Embracing a Holistic Vision for Change
Article by Kerry Naughton and David Rogers
Partnership for Safety and Justice was founded in 1999 as the Western Prison Project, a criminal justice reform organization focused on prison conditions and challenging the over-reliance on incarceration as an approach to public safety. In 2004, a victims’ advocacy organization called Survivors Advocating for an Effective System (SAFES) approached the Western Prison Project about a potential merger.
Initially, the merger seemed like an unlikely possibility, but through extensive discussions, the idea of a new organization with a holistic analysis around changing Oregon’s approach to public safety became incredibly compelling. There was no model for developing a grassroots base of survivors of crime, people convicted of crime, and the families of both, but the boards of both organizations wanted to move forward. After extensive meetings with the membership of both groups, the two groups merged. Shortly after the merger, the organization changed its name to Partnership for Safety and Justice (PSJ).
The name change was necessary to help manifest new goals, language, and a vision for change that appropriately supports the interests of all our constituencies: groups often thought of as oppositional – survivors of crime and people convicted of crime. But from a public safety policy perspective, how oppositional are the interests of these two constituencies? Is there room to create a meaningful partnership for change?
Common Ground: A Holistic Vision for Public Safety
Although there are some existing tensions and oppositional dynamics between parts of the victims’ assistance and rights field and criminal justice reform groups, there are also many shared goals, values, and experiences that have gone mostly unnoticed and unexplored. By exploring some of the common goals and values between victim-oriented groups and criminal justice reform organizations, a very different discourse could emerge about criminal justice policy that improves the outlook for all people and the public safety system as a whole. PSJ is in the process of further discussing and incorporating the following areas of common ground between victim-oriented groups and criminal justice reform organizations to deepen our holistic perspective.
Values: As Partnership for Safety and Justice began to intentionally build an organization that works with survivors of crime, people convicted of crime, and the families of both, it became clear that an overarching framework would help our members and allies understand how they could work together despite traditional notions that these groups have oppositional interests. Early on, PSJ’s members identified a set of values they thought were important in guiding the development of our public safety policies. The values are Safety, Prevention, Accountability, Justice, Redemption, and Healing.
A Public Safety Framework: For the vast majority of crime victim advocacy groups, reducing future victimization is a major goal that easily fits into a larger objective of creating public safety. The goal of enhancing community safety should be easily shared among most legitimate interests engaged in criminal justice-related policy advocacy. Disagreements may develop around identifying the best strategies for meeting that goal, but not in the goal itself.
The idea that using a public safety framework allows for broader coalition building is not a new or radical concept. But it is worth noting that for some criminal justice reform groups, using a public safety framework is more rhetorical or tactical than deeply felt, which is often a dynamic that is noticed by other policy stakeholders, including victim-oriented groups who could be real allies on a range of issues.
Reducing Recidivism, Reducing Victimization: Policies that help reduce recidivism also help reduce victimization, but rarely are criminal justice reform advocates making those connections and using the language of “reducing victimization.” Instead, traditional criminal justice reform advocates often focus on the cost of recidivism in terms of dollars and cents, emphasizing the economic cost of re-incarceration. But “reducing victimization” is a goal of all victim advocates and can be discussed and promoted in thoughtful ways. “Reducing victimization” can be an area of significant common ground in a wide range of criminal justice policy areas.
Parallel Needs: Some victim advocates have identified the parallels between the needs of victims in rebuilding their lives and the needs of formerly incarcerated people re-entering the community. Crime survivors need a range of services to rebuild their lives, including safe and affordable shelter, employment, medical and mental health assistance, and drug and alcohol treatment. Formerly incarcerated people need the same range of services when returning to the community. The lack of support services for both victims and formerly incarcerated people has profoundly negative impacts on millions of people and their communities. This further raises questions about the effectiveness of how public safety spending is currently being prioritized and provides room for a common goal.
Funding for Services: Just as there are real parallels between what crime survivors need to help rebuild their lives and what formerly incarcerated people need when returning to the community, there is also a parallel that these services are significantly underfunded. There is significant coalition-building potential in advocating for re-prioritizing public safety spending that builds community-based programs and support services for both crime victims and formerly incarcerated people.
Parallel Justice: Susan Herman, a national victim advocate, has highlighted the need for a system of Parallel Justice. This concept underscores that the current criminal justice system does not have a primary focus of helping crime victims rebuild their lives. The outcomes used to measure success in the current criminal justice system are very different than those used by community-based crime survivor advocates. Prosecutors measure success by closing cases through convictions, and police ultimately strive for a resolution to a call so they can move onto the next. In this context, the notion of Parallel Justice suggests that society needs an additional or parallel system that isn’t focused on accountability for the offender but is instead focused on providing necessary support to crime victims.
The concept of Parallel Justice has been promoted as a way to ensure that both system- and community-based responses better focus on the individual victim’s needs, whether or not the crime is ever reported. Parallel Justice upholds victim safety, the right to compensation (no matter what crime was committed), and a coordinated governmental/community response to meet the victim’s needs. The infrastructure already exists in the current community-based segment of the victims’ assistance field, but more work can be done to ensure that every survivor has access to assistance.
Creating a New Discourse for Change
The criminal justice reform movement and the victim advocacy field were created out of the painful and emotional consequences of crime. The current response to crime in the U.S. has produced little investment in rehabilitation and support services for crime survivors or for people who commit crime, doing little to break the cycle of victimization. Over time, each field has developed its own language and structures as a way to best advocate for its constituency or goals. The language differences, separate structures, and lack of shared experiences and coordination has led to mistrust and assumptions about the other field. Many advocates view the other field as oppositional. But when we break through the assumptions, we find we have much more in common than first thought.
Each field has much to gain by making sure that resources are devoted to services and rehabilitation for people who commit crime and people who survive crime. Each field has much to gain by focusing on prevention efforts. And each field has much to gain by recognizing that while accountability is important, it is one part of a larger coordinated community response to crime and violence. Finding evidence-based ways to shift resources away from incarceration and reinvesting them into prevention, re-entry services, drug and alcohol treatment, and victims’ services will significantly reduce crime and provide better outcomes for people who commit crime, people who survive crime, and our entire communities.
Victim advocates and criminal justice reform advocates are already engaged in the slow, difficult work to create public safety. We just need to shift our thinking to realize that we can be in the work together.
(For more information about Parallel Justice, see The National Center for Victims of Crime's website at http://www.ncvc.org/ncvc/main.aspx?dbID=DB_PJFramework146)
