By Kathleen Flynn
Part of my job as a mediator is to work with both adult and youth offenders to ensure restitution is paid to their victims. Much of the difficulty comes in getting offenders to recognize the victims behind their crimes. Some offenders think that they haven’t hurt anyone, so their crime is no big deal.
Some examples of crimes that offenders view as victimless are shoplifting, vandalism, graffiti, theft from large companies, and robbing people of means. There is a misconception that the victims in these cases can absorb the loss because they’re rich or insured. The reality is that there is no such thing as a victimless crime.
Theft from any business requires the company to compensate for losses by raising consumer prices, lowering wages to employees, or limiting work hours to cut down on expenses for employee health insurance. Companies will also purchase added inventory insurance and pay for security guards, cameras, and other theft prevention devices, further shrinking employee wages and raising consumer cost.
Graffiti and vandalism often times create an even greater hardship for small businesses and homeowners. An owner has to pay someone to clean or repaint their vandalized property so its value doesn’t drop and customers keep coming back. Depending on how badly the property is damaged, vandalism also raises an owner’s insurance rates. These victims also experience a great sense of emotional outrage because many have worked all their lives to attain their business or home.
Financial hardship, outrage, and fear are some of the byproducts that go unseen by an offender while in commission of a crime. When companies or homeowners file insurance claims due to crime, the insurance company raises rates on the rest of us to compensate for their loss. When one home is robbed, neighbors become fearful that they will be next.
As my supervisor, Brohne Lawhorne, says, “When someone commits a crime, it is like dropping a pebble in a pond. It has consequences that are far-reaching to many unseen people.”
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
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Having worked in retail before, I know how even the pettiest of theft can affect employees of small or even large businesses. The work place becomes an oppressive environment where your bags must be checked before leaving each day and money comes out of your pocket if someone swipes something on your watch. There is collateral damage to every crime, and many times the victims aren't who you'd expect.
ReplyDeleteKathleen,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the work you do. It's also good that you point out that one crime is just the tip of an iceberg. People who commit crimes the research shows commit lots of them. It's something like 10 percent people of the people commit 90 percent of the crimes in our community. Apprehending the unlawful goes a long way to improving quality of life.
Kathleen,
ReplyDeleteGreat piece. Most of society's citizens are law abiding and rarely interact with police officers, therefore citizen's draw their conclusions about the work police officers do and how they perceive things from television shows and the local newspapers (both do not portray police officers fairly nor accurately). Your experience and personal interactions with victims provides our citizens with a greater insight as to what our police officers encounter on a routine basis throughout their career. Keep on educating those of us on the blog who need to be informed from sources other than the local rag and local news stations!
SeeingRed
Seeing Red-
ReplyDeleteBoth Kathleen and I have worked in the Victim Offender Mediation Program. It might interest you to know that the recidivism rate of offenders going through this program is only 2%, because offenders who face their victims see how their crime affected the victim both financially and emotionally. It is a time for the victim to ask questions and to hopefully get some closure. The number one question victims always ask is,”Why me?” 98% of the time the offender chose that person’s property or business at random and did not now the victim personally. In many cases that brings some comfort to the victim because their fear was that they were being personally targeted.
Even in cases of petty theft or shoplifting from local stores, once offenders have to face their victims and hear the affects of their crime on the business and the loss both to the store and employees, the chances that they will shoplift again goes down significantly. I think that accountability like this program provides is one thing that is missing from the justice system-