Petitioning For A Model Criminal Justice System

If you are a Virginia resident, please add your name and zip code to the petition below as a message on our FB page or feel free to print copies, gather signatures and mail them to VJC, P.O. Box 434 , Harrisonburg, VA 22803 by November 15.

When I was in college in the sixties, some fellow students and I made regular visits to the former jail at 60 Graham Street, which had a capacity of around 50 men and with one small cell for several women. Our experiences with Sheriff Strawderman and his staff, and especially with those in his charge, forever changed my life.

Thirty years later, in 1995, our community opened a new jail at 25 South Liberty Street, designed for 250 inmates. But in less than three decades after it opened, the new facility had been double bunked to hold as many as 400, with up to an additional 200 housed at the Middle River Regional Jail in Verona.

While those numbers have leveled off since covid, something about that dramatic increase just didn’t seem right to many of us, which led to the formation of the Valley Justice Coalition, a citizens group focused on alternatives to incarceration. 

We wondered why, with our local census numbers increasing only around 55% since 1965 (much of that due to JMU’s rapid growth), our jail numbers skyrocketed by over 600% during that period. Were we really seeing that much more crime? And are Americans in general so much more criminal than other industrialized nations in the world that have far, far lower rates of incarceration?

Much of that increase can be attributed to a rise in drug related sentences, which is why we have fully supported Commonwealth’s Attorney Marsha Garst’s (and others’) efforts in establishing a Drug Court and a Day Reporting alternative to incarceration for those with substance use disorders. 

We also applaud Sheriff Hutcheson for providing educational tablets for inmates. These offer music and other forms of entertainment that can be accessed by individuals availing themselves of a set number of educational and self-improvement classes on these devices. With over 90% of the jail population being repeat offenders, the sheriff hopes, in the words of Marsha Garst, to have jail become more like a greenhouse rather than simply a human warehouse.

We were also pleased to collaborate with Delegate Wilt in his championing legislation to create a Public Defender’s Office for our community last year, through a bill he co-sponsored with Delegate Sam Rasoul, a Democrat. Good representation in court for those unable to afford an attorney can result not only in more just sentences but also in less court time and taxpayer money spent in costly appeals.

In a recent Zoom conversation with Delegate Wilt and Virginia Department of Corrections Director Chadwick Dotson, we were able to share our concerns about the fact that the Virginia Parole Board, whose mission it is “to grant parole or conditional release to those inmates whose release is compatible with public safety,” actually released only 16 persons in 2024, some of those due to serious health problems. We noted that for the first time ever, there are more aged and often ailing individuals eligible for geriatric release than for all other current categories combined, creating astronomical healthcare costs for taxpayers in the Commonwealth. And according to the Parole Board’s most recent report, it granted not even one release last month. Has our Department of Corrections failed to correct even a single one of the nearly 200 cases the Board reviewed in September?

We also recently had retired professor Howard Zehr as a guest at one of our recent VJC meetings, someone  known worldwide for his pioneering work in Restorative Justice alternatives to typically adversarial court processes. Our local Fairfield Center is ready and able to facilitate this kind of process, one in which offenders meet with their victims to work out a plan for making satisfactory restitution to repair harms they have inflicted, rather than simply being prescribed a punishment and denied the right--and the responsibility--to make things right.

None of these alternatives represent being “soft on crime,” but rather our becoming more “smart on crime,” and more effective in actually correcting wrongdoers, which is what a Department of Corrections should be all about.

In the interest of promoting a model criminal justice system in the Commonwealth, we are circulating a "public purpose"  petition in support of policies we believe are in every citizen’s best interest, regardless of their political leanings, as follows:

A PETITION IN SUPPORT OF SAFER AND MORE JUST COMMUNITIES

To: Public servants in Virginia involved in criminal justice issues

By:Concerned taxpayers in the Commonwealth

We favor the creation of an ever more just and effective criminal justice system, one that supports:

• Rehabilitation over mere punishment.
• Restorative justice alternatives that give high priority to victims' needs for reparation and restitution by offenders.
• Supervised release for aging and thoroughly rehabilitated persons behind bars.

NAME (legible, please)   ZIP CODE  (required)   PHONE OR EMAIL (optional)

In the spirit of the prophet Micah, we believe we are all required to not only do justice, but  to love mercy and together walk humbly with our just and merciful God.