Does Circle Justice work? That’s the main question asked in Touching Spirit Bear. After viciously attacking a classmate, young Cole Matthews is permitted to spend a year on a remote Tlingit island, facing hardship and seclusion, in hopes of avoiding a trial as an adult and the possibility of a lengthy prison sentence.

In a civilized society, when a person is convicted of a crime, there are sentencing consequences that may involve jail time, financial penalties, mandatory counseling, drug testing, community supervision, or even death. There are many considerations in what makes a just consequence for the criminal’s actions. Sentencing in the traditional state justice system includes considerations of at least punishment, rehabilitation, vengeance, and deterrence.

Society’s pendulum is constantly swinging between tolerance for forgiveness and the need for justice (which, often at its outer fringes, can be viewed as a form of bloodlust). The morally acceptable objective is one of proportional balance. Punishment is, in a morally just society, retribution justly proportional to the crime. Rehabilitation seeks to correct the character flaws in the criminal that led to the crime; rehabilitation benefits both the criminal and society because it attempts to make it possible for the criminal to incorporate back into society while reducing the chance of repeat offenses. In an effective criminal  justice system, we expect to see both punishment and rehabilitation.

Vengeance is more likely to play a role when organized society does nothing. Vengeance often contributes to an almost unstoppable generational cycle of recurring violence, particularly when executed by the immediate victims of a crime. Deterrence, as C.S. Lewis pointed out, as a form of justification for the punishment, is a pernicious form of governmental tyranny.With deterrence there is no longer a need to justify the proportionality of the punishment to the crime.

In 1993, a Washington State judge tried an experiment, later reversed, that emphasized rehabilitation. The judge allowed the two men, Adrian Guthrie and Simon Roberts, to voluntarily agree to be banished for 18 months to an Alaskan Island following their conviction for their violent robbery of a pizza delivery man. The judge had hoped the State Legislature would change sentencing laws and permit tribal justice while the boys were banished. (The State did not.) You can read about this rare attempt at tribal justice in non-tribal state courts in a 1994 article from Time magazine: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,981427,00.html. And you can read Ben Mikaelsen’s 2001 book, Touching Spirit Bear, which attempts to capture the more aspirational facets of the experiment of tribal Circle Justice in a fictional book about the angry young man Cole who assaults and seriously injures a classmate.

This well-written book will appeal to and be understood by young adults. I read it for my son and his “book club” at school. In Touching Spirit Bear, Mikaelsen describes a world where compassion and an almost surreal reliance on rehabilitation and the individual’s ability to heal himself in seclusion and hardship results, in the end, in just and morally acceptable consequences. The result is far outside of the experience of most people. Many mature readers will find Cole’s resilience, determination, and ability to change emotionally satisfying but somewhat unrealistic.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t place more emphasis on rehabilitation in our justice system. In the real world, we’ve seen the justice pendulum in Washington State since the mid-nineties swing and stick on the punishment facet. Judges are left with little discretion in setting the form or extent of punishment. “Whatever you do the animals, you do to yourself. Remember that.”  Touching Spirit Bear, p. 18 (2001).

That’s it on “Touching Spirit Bear.” Now, back to some depressing adult writing!