Editorial | Take justice to communities

We hope that Delroy Chuck exceeds his wish and that hundreds, thousands even, of ordinary folk sign up to be conflict negotiators under the insufficiently promoted, and underused, restorative justice programme the minister wants to make a significant part of Jamaica’s dispute resolution/justice system.

But while this newspaper is excited by the concept, we feel that the idea should be tweaked a bit, or perhaps a lot, to bring its services not only closer to communities, but to make them more immediate, almost on demand, 24 hours a day. Indeed, an expanded restorative justice project might work alongside more formal, community-based Petty Session Courts that deal with matters that are outside the remit of, or are incapable of resolution by, community restorative justice interlocutors.

Restorative justice, at its simplest, brings together the parties to a dispute or a hurt victim, offender, community representatives, to work through the offence, with the aim of having the offender take responsibility, where indeed he ought to, while providing the victim and the community with a justifiable sense that the harm has been repaired. The aim is for genuine healing all round and the fostering of peace in communities.

Jamaica has restorative justice centres, facilities where these dispute resolution sessions take place or communities can access support, in all the island’s parishes. But according to Justice Minister Chuck, his aim is to bring the number to 20. Two centres are soon to open in the constituencies of North Western and South Western St Andrew, at the behest, Mr Chuck said, of their members of parliament.

“The Ministry of Justice is committed to make restorative justice a major part of the work that we will be carrying out, and we are doing so because we have seen that it works,” Mr Chuck said. So, he wants people other than police officers, teachers and pastors to be involved. That is good. Mr Chuck’s goals, with regards to to numbers and reach, are not sufficiently expansive.

SPECIFIC NUMBERS

Unfortunately, while Mr Chuck claimed a 90 per cent resolution/settlement rate from “thousands” of conflict resolution conferences, he did not provide specific numbers or a disaggregation of the data to paint a picture of exactly where these settlements took place and over what period. Neither was there an analysis of the types of cases that were settled. That is important information if there is to be a deeper assessment of the project’s past success and its likely future achievements.

Nonetheless, we take Minister Chuck’s word that there is more than proof of concept, hence his intention to expand the project and this week’s training of more people in restorative justice. The process works in other countries. On the face of it, Jamaica is ripe for a massive scale-up of this type of intervention, although, at first glance, this may seem counter-intuitive, given that the country’s high level of violent crime is in need of, it may be presumed, traditional types of tough law enforcement.

Indeed, more than 1,300 people are murdered here each year. Our homicide rate hovers just south of 50 per 100,000 population, keeping Jamaica among the top five of the world’s most murderous countries that are not at war. And there is the fact, too, that not all shootings end in death, and that up to 20 per cent of the homicides are with weapons other than guns.

But there is also another truth. While many of the island’s homicides are the result of gangs or their members attempting to assert authority, a good proportion stems from breakdowns in interpersonal relationships between ordinary citizens, or because of feuds whose origins have long since been forgotten. One section of a community just knows that it is in conflict with another.

It is common ground that much of this violence represents an incapacity of large swathes of the society, especially young men, to resolve disputes. And, with distrust for, and the complexities associated with, the formal court system, there is little incentive for them to make complaints to law-enforcement agencies. The default is to take matters into their hands to assert respect.

DETERRENT

The wide availability of dispute resolution/restorative justice interlocutors, on whom complainants can call, or who can intervene at the onset of conflicts, at any time of day or night, might be a deterrent to the worst of such behaviour.

While having justice centres in communities is encouraged, it would be even better to have many respected interlocutors across communities, to whom matters can be referred quickly and who can intervene before disputes boil over into violence.

Some issues won’t, for various reasons, lend themselves to this process, requiring a more formal judicial arrangement. The least complex of such cases might be traversed to rejuvenated Petty Session Courts, sitting in communities, at times that make sense to community members. Which may not be only the normal workday when people in poor communities are hustling for their livelihoods. The idea, therefore, is that you take into account a community’s particular circumstance in designing the structure of these arrangements. The bottom line is to provide people access to basic mechanisms of justice on a timely basis, in a fashion with which they are comfortable and which they also trust.