npr:
A teenager’s life is on the line — but he is nowhere to be found.
People have gathered inside a D.C. government building on a rainy holiday morning to help decide what happens to the young man, but he hasn’t shown up.
After several phone calls and nearly an hour of waiting, the 16-year-old boy finally arrives. NPR, which was permitted to attend the meeting for this story, is not identifying him because he is a minor.
Facilitator Roman Haferd is eager to get started.
“It’s been a bit of a morning — a bit of a scramble this morning — but the good news is that everybody’s here,” he says.
The boy was involved with an assault. But what plays out over the next three hours is a restorative justice conference — a guided conversation between a juvenile who broke the law and the person whom the juvenile hurt.
If the program works, the victim and the offender discuss what happened and agree on a way to move ahead so that criminal charges are dismissed.
To supporters, the message is clear: Achieving justice doesn’t always involve punishment or retribution — and young people have the capacity for change.
D.C. Prosecutors, Once Dubious, Are Becoming Believers In Restorative Justice
Illustration: Anke Gladnick for NPR
(Source: NPR)
Oscar Wilde was a very popular man for the majority of his life; he had some famous works. Some of the most famous among them is the play The Importance of Being Earnest and the novel The Picture of Dorian Grey. He was a large figure in the aestheticism movement, which had a philosophy of “art for art’s sake,” and enjoying things for the beauty of them, not believing that art had to have a deeper meaning to be considered good. Wilde embraced this philosophy in his entire life. His style was extravagant, and his home was much too luxurious for his budget, but with his wife’s wealth and the money from his writing, they managed. True to this philosophy, he tended to say things because they sounded clever and not because they were true. This led to an extensive list of incredible quotes, but also led to problems in more official matters, such as the trials he was subjected to later in life.
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Super Science Fiction (February 1959) Cover by Ed Emshwiller
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The Deadly Spawn
