Restorative justice
It follows that conversations with those who have been hurt and with those who have inflicted the harm must be central to the process.Although law professionals may have secondary roles in facilitating the restorative justice process, it is the citizens who must take up the majority of the responsibility in healing the pains caused by crime.
In 2014, Carolyn Boyes-Watson from Suffolk University defined restorative justice as:[20] ...a growing social movement to institutionalize peaceful approaches to harm, problem-solving and violations of legal and human rights.
These range from international peacemaking tribunals such as the South Africa Truth and Reconciliation Commission to innovations within the criminal and juvenile justice systems, schools, social services and communities.
Rather than privileging the law, professionals and the state, restorative resolutions engage those who are harmed, wrongdoers and their affected communities in search of solutions that promote repair, reconciliation and the rebuilding of relationships.
[28] According to Howard Zehr, "Two people have made very specific and profound contributions to practices in the field – the Indigenous people of Canada and the United States, and the Maori of New Zealand... [I]n many ways, restorative justice represents a validation of values and practices that were characteristic of many indigenous groups," whose traditions were "often discounted and repressed by western colonial powers".
[29] For example, in New Zealand, prior to European contact, the Maori had a well-developed system called Utu that protected individuals, social stability, and the integrity of the group.
[36] The book made reference to the positive results of efforts in the late 1970s and 1980s at victim–offender mediation, pioneered in the United States by Howard Zehr, Ron Claassen and Mark Umbreit.
[39] "Restorative justice is a fast-growing state, national, and international social movement that seeks to bring together people to address the harm caused by crime," write Mark Umbreit and Marilyn Peterson Armour.
"[42] The development of restorative justice in continental Europe, especially the German speaking countries, Austria, Germany and Switzerland, is somewhat different from the Anglo-Saxon experience.
[46] The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission shows how restorative justice can be used to address system-wide offenses that affect broad swaths of a group or a society.
[47] In criminal cases, victims can testify about the crime's impact upon their lives, receive answers to questions about the incident, and participate in holding the offender accountable.
[48] In criminal cases, this can include money, community service in general and/or specific to the offense, education to prevent recidivism, and/or expression of remorse.
[50] While restorative justice typically involves an encounter between the offender and the victim, some organizations, such as the Mennonite Central Committee Canada, emphasize a program's values over its participants.
[citation needed] Besides serving as an alternative to civil or criminal trial, restorative justice is also thought to be applicable to offenders who are currently incarcerated.
These include: difficulty engaging offenders and victims to participate in mediation; the controversial influence of family, friends, and the community; and the prevalence of mental illness among prisoners.
[53] In social work cases, impoverished victims such as foster children are given the opportunity to describe their future hopes and make concrete plans to transition out of state custody in a group process with their supporters.
[60] Collectivity is emphasized as the group must create an action plan to heal the harm and find a way to bring the offender back into the community.
[61] While the focus is in making the victim(s) whole, the added benefit of restorative justice programs are a reduction in disciplinary actions such as suspensions and expulsions resulting in lower discipline numbers reported to the state, and more effective reformative and/or reconciliatory actions imposed, such as writing apology letters, performing community service or – for example, in cases of bullying – composing a research paper on the negative effects of bullying.
"[63] However, alternatives to the practice exist, such as reading victim impact statements while holding the perpetrator accountable, reducing the risk of further harm or revictimization.
Suggested reasons for why it can be effective include: Many restorative justice systems, especially victim–offender mediation and family group conferencing, require participants to sign a confidentiality agreement.
Soon afterward, Assistant Manhattan District Attorney Dafna Yoran suggested using restorative justice to reduce the charge to manslaughter, which had a maximum sentence of 10 years, on two conditions.
The largest restorative justice conference in history took place in the course of the 1990 reconciliation campaign that ended the blood feuds among ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, which was attended by between 100,000 and 500,000 participants.
[78] The reconciliation campaign was led by Anton Çetta, and over a period of three years (1990–1992) approximately one third of the entire population of Kosovo were documented to be actively involved in restorative justice conferences to end the blood feuds.
In traditional approaches the study of crime, violence and related behaviors emphasizes the negative aspects in people's lives that are associated with deviance, criminality and victimization.
In an abolitionist style of restorative justice, participation is voluntary and not limited by the requirements of organizations or professionals, the process includes all relevant stakeholders and is mediated by an independent third party.
[88][89][90] In other studies, a minority victims have reported feeling pressured to forgive the offender, downplay the intensity of their emotions, or move quickly through the restorative justice process.
The provision of reparations will in a sense create a restoration of the way life was before violence, and also signal the moving forward of a society through institutional change.
[101] Additionally, some critics like Gregory Shank and Paul Takagi see restorative justice as an incomplete model in that it fails to fix the fundamental, structural inequalities that make certain people more likely to be offenders than others.
The 2004 British drama film Red Dust based on the novel by the same name tells an exemplary fictional story about the applied methodology of restorative justice used by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (South Africa).
In July 2020 the BBC Radio 4 series The Punch examined the case of Jacob Dunne who was convicted of manslaughter after landing one blow on his victim, James Hodgkinson, in a fight outside a pub.
