Circle Sentencing Harsher than Jail |TODAY|

Submitted by dan. on 2007-06-06 22:32.
Offender Support | Restorative Systems | Victim Support

You see some sad things in a newspapering job... . I've interviewed the homeless, the abandoned, the lost and the lonely. Been at the funerals of innocents. Heard parents wail over a child's suicide. fter 20-odd years of relatively stoic reportage, I almost lost it Sunday. I nearly cried for Andrew Balser, who died at age 14 in a stupid teenage prank in 2005. I clenched down hard when Kyle Pickett, just 20 years old and charged with his best friend's death, sobbed out a detailed confession.

Yet the thing that got me most, the thing that made me fight hardest to retain control, was the curative sweetness in that room, as Kyle went through a relatively obscure form of justice known as community conferencing.

Also called sentencing circles, the process puts offenders and victims together in a room to tell their stories, to question events, and to eventually develop a sentence of reparation to be taken to a judge for final decision.

Read it all. For a previous column describing how the victim died, see this.