Crime and Its Victims: What We Can Do?

Book Review
reviewed by Byron Fraser
April 1999

Crime and Its Victims: What We Can Do?
by Daniel W. Van Ness

(From: Justice Fellowship, PO Box 16069, Washington, DC 20041-6069 for $8.45 US, Phone (703)904-7312 for publications list)

In 1995 I wrote a somewhat lengthy review of an excellent early (1977) work in the Christian Restitutionary Justice genre, Roger Campbell's Justice Through Restitution: Making Criminals Pay (copies available on request at 604-936-4689), in which I pointed out the many parallels with traditional libertarian thinking about criminal justice. Criminal lawyer Daniel W. Van Ness' work is a slightly later (1986) book in the same vein - also known as the Restorative Justice Paradigm - and a foundational piece of literature for Justice Fellowship, the advocacy branch of Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship Ministries. You'll probably remember that Colson was one of the convicted Watergate conspirators who was so horrified by his personal experience with what actually goes on in American jails that, when he got out, he devoted his life to prison reform and the victim's rights movement. His Fellowship currently has chapters in 25 states and he has recently got on board the burgeoning private prisons movement by opening his own private prison in Texas (see also especially, in this connection, the 1998 title from The Fraser Institute, Privatizing Correctional Services, edited by Stephen T. Easton). Nowadays when even "the butcher of Waco", Janet Reno, had been yapping about bringing in a "Victim's Bill of Rights", we can see that we truly "have come a long way, baby".

Space does not permit anything like a detailed account but I can briefly state that Van Ness' focus is mainly on the on-going revolution in legal thought against the monarchist and State-socialist notions of crimes as being against "society", "the State", or "the King's peace", etc., in contradistinction to actual distinct crime victims who need to be compensated for their very real losses. His treatment is very similar to that of Randy Barnett and John Hagel in Assessing the Criminal: Restitution, Retribution, and the Legal Process, which most libertarians are aware of, and which he references and recommends. Of course, for the purest libertarian, his proposals leave a lot to be desired. He doesn't see the potentials of a totally privatized criminal justice system with fully private (not just contracted out) prisons which wouldn't cost taxpayers a dime and with swift and full restitution paid to all victims via universal private crime insurance (again not compensation by State tax dollars and co-option of the victim's rights movement as a pretext for "progressive" State-expansion!) Then, too, he expresses the typical Christian willingness to violate the libertarian non-aggression axiom when it comes to victimless crimes.

In all, however, there is enough positive, informative, data in this volume for it to merit a place in the legal section of your bookshelf. So what if some Christians haven't yet figured out that "Thou shalt not steal" equates anarchism! What a welcome revelation it must be to them that God has been a libertarian-anarchist all along. Who knew?!