ir crimes? The government should initiate work programs; where the criminal is given a job and must relinquish his or her earnings to the victim of their crime until the mental and physical damages of their victims are sufficed. A court will determine how much money the criminal will have to pay for his restitution costs, and what job the criminal will have to do in order to pay back that restitution. The most obvious benefit of this approach is that it takes care of the victim, the forgotten person in the current system. Those who experience property crime deserve more than just the satisfaction of seeing the offender go to prison. Daniel Van Ness, president of Justice Fellowship, has said: "All the legal systems which helped form western law emphasizes the need for offenders to settle with victims." The offense was seen as primarily a violation against the victim. While the common welfare had been violated and the community therefore had an interest and responsibility in seeing that the wrong was addressed and the offender punished, the offense was not considered primarily a crime against the state as it is today. Restitution offers the criminal a means to restore himself-to undergo a real change of character. Mere imprisonment cannot do this; nothing can destroy a man's soul more surely than living without useful work and purpose. Feodor Dostoevsky, a prisoner for ten years during czarist repression, wrote, "If one wanted to crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments...one need only give him work on a completely useless and irrational character". This is exactly what goes on in the "make work" approach of our prisons and it is one of the contributing factors to prison violence. "The idea that a burglar should return stolen goods, pay for damage to the house he broke into and pay his victims for the time lost from work to appear at a trial meets with universal support from the American peop...
