Yvonne Byrd, director of the Montpelier Community Justice Center, Karen Vastine, the community justice
coordinator in Burlington,
and Marc Wennberg, director of the St. Alban’s Community Justice Center, explain how volunteers help craft restorative
responses to crime and conflict in Vermont.ROBERT V. WOLF:
Hi, I'm Rob Wolf, director of communications at the Center for Court Innovation, and today I’m lucky to have
three guests from Vermont, all of whom are involved with community driven justice centers. With
me is Yvonne Byrd, director of the Montpelier Community Justice Center, and Karen Vastine, who is the community justice
coordinator in Burlington, and Mark Wennberg, who is the director of the St. Albans Community Justice Center. Nice
to have you all here. ALL: Thank you, nice to be here. WOLF:
So your work in creating and running some of Vermont's 15 community justice centers has made you guys experts
in involving the community in the delivery of justice. What is a community justice center. Yvonne, I thought you
might want to answer that. YVONNE BYRD: The community justice center
is charged with delivering restorative responses to conflict and crime, and a restorative response would be basically
having the people involved, with the support of community, come up with the best, the most positive resolution to
a negative situation. WOLF: Why involve the community in the first
place, Karen? KAREN VASTINE: Well, I wonder too if it's just
important to add that victims are a very important component of our community and that they are also involved in
restorative justice. As a matter of fact, it's an opportunity for the offender to make direct amends to the
victim, if the victim so chooses to be engaged in that way. And I believe that, in terms of involving
community members in restorative justice and helping to hold low level offenders accountable, or any kind of offenders
accountable, that what it's about is empowering your community. And I think that it brings the community also
closer to the offender. So one thing that we know is that if somebody is in isolation, that if
they don't feel connected to their community, that they are less likely to change their behavior. So having
the community members involved actually shows the participant or the offender that there's a reason for caring
and wanting to change their behavior. And I think, also, that it helps to link them in a more positive, more meaningful
way to their community if they don't already have that linkage. WOLF:
Also, maybe we can be a little more specific about how the community is, in fact, involved in the reparative justice
panels. So maybe Mark can just give a brief description of how, how they work and explain how the community is involved?
MARC WENNBERG: So restorative justice panels or restorative boards
receive referrals from multiple sources. It could be their pre-charge from the police or the state's attorney,
or post-adjudication directly from the judge or the probation or parole department. The reparative
panel/ restorative justice board is volunteer-driven, volunteer-led, although there are staff present at the meetings,
in most cases, where, working with the offender and if the victim wants to participate, the victim as well, we identify
what happened, who was affected by what happened, how were they affected, what do they need for the harm to be repaired,
and who's responsibility is it to repair this harm, as well as what is this person going to do so that something
like this doesn't happen again? So how are they taking concrete changes in their own life? They
collectively, and in a consensus fashion, develop a reparative contract,