Howard Zehr is a criminologist who has spent the greater part of his life exploring how criminal justice systems, the American one and others worldwide, can be improved to better serve their respective societies, the victimized and their survivors (“co-victims”) and offenders. He is considered a pioneer in the field of “restorative justice.” Restorative justice often involves a meeting or meetings between a victim of a violent crime and his or her offender, or a meeting between such a victim and an unknown offender who offended at a similar level against a third party. As one can easily imagine, this is an uncertain and fraught process. There’s no guarantee this will not further traumatize the victim. It’s usually only undertaken after a decent amount of time has passed (often, years) and the victim or co-victim has been able to reach a point where he or she feels comfortable enough to have a confrontation that intense.
One stated goal of restorative justice is to empower victims, to help them combat their feelings of anxiety and, in many cases, a profound sense of powerlessness that assails them after victimization. Offenders are encouraged to make amends in the form of apologies and good works. Sometimes restorative justice involves actual financial remuneration. Besides the psychotherapeutic benefits for victims, there is evidence that it decreases the likelihood that offenders will reoffend. Although restorative justice is a relatively recent innovation in the penal system, in many ways it might remind one of how now-vanished cultures in bygone eras handled justice.
Transcending is a book of portraits, in words and photographs, of victims and co-victims of violent crimes. Many of these individuals have lived through assaults so horrible you shudder to imagine the details they’re leaving out of the accounts of their long hospitalizations and journeys of many years to recoveries that are sometimes painfully partial. Some are parents who have lost children to predatory monsters. Some are incest survivors or survivors of stranger rape. Some have lost parents to murder. The first thing all these people have in common is major trauma that proved a threat to their very existence. The second thing they have in common is that they all survived. At the time this book was published, 2001, some were thriving, some were just finding the balance, and some were still struggling from day to day. Reading the book eighteen years after its publication date, you want to send good wishes into the darkness after them, and hope they are at peace.
A large number of the people profiled in this book have explored restorative justice, and have actually met with their offender(s). Sometimes this led (in the words of the interviewed) to “forgiveness,” but that’s a word used, one senses, in different ways by different individuals in this book, just as it is in life. For some victims, forgiving the offender means freeing themselves from the burden of hating any longer. Perhaps they better understand the forces which made the monster they face in that fateful conference, who might himself be an individual who was victimized from childhood forward. Perhaps with this understanding they can turn and walk away, their burden a little lighter. But then others in this book find a new calling in speaking to the victimizers and awakening these offenders to a sense of responsibility for their actions, and it becomes an important part of their lives. For some survivors, this process proves energizing and transformative. Others embark on the process of restorative justice only to find a cold manipulator on the other side of the prison glass. The book doesn’t paint overly rosy scenarios or deny the uncertainty of the process in restorative justice. The stories, though brief, are riveting. Many of the words stay with you.
This is not a lurid or exploitative book. This is a very spiritual book. I suppose that should not surprise me, since Zehr has a solid Mennonite background. This was not marketed as religious reading material. But I noticed the majority of the victims presented here do talk about their religious faith, and that faith is usually some form of Christianity. You might think the victims discovered this faith in their times of greatest crisis, that it’s a reflection of the “no atheists in foxholes” phenomenon. But I get the impression that most of these people had that faith before their victimization occurred. Not surprisingly, that faith was often tested by the torturous experiences they went through. Their faith often had to be redefined. I wondered whether this predilection for religious narratives was a result of the choice of agencies with which the author liaised to find the subjects for his book. Perhaps he went through ministries or agencies which had connections to ministries. The subjects and narratives are not all Christian. The book opens with several profiles which omit mention of God. One victim even mentions drawing support from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. But as the book continues, the Christian narratives quickly come to predominate. This didn’t bother me as a reader at all. I only mention it in the name of full disclosure for other potential readers. I know some readers find God-talk a great downer. The thing is, as with “forgiveness,” “God” clearly means different things to different survivors in this book. None of the survivors dwell overly much on their religious experience. It’s usually only a sentence or a brief paragraph. The majority of their accounts are about the healing process itself and how they manage to process the tragedy they still carry within them.
While this is dark reading material, I found myself greatly appreciative of the ways it challenged my own views on what justice should be. Many of the survivors point out how minimized (even trivialized) they felt at the hands of the State. The State plays victim in a courtroom. It arrogates the role of victimhood and throws the victims out of the courtrooms as soon as they testify. As one Canadian survivor of childhood abuse put it:
“The charges were pressed in the name of the Queen, her Crown and dignity, and I was just a witness. I didn’t like that bullshit — this happened to me. It didn’t happen to the f***ing Queen! I was always a bit pissed off about that.”
For me, some of the most disturbing stories told in this book (beside the raw nerve elements of murders of children and crimes involving torture) were the stories told by survivors in which justice never did arrive, and might never arrive. There are cases where the obvious murderers skated, got away scot-free, and cases where no charges could be brought for differing reasons. Some of these people had to undertake their healing while racked with doubt as to the identity of the murderer of their loved one. Some of these survivors are living with nagging suspicions they cannot prove. The book presents a real gamut of hells.
A few of these crimes were high-profile stories before the turn of the century and are still much discussed. I was surprised to find so many high-profile crimes from my home state of Pennsylvania, but the author had a connection here with the (then) governor’s victim advocate for our state. I found my explanation for that in Zehr’s “Acknowledgments.”
The book closes with an essay by Zehr, “Looking for the Burma Shave Signs — Victimization and the Obligations of Justice,” which does a stellar job of spelling out what restorative justice believes it can offer both victims and offenders, and ultimately societies, that retributive justice cannot.
What will I remember most from this book? I will remember the words of the survivors themselves, brave words, hopeful words, and often wise words. Here’s just a small sample:
“The measure of our civilization is not technology, but our attitude about life and how we treat each other. The abhorrence of violence is certainly a measure of how civilized we are. We’re not very civilized because we still solve our problems with violence.”
— Martha Cotera
“People shouldn’t go to prison so they can suffer. The suffering they need to do is to share the suffering they’ve inflicted.”
— Keith Kemp
“The offender who shot my son got a life sentence. But I feel more anger toward his mother than toward him. Somebody that’s 14 years old and had no remorse whatsoever must not have had any love at all.”
— Louise Williams
“In taking responsibility for having killed somebody, he needs to see his responsibility in having made all these other little deaths.”
— Amy Mokricky
“You trusted life not to injure you this way. You trusted life not to take a beloved person in this way. You trusted humanity not to have that ugly side to it. You trusted your family to be strong, and then instead you had to be strong yourself.
You trust that the judicial system is going to work. You trust that reporters have decency. You have incredible expectations of others’ behavior that just doesn’t happen. Now I have no trust in others, but I have a greater sense of trust in myself. I know myself a lot better. I see myself as being a lot stronger and more beneficial to the community.”
— Amy Mokricky
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