Crime, repentance, and reconciliation

What can be done to keep children out of prisons, so-called correctional labor facilities? It is an open secret that inmates are not “corrected” there. Judicial statistics point to a vicious circle of recidivism: nearly a third of Ukrainian teenagers released from prison commit new crimes and end up back in prison. As a result of this “rule of law,” there are more Ukrainian men doing time than serving in the armed forces. According to the State Judicial Administration of Ukraine, 2,700 minors (one-fifth of all convicts) were imprisoned in 2006 and almost 2,000 minors, including 100 girls, were serving a prison term as of Dec. 1, 2007.

RECONCILIATION BEFORE TRIAL

Anyone can commit an offense. Someone once said that every individual has done something in their lifetime, for which they can be put inside, but whether they repent is another matter. Ksenia, 15, and Olha, 20, stole their drunken neighbor’s apartment keys and walked away with her video system, computer, money, and some smaller items. The prosecution indicted them under Article 185, Part 3 (burglary) of the Criminal Code of Ukraine and declared the apartment owner Valentyna Ivanivna the injured party.

If the girls had been unlucky and the judge had adhered to the principle of “a thief’s place is behind bars,” they would have joined the ranks of inmates at the Melitopil girls’ penal institution, but they were advised to reconcile with the victim, an offer that Olha accepted. In other words, she experienced restorative justice, a system that is still not very popular here but widespread in Europe, the US, and Canada for the past 20 years. According to the victor offender reconciliation program, offenders reimburse the losses suffered by their victims, who meet with the offenders and tell them about their anguish. Offenders then offer their apologies. This is the principle that allowed Valentyna Ivanivna and Olha to reach a deal on waiving damages, with the result that the girl avoided a harsher punishment.

As a result of this unconventional method of seeking justice, 9,600 minors were convicted in Wales in 2006, but only 8 percent of them landed behind bars. In Ukraine, even if a prisoner is released on parole, this is usually done without the reconciliation (mediation) procedure.

As a way of settling a court case, restorative justice has long been applicable in Ukraine both to adults and children, but it was not until a few years ago that more attention started being paid to this program. In 2005 a conference of the Council of Europe justice ministers recognized restorative justice as a social mission aimed at reforming criminal jurisprudence.

DIGNITY AND SHAME AS MAIN DETERRENTS TO CRIME

“Why is this practice still not widespread in Ukraine? Because, even though we extol rule of law, we still have a different take on the very idea of justice,” said Lada Kanevska, vice-president of the Ukrainian Center for Common Ground, whose experts have been promoting the idea of restorative justice in Ukraine for six years. “We can settle a conflict either according to the letter of the law — under the article of the code that the offense was committed and what prison term this carries — or the spirit of the law, i.e., views on lawbreaking as laid down in the Bible or even earlier.”

According to the Conviction Monitoring Department, most children who commit crimes come from problem families, are social orphans, or genuine orphans. Some break the law in search of food, while murders and rapes are often related to certain mental deviations caused by social problems.

“There is a term known as ‘partly dysfunctional family.’ This means that a family is successful in material terms but has problems in terms of bringing up the child as a citizen and a responsible individual,” psychiatrist and mediator Roman Koval told The Day. “Financial well-being is just one part of parenting requirements. When a child is growing up, he or she must acquire a set of common human values, an idea of the world and of themselves as a human being, and a sense of dignity. There was a case here in the Crimea, when a 15-year-old criminal offender was living by himself in a house without water, light, and heat.”

Naturally, in this kind of situation human dignity — the boy’s own or somebody else’s — is out of the question. This is very bad because, as researchers who study juvenile delinquency claim, the emergent feeling of shame for a misdeed is the turning point that can put a person on the right track.

Crime, Shame and Reintegration is a book written by the Australian John Braithwaite, who studies juvenile delinquency. He believes that restorative justice is only effective if a teenager feels shame, because the inner mechanism that prevents a person from committing a crime is a feeling of shame for transgressing the norms and rules of a society. Experts are convinced that law-enforcement bodies and the entire judicial system are unable to reeducate because offenders feel no shame in their prison milieu,” Koval says.

NO SHAME FOR WHAT?

According to the State Crime Prevention Service, out of the 2,000 children who were imprisoned in 2007, 43 percent were convicted of theft, almost 30 percent committed assault and robbery, and 12 percent committed premeditated murder or caused grievous bodily harm. And although the service claims that “correctional facilities have proper conditions for personality development, recreational leisure, and psychological and social support for teenagers,” the true indication of the quality of this work is the fact that nearly 60 percent of these teenagers are repeat offenders.

Another questionable “official” claim is that juvenile delinquency is on the wane in Ukraine. In reality, the situation is not that simple. “I think the real situation has only worsened because some thefts (of cell phones, for example) are no longer considered a criminal offense in Ukraine. There is another point that nobody discusses: the numbers of teenagers in Ukraine are shrinking by 300,000 to 500,000 a year. So if you look at the absolute figures of juvenile delinquency, it seems to be on the decline, but if you measure it against the general number of teenagers, you see a disturbing trend,” Kanevska said.

To return a child with a lengthy criminal record to a normal life (if/when this is possible), we should change our methods. Mediation alone is not enough. There should also be other instruments that instill shame and a sense of dignity in a child. Experts say that the greatest effects are produced by programs that aim to involve as many people as possible (even when the parents are indifferent) to saving a young person who has gone astray: the courtyard where the child grew up and where the neighbors know him/her; the school and the teachers who taught the child; the sports coach — anyone who will not brush the child aside but will try to help him/her reconsider what happened, reimburse the damages, and perhaps regain the feeling of personal dignity and respect for other people. Support from many people is crucial in this situation.

A FIVE-YEAR $6 MILLION PROJECT

These are the principles forming the basis of the restorative justice programs that acquired a new lease on life in early 2008 thanks to the Canadian government’s support. These projects are being implemented in the judicial practice of 11 regions by the Ukrainian Center for Understanding, part of the international organization Search for Common Ground, in partnership with Ukraine’s interior and justice ministries, the Supreme Court of Ukraine, the Conviction Monitoring Department, secondary schools, and other institutions. The program is focused on Kyiv, the Crimea, Lviv, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Odesa, and a handful of small towns.

Attesting to the effectiveness and importance of this program are the language of impartial figures of the past few years and the experience of specific judges. Reconciliation was achieved in two-thirds of all cases, 90 percent of cases ended in a damages compensation deal, and 85 percent of offenders considered the deals fair. The words of Krasnogvardiiske judge Maryna Kiriukhina should be heeded:

“Whenever we had an opportunity to send the participants of a criminal situation to reconciliation programs, I was able to sleep easier because I knew that my rulings would lead the two parties to reconcile, and that thanks to mediation they will be greeting each other on the street in 10 years’ time, and when they are released from prison they will not smash my head in on a dark street.”

COMMENTARY

Yurii POKALCHUK, writer:

“I regularly visit boys in two detention centers: in Pryluka (I’ve been teaching literature classes there for many years) and now in Kremenchuk.

“I see several problems in the prison camps. First, the courts: judges are often indifferent to people. I know of instances where teenagers were kept in a pretrial cell for 12 to 18 months. This is inadmissible because if a person has been in pretrial detention for only a few months, he or she can still be saved, but if it is a matter of 18 months, no reeducation is possible.

“Second, the penal institution is part of the upbringing of teenaged criminals. They are always busy there, but the problem is that when they are released, nobody wants to employ them. Society is indifferent to them. I recently dealt with an orphan boy, who asked social services for help after being released from prison. He was referred to a boarding school, but they rejected him because he had been in prison. Where could he go? The solution is very simple: the penal institution where a child has received vocational training should guarantee him/her a job. There are many local social services that should be more active.

“There’s another important thing. Last year the Yanukovych government withdrew privileges from the military and correctional officers — privileges for “a non-prestigious job.” Now people don’t want to work in penal institutions, so who will deal with the boys? To get people interested in this type of work, these privileges must be restored immediately, because these people are the only ones who can influence teenagers. As for restorative justice, I have never come across it. All I know is that releasing teenagers on bail is absurd because they will not hold themselves responsible for what they have done.”