FIRSTHAND VIEW OF PRISON LEADS TO A CALL FOR RESTORATIVE

After 16 years in the state Assembly and two in federal prison, Pat Nolan
has seen laws made and he has seen them enforced. Now the burly, graying,
onetime Republican leader wants legislators to know they are doing it all
wrong.

The former lawmaker from Glendale says he once saw convicts as less than
human. He voted enthusiastically for more prisons and longer sentences. But
he returned to the Capitol last week as a man transformed. His message,
discovered and honed while doing time on political-corruption charges and
delivered now with a convert's zeal: The criminal-justice system is a
failure and a huge waste of money.

Nolan, 47, once touted as a potential governor, now is president of Justice
Fellowship, a Virginia-based group trying to change the justice system's
focus from punishment to healing. Locking people up and throwing away the
key, Nolan said, isn't doing the criminals or their victims any good.

"We've built 17 new prisons in this state," said Nolan, dressed in a
charcoal pinstriped suit, white shirt and red and black striped tie. "Blood
still flows in the streets. People don't feel any safer. Let's try a new
approach."

If all of this sounds familiar, that's because it mirrors themes long
advocated by liberal Democrats and prison reformers.

The problem, Nolan said, is that when prisoners emerge, many are no more
likely to obey the law then when they went in. They are jobless, homeless,
hooked on drugs and illiterate.

"We hand them 35 bucks and say, 'Don't come back,"' Nolan said. "But they
do come back. And in the process of coming back they usually harm somebody
else. ... We've done nothing to prepare them to re-enter society."

In other states, Justice Fellowship runs intensive programs for inmates
willing to accept the group's Bible-based teachings. In prison, they get
education, counseling and drug treatment while their families are linked
with local churches.

Called "restorative justice," this method also seeks to reconcile the rift
between offender and victim, emphasizing restitution over punishment. And,
crucially, it stresses the role of individuals and the community rather
than government.

"We define crime as a broken law," Nolan said. "The Bible defines crime as
a broken relationship. Humans are involved, not government structures, not
the authority of government. Real humans. There's a real person harmed and
a person who's done the harm. ... Make the victim whole. Now, that is
tough."

Nolan tells the story of a drunk driver who killed a man. The victim's
mother suggested a novel sentence: Make the offender write a $1 check in
the victim's name every day he would have spent in prison. Nolan says the
sentence allowed the man to keep his life and family together. But writing
the dead man's name each day became an awful reminder of what he's done.

"As each day went on, that became a tougher and tougher sentence," Nolan said.

The victim's mother, Nolan said, put the checks in the bank and, when the
sentence was complete, returned the money to the offender to help him put
his life back together.

"That truly is restorative," Nolan said.

Nolan's crusade is not without flaws. Since pleading guilty to a single
count of racketeering, he has insisted he was the victim of trumped-up
charges by a politically motivated prosecutor. Nolan's call for healing on
a mass scale might carry more weight if he admitted that what he did was
wrong.

Beyond that, his cause faces determined opposition from his former allies
in government. Officials in Gov. Pete Wilson's administration, citing
declining crime rates, say the prison-building boom has worked to make the
state safer by taking crime-prone thugs off the streets.

Advocates for crime victims, meanwhile, oppose spending millions to help
criminals find jobs and housing while the people they harmed face a lonely
struggle without government aid.

But Nolan says his approach is better for victims than the current one,
which uses them as "props" for the government's case against the criminal.

"We should lock people up because we're afraid of 'em, not because we're
mad at them," Nolan said. "We lock up a lot of people just because we're
mad at them. It's very destructive. We don't heal them."