Mount Cook

PHOTO: GRANT MAIDEN

Railway station, Dunedin

Abel Tasman National Park

Awaroa Inlet Surprise

Wellington cable car

Yael Shy crossed many bridges while on co-op in Auckland.

PHOTO: BECKY NUNES

Restorative Justice

A Co-op Down Under Brings High Hopes

A CRIME IS COMMITTED in one of Auckland’s sprawling neighborhoods. It could be vandalism, assault or vehicular manslaughter. If the defendant pleads guilty, an extraordinary thing can happen.

Guided by trained facilitators, the defendant and victim, their families and friends, sit down together and talk about the crime’s effects on everyone involved. Then they negotiate a way the offender can make amends. A judge will later weigh the outcome in sentencing.

This is New Zealand’s system of restorative justice. The island nation is a world leader in the movement to give victims a stronger voice in the criminal-justice process and allow offenders a way to atone for their crimes beyond sitting in a jail cell.

Yael Shy ’07 spent her winter co-op in Auckland’s criminal courts studying restorative justice and making her own contributions to the system. Working with two of the field’s leading jurists, she attended victim-defendant conferences, analyzed the case law and interviewed participants. She wrote two detailed reports, one of which was cited in a recent New Zealand court decision.

Sitting in a café across from the Auckland courthouse, the 24 year old said restorative justice was her driving interest in the law. “One of the reasons I came to Northeastern was to do this co-op in New Zealand,” Shy said. “My application essay was about restorative justice.”

An Alumni/ae Association scholarship that encourages students to undertake cutting-edge legal work and travel to new geographic areas made the co-op possible. Shy plans to do her next co-op at the district attorney’s office in Milwaukee, one of the growing number of US jurisdictions that employ restorative-justice techniques. “It’s creeping into criminal justice systems from the ground level all over the country,” she said.

Righting Wrongs

Shy’s fascination with international restorative justice started as an undergraduate at New York University, when she traveled to South Africa to observe the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the world’s most prominent example of restorative justice. She saw the process offered an alternative. “It’s a way to create social justice without enemies,” she said.

The daughter of a rabbi, Shy explained the less-worldly qualities of restorative justice hold special appeal for her. “It’s a human process to sit down and face somebody, to see that they’ve suffered too,” she said. “I think it has spiritual aspects in the way it’s directly related to healing.”

Auckland District Court Judge Fred McElrea, a leading figure in New Zealand’s restorative justice movement and one of Shy’s two co-op supervisors, said the process is similar to the way some traditional societies deal with crime, including the indigenous Maori people of New Zealand. “There’s the idea of putting right the harm and restoring people to a position of respect,” he said.

McElrea explained that restorative justice principles had been operating in the juvenile court system for years when he and others decided they could be equally successful in adult cases. Five years ago a measure was introduced in Parliament to start a pilot program. Billed as a law to help crime victims, it won backing from victims’ rights groups and the New Zealand bar.

“With restorative justice, victims get a sense of involvement and closure,” McElrea said. “It’s a far, far better system for victims.”

Auckland District Court Judge Stanley Thorburn, Shy’s other co-op supervisor, said restorative justice works especially well in vehicular manslaughter cases, where defendants feel great remorse and victims’ families experience tremendous grief and anger. “If you’re talking about restoration,” Thorburn said, “the greater the crime, the greater the need for healing.”

Restorative justice in New Zealand, however, is not without its critics or problems. A recent study of the program’s first four years raises questions of whether it reduces recidivism enough to justify costs. The program’s weak point is that many offenders don’t make good on their restitution promises, and courts have little means of enforcing agreements other than taking the offender’s lack of compliance into account when sentencing.

Though New Zealand has a progressive streak, Kiwis tend to favor strong punishments for criminals. The nation has one of the world’s highest incarceration rates, and is currently experiencing a crisis because of overcrowded prisons. That, however, may be a prime reason why restorative justice continues to gain wider acceptance as an alternative to long prison sentences.

Currently, restorative justice is being used in a handful of New Zealand’s largest district courts. When a case looks like a likely candidate, the court offers the option to participate.

If the parties agree, then they, their supporters and two court-trained facilitators meet at a neutral location, such as a community hall. The facilitators are often lawyers, psychologists or social workers who serve the courts part time. Every effort is made to select facilitators who come from the same culture as the victim and defendant. Auckland, for instance, has a multi-ethnic mix of Maori, Pacific Islanders, Asians and Europeans.

In the meeting, the victim proposes a means of restitution, from a simple apology to a more creative approach. One woman wanted the defendant to pay for her karate lessons. Another victim asked the offender to get job counseling. Two young men who vandalized churches were asked to help repair the buildings. Most victims do not ask for monetary restitution because New Zealand has a national insurance scheme that pays for medical costs and other damages for crime victims.

Prior to sentencing, the judge adjourns the case until the offender completes the agreement or else fails to do so. Successful participation in the program is treated as a strong indicator of remorse and can greatly reduce an offender’s sentence.

“It’s not a get-out-of-jail card,” Shy said. “It’s just a side process. Restorative justice doesn’t solve everything, and it’s not always appropriate, but there’s a chance that justice will be done.”  H.S.

Summer 2006

Paradise Found

BY HUDSON SANGREE ’00     |     PHOTOGRAPHS BY SASKIA KIM ‘00

Early this year, Hudson Sangree ’00 and his wife, Saskia Kim ’00, headed to New Zealand — she, for a prestigious fellowship; he for the travel and experience. They were greeted by stunning landscapes, lush vegetation, a progressive legal system and a wide variety of Kiwis eager to welcome visitors as friends.

IN MARCH, near the end of summer in New Zealand, my wife, Saskia Kim ’00, and I stood on a remote beach in the Abel Tasman National Park and watched the sun set on Whariwharangi Bay. Turquoise waters stretched north to the horizon while lush, forested mountains rose behind us to the park interior. A soft breeze blew from the ocean, gentle waves lapped the golden sand. We’d hiked all day to reach this spot and had the beach nearly to ourselves. Though not so far from civilization, we were in a subtropical paradise on the far side of the world.

Suddenly our hiking companion, Steve, shouted from down the beach, pointing just offshore. We hurried toward him and saw dark shapes moving through the water, dorsal fins breaking the surface. They were dolphins. Five or six of the creatures swam back and forth a few yards from the beach, sometimes leaping into the air. We watched, enraptured, for many minutes until it was too dark to see. With the moon rising above the hilltops, we headed back to the candlelit farmhouse that serves as a backpacker’s retreat on the Abel Tasman Coast Track, one of New Zealand’s Great Walks.

The main reason we were in New Zealand, after all, wasn’t for a holiday but for work. Saskia, an attorney with the California Senate, had received an Ian Axford Fellowship in Public Policy, giving her the opportunity to spend six months in New Zealand’s capital, Wellington, learning about the nation and its government. I got to tag along.

Our long journey had really started a year before, when Saskia traveled to the New Zealand Embassy in Washington, DC, to interview for the Axford Fellowship. Each year, two or three fellowships, funded by the New Zealand government, are awarded to outstanding mid-career American policy professionals. A specialist in consumer and financial privacy, Saskia developed a project to study New Zealand’s efforts to protect citizens from intrusive data-collection practices. New Zealand is a progressive nation with one of the world’s most comprehensive privacy laws, limiting how both businesses and government agencies may gather, use and disclose personal information.

Home Away from Home

In California, Saskia works with state lawmakers to craft statutes that protect citizens from potentially harmful effects of emerging technologies, such as radio frequency identification (RFID), biometrics and spam. California has some of the strongest privacy laws in the United States. In New Zealand, she split her time between the Ministry of Justice and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, the two agencies that oversee the nation’s Privacy Act. She worked with government lawyers as New Zealand’s Parliament considered updates to the act, keeping pace with technology. In her final report, Saskia undertook a comparison of how New Zealand and California are addressing the privacy implications of various emerging technologies.

Beyond work, Axford fellows are expected to travel throughout New Zealand and get to know its landscape, culture and people. We arrived during the austral summer in January and toured the South Island, a spectacular land of jagged snow-capped mountains, glaciers and vast rolling plains — scenery featured in “The Lord of the Rings” movies. The island’s west coast is known for its rainforests and dramatic fiords, the most famous of which is Milford Sound, a magnificent sea valley of sheer cliffs, roaring waterfalls and deep cold water. Exploring the rest of the island, we visited Abel Tasman, on the sunny north coast near Nelson, the Marlborough wine region (New Zealand’s answer to the Napa Valley), and the Marlborough Sounds, a stunning area of mountain valleys flooded by the sea with hundreds of miles of waterways, coves and inlets.

Several of our favorite places were on the east coast of the South Island. On the Otago Peninsula, near the university city of Dunedin, we saw rare yellow-eyed penguins and the only mainland nesting colony of royal albatross. In Oamaru, a town of white limestone, we watched dozens of little blue penguins make their way ashore. And near the town of Kaikoura, we boated among hundreds of dusky dolphins, which raced our bow waves and did back flips in the air.

The North Island is much more populated and dominated by volcanoes and subtropical beaches. Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city with 1.2 million residents, sits on a picturesque sailboat-filled harbor. About a quarter of New Zealand’s population of 4 million live in Auckland, which has the world’s largest concen-tration of Pacific Islanders and a growing Asian population. The North Island is where most of New Zealand’s indigenous Maori live, their culture portrayed beautifully in the movie “Whale Rider.”

Between the North and South Islands lies the rough and windy Cook Strait. From Picton on the South Island, a three-hour ferry crossing of the strait brings travelers to Wellington, the capital and one of the world’s most attractive cities. With its white houses climbing hillsides above a large harbor, the city is reminiscent of a little San Francisco. Wellington teems with theater, music, museums and cafés. It also has a thriving filmmaking industry, led by Peter Jackson, director of “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy and “King Kong.”

In Wellington, we leased a cottage on a hillside in Thorndon, a historic neighborhood of Victorian homes. The residence of Prime Minister Helen Clark was just a few blocks down the main road. A rambling green house, it is protected only by a shoulder-high wooden fence. Like many Kiwi homes, there is a mailbox at the end of the driveway with a small sign saying “No Circulars.” To me, it represented the strong egalitarian streak that runs through New Zealand society, where even the prime minister has to deal with junk mail.

Saskia Kim at Oriental Bay in Wellington. The Tararua mountains are in the distance.

PHOTO: GRANT MAIDEN; MAP: MARK GABRENYA

It bears noting here that during our stay the prime minister, the chief justice and the governor-general (the queen’s represen-tative) were all women. In 1893, the nation was the first in the world to give women the right to vote. It’s just one example in a long history of New Zealand’s passage of progressive laws. Two years ago, New Zealand’s Parliament passed a bill providing for same-sex civil unions, with essentially all the rights and obli-gations of marriage. In Wellington, even most married people now refer to their spouse as “partner” — another example of the Kiwis’ desire for a society where everyone is equal.

A World Apart

Though generally self-effacing, New Zealanders also have a growing degree of national pride and independence, especially with regard to the United States. A landmark moment in New Zealand politics came in 1985 when French agents used explosives to sink the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbor, killing a Greenpeace worker. The group had been protesting French nuclear testing in the South Pacific. The sinking was a catalyst for New Zealand’s anti-nuclear movement. The country declared its territory a nuclear-free zone, preventing US warships with nuclear capacity from entering its waters. The move created a rift with the US government over trade and defense but gave New Zealand a greater sense of national pride and identity.

In the decades since, New Zealand has become a world leader in environmental law, protecting vast areas as national parks and nature preserves. It has launched campaigns to reverse past environmental damage by replacing imported plant species with native bush and trying to control animal invaders such as the Australian possum, which destroys thousands of acres of plant life every night. New Zealanders are also trying to slow the decimation of native bird species. Kiwis dedicate huge amounts of their national budget to protecting their environment, by one estimate the same proportion as Americans spend on defense.

In the criminal arena, New Zealand has in recent years legalized prostitution, relaxed marijuana enforcement, and undertaken a program known as restorative justice that offers reduced prison sentences to offenders who make reparations for their crimes. In Auckland, I met with Yael Shy ’07, a second-year co-op student studying restorative justice (see adjacent story). She believes Northeastern lawyers would find New Zealand appealing. “There’s the progressive edge that is similar between Northeastern and New Zealand,” she says.

In fact, I suspect that Saskia, Yael and others may be on the forefront of a growing interest by Northeastern lawyers in New Zealand. With its progressive politics, beautiful natural environment and down-to-earth people, its appeal is similar to Alaska, Vermont, Hawaii and other destinations that have attracted Northeastern law graduates and students. Perhaps in the coming years, more will discover New Zealand as a vacation or co-op destination, a place to work temporarily, or even as a new home on the far side of the world.

Hudson Sangree is a journalist who has written for the Sacramento Bee, San Francisco Daily Journal, Los Angeles Daily Journal, Los Angeles Times and other publications. He and Saskia Kim live in Davis, California.