Why is that important? OK, here is a six-paragraph sermon. This is important because it will help you understand why we feel so strongly about this project:

The current use of prisons around the world is both counterproductive and destructive. It fails to adequately respond to the problem of crime, as demonstrated by its high failure rate and in its inability to meet the multiple needs of crime victims and their communities. Furthermore, it is expensive; corrections budgets compete with education, medical care and other basic services governments provide their citizens. Nevertheless, it continues to be the dominant policy response in virtually all countries largely because of a lack of alternative approaches to deal with the reality of crime that are both effective and acceptable to the public.

Restorative justice has been suggested by some as such an alternative approach. In some countries it has served as that, at least for “lightweight crime”: juveniles and minor crimes. In most places, however, it plays an even more limited role, consisting of specific, limited programs (programs that bring victims, offenders and others together) surviving precariously on the margins of their criminal justice systems.

These encounter programs could have a much greater impact if current knowledge about their capabilities was appropriately applied to more serious crimes involving more serious offenders. But it has been argued that restorative justice is much more than encounter programs; it is a philosophy or theory of justice that could be applied to every aspect of a society’s response to crime and conflict.

There is initial evidence that this would indeed produce better results than current strategies, not only in reduced recidivism rates but also in increased victim and community satisfaction and recovery.

How do we test the full potential of restorative justice? Is it sufficiently robust to deal with the caseload of contemporary criminal justice systems? To answer that question one would need a demonstration project where the vision and theory of restorative justice could interact with the reality of crime and conflict. Out of that it would be possible to explore creation of a new model – a restorative model – of crime prevention and response.

The RJ City project offers an opportunity to investigate how that might be done by creating a virtual city. Its challenge to us is to create a justice system that responds as restoratively as possible to all crimes, all victims, and all offenders in a city of one million people.

 There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?