What happens to the offender, after participating in the VOD process?
Typically, offenders come away with a completely new and different understanding of the devastating impacts of what they have done, an understanding that would have been impossible to fully grasp and absorb at the time of the trial and/or sentencing. (This is one of the reasons VOD is more effective when it’s initiated some years after sentencing, rather than sooner.) The VOD experience usually enables a new understanding of personal accountability for offenders, and what it means to “carry” this, as they remain in prison. For those survivors who succeed in conveying this understanding to the offenders, a common feeling is that they have finally been able to “leave some of the pain and grief at the prison, with the offender, where it belongs.” Ironically, many offenders actually appreciate this, as painful as it may be, because they feel they have finally been held to account by the “true” authority, at last. And it is no longer as easy to “sleepwalk” through their sentence, where they
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