Restorative Justice Movement Research Articles

The Transformative Potential of Restorative Justice: What the Mainstream Can Learn from the Margins

Restorative justice is an idea and a practice that has had a significant impact on criminology over the past four decades and has proliferated throughout the criminal justice system. Yet from the beginning of this movement, there have been worries that the mainstreaming of restorative justice will lead to its dilution, or even corruption, and undermine its transformative potential. Developing alongside the growing institutionalization of restorative justice has been a transformative justice movement that has arisen from larger movements for racial and gender justice, drawing on similar foundational values to restorative justice. This review interrogates the relationship between restorative and transformative justice by examining a flourishing of ideas and experiments at the margins of the restorative justice movement in three key areas—responses to racial injustice, sexual violence, and environmental harm—and finds that restorative justice has the capacity to work at multiple levels to respond to harm, transform relationships, and prevent future injustices.

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the restorative justice movement in Russia

This article examines the controversial period of emergence and development of restorative justice in Russia. This domestic experience is compared with the modern European understanding of restorative justice and its fundamentals. It is acknowledged that our country has an interesting experience of restorative justice, documented in the Restorative Justice Herald and other documents, which we can be proud of thanks to the actions of a team of like-minded people in more than 30 regions of the country. But there are also difficulties. The attitudes towards restorative justice on the part of the authorities, law enforcement agencies and academia are analyzed. Attention was paid to the discussion of the model legal regulation of the concept of reconciliation in criminal proceedings, which took place on April 22, 2022 at the Department of Criminal Procedure of the North-West Branch of the Russian State University of Justice. As the social response of civil society to crime, restorative justice is based on fundamentally different principles from state governance. Such work requires a fundamentally new way of thinking and working. It is concluded that restorative justice in Russia is wrongly restricted. Comments are made on the model of legal regulation of conciliation in criminal proceedings from the perspective of the essential nature of restorative justice.

Exploring the genesis and praxis of restorative justice in Nova Scotia, Canada

Nova Scotia has seen the most systematic growth of restorative justice (RJ) in Canada. Initially moving from a pilot RJ phase to province-wide implementation for young offenders, a similar model was used to implement RJ for adult offenders. Nova Scotia has received national and international attention for its innovations in RJ. Extensive articles and reports have been published about the RJ movement in Nova Scotia, focusing mainly on the impact of RJ practices. Few peer-reviewed journal articles document the factors that contributed to the actual growth of RJ in Nova Scotia. To address this research gap, this study employed 8 in-depth key informant interviews and a survey. Two distinct stages—Catalytic and Innovative—emerged as salient factors shaping the growth of RJ in Nova Scotia. This study also reveals contemporary discourses and issues prevalent among RJ visionaries and practitioners in Nova Scotia, such as relational theory of justice, the moratorium against the use RJ for gender-based violence, and the role of government. This research offers a comprehensive debate on the concept of a moratorium against gender-based violence and the role of government. The paper concludes by addressing limitations and areas for future research.

Circle Pedagogy in Criminal Justice Education at a PWI: A Student/Faculty Collaborative Autoethnography

The restorative justice movement is grounded in the longstanding traditions and philosophies of indigenous and First Nation communities. As a restorative practice, circles have the potential to reactively repair harms and proactively build and strengthen community bonds. More recently, circles have been used to facilitate dialogues in a variety of community settings, including workplaces, schools, and correctional institutions. The authors first met as teacher and student at a Predominantly White Institution in a Race and Crime course where the instructor used circles in a classroom context. The circle as a pedagogy encourages critical thinking and community engagement as an alternative to a traditional banking pedagogy. By emphasizing values such as voluntariness, vulnerability, and egalitarianism, circles mirror a Freirean dialogical pedagogy. The authors went on to form a mentor-mentee relationship and attended online community circles together. This exploratory paper reflects on the authors’ experiences in classroom and community circles in order to share what they have learned about the purpose and application of circles. In the classroom, circles provide students with a safe space to have their voices heard and to listen to the perspectives of others, thus allowing them to engage in productive dialogues about controversial subjects.

Sexual harassment in a university setting: Searching for justice and compassion in an unjust and indifferent world

The article deals with the question concerning legal responses to sexual harassment – whether those responses should be relentless in punishing and stigmatizing perpetrators and banishing them from positions where they can offend further, or whether there should be room for rehabilitating or even forgiving at least those offenders whose abusive behavior is not violent or serial. On the one hand, the importance of achieving justice and equality for women is critical. On the other hand, one may recognize the possibility of repentance and restoration of both victim and offender to society. The modern restorative justice movement, informed by Christian theology, suggests that alternative dispute resolution mechanisms should not only ensure that victims receive appropriate restoration for the harm they have suffered, but also try to restore perpetrators who accept responsibility for their offenses back into the community. It seems that practiced in the right cases, restorative justice may turn the disempowerment and fearful, sometimes guilty in-turning that victims may experience in adjudicative processes, into a freedom of giving beyond justice, and they may move the self-justificatory shame of a perpetrator into true repentance and reparatory action. At least, restorative justice may push them toward a relational dynamic that is healthier for both whether they must necessarily encounter each other in the future or free themselves from the hurt of the past.

What exactly are you restoring us to? A critical examination of Indigenous experiences of state‐centred restorative justice

AbstractOver the past 30 years the restorative justice (RJ) movement has become increasingly accepted within the creases of formal justice systems everywhere, but most especially within the systems of settler‐colonial states. From a critical Indigenous perspective one especially powerful driver for the elevation of RJ to its current exalted place in state crime control, has been the purposeful utilisation of Indigenous cultural artefacts by the movement to market their wares. Utilising research on Indigenous peoples’ experiences of state‐centred RJ programmes, this article challenges claims made by RJ practitioners and state functionaries regarding the emancipatory potential of RJ practices for Indigenous peoples residing in settler colonial contexts.

Restorative Justice – Peacemaking Not Warmaking; Transformative Justice – Penal Abolitionism Not Prison Reform

Appreciation goes to Dr Brad Jersak, the author’s friend, encourager, and mentor. In October 2020 at his invitation, a Q & A format was adopted for a presentation on what most commonly is known as “Restorative Justice.” As is clear from the title, this presentation argued emphatically for peacemaking and abolition as opposed to reform. What follows is a reworking of that material and addition of new, retaining the Q & A format. It begins with three pointers to the tendency of the State to use the criminal justice system as a means to population control. It then gives some background to the author’s lifelong immersion in issues of Restorative Justice, and the development of his thinking, particularly with respect to individuals harmed by the criminal justice system. Its negative community impact is then set out and an assessment is made of the penitentiary as a disastrous social experiment. The article concludes with a positive look of how the Restorative Justice movement has risen as a genuine alternative to the Western criminal justice system.

Restorative justice myopia

The restorative justice movement, now well in its forties, is generally in great shape: active, vibrant and productive. It includes a strong academic community (with a central role played by this journal, TIJRJ), a robust body of empirical knowledge about its effectiveness and an ever-growing practice around the globe. Still, it has been suffering from myopia: a difficulty to see distant objects or issues clearly. Being short-sighted in relation to certain issues slows our ability to react, be proactive and collaborate with colleagues who are active in those fields, inhibiting our potential as a social reform movement. The myopia I refer to is the difficulty to see clearly other social movements and legal reforms that have been gaining momentum in recent years. I refer to two related areas of development: therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ), including its practical implementation through specialised and problem-solving courts, and the emergent discourse around prosecutorial reform addressing the problem of mass incarceration. The goal of this Editorial is to aim the spotlight on these two trends, or social agendas, and to discuss how restorative justice activists’ improved familiarity with these may contribute to the movement. I begin with a section on TJ, referring to certain studies and publications as examples of its focus. A separate section on specialised courts articulates some of the similarities and differences between them and restorative justice. I then continue to discuss the discourse around the problem of mass incarceration or the ‘carceral state’ and explore the few exceptions where explicit references were made by restorative justice scholars to these trends. In the concluding section, I point out four paths by which a farsighted restorative justice movement can follow: the theoretical, methodological, practical and professional.

Evolving Mechanisms for Rehabilitation of offenders through Probation as an alternative to Punishment in Judicial system of Pakistan

Crime and punishment have always been considered as two sides of the same coin. In the primitive legal systems, the real object of inflicting punishment was deterrent and retributive, however, with the evolution of concepts of rights and civil liberties the restorative justice movement started gaining momentum in criminal administration of justice, the need to reconsider the objects of punishment has arisen and various theories were evolved to juxtapose these two extremes in such an optimum manner that ends of administration of justice could best be achieved. This article aims to find out the ways for proper implementation of probation laws to make community service as an alternative to crude punishment which seemed to have ignored the very object of punishment i.e., reformation for the betterment of society

Criminal defendants’ family and the death penalty in China - a case analysis

ABSTRACT The restorative justice movement has increased the rights of consciousness for crime victims and their families globally. Though the practice of family group conferences in Australia and New Zealand and the court-ordered mediation programmes in China have increasingly involved defendants and their families, their roles in the criminal justice system have not been the main focus of academic inquiries. Citing a high-profile capital case in China, the Nian Bin case, this study examines the defendant family’s strategies in seeking legal redress, managing physical, emotional and financial tolls as well as coping with the victim families, throughout their eight-year pursuit of Nian’s exoneration. Given Confucian teachings on the importance of family to the individual and the society at large, this study provides a microscopic view into various precipitating factors for a capital defendant’s family activism. It also draws broader implications for China’s criminal justice reforms and the restorative justice movement.

Restorative justice and criminal justice: limits and possibilities for Brazil and Latin America

This article is based on the 2017 RJIJ annual lecture and seeks to examine the development of the restorative justice movement within the judiciary in Brazil (‘judicial restorative justice’) in the last decade or so (2005-2017). The focus is on its relation to penal justice, listing the main possibilities and challenges in the Latin American context. The main question I wish to address is how does restorative justice, being led by the judiciary in Brazil, look like? When, where, how and under which theoretical and methodological angles is it being developed? What are the human and material resources being used? How can the relationship between restorative justice and the current Brazilian criminal justice system be understood? My hypothesis is that judicial restorative justice in Brazil is going through a process of expansion and development, framing a paradigm that is under construction and in which, despite the possibilities of challenging and transforming the current justice system, it has been nevertheless colonised by this same justice system. Therefore, restorative justice is being left to deal with low-level crimes and facing structural and conjectural limits to the concretisation of its objectives. In addition, the field in Brazil is hit by a structural lack of dialogue with other Latin American countries, which results in a mutual impoverishment of sorts, as the ‘restorativism’ currently experienced, hither and thither, is heated up by the intersection of emancipatory principles and values.

Communities at Large: An Archaeological Analysis of the \u2018Community\u2019 Within\xa0Restorative Justice Policy and Laws

Within the scholarly literature on restorative justice, the ‘community’, as a distinctive crime stakeholder, has been the target of extensive research. This work provides an original interpretation of the underlying images of the community within policy documents and legal statutes on RJ produced in England and Wales since 1985. The paper begins with an outline of the most recurrent representations of the community in relevant laws and policy, unearthing their theoretical underpinnings. The next step aims to infer from the general representations a range of more specific features, and to sketch out an ‘ideal’ model of community in restorative justice, whose cultural background is also outlined. As a final step, some critical reflections on the implications of the ‘ideal community’ are offered. By identifying what is taken for granted in laws and policies on restorative justice and its cultural context, this study aims to foster a critical “reality check” on this specific development of western penal policy, relevant for the restorative justice movement, at the international level.

Victimology’s debt to Nils Christie: The outlasting legacy of a free thinker

The tragic accidental death of Nils Christie was a huge loss to the scholarly worlds of criminology and victimology. An old dear friend and highly esteemed colleague, Christie has been hailed as one of the most innovative criminological thinkers of the 20th century. He left an outlasting legacy to both criminology and victimology. His contributions are characterized by their creativity, their originality and their clarity. To remedy what he saw as a terrible injustice done to crime victims he outlined a court procedure that restores the participants? right to their own conflict, a procedure that provided the theoretical underpinnings of the restorative justice movement. He drew attention to the fact that victimization is not an objectively defined phenomenon but is a personal, relative and highly subjective experience. He insisted that mental images of those subjected to the same victimizing act could be and usually are quite varied. Criminology and victimology owe much to Nils Christie. The present article briefly highlights just a few of his significant contributions.

Anxiously Awaiting the Future of Restorative Justice in the United States

The problems of mass incarceration and other criminal justice system failures in the United States—such as racial disparities, wrongful convictions, and high recidivism rates—have reached a tipping point. For the first time in decades, coalitions of politicians on the left and right are seeking criminal justice reform. What is the place of restorative justice in these efforts? What is the depth and breadth of restorative justice implementation? How familiar is the American public with restorative justice? How successful is the restorative justice movement? In this article, we seek answers to these questions as we try to assess the future of restorative justice in the United States.

The Spiritual Dimension of Social Justice

The Spiritual Dimension of Social Justice

ISLAMIC CRIMINAL LAW AS A BRIDGE OF CONTENTION BETWEEN PUBLIC AND INDIVIDUAL INTEREST WITHIN RESTORATIVE JUSTICE

Restorative justice has been developing broadly in many countries as a new paradigm in the criminal law field. Following the necessity and global trend, Indonesia has made an effort to replace the current Juvenile Court Act (JCA) with the new one, called Juvenile Criminal Justice System Act (JCJSA), which utilizes diversion as a restorative justice program for juvenile delinquent which took into effect since July 2014. As a new paradigm, restorative justice has been criticized sporadically. One of the critics is how to balance public interest and individual interest when they are in conflict regarding the restorative justice settlement that reached by the victim and offender. The contention between the proponent and opponent of the restorative justice movement on this issue is remains unsolved up to present. This issue is also possible may be arise when the Indonesian government enforces JCJSA. As a Muslim-majority country, Indonesia has an opportunity to resolve the contention by offering Islamic Criminal Law ( jinayat ) as an approach method since restorative justice values exist also in Islamic criminal law. There are at least two notions why Islamic criminal law could relax the contention. Firstly, historically Islamic law ever existed in Indonesia. Secondly, restorative justice values exist in Islamic Criminal Law. This paper will try to portray restorative justice in Islamic criminal law point of view in order to mollify the contention.

Ambivalent Sovereigns and Restorative Justice: Exploring Conditions of Possibility and Impossibility for Restorative Justice in a Post-communicative Age

This contribution hopes to be able to contribute to answering the question: whither restorative justice? The restorative justice (RJ) movement has arrived at an existential crossroads. In this contribution an attempt is made to analyse how some of the origins of the RJ movement could be located in the emergence and crystallization of a new form of life (“control society”) in the wake of the Second World War. At the heart of this form of life one might be able to discern, on the one hand, a desire for and will to radical sovereignty, and, on the other, a resulting awareness of ambivalence. Whilst these aspects of post-war life have formed the backdrop of developments in RJ, and have therefore formed part of its conditions of possibility, one might now wonder if, in a post-communicative age such as ours, those very aspects have now become part of its conditions of impossibility. The argument explored in this contribution however holds that elements in the aforementioned form of life also hold potential for the re-thinking of restorative justice theory and practice.

Dialogical Processes Examined: A Victim offender dialogue case study

This article outlines the evolution and development of Victim Offender Dialogue now seen as a growing part of the Restorative Justice movement worldwide. A case study outlines the rationale given by both victims and offender for participation and the necessary preparation undertaken to conduct an authentic process with both. An examination is made of the nature and extent of the issues explored during the dialogue and the process and outcome of the dialogue itself. This review describe moments of heartbreak, sadness and humour as the dialogue unfolds, capturing key transformational moments in the process. In conclusion, the question of forgiveness is considered, whether it was given or received.

Repeat performance: is restorative justice another good reform gone bad?

Given the current constellation of fiscal, moral, and logistical problems facing its corrections industry, the USA is on the cusp of a widespread penal reform movement. For the past 200-plus years, each US penal reform that intended to diminish penal practices resulted in widening the reach and deepening the roots of the nation’s punishment system. The question asked here is: is the restorative justice movement in the USA headed the way of past benevolent penal reforms? A new type of social movement: the regressive social movement model is presented. Three past benevolent penal reforms – the penitentiary, the adult reformatory movement, and parole are dissected in order to formulate a regressive reform profile and tested against the restorative justice movement. Field research finds that a repeat performance of regressive reform is in progress. In each of the eight restorative justice movement, variables demonstrate characteristics evident in past benevolent penal campaigns, resulting in a redirection of the campaign’s course.

Words on words

For the launch of Restorative Justice: an International Journal a unique symposium has been organised. One of the most inspiring figures in the restorative justice movement, Nils Christie, accepted an invitation to reflect on some of the 'common' concepts in the field. More than three decades after the publication of the now classic Conflicts as Property, Christie comments in a critical and quite provocative way on the names of the ?babies? - 'because names are important: names influence action, create expectations, and sometimes hide realities'. The concepts of 'justice', 'restoration', 'reconciliation', 'victim', 'offender', ... pass the review. Ten established scholars from different parts of the world and traditions react to Christie's Words on words. They elaborate on his ideas, debate, contradict them, resonating important evolutions in current thinking and practice of restorative justice worldwide.