Restorative Justice In Action: the Words and Work of Dennis Maloney

Article by Arwen Bird 

The recent death of Dennis Maloney sent a shock through the national and local community of criminal justice reform advocates.

Under Dennis’ leadership, Deschutes County’s Juvenile Justice System became a national model for community justice in action -- through pioneering programs to get restitution to survivors, give people convicted of crimes skills to succeed in work and life, and heal communities affected by crime.

Dennis spent the last decade of his life helping communities across the nation to shift their justice systems to a balanced and restorative approach. We can all learn important lessons about restorative justice from Dennis’ words and his work.

If you deny victims’ participation in the process nothing good can happen.

- Dennis Maloney, Kaleidoscope of Justice, Summer 1999

Dennis’ words reflect his commitment to shift the system to a restorative one, which focuses on repairing the harm done when one person makes a decision to hurt another. In order to do that, the system must ask and listen to crime victims and survivors to find out what we need to heal. Survivors need help for more immediate needs such as shelter care or hospital care; in the long term, we may need help with counseling for emotional needs or job training skills to be able to provide for ourselves.

In a restorative and balanced approach, the need for healing can inform judges about appropriate consequences for people who have done harm, and prioritize restitution for that harm.

Although some people have focused on involving crime survivors only to push for longer sentences, Dennis understood that survivors have much more to offer than that. Our participation -- and the truth about the harm that happened -- is an important part of shaping a system that holds people accountable; this can be the first step toward healing for communities, survivors and people convicted of crime.

One day I’d be planning children’s services, for which there was a pittance of funding, and the next, I’d be projecting prison spending, with politicians eager to throw money in that direction to appear tough on crime. I found myself planning future jails for my daughter’s kindergarten classmates.

- Dennis Maloney on his appointment to a prison forecasting committee while also developing youth programs for Oregon’s Commission on Children and Families. Ideas for an Open Society, Vol 3. No. 3

Dennis talked often about the fact that the punishment approach of building more and more prisons in response to crime is an expensive, faulty strategy that does not reflect the value of public safety in our communities.

Part of creating safety in each community means helping people while they’re incarcerated gain the skills they need to engage positively once they are released. It means sentencing people to meaningful community service, such as having young people convicted of crimes build homes for people who need them. Overall, prioritizing quality education is a long term strategy to prevent violence by giving our youth the opportunity to only make positive contributions in their communities.

Oregon spends more state funds on prisons than higher education. This prioritizing of prison spending over education for young people reflects an overall value structure. Our current values demonstrate that the ‘tough on crime’, ‘let’s lock ‘em up’, approach is being pursued at the expense of programs and policies that will bring healing and safety to our communities, including our education system. Prisons are the most expensive solution to crime, and our children are paying for it. Dennis was an advocate who consistently spoke up about our misplaced priorities in spending for programs and services for youth.

It is indigenous peoples who have been practicing restorative justice, whether in New Zealand or African villages. Desmond Tutu lectures about restorative justice, called Umbutu. The idea is simply that the community is well if the individual is well. If the individual becomes ill, the community becomes ill.…Sadly, American criminologists have never really looked to the Native American justice practices.

- Dennis Maloney, govtech.net interview by Steven Ferry March 2001

There is much that we can learn from looking to other cultures for ideas and values to shape our criminal justice system. Early in his life, Dennis worked as a VISTA volunteer with tribes in Wisconsin. There, he had the opportunity to observe a local judge who sentenced youth to community service projects that reflected the culture of the tribe. Dennis used the thinking and traditions that he observed there to shape Deschutes County’s Juvenile Department. Today, Deschutes County has become a national model for restorative and balanced justice.

In much of his writings and interviews Dennis talked about the need for systemic change. Whether it comes from people native to Africa or America, there is much our justice system can learn from other cultures about healing for survivors and communities.

One such example is the Kake Tribe of northern Alaska. The Tribe established a Heart Healing Council, based in Tlingit traditions. Circle Peacemaking, an element of the Heart Healing Council, is practiced with young adults in celebration of successful completion of a sentence and as healing circles for victims.

The person charged with a crime is guided through a group process to determine their sentence and then their sentence is carried out and supervised by the same group of people from the community. Ultimately the person charged with a crime gains a greater sense of connection to the community through the support and consistent presence of circle members. Success rates for this form of sentencing and supervision are very high, 97.5 percent of people successfully complete their sentence (compared to 22 percent of people in the mainstream Alaska court system).

The Kake Tribe provides just one model among many that exist in indigenous communities across the world. Many have been using a restorative approach for centuries and we could learn much from their ways of practicing justice.

With citizens and victims more involved, there is an endless creative energy available to transform the criminal justice system into a community justice system.

- Dennis Maloney The Emergence of Community Justice, Criminal Justice in the U.S.

In a ‘community justice’ framework, the people who were harmed (crime survivors) are the primary “customer” of the system, the people who did the harm are held accountable in constructive and meaningful ways and crime prevention is prioritized. This is the system that Dennis dedicated much of his life to create and what Dennis was able to contribute to the world of criminal justice reform is similarly without measure

At the heart of Dennis’ advocacy was a firm belief in the humanity of everyone involved in acts of violence. He worked tirelessly to change the ways that we respond to crime to reflect that value, and there is much we have gained from his life and work.

He leaves behind five daughters and his wife, in Bend, Oregon.

To learn more about balanced and restorative justice we suggest visiting www.barjproject.org

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of Justice Matters.