Restorative Justice

IT'S a warm, cloudless day and Patty O'Reilly is about to meet the man who killed her husband. A million thoughts compete for attention in her head. Two stand out. \o7Why am I here? What good will it do?\f7 It has taken O'Reilly 29 months to get to this emotional state, to the point where she can walk on sturdy legs into a maximum-security prison and face a convict who blasted a giant crater in her life. In the beginning, O'Reilly felt only loathing for the man.

Bright-orange pumpkins are ripening in a 6-acre garden that provided a summer-long cornucopia of fresh vegetables for a food bank serving some of the poorest counties in Missouri. Cultivating and harvesting the bounty were inmates at Southeast Correctional Center, where the garden is located.

We've tried blame. We've tried shame. We've tried hard punishment. But on the doping-in-sports front, we're making very little real progress. Suspicion still reigns. Chemists remain ahead of the testers. Every other week there's a new bust. We've hit a wall. There are the athletes who get caught and then, invariably, smile and smirk, duck and dodge, taking as little responsibility as possible. There are those, like me, who feel moral outrage -- that altering the body this way should never be condoned.

Deep inside this infamous old prison, Patty O'Reilly stands before eight men doing hard time, her shoulders slumped, a man's gold wedding band hanging from a chain around her neck. Three of the inmates are sobbing. The others sit motionless on metal chairs, eyes locked on the small, sad woman in front of them. O'Reilly's words seep out. A ballet teacher from Sonoma, she has come to San Quentin to share a story -- about the killing of a husband and the trauma caused by that loss.