How Minnesota’s new Office of Restorative Practices hopes to make you safer and save you money

Kendall Hughes was stabbed 12 times in the head, neck and back by a prisoner in a chapel while working as a Colorado prison system chaplain in 2002.

A trauma surgeon told him the man had just missed killing him.

"As traumatic as that was and the after-effects on me and my family ... the thing that was equally difficult was going through the federal justice system," Hughes said.

Hughes was appointed the first director of the newly created Office of Restorative Practices within the Minnesota Department of Public Safety in October. He has decades of experience with restorative work in the Federal Bureau of Prisons and co-founded the Three Rivers Restorative Justice nonprofit in southeastern Minnesota. He is focused on helping victims heal and helping people rebuild their lives after crime.

The aim of restorative practices is to prevent court involvement when possible and provide alternatives to traditional legal processes both for victims and offenders. The crime victim has a say in what the offender must do to make amends with a goal of helping those who've caused harm repair it.

Restorative practices can also save money and heighten safety by reducing recidivism and the need for incarceration or out-of-home placement for youth, Hughes said.

"Restorative justice burns in my bones," Hughes said. "The traditional system sometimes does not meet the needs of victims, and it does not meet the needs of the people who caused the harm. Sometimes it makes them worse."

In Colorado, Hughes' attorneys said he did not have a say in the matter, that they would handle things legally, and Hughes could give a victim impact statement, Hughes said. A year and a half later in court, he sat all day waiting to give his statement but was forgotten.

"That was almost as difficult as the act of violence against me," Hughes said.

After this experience, while working in prisons in Kansas, Hughes discovered restorative justice. He said seeing changes in the men he worked with brought him the sense that what he went through matters and he could do more to help.

"I saw them become people who today you'd be happy to have sit at your table and be your neighbor," Hughes said.

The new Office of Restorative Practices was allocated $8 million for the biennium to help expand and strengthen the work of restorative initiatives across Minnesota. Afterward, they expect to receive $5 million per biennium on an ongoing basis.

Arguments from both sides

During Rep. Sandra Feist's first legislative session in 2021, she authored the Veterans Restorative Justice Act , which provided access to a specialized sentencing structure for eligible military veterans convicted of criminal offenses. Since then, her interest in restorative practices has grown and she's worked with youth restorative justice initiatives across Minnesota, along with the creation of the new state office.

"What we're trying to do is really unique. We're trying to shift power and the creation of accountability from systems to community," said Feist, DFL-New Brighton.

According to Feist, the proposals for the office were well received in the Minnesota House Public Safety Finance and Policy Committee. She said a broad group of people came together to work on the initiative, including law enforcement, prosecutors, child welfare experts, public defenders and people who've been directly impacted by restorative practices.

"My goal is to continue to find ways to weave restorative practices into our laws because I believe that it is a more effective and more just system," Feist said.

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Republican Rep. Paul Novotny of Elk River, who also serves on the Public Safety Finance and Policy Committee, said while he supports restorative practices, he wasn't necessarily in support of creating an office to promote them.

"The concept, from our side of the table, is good," Novotny said. "We like the idea of restorative justice, but that doesn't need to be a huge bureaucracy at a state level."

Novotny worked at the Sherburne County Sheriff's Office for 33 years and said he feels restorative justice can be most effective with a youth's first experience in the juvenile justice system. He said if applied as an additional tool in the current court system, he could see it saving the state money.

"The most important thing you can do in law enforcement and public safety is to prevent that next incident or that next crime," Novotny said. "That should always be the focus."

Reducing recidivism

As director, Hughes will work closely with local communities to help them create restorative practices with the aim to make Minnesota safer. Each county or jurisdiction in Minnesota will form a restorative practices advisory committee made up of community members and justice system staff. These committees will design programs and processes for their counties.

Hughes said restorative practices already are well established in Minnesota compared to other states.

"Each county is going to come about it differently," Hughes said.

One of the office's initiatives is conducting research on the impact of restorative practices in the state. Each year, the office must report its findings to members of the legislative committees and divisions with jurisdiction over public safety, human services and education.

Hughes said restorative justice methods have been studied by the University of Minnesota and its research shows that 95% of victims say they'd go through the process again.

He said typically in Minnesota, 40% of people who commit a crime will reoffend within a year, but through restorative practices the percentage falls to between 10% and 20%. He believes this lower reoffending rate is what will make Minnesota safer.

Designed to save money and center healing

As a chaplain, Hughes said he worked with people from various cultural backgrounds and religious beliefs. Relationships he built with Indigenous people taught him that everyone is connected and it's important to recognize the humanity in another person, which is often hard to do when they've caused harm.

"You can only really hurt somebody when you don't see them as a person like you," Hughes said, "and when you're hurt by somebody, you think they must be a monster."

Restorative practices focus on the needs of everyone involved, said Yellow Medicine County Restorative Justice Department director Sharon Hendrichs, who is also a former probation officer.

"We don't know sometimes what's caused youth to make the decisions that they've made and brought them into the criminal justice system, and we need to take the time to peel back the layers to get to the root of what's driving these decisions and help those pathways change," Hendrichs said.

Yellow Medicine's Ojibwe-rooted Circle sentencing is a community conversation about who was harmed, what needs to be done to make a victim whole again and how the person who caused harm can be supported in fulfilling their own personal goals – to not find themselves in a cycle of committing crime, Hendrichs said. This may include restorative restitution or volunteer work, but the emphasis is on giving back to the community in a meaningful way.

"What I've seen is that youth, adults and families who come into Circle and create connections and relationships with people are less likely to harm people in communities that they feel connected to, and that creates a lot of safety," Hendrichs said.

Hughes said it's expensive to imprison, and at the end of the day doesn't always help people learn valuable lessons.

Since developing Circle practices in Yellow Medicine County in 2006, the amount spent on out-of-home placements for youth has decreased between $200,000 and $268,000 annually, according to a report from the county Restorative Justice Department.

"We also saw the ripple effect of youth who went through Circle with their family and younger siblings: We weren't seeing their siblings come through," Hendrichs said.

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Hughes said that by hyper-focusing on punishment, the standard court system is not designed with healing in mind. The man who attacked Hughes 22 years ago was put into solitary confinement for 14 years. Hughes said he came out even more violent and now is serving life in prison.

"For me, that wasn't what I wanted, either," Hughes said. "I didn't want anyone to suffer the way that I had."

Healing is not what he experienced in the Colorado court system, and though Hughes said he's sure that state's systems are better now, he hopes crime rates in Minnesota will drop by being a state that centers healing and second chances.

"As a result, violence will go down, victims will feel their needs are met, communities will be more whole and it will cost less," Hughes said.