Two Marquette students are gaining in-depth career experience in a unique approach to criminal justice.
Katie Derzon and Shannon Knoblauch are working at the Benedict Center, an interfaith, non-profit agency dedicated to achieving a restorative system of justice. The aim of the restorative justice system is to work with victims of crime, offenders and the community and treat every party with dignity.
Derzon is a first-year public service graduate student with a focus on non-profit management and one of 10 Trinity Fellows. Knoblauch is a College of Arts & Sciences freshman who plans to major in social welfare and justice with an emphasis in pre-law.
The women were assigned to the Benedict Center because the center's mission fit their career goals.
"I've always wanted to work in public service with a focus on law," Derzon said.
Derzon works with the Sentencing Advocacy Program, which advocates for offenders and seeks alternatives to incarceration. According to the center's philosophy, alternative sentencing is more effective than incarceration because it increases offender accountability to the victims of crime and the community.
Her participation in the program includes helping to develop the Sentencing Advocacy in Milwaukee Program, or SAM, an online database of treatment centers and options for alternative sentencing. SAM will be accessible to public defenders and judges so possibilities for alternative sentencing will be readily available.
Derzon said her work at the Benedict Center will expand her knowledge of the criminal justice system and give her experience for her future career in public service.
Knoblauch devotes time to the Women's Harm Reduction Program, which offers alcohol and drug abuse treatments, education programs and women's health classes to women with prostitution and/or drug related charges. She works as a tutor and establishes relationships with the women she will advocate for in court.
"They have a strength I wish I could have, but I would never hope to know the circumstances that gave them that strength," Knoblauch said.
Knoblauch also participates in the Second Chance Program, which helps women with warrants for prostitution.
Kit Murphy McNally, the executive director of the Benedict Center, said volunteers like Knoblauch are "absolutely vital" in helping the center. She called Derzon a "true partner and developer of SAM."
"In the justice system now, the focus is on the offender and not on the harm done to the offender, victim and community when a crime is committed," McNally said. But "handing justice over to the state does not help mend relationships in the community."
This article appeared in The Marquette Tribune on Dec. 7 2004.