Offender Accountability is a willingness – or accepted obligation – to acknowledge and admit causing traumatic harm and loss and devastation to others, and to account for the actual choices to cause those harms. This means taking responsibility for, and explaining those choices – without excuse or evasion, as difficult as that may seem to be. To Survivors, it’s  the very least an offender should be expected to do.

What Offender Accountability REQUIRES:

 Accountability requires offender acknowledgement, ownership, and explanation, and a willingness to try and address whatever survivors may need for a sense of restitution or reparation – knowing such harm and loss can never be truly repaired or restored.

What Offender Accountability is NOT:

Accountability is NOT Arrest, Trial, Conviction, Sentence, Prison, or Probation/Parole. These are merely some of the punishing consequences of offenders’ choices to commit crimes and cause harm.

Offender Accountability does NOT require remorse. There are offenders who don’t have the capacity to ‘feel’ about their crimes the way most people might be expected to feel – and don’t care to feel anything about them. Yet they can still be accountable for their choices.

Holding Offenders Accountable  should always include the needs of victims, survivors, and society. The job of police, prosecutors, judges, juries, and corrections professionals is to detain, adjudicate, incarcerate, and (possibly) help to rehabilitate offenders.

In the event of their later release, it is the Community Supervision (Parole or Probation) professionals who may have the greatest opportunity to apply a Victim-Centered understanding to their interactions with offenders – who themselves must continue to be accountable for their thinking, choices, and behaviors. Our systems should ensure that all Community Supervision professionals are sufficiently trained in all aspects of the Victim/Survivor experience. Because Accountability MATTERS.

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