Public Commons

Part of Court cases

1. Invitation to City Lawyers to Act

At about two a.m. last Hallowe’en, park neighbour and friend Bruce Whitaker was awakened by the sound of cracking and smashing in the park. He got up and looked, and called the police. Two cruisers happened to be in the neighborhood already and came within minutes. They arrested a young person under 18 for vandalizing the cob courtyard that was built by many neighborhood people under Georgie Donais’ direction all last summer. With some large stones, the young man had destroyed half of artist Susan Szenes intricate mosaic counter, all the plumbing fixtures on the public health sinks, and three-quarters of the tiles painted for the cob courtyard by park children. He had also made many holes in the walls. The cob walls are much too strong to break down, but the many holes in the plaster would give access to winter snow and rain (and so there is some interior water penetration now).

Our first step was to hire summer cob-builder foreperson Heidrun Gabel-Koepff to record all the damage for the court, and to fix as many of the plaster holes as possible. Our second step was to try and get involved in the court case. Georgie and many others thought it would be best if the young man was sentenced to do community service hours fixing up the cob damage. That could connect him to the community in a more positive way at the same time. (Most park youth are also park-boosters, and this park has an unusually low amount of damage through vandalism.) But no matter where we asked, we couldn’t find out anything about the court case. In frustration, we turned to the City’s legal department, to see if they could gain standing at the trial. That’s when we found out that the city does not use their lawyers to follow up on vandalism even when an arrest is made. Their reason: it would not be cost-effective. Many park friends disagree. If the police know that the City will not go to court for vandalism, why would the police take the trouble to investigate such acts? They would see it as a waste of their time. Beyond that, news gets around. Many youth know that the City doesn’t follow up in vandalism arrests. So why should they worry about doing antisocial acts in public space?

Since concern about antisocial acts by youth is currently running high in Toronto, we contacted City Councillor Adam Giambrone and the mayor’s office. The councillor said he is looking into changing policy but we are asking for a meeting with city lawyers, so that park staff and cob builders can explain our thinking to them. Watch the newsletter for follow-up.

2. Young Offender Diversion Since the City (owner of the park and everything in it) took no role in contacting the courts about the youth who vandalized the cob courtyard, other ways had to be found. After much searching and phone tag by park staff, Jutta Mason went to the youth court at 311 Jarvis Street. She walked up and down the office corridors and looked at door signs until she found the youth’s probation worker. Then they had a long talk.

It turned out that the probation worker lives in this area. She had watched the cob courtyard being built and had brought her whole family over to see it at Thanksgiving. (Toronto is a small town!) Not only that – the probation worker had read in the December Park Newsletter, posted on the rink shed, that we were frustrated because we couldn’t contact the court about the cob vandalism.

The probation worker knew how much community effort had gone into the cob courtyard. So she had told the young man, after he formally accepted responsibility for the damage in the park last November, that he would not be charged if he went and talked to the cob builders, and also helped to repair the damage. But there was a snag – before the young man could do any repair work, young offender diversion procedure says there first has to be a “talking circle” on the model of what native people do (they call it a “healing circle”). Everyone with a specific concern about the incident, including the young man’s friends and the cob courtyard builders, could be involved. The agency employed to set up and lead this circle is called Peacebuilders International. They are based in St. James Town and Regent Park, and they hadn’t contacted us because they had never heard of Dufferin Grove Park and didn’t know how to find us.

So we invited their worker to the park and had a good talk with him. Now we hope the preparations for direct contact are going ahead. More news next month.

3. Open letter about the alternative sentencing circle at Dufferin Grove Park on March 28, ’06: by David Cayley, author of The Expanding Prison Open letter about the alternative sentencing circle at Dufferin Grove Park on March 28, ’06. The circle was with a young man who had done a great deal of vandalism to the community-built cob courtyard structure, and had been arrested the night of the damage, because a neighbour called the police.

Dear Peacebuilders,

Here are a few reactions to the Peacemaking Circle. My responses didn’t exactly fit the format of the questionnaire that was distributed after the circle so I have written them out in the form of an open letter that can also be shared with other participants. My main reaction was that the event was too prescriptive. Many of the rules, rituals, and procedures that were set out in advance seemed designed to steer the participants into very personal, almost confession statements. Since some of the people were perfect strangers to each other, this did not seem to me appropriate. I came to the meeting because I wanted to find out why the young man in question had damaged the cob wall so deliberately and so extensively. I also hoped to participate in crafting some suitable resolution. Instead we spent a good deal of the evening talking about ourselves.

One of the things that inspired Jutta Mason to undertake the work she has done in the park was an article written thirty years ago by Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie. It was called “Conflicts as Property,” and it appeared in the British Journal of Criminology. (Jan., 1977, 17:1) Christie argued that the criminal justice system “steals” conflict from communities and turns it into a resource for expert professionals. Faced with the arcane, rule-bound world of police, courts, and prisons, the people who actually had the trouble in the first place feel inhibited, intimidated and incompetent. The dramatic and expressive features of the conflict tend to be muffled. Communities are weakened as their ability to deal with conflict withers and their dependence on professionals increases.

The Friends of Dufferin Grove Park have tried to counteract this tendency by having trouble that erupts in the park brought back to the park for resolution. This has been a frustrating and uphill struggle. The criminal justice system presents few handles to communities in which people hope to act as something other than clients and grateful dependents. Bringing this matter back to the park was a real step forward. But it was then all the more disappointing to find that one system had simply been replaced by another. The community was included, but played little part in deciding what would be discussed and how it would be discussed.

I found the requirement that people be holding an object while speaking unnecessarily constraining. The rock was better than the more cumbersome drum would have been, but I still think it inhibited spontaneity and limited initiative within the circle. I’m sure it does prevent people from talking over one another, but an effective moderator would do the same. In the end the talking rock discouraged direct dialogue with the young man or among the other participants.

I thought that ex-Judge Jim Felstiner’s word that his notes were no more than a memory aid should have been accepted. I also wonder if it is necessary or desirable to impose a requirement of confidentiality at all. Court proceedings are public, except in very exceptional circumstances, and alternative procedures should be public too. Cloaking such circle in confidentiality creates a mystique that works against the spirit of community.

It was never entirely clear to me what the authority of the circle was. There were hints, for example, that the circle-keeper knew more about the young man than we were being told. Were we there as a decision making body, or were we, in fact, being fitted into a process involving considerations to which we were not privy?

I was uneasy with the emphasis that was placed on the circle as a format. A circle is convenient way for people to see and address each other. But, in this case, the circle was presented from the outset as an institution with its own values. It was said, for example, that trust was one of the circle’s values. But, to me, trust arises only when people have proved trustworthy. It cannot be created or imposed in advance.

In the circle the participants were encouraged to talk about their own feelings and experiences, and not just about the significance of the incident that brought us together. The purpose seemed to be to dampen punitive feelings amongst the participants and to instill confidence in the youth by putting us all on the same level.

But, what got lost in this for me was the question of justice. We were there, I thought, to discuss a wrong, and to ask how it could be set right. There was much that was good about what happened in the circle. The youth was exposed to powerful statements about the consequences of his actions, and the people he hurt were able to find out what happened and say what it meant to them. A resolution was proposed. This should have been done much sooner, and not five months after the event, but it was good that it was done at all. I just don’t think that a professionally designed and administered process was necessary to achieve this essentially simple, and human result.
Yours truly,

David Cayley