For victims of crime – including the most heinous acts – sitting down with the perpetrator can be a massive step, writes Sarah Daniell.
Thirteen years after the conviction of the man who murdered her 3-year-old daughter and attempted to murder her, Jayne Crothall decided it was time to meet him. Luke Sibley was coming up for parole. In 1997, he had strangled and suffocated Brittany in her bed while she slept and then went into Jayne’s bedroom, attacking her with a knife and hammer.
Sibley, 18 at the time, was a boarder at their Christchurch home and Crothall had evicted him three days earlier for exposing himself to her daughter.
“I had a lot of questions,” says Crothall. “I was very active in the parole hearings and decisions and trying to keep him behind bars for as long as I could. To keep him away.
“I was scared. I thought he would come after me or my children, so I contacted the Parole Board and told them I’d like to meet him face to face.”
Time may have passed but the demons and questions remained. So, in 2010, Crothall began the process of confronting them, and him, at a restorative justice meeting at Rolleston Prison.
Restorative justice is a community-led response to crime that requires accountability for the harm the offender has done to the victim, their whānau and community.
It is voluntary for all parties, although victims or survivors are often asked to attend sessions before an offender has been sentenced – a contentious issue, even for proponents of the practice, because it’s often linked with sentence discounts.
A typical restorative justice hearing involves the offender, victims/survivors, nominated supporters and a facilitator.
On the day she sat down with her daughter’s killer, Crothall was supported by her partner and a Victim Support advocate. Sibley sat on the opposite side of the table, supported by two psychologists, two facilitators and a prison guard.
“I was absolutely terrified. He was just as nervous as me. His palms were sweating and he kept wiping them on his legs. He read me a letter of apology he’d written. I kind of reassured him in that first meeting. When he looked cut up, I said, ‘Do you want to have a break now? Let’s have a break.’ So we went into another room, and I thought to myself, ‘Isn’t that funny, I’m so bloody terrified and here I am reassuring him.’”
After that first meeting, Sibley’s imprisonment continued. Three years later, they sat down again for a second restorative justice meeting. This time, it was different.
“He was like a completely different person. The meeting was a little bit more casual; I wasn’t as scared and it went on for a long time – about a couple of hours – and we were able to ask him questions about what happened when he killed my daughter and find out some missing pieces that I had carried with me for 20 or more years.
“Steve, my partner now, was my neighbour at the time. He heard me screaming when Luke was attacking me and rushed over to my house and saved me and went back and found Brittany, unfortunately for him. So there were a couple of things he wanted to know that I didn’t, like the way she was lying and positioned. I told Steve that when I was ready to find out I’d rather hear it from [Sibley].”
In the process of restorative justice, the mother, who had struggled with unimaginable grief, had confronted the architect of her misery and in doing so, also freed herself. “It restores your humanity. I felt he had genuine remorse and wanted to give it a go out there.”
Sibley told Crothall that allowing him to apologise was “100 times more beneficial” than any rehab programmes he had done while inside. As for her: “I felt like I had a bit of control in some ways. I went to the Parole Board after that second meeting and said, ‘I’m not here for anything other than to say thank you for seeing me over the last nine or 10 years and for taking everything I said on board.’”
Twenty-three years after he’d been imprisoned, Sibley was released on parole. He was 40.
Encouraging remorse
Although restorative justice can help victims to understand what led to the offending, it also aims to bring home to prisoners the impacts of their crime. The theory is that these conferences encourage an offender’s sense of remorse and “can convince offenders to denounce criminal behaviour and to fear the disgrace engendered by reoffending,” US research published in 2004 found.
“Addressing their violation is in my view a huge step to their rehabilitation,” says Julian Paku, who is a facilitator with the Auckland Restorative Justice Trust and has led prisoner rehabilitation programmes for five years. “They need to apologise to restore their tapu and mana. Part of them is constantly thinking about what pain and damage their actions have caused.”
Restorative justice was founded in the US in the late 1970s by criminologist Howard Zehr, who is dubbed its “grandfather”. It is centred on the needs of victims, conflict resolution and upholding the dignity of all involved. Findings of restorative justice conferences can be presented to a judge before sentencing; the judge may take into account any agreements from the meetings.
Addressing their violation is in my view a huge step to their rehabilitation.
New Zealand was an early adopter, beginning with conference procedures for young offenders and culminating with provisions in the 2002 Sentencing Act. Zehr visited as part of his research and met former District Court judge Fred McElrea, who was instrumental in establishing restorative justice here. In a paper for an international criminal justice conference in London in 2002, McElrea wrote that restorative justice “allows the law to be supplemented by grace. It moves away from the concepts of ‘revenge’ and of one party dominating another.
“Everywhere, victims are regularly found not to be vengeful people demanding their pound of flesh,” he wrote. “Lawyers are well capable of playing non-adversarial roles. Judges can be enablers and servants. What a breath of fresh air it is to be free of those rusty old shackles, to be hopeful, and to be inspired by the prospect of a better way of doing justice.”
A 2013 survey assessing reoffending rates among restorative justice-conferenced offenders found a 15% lower rate of reoffending compared with all offenders over the following 12-month period. Over three years, they were 7.5% less likely to reoffend.
In the UK, it has been shown to reduce reoffending rates by 14%. “A large part of this is likely to be because the offenders may not have ever had to face the consequences of their actions before,” says English service provider Restorative Solutions.
However, research on outcomes in New Zealand suggests there is room for improvement in how restorative justice (RJ) is delivered. Prominent victim advocate Ruth Money is also an advocate of restorative justice, though she has caveats about its structure and process, in particular for victims of sexual violence. “I’ve seen RJ work well,” she says. “But I fear a lot of RJ practice in New Zealand has moved a long way away from its origins. Here, it often operates on coercive control – the system forces the victim to do something they may not be ready for.”
Internationally, it’s not tied to sentencing. In New Zealand, the outcome of a conference can, at the discretion of the judge, lead to a reduction in the offender’s sentence.
The previous government had a restorative justice target of 25% of victims and offenders conducting at least one session. Money says victim advisers, judges, lawyers and parole boards were pushing to achieve this target, and victims were often railroaded into agreeing.
“An example is a woman who was seriously sexually assaulted and was strongly encouraged during a Parole Board hearing to attend an RJ session. She felt pressured. She’s very vulnerable and she doesn’t want to meet the stranger who raped her in her home in the middle of the night.”
In her work, Money oscillates between compassion and pragmatism. “There are definitely people who need to be incarcerated to protect them and us. Do we still treat them as human beings? Yes. Incarceration should be a place of personal development because they sure as shit are going to get out one day, so if we don’t have a genuine desire to rehabilitate – if we just lock people up without even trying to reform behaviours – we’re going to get the same results.”
A healing experience
Before Jayne Crothall met the man who had murdered her daughter, she couldn’t say his name. “I called it ‘the tragedy’. After the meetings, I could speak more freely about it and I could say ‘Luke Sibley’.
After he was released, Crothall felt something had been resolved. “I don’t understand how he got to that point. I don’t know that I will ever come to terms with why he – or anyone – would do that. There’s no way I will ever understand.”
Ultimately, she says, it came down to accountability. “There are people who don’t ever deserve to get out of prison because they are not remorseful. A meeting would never work. But restorative justice was more about myself feeling better and feeling he was ready.”
Her family was also able to heal. “That tragedy has been spread down to my children. They were so angry when they found out about it, because both of them were born after Brittany died.
“I feel a bit teary saying this, but I felt really, really guilty for the impact it had on their lives. But they are the most absolutely incredible young men. It’s almost the opposite – I’ve helped them to be amazing men.”
Look to the source
Julian Paku would agree restorative justice has sent a breath of fresh air through New Zealand’s criminal justice system. Paku (Ngāti Kahungunu, Te Arawa, Whakaue, Pikao, Tūhourangi, Tuwharetoa) has led prison rehabilitation programmes for five years.
He has worked with offenders who run the spectrum from raging and staunch to extreme vulnerability. Often those characteristics coexist.
Paku believes rather than looking at crime and justice in a linear way, we need to start looking at it more creatively.
“What happens when they’re outside? What does it look like for their children, families, when it comes to health? If you are living in a world of poverty and deprivation, which is what got you to prison in the first place – where does that end?”
The road to a healthier society begins not with revenge and retribution but with rehabilitation, says Paku.
“Most guys I’m working with are doing time for addiction-based crimes. They are on meth or drinking. When you’re talking with them, so many of them tell me, ‘I do it to mask the trauma.’ They don’t use that word, some of them do, and some of them are very, very onto it. And they talk about masking everything that has happened to them. Really horrible things.”
In his work, Paku rarely feels pessimistic. “I don’t feel cynical when I’m working with men that they can’t change. I do get cynical when I hear people say ‘they’re never gonna change’.
“You hear these politicians: ‘Lock ‘em up and throw away the key; that’s the way to deal with them,’ and you think, ‘You don’t know anything. You have no idea what you are talking about.’”
Laura Clark (a pseudonym to protect her privacy) is a Kāpiti-based addiction counsellor of 25 years who has worked at Arohata Women’s Prison.
“We’re dealing with people; human beings. Regardless of the narrative, we rarely ever lock people up and throw away the key – these people are going to go out into the community. So what happens in jail, and what they’ve been through to get there, really matters. Something better needs to happen for those who end up in the justice system.”
Tomorrow: Tough-on-crime policies and expanding prison capacity will not cut reoffending, say rehabilitation advocates.
