Restorative Justice and the Dangers of Community

Abstract

Restorative justice needs something to restore, and one key thing it is very often said to restore is, some formulation or other, But is a very dangerous concept. Sometimes it means very little, or nothing very coherent; sometimes it means so many things as to become useless legal or social discourse; and sometimes sunny harmonious sound of very word masks conflict and indeed discriminatory exclusion, or at least arbitrary political arrangements (as the international community). This paper explores various uses of trope, from as an ideal to sense of community as a social goal, to the community as a supposedly identifiable social entity to the [group name] community as designation for a certain social, racial, ethnic, or other associations. It argues that greater self-criticism use of these tropes is essential to a thoughtful programs area of restorative justice. The paper offers such admonitory examples as deinstitutionalization of mentally ill people 1970's, an unequivocal social and economic catastrophe that was motivated part, paper argues, by widely shared, unexamined notions of how gravely disabled and often abandoned people could be treated in community.