The View Across the Aisle

Gary W. Hardy, PhD

Courtrooms are carefully designed places. The architecture itself tells us where we belong. One side of the aisle is reserved for victims and their families. The other side belongs to the accused. The separation is both physical and emotional, reinforcing the belief that the people on opposite sides of the room have nothing in common.

For years I sat on the side reserved for the accused.

What I remember most, however, is not always looking across the aisle. Often I found myself looking beside me at the man waiting for his own hearing, the one who would ride the same bus back to jail that evening. He had his own family, his own regrets, his own fears about what would happen next. Looking at another human being who was frightened and broken had a way of pulling me outside my own circumstances.

But there were also moments when I looked across the aisle.

Over the years I listened to countless victim statements, some involving my own offenses and others involving people I had never met. I heard grief, anger, fear, and loss. Parents mourned. Spouses wept. Families described the damage that had entered their lives. Those words were often painful to hear, but they revealed something that the legal process itself seemed unable to acknowledge: pain existed on both sides of the room.

The suffering was not identical, nor were the responsibilities the same. Yet everyone in that courtroom carried some form of loss. The system seemed designed to reinforce conflict, to divide people into winners and losers, victims and offenders, as though one person's healing required another person's destruction.

Over time I came to believe that accountability and restoration are not opposites. True accountability requires us to confront the harm we have caused, but it should also ask what healing might look like for everyone involved. Too often our criminal legal system judges people solely by the worst thing they have done while giving little attention to what they have done right, who they once were, or who they might yet become.

We speak often about rehabilitation, yet the original meaning of that word is to restore someone to usefulness. I have seldom seen our system pursue that goal. From the courtroom to prison to community supervision, the emphasis is often control, containment, and punishment rather than restoration.

Years later, I still carry the view across the aisle with me. I remember the man sitting beside me, and I remember the families sitting opposite me. Both taught me something important: that human beings are more than the worst moments of their lives and that genuine healing requires more than punishment alone.

Justice, if it is to heal, must make room for both accountability and hope.