Justice Minister Delroy Chuck has called out the Department of Correctional Services for not doing more to embrace restorative justice, which he says can help convicts who have refused to accept guilt and are “enraged” at the courts and society for locking them away.

Speaking at a recent restorative justice policy forum which focused on post-sentence rehabilitation, the justice minister said, “while significant progress has been made in involving communities, police and courts in utilising restorative justice to settle conflicts, restorative justice practices within the rehabilitative systems such as corrections and parole remain underutilised”.

According to Chuck, “despite a valuable partnership with the Department of Correctional Services, restorative justice has only been applied in one case, highlighting a missed opportunity in addressing among other things, recidivism challenges”. Describing the case as a “pivotal,” Chuck said, it remains “a real success story to show what restorative justice can do in the correctional services”.

“We know restorative justice works at the pre- and post-charge stages through community and police referrals, which boast a success rate of about 80 per cent. Over 2,300 restorative justice conferences were conducted during the course of last year and approximately 2,000 were completed and considered successful. My greatest problem is why it is not being used more. We have so many conflicts in our society…but somehow we feel that people are not taking it up,” he told the forum.

Restorative justice seeks to resolve conflict by having all parties involved come together to reach an agreement in a bid to birth a different way of thinking about crime and conflict. It focuses on holding the offender accountable in a more meaningful way to repair the harm caused by the offence, helps to reintegrate the offender into the community and helps to achieve a sense of healing for both the victim and the community.

In labelling the social justice programmes of victim services, child diversion and restorative justice as therapeutic justice or justice that heals, the justice minister said the correctional services would be well served to buy into them.

Said Chuck: “We know that this is necessary to heal the rage that sometimes emerge between offenders and victims and that rage continues unless it is healed; the beauty of restorative justice is that we try to get the victims and the offenders in a circle with a facilitator and try to find out what happened, how we can repair the damage”.

The justice minister, in noting he has done quite a bit of research and has been to prisons across the world including all those in Jamaica, described as “frightening” the tendency of most inmates to deny wrongdoing.

“The vast majority of them never accept that they did anything wrong. I have interviewed at least 50 men on death row and every single one of them [declared innocence]; I take students there, and when we are leaving death row the students say to me ‘but it’s pure innocent people on death row’; I said they can fool you, they can’t fool me,” the justice minister said.

Continuing, he said, “they all believe the judge got it wrong or the jury got it wrong and they are in prison and various institutions enraged because they feel that society is against them.

“They don’t accept that they have done anything to the victim or society and this is where correctional officers, probation officers, parole officers, restorative justice can assist because somehow we have to find out if these persons who are serving time, who have been tried, convicted by the judge or the jury, to accept that you did something wrong and put it behind you to go forward because if that is possible, we could get the victims to speak to you,” he added.

The Government in 2018 introduced the Restorative Justice Programme to resolve disputes, particularly at the community level, so as to rebuild relationships and avoid further acts of violence from reprisals. Restorative Justice Centres have been established in all parishes with trained facilitators to conduct restorative conferences and healing circles. The Restorative Justice Centres form part of the Ministry of Justice’s efforts to improve alternative dispute resolution methods.

— Alicia Dunkley-Willis