parts."
Much as the Maori and the Inuit brought the whole community together in search of restorative justice, Luchini hopes to broaden the process beyond the circle of himself as mediator, plus offender and victim. He'll be holding a series of community informational meetings this month to try to inspire involvement and support. Then in January he'll hold the first of several training sessions for volunteer mediators. Initially he's looking for perhaps eight trainees to supplement and expand his current efforts. The training will be free for program volunteers, though the sessions will also be open for a fee to anyone who just wants to learn mediation skills.
Training will involve at least 48 hours of instruction and role playing, followed by sitting in on mediations with Luchini. Besides passing an interview, screening and a background check necessitated by the nature of the program, Luchini says applicants should be good at self-evaluation, want to learn the skills of listening and be willing to forego judgment in the cases they mediate. That last is the hardest: "It's not about coming in here and telling kids to straighten up. It's about letting people do the work themselves."
Beyond that, Luchini would like to involve others in the community as observers (all signing a confidentiality agreement, as do the participants). This might include retailers who've had merchandise stolen, sitting in on a similar case, or people with experience as gang members, talking to kids about getting out.
Given both additional financial support and community interest, Luchini also wants to expand the program to include Hidalgo and Luna counties and to adult offenders. "My larger vision is: What would it be like to transform, to work within an entire judicial district, to make a restorative approach available throughout the area?" Though Dona Ana County is outside the Sixth Judicial District to which he's been assigned, he'd nonetheless love to help spark a similar initiative in Las Cruces.
"I believe that to significantly reduce crime, to make people feel safer, when crime happens things need to be better restored," Luchini says. "When offenders and victims are able to face each other, you get some truly amazing stories."
For information on the Restorative Justice Program of Southwestern New Mexico, write PO Box 528, Silver City, NM 88062, call 505-534-0336, or email info@rjnm.org.
David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure.
Copyright 2004 by Desert Exposure. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.