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By Tamela Baker|Published Date: June 02, 2009 Photography By David Brennan
 In Genesee County, New York, justice takes on a whole new meaning.
About 30 miles southeast of Buffalo, in the small municipality of Batavia, New York, quaint old homes flanked by older trees line well-kept streets. Children giggle and tease on the way home from school. Traffic gets a little heavy right around five. Batavia, the county seat of Genesee County, could have come right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Nobody would guess that something radical is happening in this conservative enclave of Western New York. But in a state notorious for its ever-expanding prison system, this is one community that is seeking—and finding—creative nonprison criminal-justice alternatives.
Community Solutions to Community Problems
It began in the early 1980s, when former Genesee County Sheriff Douglas Call took the extraordinary step of campaigning against building a new prison. Making offenders take responsibility for their behavior was more important, he reasoned, than simply punishing them for it. He tapped Dennis Wittman, a veteran probation officer, to develop a program for sentencing offenders to community service and including victims in the criminal justice process.
And Wittman was ripe for the assignment. “When I was with probation, I saw a system that was very one-sided,” he says. It dealt with offenders, period. “I kept thinking, Where are the victims?”
What’s more, the system—particularly incarceration—was expensive. “From a county government perspective, it’s big money in terms of the cost of the whole criminal justice system,” says Genesee County Manager Jay Gsell, “and then certain parts of it are more expensive than others if we just take the attitude that anybody who does something wrong needs to spend time in a facility.”
Most important, leaders in this community—just 10 miles from New York’s infamous Attica prison—realized that traditional lock-’em-up sentencing approaches, though popular among political leaders, just weren’t working. “It’s real convenient because it says you’re being tough on crime,” Gsell says, but “it’s very short-sighted…It oversimplifies how to deal with the problems.” Not the least of which is the staggering number of prisoners who recidivate—up to two-thirds, in many states.
There had to be a better way.
Wittman knew a lot of influential people in the community, and with that basic network he set out to build support for his pilot program. Now, nearly 20 years later, Genesee Justice enjoys wide and enthusiastic support among the locals and is touted internationally as a successful example of Restorative Justice. That’s because Wittman and his diverse crew of supporters have hit on a formula that does more than punish an offender for a crime—it helps to heal the whole community.
Merely locking up an offender does nothing to repair the damage done by the crime itself. Nor, in many cases, does it do much to rehabilitate. Wittman’s radical approach was to (1) identify those remorseful enough to earn acceptance back into the community and (2) through a variety of mechanisms—community service, meetings between the offenders and their victims, and pre-sentencing “diversion”—allow offenders to earn back their place in the community.
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