Editorial | Justice in communities

The agreement between the Government and 13 church organisations to train thousands of congregants in restorative justice practices is a welcome development, which this newspaper hopes can be rapidly scaled up to afford swathes more people the skills in resolving disputes.

At the same time, as we suggested more than a year ago, the structure of the restorative justice programme, or elements of it, should be tweaked, so as to bring even greater urgency to the intervention in, and the resolution of, disputes between individuals in communities. Jamaica’s situation calls for something akin to a rapid-response dispute resolution mechanism.

In his statement to Parliament this week, the justice minister, Delroy Chuck, said that the 13 groups with which a memorandum of understanding was signed represented more than 3,000 church congregations across the island.

“We plan to train approximately 25 members of every congregation over a two-day period in restorative practices,” Chuck said. Based on those numbers, that should provide at least 75,000 people with the skills to help people settle basic disagreements and disputes. They will join 2,398 teachers, students and parents in 81 schools who, Mr Chuck said, were recently trained in these skills.

We support this thrust to community-based, restorative justice initiatives for three main reasons.

BURSTING AT SEAMS

First, Jamaica’s courts are bursting at its seams with cases, notwithstanding the huge efforts of recent years to reduce the backlog. If it can be avoided, it makes little sense to add to the case overflow, especially with respect to matters, which, if appropriately handled early, ought not to require using the resources of the formal court system.

The second reason relates to the first. Conventional wisdom is that Jamaica’s youth – the primary perpetrators and victims of the country’s crisis of violent crime – are especially poor at resolving conflicts. Simple disputes, whether in the schoolyard or communities, not infrequently between friends, can quickly turn violent, leading, sometimes, to murder. Indeed, the police chief, Antony Anderson, reported recently that of 1,108 homicides reported in Jamaica up to the start of September, 15 per cent resulted from interpersonal conflicts between people who knew each other.

Often, these major crimes mushroom from seemingly petty – but from the perspective of the victims grave acts of injustice – quarrels, which early interventions by trusted and respected interlocutors might have tempered. The process, when employed, works.

In 2021, for example, of 2,600 cases for which dispute conferences were actually held, 88 per cent were successfully resolved. The figure rises to over 90 per cent when 2020 is also taken into account. However, the use of these alternative methods of resolving disputes has been limited.

For instance, last year, approximately 31,000 criminal cases (not including filings in specialised courts like those dealing with family matters) were lodged in the lower level parish courts. Yet, over a four-period, up to 2021, a mere 7,667 matters were sent for restorative justice resolution. More than three-quarters of those (78 per cent) were referrals for the courts. Over the same period, 10 per cent of referrals were from the police. Twelve per cent came directly from communities.

GREATER COMMUNITY REFERRALS

We believe community referrals should, and can be, far greater, if the arrangements for interventions were more accommodative and flexible. Which is not to imply that the system, as it is now structured, is inaccessible, or overly difficult to manoeuvre. Rather, we feel that restorative justice initiatives, and similar arrangements, ought to operate in greater accord with the rhythm of the communities they serve.

So interventions shouldn’t work only in sync with the clocks at restorative justice centres. In the way first responders provide initial medical care during emergencies, trained restorative justice/community dispute resolution interlocutors, if they act early, can help to prevent the escalation of problems. While they won’t necessarily resolve problems immediately, they can perform a triage of sorts that helps to lessen the visceral impulses. Protagonists would be confident that pursing justice won’t be a long and arduous endeavour. That justice might be only an apology.

The facilitators, however, have to be available in the communities. In some instances they have to be proactive. The agreement with the churches is a seemingly good start. Hopefully, it will expand exponentially – or at least sufficiently to fit the problem.