I didn’t know a great deal about restorative justice before 2008. I was appearing as a guest artist at the ‘Get In’ Festival in Liverpool where I met Jim Moriaty, artistic director of Te Rekau community theatre company based in New Zealand. Jim’s commitment to theatre as a tool for change has helped transform the lives of many of his country’s most vulnerable people.
The company takes young offenders and puts them through a rigorous residential programme aimed at addressing the root causes of their behaviours and attempting to repair the harms that they have caused. This programme is carried out in partnership with the New Zealand justice system as an alternative to custodial sentencing; something that notable political figures including former justice ministers David Gaulk and Rory Stewart have called for here.
Jim had brought along a young person working with the company, devising and touring a performance to communities affected by offending behaviour. It was clear this process had had a remarkable effect on them. I’ve worked in many prison, probation and youth offending settings and rarely meet someone who has, in well-fitting cliched terms, literally ‘turned his life around’.
A year later my younger brother, aged 38, was murdered in a frenzied knife attack by a 17-year-old neighbour – someone he’d shown great kindness to, in recognition of the turbulent life this boy had endured. So began an endless whirlwind of trauma, grief and despair navigating the criminal justice system.
Advised by counsel, he took a ‘manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility’ charge and five years later was knocking at the door of the parole board.
Two successful appeals later we were running out of options. After less than eight years in prison, he due for release on licence.
It had been a difficult few years. My brother’s beloved wife, adored two young sons and close friends had really struggled with the brutal and meaningless manner of his passing. I’d been the first person at the scene of the killing, and that sight will be forever in my mind. I’d never envisaged myself at a murder crime scene or in a morgue, courtroom or prison but all that was my new reality.
In my rage and pain, I had deeply disturbing dreams about the offender killing myself and my family. When my wife (DfE student support champion Polly Harrow) gently suggested we consider restorative justice, I thought she’d lost her mind. But she told me how we dehumanise and demonise through disconnection, separation and avoidance. How the threat becomes so much bigger in your imagination.
The alternative, it seemed, was to continue through a living hell.
We went through months of thorough preparation with probation; I had to work out how to address the person I’d been harbouring such violent and vengeful feelings towards. Then there we were, sitting across a table from him, looking into his eyes in a ridiculously normal office with tired furniture: me, Polly, the probation team and his advocate.
Those two and a half hours literally changed my life. It was like pulling the curtain to find the Wizard of Oz was just an ordinary mortal with seemingly no ill intent. He was 24 and looked like a lost little boy.
Did he say sorry? Yes. Did he seem remorseful? Yes. Did his words help? How could they?
Were we meant to forgive, to forget, to understand? Could we?
As I spoke to him, there was a visible shift. I was beginning to feel emboldened and able to speak my mind clearly. I finally had empowered myself against this most dreaded of threats. He was finally confronting our truth and coming to terms, in the most personal and direct way, of the consequences of his murderous actions.
Our last words to him were “You owe it to us, to his children, to make something of yourself, to be the best version of yourself, to cause no more harm and to live a good life”. We left in stunned silence as we digested what had occurred. We learned afterwards that he said “I want to do better…for them.” In that moment we had become his emotionally available adults, something he had little experience of in his fractured young life. We had shown him empathy, and the whole room felt the extraordinary weight of that compassion looking into the face of a murderer.
My young nephews had suffered with severe anxiety about his release and whether he would seek them out. I was able to tell them with certainty they no longer needed to live in fear. Out of all of it, that was the most significant thing I could have said to those heartbroken children.
I could not have entered or completed this life-changing process without Polly’s unwavering support and wisdom. In our professional lives, we have both gone on to advocate for and train educators in restorative practice to reduce issues of conflict with their students and help build their abilities to heal relationships. This is something we vehemently believe in; we know that it works.
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