Take a walk in my Sneakers: Restorative Justice on College Campuses

According to Karp, colleges and universities are lagging behind the juvenile and criminal systems because of their "uncreative, cookie-cutter sanctions." Karp believes that judicial professionals should seek out unconventional ways to teach students life-long lessons about their wrongdoings and the consequences of their actions.

The U.S. Department of Justice adds that restorative justice was a way to find common ground between camps who support harsh punishment and those who support more lenient justice. It breaks down the implementation of justice into two categories: Restorative justice, and retributive justice. Retributive justice has an outlook that "justice determines blame and administers pain." Under this model, the roles of the victim and offender are passive, and justice becomes a "contest between the offender and the state."

The department has seven guiding principles concerning restorative justice:

1. Crime is an offense against human relationships.
2. Victims and the community are central to justice processes.
3. The first priority of justice processes is to assist victims.
4. The second priority is to restore the community, to the degree possible.
5. The offender has personal responsibility to victims and to the community for crimes committed.
6. Stakeholders share responsibilities for restorative justice through partnerships for action.
7. The offender will develop improved competency and understanding as a result of the restorative justice experience.

So when I take this logic and apply it to a university setting, I can see how restorative justice can play a major role on a college campus. Higher education states that our main goal is to help students develop and mature into more conscious, thinking, feeling human beings than they were when they entered this place. Restorative justice aids this mission by putting perpetrating students into situations where they can feel and understand the hurt, inconvenience, and confusion their actions have caused.

As a resident assistant in a all-sorority residence hall, I saw restorative justice "at work." My hall director believed that residents should know and understand why the policy they disregarded exists. For example, a resident was documented trashing the hallway and her floor's lobby. My RHD could have easily sanctioned her with a warning, meeting in her office to ask her why she did it, put in on the resident's record, and went about her day. However, that's not how restorative justice works. This resident was sanctioned to pair up with her floor's custodian every Monday for a semester and help her on her floor rounds. At the end of the semester, the resident wrote a paper discussing her experience and what she had learned, and my RHD could see a profound difference in this woman. The resident stated that she learned to respect and appreciate the people who help make her life easier. She also found herself experiencing anger and disappointment when she saw her sorority sisters throw trash on the floor without any regard, something that she did all the time without even thinking about "who has to clean up my unnecessary messes." She ended her paper saying that this was a lesson that she knew she could apply to any life problem because she learned to walk in someone else's shoes and be more responsible.

I do not think that this resident could have learned this if her punishment was retributive. Restorative justice allows for students to interact with what they did wrong, which in turn has a greater chance of creating learning opportunities.