Many of us adults did some real bad things when we were kids, and the punishment was often swift and, quite frankly, a pain in the butt (lots of pun intended there).

If you recall, there was a form of “restorative justice” back then, just like the program in existence today.

I remember one quite distinctly.

My sister and her friends set up tents in our backyard and had a party with their Barbie dolls. Well, my friends and I decided to crash this party when the girls went in the house to do something. To this day, I still can’t believe what I did. I bit parts off each Barbie and strung the bodies up by the heels, leaving them to hang from the tent ceiling like a Silence of the Lambs murder scene. (Now that I got that off my chest years later, I still don’t feel any better.)

Anyway, we snuck out of the tents giggling like lunatics, envisioning the sheer horror on the girls’ faces when they stumbled onto that grisly scene. They probably had nightmares about it for months.

That night my dad got a call from one of the girl’s parents, wanting to know who was responsible for such atrocity. Knowing my dad, it didn’t take long for me to confess my crime, and to my horror (here’s the payback), my parents set up a conference with the whole family of the girl whose Barbie I ravaged.

It was the most embarrassing half hour of my life, standing in the middle of the room while the girl and her parents stared and listened to why I chewed up Barbie. I thought I was going to die of shame.

The family accepted my profuse apologies and had forgiven me, but the mother probably never trusted me after that. Who would?

I recall paying some restitution in the matter, but I wasn’t too happy with my friends who seemed to have escaped punishment.

I never disrespected Barbie again after that.

So you see, restorative justice has been around for a long time, and it is certainly an effective tool that should be used more often than the court system.

I could have used it more often myself, such as the time I took a slingshot and launched a BB across the street and cracked the window of someone’s apartment. Never got caught for that.

I could have also used it after I shot out all the light bulbs in a barn with my pellet gun.

I confess my sins and apologize for my transgressions.

  Lyonel Doherty, editor