Kim Cook summarizes her life this way, “I went from welfare to a Ph.D. in 10 years. I went from being a battered woman to a university professor [in 15 years].”

And Cook has added to her resume: a criminology professor at the University of Southern Maine, who is in Australia on a Fulbright scholarship to study restorative justice.

To start at the beginning, the 39-year-old Cook was born in Bristol, Conn. In 1972, she moved with her family to Milo, where her father was born and reared. Her parents, Everett and Freda Cook still live in Milo.

She graduated from Penquis Valley High School in 1979.

And then, she says, “I had a train wreck.”

Cooked moved to Florida for a job opportunity. There, she met a man and moved in with him. It was a bad move: he turned out to be “a very abusive man,” she said.

After six months with him, she moved out. “I left him on the night John Lennon was murdered,” Dec. 8, 1980, Cook recalled in an interview with the Bangor Daily News.

She returned to Milo and moved back in with her parents. Three weeks after returning, Cook found out that she was pregnant.

While pregnant, Cook took a job at the now-closed Hathaway Shirt Factory in Dover-Foxcroft.

In July 1981, Cook gave birth to a son. Eighteen months later, she said she was fired from the factory because she spoke out about working conditions.

In addition to raising her son, Cook also had custody of her nephew.

“I was 21, with a 11/2-year-old and a 5-year-old,” she said. “It was not a fun time in my life.”

Cook was living in low-income housing in Milo and getting by on welfare.

Despite that struggle, Cook laughs today at the amount of things that piled up on her, some of which she added to the heap.

For example, after a year out of work, while still on welfare and raising two boys, Cook enrolled at the University of Maine in January 1984, as a full-time student.

With her nephew in school and her son in daycare, Cook commuted to Orono for classes, a 70-mile round trip each day.

“I was on course overload,” she recalled.

Cook took five courses a semester during the academic year, plus summer classes, because “it was easier to commute from Milo in the summer than it was in the winter,” Cook said.

She charged ahead because “I had to get it done,” she said.

The inspiration for her demanding schedule was then-President Ronald Reagan.

“I wanted to hurry up and get through college before Reagan cut social welfare programs,” she said. “If I didn’t get it done, I wasn’t going to get a college education.”

Travel Agent to Criminologist

Cook began studying French, Spanish and Latin, with the idea that she wanted to become a travel agent specializing in Europe.

Then she took a sociology course and everything changed.

“Sociology made tons of sense to me,” Cook said.

Living with a batterer and working in a factory “made me understand sociology, especially violence against women,” she said. “The social theories I was learning made me understand the genesis of violence and economic deprivation.”

Above all, Cook said, it made her understand that she could overcome both obstacles.

“Sociology was a true calling,” she said.

And, as if she needed any additional spurs, Cook said that when she declared sociology as her major “that was a commitment to get a master’s and a Ph.D. I wasn’t going to stop until I went all the way.”

In 1987, she received her bachelor’s degree in sociology, with distinction, from UM, becoming the first person in her family to earn a college degree. While at Orono, Cook had begun to specialize in criminology.

She immediately plunged into graduate school at the University of New Hampshire, where she earned her master’s in 1990 and doctorate in 1994.

By the time she finished at UNH, her nephew had been adopted by another member of her family. Cook, however, had taken her son to New Hampshire with her and enrolled him in elementary school.

With doctorate in hand, Cook took a faculty position at Mississippi State University.

She spent one academic year there before returning to Maine to accept a position as an associate professor of criminology at the University of Southern Maine.

“I came back for the professional opportunity and personal reasons,” Cook explained. “USM’s criminology department is known worldwide, and I wanted to pay taxes to Maine because Maine had invested in me … I’m a product of the Maine education system and the Maine welfare system. I appreciated the way Maine taxpayers invested in me and I’m proud to pay Maine taxes.”

In 1998, Northeastern University Press published her book “Divided Passions: Public Opinions on Abortion and on the Death Penalty.” That same year, she won the New Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology’s Division on Women and Crime.

From Maine to Australia

In December, Cook left as a Fulbright Scholar for a year at the Australian National University in Canberra to study a specific element of that country’s criminal justice system.

Australia has excellent experimental programs in restorative justice, she explained.

The aim of restorative justice is to reintegrate the offender into society while at the same time “giving voice” to the victims of the offender’s crime, Cooks said.

Part of the process involves “shaming,” she said. This involves the offender and the victim talking about the crime, with the victim recounting how it has caused damage and the offender taking responsibility for it.

At the end, the two sides come to both “emotional reconciliation and practical compensation,” she said.

In Maine, the state Corrections Department has implemented a series of trial restorative justice programs involving about a dozen communities and last summer began a fledgling program in 12 schools, according to Denise Lord, the department’s policy director. They are modeled on similar programs in Vermont.

The benefits of this approach are to engage community members in establishing values and standards, Lord said. Also, restorative justice is much more effective at involving both the victim and the offender in the punishment process.

“The judicial system is bureaucratic and impersonal,” according to Lord. With restorative justice, “the damage done is felt more profoundly by the offender.”

Also, restorative justice keeps offenders “functioning in the community,” she said. “Isolating people from the community [in jails or prison] has some value, but it’s not the only intervention, and I don’t even know whether it is the most effective.”

But while Maine’s restorative justice programs only deal with first-time, non-violent or juvenile offenders, Cook said that in Australia, “they use it for all offenders, even drunk driving and murder. It’s quite remarkable.”

Research shows that the recidivism rate for criminals who go through restorative justice programs is low and victims are more satisfied than those who experience the traditional justice system, Cook said.

Translating the full range of Australia’s restorative justice to America could be difficult, however.

“We like punishment here,” Cook said. However, “the romance we have with punishment is dangerous and costly.”

It is costly because America’s prison population is burgeoning and penitentiaries are bursting at the seams, she said.

And it is dangerous because research shows that the greater the emphasis on punishment, the greater the incidence of re-offense, Cook said. Criminals emerge from prisons much worse than when they went in, much more committed to crime and carrying the stigma of imprisonment.

She will write a book based on her Australian research and hopes to turn her work there into funded research back here in the United States.