Restitution: real fine for criminals.

• Author: Lehrman, Karen

Restitution: Real Fine For Criminals

"Under our system of law," then-House Majority Whip Tony Coelho said last spring, "John Mack owed his debt to society, not to this young woman." But Mack, who subsequently became Jim Wright's right-hand man, had slashed the young woman's throat, not "society's." Mack had beaten the young woman over the head with a hammer and left her for dead. Pamela Small's family paid thousands of dollars to have her face and skull reconstructed. Besides sitting in jail for a few years more than the 27 months he served, shouldn't Mack have had to contribute something (like maybe everything he owned) to repair some of the damage he'd done?

Today, Coelho's "logic" notwithstanding, he probably would have. Federal judges and judges in 23 states are required either to order criminals to compensate their victims or to explain in writing their reasons for not doing so. And in the last few years, an almost underground system of victim restitution programs has sprung up across the country. In one of these programs, while incarcerated, Mack might have had to work off his victim's medical bills. He might have had to sit across a table from his victim and face up to what he'd done to her. He might have been moved enough to apologize, which, in Small's words, "would have helped. If only symbolically."

The concept of victim restitution, of course, is hardly new. In the Bible, Zacchaeus, a corrupt tax collector, had to pay Israelites four times what he had taken from them and then give half of what he had left to the poor. Throughout much of medieval times, restitution was the method of choice to recompense victims. But in 1116, England's Henry I, son of William the Conqueror, made himself the victim of all criminal crimes. A fortunate side effect of this move was that the state got to keep all compensation. The role of the victim gradually disappeared from the criminal justice system; to seek compensation, a victim was forced to go through arduous and often prohibitively expensive civil court proceedings.

The idea of victim restitution resurfaced in the late 1960s, propelled by a general dissatisfaction with both institutionalization and probation. Restitution could hold a crook accountable for his crime - benefitting the victim, the community, and perhaps even the offender. One of the most innovative restitution programs was started in the Quincy, Massachusetts, District Court by Judge Albert Kramer in 1975. Kramer thought there...