Restorative Justice

Social Justice Usage

Source: Johnstone, Gerry, and Van Ness, Daniel. Handbook of Restorative Justice. London, Routledge, 2013, p. 5.

The restorative justice movement is a global social movement with huge internal diversity. Its broad goal is to transform the way contemporary societies view and respond to crime and related forms of troublesome behaviour. More specifically, it seeks to replace our existing highly professionalized systems of punitive justice and control (and their analogues in other settings) with community-based reparative justice and moralizing social control. Through such practices, it is claimed, we can not only control crime more effectively, we can also accomplish a host of other desirable goals: a meaningful experience of justice for victims of crime and healing of trauma which they tend to suffer; genuine accountability for offenders and their reintegration into law-abiding society; recovery of the social capital that tends to be lost when we hand our problems over to professionals to solve; and significant fiscal savings, which can be diverted towards more constructive projects, including projects of crime prevention and community regeneration.

New Discourses Commentary

“Restorative justice” refers to an approach to justice that seeks to “restore” the transgressor within the community or individuals against which he has committed his crimes. Its goal is not to punish crime but to “heal” from it and restore those involved, whether transgressor, victim, or broader communities in which they are embedded. It is a “holistic” approach meant to replace punitive or retributive justice (punishment and discipline), which are believed to be unable to repair harms or to multiply them, and is popular within the broader “Social Justice” movement, which may apply it alongside reparative justice that centers the victim and seeks repair or reparations for the harm done. In practice, restorative justice tends to focus upon establishing meetings between the transgressor(s) and his victim(s), say in talking circles, and seeks to get them to understand the harm they caused and, on the other hand, to foster understanding in the victims of what led the perpetrator to transgress in the first place.

Academic analysis tends to be positive toward restorative justice, especially over punitive, carceral, and retributive justice models that seek to punish criminals or segregate them from their communities (say, by incarcerating them in prisons). It has been increasingly applied, especially in schools, since the 1990s. In the educational domain, it is believed to be a prophylactic and restorative remedy to the alleged “school-to-prison pipeline,” which Wikipedia defines in explicitly identity-political terms as “the disproportionate tendency of minors and young adults from disadvantaged backgrounds to become incarcerated because of increasingly harsh school and municipal policies.”

In an influential academic essay on restorative justice from 2004, John Braithwaite writes that restorative justice is “a process where all stakeholders affected by an injustice have an opportunity to discuss how they have been affected by the injustice and to decide what should be done to repair the harm.” Another academic, Carolyn Boyes-Watson, describes restorative justice by writing, “Rather than privileging the law, professionals and the state, restorative solutions engage those who are harmed, wrongdoers and their affected communities in search of solutions that promote repair, reconciliation, and the rebuilding of relationships.” Braithwaite agrees in optimistic tones, writing, “With crime, restorative justice is about the idea that because crime hurts, justice should heal.” This healing is to be achieved through conversations, as indicated, which Boyes-Watson inform us, “seek to build partnerships to reestablish mutual responsibility for constructive responses to wrongdoing within our communities. Restorative approaches seeks a balanced approach to the needs of the victim, wrongdoer, and community through processes that preserve the safety and dignity of all.” This description should not be conflated, we are to understand, with the idea that the victim of wrongdoing shares some responsibility meeting their transgressor partway in the circumstances or remedy, which advocates of Social Justice consider absolutely verboten (though, in practice, these determinations are always made by virtue of positionality, such that those in more privileged positions must do this, and those in relationally less privileged positions must never be asked even to consider participating in it).

Like many similar programs touted by advocates of Social Justice ideologies (for example, Social-Emotional Learning), restorative justice may have appropriate contexts in which it is beneficial in the ways described by academics but at the same time may be applied, sometimes vigorously, outside of those contexts or beyond the scope of application with discernible negative results that are ignored by motivated analysis, up to and including the possibility of being directly implicated in the rise of rates of school shootings in American schools.

One simplifying and colloquial way of describing restorative justice would be with the (now-sarcastic) slogan from 2020, “send in the social workers,” which refers to replacing police forces with teams of social workers in the effort to prevent crime and to heal—or, restore—communities that have suffered from criminals. This synopsis applies because the same rationale toward criminality and justice is ultimately behind both widespread implementation of restorative justice programs and replacing police and criminal-justice work with social workers. That rationale is that the basis for misbehavior and criminality is ultimately some problem by which the system has failed the transgressor, leading him to believe incorrectly that criminal or felonious behavior is justified or necessary to his circumstances. The structure of society is such that it produces conditions where criminality and transgression are deemed necessary. Both sides of the transgression need to understand this in order to heal. As noted above, while this rationale might be correct in some cases, it is likely flawed in most cases, rendering restorative justice a potential tool in the toolbox of the justice system but one that is suited only to particular sorts of circumstances and ill-suited to many others. Indeed, the rationale beneath restorative justice often amounts to little more than letting “structurally disadvantaged” criminals get away with it while their victims have explained to them why accepting and tolerating their criminal behavior is the “socially just” thing to do, given the “structural” or “systemic” circumstances.

In practice, particularly in schools, restorative justice programs therefore avoid punishment and discipline. Transgressing kids, including repeat offenders, are not punished, not suspended, and so on, and, in particular, do not have a paper trail of their truancy and misdemeanor established, lest these put them in the so-called “school-to-prison pipeline” in a manner that is socially unjust. Instead of using those retributive approaches to justice, talk circles are held between transgressors, victims, and sometimes bystanders (often, entire classrooms) in which feelings and motivations are discussed until “restoration” of the social environment and “community” have occurred. Obviously, in addition to the distractions caused by bad behavior, often occurring in serial from a small fraction of the students who are repeat offenders, this displaces class and learning time further to engage in a “social and emotional” approach to restorative justice. Put simply, restorative justice means that nobody, or at least nobody within a recognized “oppressed group,” gets punished for bad behavior, which can sometimes be quite severely transgressive, except under the most extreme circumstances, and a minimal paper trail of these misdeeds is recorded. Under restorative justice paradigms, teachers and school administrators who hope to keep classroom discipline are completely disempowered to do so, particularly against serial offenders who realize how easily this paradigm can be gamed.

In reality, criminality is not all the result of socially constructed oppression and unjust conditions in society, and neither is it something that people simply would never engage in if properly socialized outside of those conditions. Therefore, in reality, restorative justice programs tend only to work in very narrow circumstances, usually in which there are already close affective bonds between the transgressor and his victim(s), as in families or closely-knit communities, though under the right circumstances and application, it can be successful in other circumstances (exponents of the Social Justice movement may be inappropriate extrapolating from these narrower circumstances to advance generally unrealistic policies, then). In classrooms and cities, they reliably produce the opposite of justice, which is typical of programs that seek “Social Justice” instead, and is probably a leading cause of deteriorating behavioral and discipline issues in schools.

Revision date: 12/13/22

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James Lindsay