OpEdNews - Page 3 of Article: Utter Failure; It's Time to Rethink the Prison System

An example of a unitive justice approach in a jail setting is The Community Model in Corrections program in Emporia, Virginia. Following a well-planned set of activities that are consistent with unitive justice principles, such as respect, accountability, honesty, and integrity, the inmates in the program are largely responsible for helping one another recognize patterns in their lives and figuring out how to change them.

The objectives of the community model program are achieved at a fraction of the cost of traditional clinical treatment. Most of the on-site supervision occurs during the launch of the model. This stands in stark contrast to how traditional programs are run, some of which may have a couple of full-time licensed professionals serving as few as a dozen inmates at each institution. On the average, a community model program costs approximately one-fourth the cost of a traditional treatment program or therapeutic community.

A study of recidivism among those who complete community model programs shows that their recidivism rate in the three years after release is less than 10 percent.17 The track record for prisoners in traditional programs is dismal in comparison. A fifteen-state study found that, in only three years after release, more than two-thirds were rearrested.18 A recidivism rate of over 60 percent is the punitive justice norm.

Unitive justice does not condone or ignore wrongdoing. It is not a world of relative values or slack morals where anything goes. On the contrary, unitive justice reduces or eliminates wrongdoing by creating and maintaining a culture in which wrongdoing by anyone is not accepted behavior. One moral standard applies to all.

For example, in a prison in Virginia, when a guard ransacked an inmate's cell during an inspection, the guard was reprimanded. In the culture the warden established and carefully tended, the cells of inmates were seen as the inmates' homes and were to be treated accordingly. Inspections were to achieve their legitimate goal, not to violate the inmates' sense of security and self-respect that the warden was trying to instill. Misconduct among inmates in this particular prison were a rare occurrence.

Being held to a common moral standard that applies to and benefits everyone motivates members of the community to measure up, accepting the standards of the environment they are living in as their new norm. When shared community values do not sanction hurting one another, and this standard is applied to everyone, the need to use punishment to deter violence, to maintain order and control, quickly diminishes.

As confidence grows in the capacity of the community to provide for the safety of its citizens through peaceful means, trust develops. This facilitates reflection upon the whole system, including how the crime or breach arose and what can be done to avoid such breakdown in the future. Thus, only unitive justice has the power to restore balance and harmony among the victim, offender and local community, and at the same time, enable the root causes to surface and be dealt with.

The punishment-and-revenge approach does not restore harmony and balance within the community, and the control needed to constantly enforce compliance wastes resources. In contrast, unitive justice supports fundamental, enduring change and costs relatively little. As the accused is not pitted against the might of the state, due process is simple. Rich or poor, unitive justice provides a level playing field. Liberty and justice for all may actually be within reach when justice beyond vengeance--unitive justice--becomes the norm.

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