ENCOURAGE RESTORATIVE JUSTICE

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At the 2000 United Nations (U.N.) Congress on the Prevention of Crime and Treatment of Offenders, many were surprised that a resolution for all nations to encourage restorative justice passed unanimously. Restorative justice comprises the idea that because crime hurts, justice should heal, and especially heal relationships. It is a process in which all stakeholders have an opportunity to discuss the hurts of a crime, how they might be repaired, how recurrence might be prevented, and how other needs of stakeholders can be met. Even the societies with the highest imprisonment rates in the world—the United States, Russia, and South Africa—and most executions—China—have been sites of important innovations in restorative justice. Although most societies have many small programs (perhaps even thousands now in the United States; Bazemore and Schiff (2005) were able to list 773 programs for juveniles alone), and tens of thousands in China (Wong, 1999), mostly the support is rhetorical, not extending to the mainstreaming of restorative justice evident in New Zealand, Norway, and much of the German-speaking world. A surprisingly universal experience is that restorative justice has not proved politically unpopular. As Frank Cullen points out with rehabilitation (2007, this issue), politicians can be punitive in many respects but still support restorative justice because it makes sense to citizens, and because 80% to 99% of people report good experiences with it, whether they are victims, offenders, supporters, or attending police officers (Braithwaite, 2002; Poulson, 2003). Politicians are unafraid to vote for it at the U.N. and at home because when demands for law and order run amok, they can always say they do not mean for restorative justice to be used in “that” kind of case. Since leaders of all religions have tended to be supportive of restorative justice, seeing it as creating spaces where spiritual experience flourishes, the conservative side of politics at least learns to live with restorative justice.