There is prevailing wisdom that victims of violent crimes want the perpetrators to suffer as much as they have, but that is often not the case. Rafiah Muhammad-McCormick, whose son was shot and killed in front of her, delivered the following explanation at a crime survivors seminar held in November 2024: “The value of a loved one’s life is not measured by the length of the sentence for the individual who caused the harm.” Restorative justice, not retributive punishment, often better meets the needs of crime victims while rehabilitating those who committed the crimes.
Muhammad-McCormick said she detected remorse in her son’s shooter’s eyes in the moments after the killing and ultimately realized that the man who had killed her son “can’t give [her] back [her] son with his body.” Her story demonstrates that we need to retool a system that currently focuses almost exclusively on punishment to the exclusion of addressing the actual harm experienced by victims.
Restorative justice offers a toolbox for bringing together crime victims or their family members with the people who committed these crimes through processes designed to help offenders face the impact of their actions and help victims achieve closure. It can seem amorphous, but it is about addressing crimes individually, centering attention on the conflict between the harmed person and the person who caused the harm. It attempts to meet the needs of both parties for accountability and healing.
Many restorative processes emphasize direct encounters during which rehabilitation, repair, and forgiveness are among the desired outcomes. The restorative justice approach is based on the shared societal value of settling disputes nonviolently, a cornerstone of our legal system. The impact can be powerful: Muhammad-McCormick recounted a feeling of transcendence from seeing people “trying to put back what they took.”
The traditional prosecution process, by contrast, sidelines victims completely while purporting to act on behalf of all citizens in redressing the harm. Victims often feel left out of the whole equation, and they mostly have been. In fact, fewer than one in three victims received any compensation after they were harmed, according to a 2020 study.
To be sure, many cases are not appropriate for a restorative approach for many reasons, particularly when the parties are not interested. In some cases, a judge will determine that the offender needs to be separated from the community to prevent further offenses. However, there is no question that the use of restorative justice principles should be vastly scaled up to provide this more holistic type of resolution for many more victims who would welcome it.
The webinar at which Muhammad-McCormick spoke was convened to discuss the Alliance for Safety and Justice’s “Crime Survivors Speak 2024: A National Survey of Victims’ Views on Safety and Justice,” the largest commissioned survey of violent crime victims. The survey, as it has done in past years, challenges the persistent myth that crime survivors universally desire the most punitive responses to crimes.
Marlee Liss has described how after she was raped, she found her initial experiences over several years in a traditional court (in Canada) to be traumatic and as disempowering as the rape itself, including having to watch her initial police recordings and being cross-examined with invasive and insulting questions. Eventually, Liss sought therapy for her rapist and participated in a restorative justice process, which included an eight-hour face-to-face dialogue, facilitated by trained supervisors, with the man who raped her. Liss’s mother, Barbie Liss, who participated in the meeting, described the encounter “like soul vomit. Everything that had to be said, everything Marlee wanted to say to him, everything she had needed to clear, every question she wanted to ask, from ‘How could you?’ to how the patriarchal culture had impacted him.”
Liss became more convinced after her own experience of the need to “stop cycles of dehumanization” and challenge the prominent tough-on-crime narrative. She noted that the results of the victim survey (and the prior studies as well) debunk the “misperception that survivors want punitive” responses. Liss, since her rape and restorative process, started an awareness-raising organization and speaks widely in the U.S. and elsewhere about the value of the restorative process.
The survey provides an important reminder that survivors of crime do not always, or even mostly, want to seek the most draconian punishments for the individuals who caused their loved ones harm. Indeed, the vast majority prefer options that prioritize treatment and support over punishment. Specifically, the report finds that “by a three-to-one margin, victims believe that the most effective way to reduce crime is to create more jobs and housing instead of long sentences.” It should be noted that the research on this topic backs up the victims on the ineffectiveness of long sentences. The report also found that:
Fewer than one in four victims believes that long sentences are the most effective way to stop people from committing repeat crimes. More than two in three victims believe that mental health and addiction treatment or job training and placement are more effective strategies to stop repeat crimes.
Victims often gravitate toward a more restorative approach, even in cases of capital crimes when the death penalty is a possible result. In November 2024, Alabama executed Carey Dale Grayson for murdering a hitchhiker in 1994. The victim’s daughter spoke after the execution about the futility of the punitive approach to address the systemic problems that lead to crime.
Jodi Haley noted that her mother’s killer was abused “in every possible way,” including having cigarettes put out on his skin, facing physical and sexual abuse, and being thrown out on the street as an adolescent. “I have to wonder how all of this slips through the cracks of the justice system. Because society failed this man as a child, and my family suffered because of it,” she said.
Haley pondered what kind of positive impact Grayson [the killer] could have had on lives. The “eye for an eye” justification for the death penalty is “not right,” she said. “Murdering inmates under the guise of justice needs to stop … State-sanctioned homicide needs never be listed as cause of death … I don’t know who we think we are. To be in such a modern time, we regress when we implement this punishment. I hope and pray my mother’s death will invoke these changes and give her senseless death some purpose,” Haley concluded.
Aside from the impactful healing among individual participants, many restorative justice programs report a decline in recidivism, with studies showing a range of 10-25 percent in improvements compared to traditional processes. While there are not enough samples to study and not enough rigorous research to form a comprehensive evaluation, another Department of Justice meta-study found a moderate reduction in future juvenile delinquent behavior from available research and generally noted a positive impact in many studies, particularly with respect to participant satisfaction with the process.
The victims’ survey, which the organization has repeated annually for 10 years, explores the views on the justice system of more than 15,000 crime victims. The survey is a valuable tool, but the availability of restorative programs is sparse at best. Policymakers must allocate more resources to restorative justice, and judges and prosecutors must refer cases to these programs. Simply expanding the use of these approaches will go a long way toward truly serving victims and delivering justice.