Love Your Enemies

Most forerunners exhibit a strong desire to establish their values early in life because their ideals and their ideas are the foundation for all that they do. Mark Yantzi grew up in the Amish faith near Punkeydoodles Corners south west of New Hamburg. The second world war was still a recent memory and Mark felt quite different from other kids because of the Amish community’s pacifism. In his early years he wrestled with the pacifist principle of loving your enemies and what that looked like in practical terms. His quest to understand the principles he had inherited from the Amish faith would become a journey of discovery and the foundation for his life’s work.

After university, Mark volunteered with the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) working with young offenders who were on parol. A year later, a full time job as a parole office became available. One of his responsibilities was to direct and guide a group of MCC volunteers who worked with the offenders. In their regular meetings, they often discussed ways in which they could make the programs they offered more effective for the offender and the victims of crime. The idea of loving your enemies came up occasionally and it became the lense through which they began to look at the justice system and the objectives of their programs in an entirely new light. It was May 1974 and the focus of one of their discussions became two youth who had gone on a destructive rampage in Elmira, slashing tires and breaking windows. The group challenged Mark with the idea of having the young men meet and talk to the victims and hopefully discover how their actions had impacted them and the community.

This had never been done before so there was no provision or precedent for recommending this kind of “solution” in the pre-sentencing report Mark was preparing for the judge. Several of the volunteers strongly encouraged Mark to add a letter to the report which would recommend this new approach. They wondered if it was even legal, but they believed that this would offer the offenders and the victims reconciliation. To Mark and the MCC volunteers’ surprise, the judge, without any previous cases of this type of reconciliation on which to rely, agreed that the victims and the offenders should meet. It became a landmark decision and the “Elmira Case”, as it has become known, is regarded internationally as the beginning of  “restorative justice”.

Mark and the volunteer group had discovered a solution that they perceived intuitively, but now they needed to understand the underlying principles of their idea of “loving their enemy” and be able to communicate them. The justice system’s main premise was to come up with a punishment which was equal to the offense as a deterrent to re-offending – hence the scales of justice. The group began to see that this approach often got in the way of dealing with the underlying causes from which a person had committed the offense. It also did little for the victims who had been violated and traumatized; consequently, the re-offend rate was exceptionally high. The group also discovered that even though 90% of the accused pleaded guilty, most of the offenders would try to minimize their responsibility for their actions in order to reduce the punishment. The punishment was supposed to be the deterrent to repeating the offense but when it became the main focus of justice, it became a barrier for people when taking responsibility for their actions. Punishment was also ineffective in deterring crime when the root causes were drug and other addictions – which were the most common cause of people offending and reoffending.

Although Mark and the MCC volunteers believed they had a better solution, change is always a slow process. There were many encouraging moments and some moments when circumstances challenged their belief in what they were doing. Two things helped them persist. Mark met weekly for breakfast with several like-minded friends who encouraged him and became a sounding board for his ideas and concerns. They helped him by simply listening and giving him feedback. Every forerunner needs friends to be their “mirror” so they can discover and rediscover their ideals and from them develop their ideas.

The second thing that helped was the formation of the non-profit agency “Community Justice Initiatives” (CJI), which gave a name to what they were doing and helped expand the concept of restorative justice into other communities. Through CJI they also were able to develop specific programs for unique types of crimes such as sexual offences and elder and child abuse and neglect. CJI also made possible the freedom to experiment, evaluate and quickly respond to the effectiveness of their systems and processes to improve their results.

In the Waterloo Region, an unequaled number of offenders (70%) now meet their victims. Our Region has been a forerunner in restorative justice and has been a leader with unprecedented success. Scores of former “clients” of CJI have written to them over the last 20 years to commend this program as having “saved their lives”. They believe that taking responsibility for their choices and coming face-to-face with the impact of their actions have dramatically and deeply changed them.

Another ground-breaking innovation has been CJI’s programs which engage both the offender and victim in the restoration process. Contrary to the expected, victims often want to help offenders recover. They have a vested interest in seeing that others do not become victims as they did. This process has become healing for both parties as they work together toward redemptive solutions that get at the real cause of the crime.

The process of change has been slow. It is human nature to want an eye for an eye, even if it doesn’t produce the desired results. There are tough-talking opponents to restorative justice who claim it doesn’t work in spite of the success stories and the far superior re-offend rate of the program. It has also become fashionable for politicians to appear to be “tough on crime” which usually means increasing punishments in spite of the dismal results that produces. Thankfully, it hasn’t discouraged Mark Yantzi who has seen first hand the successes of the program.

In spite of the naysayers, this process has redefined the word “justice” based upon the idea of “loving your enemy”. It has been a 35 year journey for Mark, CJI, and his MCC volunteers but they have laid a foundation from which others can also build, create, innovate, and reform our justice system. Restorative justice programs now exist in communities across Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand, Africa, and Scandinavia. Although there are opponents and challenges, the concepts have proven viable, productive, and effective for many types of offenses.

Mark Jantzi, CJI, and the MCC volunteers have reformed our justice system to the benefit of our community and for victims and their offenders. They and the Waterloo Region have become known world-wide for their contribution to the justice system by being forerunners in restorative justice. Mark has recently retired from his administrative role at CJI, and like most forerunners, he is looking for new ways to implement and spread his ideas to make our world a better place.

Paul Weigel

Mark Jantzi is the author of “Sexual Offending and Restoration” (Pandora Press) and co-author of “Three Paths to Healing”. Both books are available through Community Justice Initiatives (www.cjiwr.com). He was also a Kitchener City Councilor and member of the Waterloo Regional Council from 1982 – 2000.