Creating a Restorative System: Update on RJ City
RJ City is a research and design project to conceive what a jurisdiction might look like that responded to all crimes, criminals and victims as restoratively as possible.
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It is a project of the PFI Centre for Justice and Reconciliation (the division of Prison Fellowship International that maintains www.restorativejustice.org, among other things). For purposes of the project, the Centre has hypothesized a law under which cities of 1 million people or more are allowed to assume full responsibility for all crimes that take place within their city limits. In return, all resources currently devoted by local and national governments to addressing those crimes will be given to those cities. In other words, cities can assume the authority and resources to design their own justice systems, but they have to pay for any outside resources they require, such as forensic laboratories, prison space, etc. RJ City has accepted this opportunity, adopted restorative principles and values as fully as possible, and created a restorative justice system. After ten years, the new system is completely in place. The task of the R&D project is to describe what RJ City’s response to crime now looks like. The project’s purpose is to stimulate imagination and creativity, and as a result build deeper understandings of restorative justice. The project has three stages: 1) create the conceptual model and reduce it to writing, 2) create a computer simulation to test how the model would work over time and to assess its effectiveness and feasibility, and 3) turn the simulation into two products: (a) an educational game to allow students to learn about restorative justice and organisational change, and (b) a public policy tool that would give public figures the opportunity to test decisions that would affect their jurisdiction's movements toward and away from restorativeness. The Centre is seeking funding for stages 2 and 3. The first stage comes to completion at the end of 2004. The latest version of the written document, a 70-page paper, is available online at http://www.pficjr.org/programs/rjcity/latest. Work continues on the important chapter relating to use of force and coercion. The current draft describes the overall framework and goes into significant detail about how accusations of wrongdoing are resolved in RJ City, as well as how the community is mobilized and equipped to assist in that process and to transmit restorative values. The chapter on the use of force will be completed in August. The Centre convened an international Advisory Board to provide guidance and advice during stage 1. Some of these persons participated in more meetings than others, due to complications related to travel and schedules. The persons who served at one time or another or for the full duration of the first stage are Gordon Bazemore, Jim Dignan, Lode Walgrave, Pat Nolan, Paul McCold, Christa Pelikan, Ann Skelton, Ron Claassen, Ann Warner Roberts, and Kay Pranis. Dan Van Ness, with the assistance of researcher Catherine Crocker, prepared the written documents, which Susan Sharpe has edited. To gain even broader perspectives, the Centre will be conducting small workshops/focus groups in Canada, England, New Zealand and the US. Participants familiar with restorative justice, who are from jurisdictions that have made a serious attempt to integrate restorative ideas into their justice systems, will be invited to comment on the philosophical and practical soundness of the RJ City design. The Centre invites visitors to RJ Online to comment as well. Please
download the document at http://www.pficjr.org/programs/rjcity/latest
and send comments to dvanness@pfi.org. Daniel W. Van Ness
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