By Rebecca Laurie

Seven weeks after law Prof. Tom Russell moved to Boulder, Colo., in 2000, student riots erupted a few blocks from his house. As a community member and a legal scholar, the incident prompted him to participate and later specialize in restorative justice, a relatively new approach to prosecuting minor offenses like theft, fighting or vandalism.

According to Russell, restorative justice is a different way of thinking about the response to crime. It focuses on the harm caused by the crime as opposed to which law was broken. The restorative approach explores how damage to the victim might be repaired. The punitive approach asks how to best punish the offender.

"As society has become increasingly punitive, restorative justice is a good way to keep kids from becoming ‘career criminals,’" Russell notes.

Getting the victim and the offender to sit down with friends and family members is the hallmark of restorative justice, he says.

"If a teenager sprays graffiti on a garage door, the punitive approach arrests the kid and sends him to a detention center," Russell explains. "By contrast, a restorative approach gets the kid and his family down to sit down with the neighbors. The kid explains why he did it, and victim voices how he feels. Together they figure out a way to repair the damage. This keeps the teen out of the system and reintegrates him back into the community."

Research shows that victims have a higher level of satisfaction, and that there is a reduced recidivism rate among offenders, he says. A facilitator mediates the conversation and a judge reviews the final decision.

In Boulder, the concepts of restorative justice helped students and their non-student neighbors initiate dialogue that encouraged responsibility. In Denver, Russell used ideas of restorative justice to help form the Central Denver Community Court, which represents seven high-crime neighborhoods. Funded by several nonprofit organizations, the court has tried 280 cases since it opened in September 2003.

"Restorative justice gives young people an opportunity to know that their community cares about them," says Elizabeth Hunt, a third-year law student who is currently interning at the community court.

Last year, Russell began teaching what may be the only restorative justice course offered by the nation’s law schools. And, he hopes that by requiring DU law students to sit in on restorative justice sessions and participate in "drive alongs" with police officers, they will understand the power of restorative over punitive criminal justice.