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Resistance See other Resistance Articles Title: “They Knew It Was the Right Thing to Do” The unlikely rise of restorative justice in a conservative upstate New York county. This is the final installment in a series on victims of crime. Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5. When officials in rural Genesee County, New York, decided 35 years ago it was time to replace their old jail, they wanted to build something not just better but bigger. Doug Call, an assistant county attorney, thought that was a mistake. Though he lacked a law enforcement background, Call had seen enough of traditional punitive criminal justice—as an Air Force JAG officer and during the nearby Attica prison uprising nine years earlier—to put his faith in sentencing alternatives. His arguments went nowhere with county leaders, so Call took matters into his own hands. He announced a campaign for sheriff on a no-new-jail platform against the law-and-order incumbent. The lifelong Republican was no revolutionary. But he was pushing ideas that wouldn’t go down easily in a deeply conservative working-class region dotted with dairy farms, small towns, and a disproportionate share of New York’s state prisons. Even so, Call won the election. 151223_CRIME_Wittman Dennis Wittman and his Husky in Genesee County. Photo by Mark Obbie To turn his vague agenda into action, Call hired as his point man Dennis Wittman, a 36-year-old probation officer and former seminary student who moonlighted as the local newspaper’s stock-car racing columnist. What they lacked in credentials Call and Wittman made up for with auspicious timing. A fringe philosophy that sought to marry alternatives to incarceration and intensive forms of victim services had just begun in a few American and Canadian outposts. For this approach to stand a chance as a true alternative to this country’s punitive ways— America’s prison-building binge was also about to begin—it needed test sites willing to build it into their official criminal justice system. Call and Wittman decided to make their county one of the first such tests for this philosophy, which would come to be called restorative justice. This pair of self-taught iconoclasts in Batavia, New York—in the words of one prominent local, “not a liberal place, not a place of innovation or excitement; a pretty plain, old place”—launched Genesee Justice, a radical experiment in the systemic application of restorative justice. Call would last only seven years in his position, but Wittman soldiered on for a quarter-century, attracting renown in restorative-friendly pockets of the criminal-justice field while remaining all but unknown in his own town. The restorative justice movement nationwide, meanwhile, fell far short of what its supporters had hoped for. In theory at least, it offers a clear alternative to the policies driving mass incarceration. Its promised solutions come at a low cost, in financial and human terms. And it has a track record for treating victims and offenders alike with a compassion that allows people to move on constructively and productively. Yet it’s barely mentioned in today’s criminal justice reform debate and has never accomplished much more than to chip small chinks out of the granite edifice of the American prison and jail system. The story of Genesee Justice explains why restorative justice has had such a hard time catching on—and sheds light on whether it ever will. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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