Week 8: How restorative justice works

So far we've looked at some of the historical roots of Restorative Justice (RJ), and at some of the key values: inclusiveness, informality, looking forwards rather than back, making amends rather than punishment of wrongdoing. But how does it actually work? What are the distinctive features of a restorative process?

RJ can take many forms, but we can identify a few key features. (NB: not every RJ initiative has all these features; some have only one or two.)

Restoration, not punishment

One of the key features of RJ in most of its forms is that it aims to 'restore' - to put things back to how they were before the crime. It 'restores' the victims of crime, enabling them to get on with their lives without being traumatised by the crime, haunted by their memories or obsessed by thoughts of vengeance. It 'restores' the offender, bringing him or her back into the social consensus about the crime that's been committed (i.e. encouraging a sense of shame and disapproval). And it 'restores' the community, reintegrating the offender and undoing any polarisation that has been created by the crime. As such it's forward-looking - as distinct from the backward-looking approach of the criminal justice system - and it's focused on making things better in future rather than on making the offender suffer.

Whether this actually means that RJ is not about punishment is another question. You could argue that 'punishment' refers to all the ways in which offenders are made to understand how bad their crime was and feel sorry for it; in this case RJ would not be an alternative to punishment at all, but an effective form of punishment.

Bringing victim and offender together
Victim-offender mediation is based on the idea that these two people, who have the greatest stake in the crime, are also best placed to resolve it. Victims can also play a key role in group-based forms of RJ. Reintegrative shaming, which is one of the key mechanisms for 'restoration', is based on an interaction in which the offender accepts responsibility for the offence and apologises, and the victim in turn accepts the apology; instead of being set aside and branded - stigmatised - as a 'criminal', the offender can then be accepted as a fellow-citizen, based on a shared denunciation of the crime.

Community problem-solving
One of the key values of RJ is deprofessionalisation, taking crimes and other 'conflicts' away from the specialists of the criminal justice system and enabling the community to resolve them, if necessary by a free-ranging discussion of what has gone on. (There's a certain amount of tension between this ideal and the use of RJ as a form of cautioning, and police-led RJ in general.) This is perhaps one of the areas where the gap between the ideal and the reality of RJ is largest: the idea of 'community' works much better in some contexts than others, and contemporary urban societies in the developed world are not the best context. It can be argued that we are all members of multiple cross-cutting communities rather than a single geographically-based one - family, friends, work, study, leisure, online - but this doesn't necessarily help. The 'community' which is supposed to be mobilised for RJ is a community which includes both the offender and the victim, which isn't necessarily going to work for these plural, non-geographical communities.

Community self-regulation
Another ideal associated with RJ, and perhaps one which has come closer to becoming a reality, is that of community self-regulation. The idea here is that local communities can be empowered to manage problematic elements within them, in the same way that businesses manage low-level white-collar crime. In this model, RJ is not a way to initiate a free-ranging discussion of the rights and wrongs of a particular crime (as in the previous model), so much as a way to bring moral pressure to bear on people who are causing disruption. This model fits very well into some current ways of thinking about neighbourhood disorder and anti-social behaviour; it's often associated with a 'pyramid' model, involving a threat of escalation to more coercive measures if the 'restorative' stage does not have the desired result.

So that's how RJ is supposed to work. But how does it actually work? For the rest of the unit we'll be looking at RJ in practice.