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Local ACLU meeting touts restorative justice program By SUSAN DEROSIA Ashland Daily Tidings A panel on restorative justice, led by Arwen Bird, director of SAFES, Survivors Advocating For an Effective System, was held Saturday at the annual meeting of the Southern Oregon Chapter of the ACLU of Oregon at the Ashland Public Library. Prior to the panel, Bird awarded attorney Bill Mansfield and journalist Wes Brain Commendation Awards for Actions Advancing and Protecting Civil Liberties. Brain was arrested in connection with actions that occurred while videotaping an Ashland political demonstration. Mansfield represented Brain in the case, and when the charges were dropped, Mansfield advocated with the City of Ashland for revised arrest policies. Other members of the panel included Jackson County Circuit Court Judge Rebecca Orf who discussed the Jackson County Family Court and Joanne Lescher of Mediation Works who coordinates the Jackson County juvenile justice victim-offender mediation program. Restorative justice The restorative justice discussion began with Bird describing the life-changing event that led to her activism. In February of 1993, Bird said, she and her sister, Sierra, were rear-ended by a drunken driver who was going about 70 miles per hour. After both suffered numerous injuries, including similar ones to their spinal chords, Sierra Bird was left with a mild traumatic head injury, leading to a lifelong decrease in mental functions. Arwen Bird was permanently paralyzed. Through the experience of watching their case go through the justice system, and getting to know other victims, Bird realized that a vengence-oriented approach was not what was needed to prevent crime, support crime survivors or ensure public safety. Motivated by the event, she co-founded, with Michele Kohler and Robin Shanafelt, Survivors Advocating For an Effective System. In Bird's case, the driver was convicted of second degree assault, lost his license for 5 years, and served a short sentence. But Bird said he did not pay his court-ordered restitution. Over the ten years since the accident, Bird continues to need health care, special wheel chairs and equipment due to the crash. In the same ten years, with the influence of mandatory sentencing, the Oregon prison population has tripled to 10,000 inmates and the budget has increased to more than one billion dollars. The goal of restorative justice is to go beyond retribution through measures that respond to the needs of survivors, offenders, and the community, while seeking to prevent the conditions that lead to crime, Bird said. Victim-offender program The Jackson County juvenile justice victim-offender mediation program is an example of restorative justice at work. The program works with 10 to 18-year-olds. Panelist Joanne Lescher of Mediation Works said the program's goal is to teach them to take responsibility for what they've done in the community. Lescher described the program as a cognitive restructuring program. "We teach them thinking errors," she said, "and the way that they were thinking when they committed the crime and hopefully they learned from that and think differently now." The program consists of six hours, over four classes. One of the homework assignments is to find out what the offenders would say to their victims if they had the opportunity. "We go through all sorts of exercises to teach them empathy, which is a very different piece to teach." Lescher said. Later, the offenders must go through a mediation session with the victim. Family court Also on the program, Judge Rebecca Orf discussed the innovative Jackson County Family Court, which combines social services, including child welfare officers, probation officers, schools and other agencies. The family court idea developed after noticing that cases often involved families who would have multiple proceedings in several courts, often with different judges hearing the cases. "It was apparent to many of us that to scatter a family's cases throughout the court and have as many as six different judges handling a piece of that family's problem, we needed to do a better job of coordinating a family's cases coming through the court," said Orf. In 1997 the state legislature funded Jackson and Josephine family courts. In implementing the family court, they started by hiring a coordinator and "hand-searching" the case files. Then all the cases of a particular family were assigned to one judge. By the end of the first year they had about 70 families involved in 1,000 cases, with an average of 12 cases for the families identified. Orf explained that part of family court involves participants waiving ex partite contact. Team members including a district attorney, a public defender, representatives from treatment agencies, child welfare, court appointed special advocates, juvenile and adult probation officers, and others, totaling about 15 or 20 people meet with the judge once a week at first. People who want to be part of the program are required to watch two sessions of the court before they can participate in the program. The court asks that the entire family get involved and the work with the families in many aspects of their lives, including getting involved in helping with finding housing and jobs. For more information about the ACLU, call the ACLU Helpline at 541-858-3349. For SAFES, log onto www.crimesurvivors.org LINKS: DAILY TIDINGS: Main | News | Sports | Obituaries | Opinion | Columnists | AP News | Subscribe | Archives | Weather | Classifieds | Contact Us | Privacy REVELS: Main | Calendar | Dining | Movies | T.V. OTHER: Road Cams Copyright 2003 Ashland Daily Tidings 541.482.3456. 1661 Siskiyou Blvd., Ashland, OR 97520. Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. - Advertisers -