The Role of Community in Restorative Justice

Fernanda Fonseca Rosenblatt, Fernanda Rosenblatt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138288706
• eBook ISBN: 9781317510543
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Although restorative justice is probably one of the most talked about topics in contemporary criminology, little has been written about how community involvement in restorative justice translates into practice. While advocates have presented the community as an essential pillar of restorative justice, the rationale for why and how this is the case remains underdeveloped and largely unchallenged. This book offers an empirical and theoretical explanation of what 'community involvement' means and what work it does in restorative justice.

Drawing on an empirical case study and the wider sociological literature, The Role of Community in Restorative Justice examines the involvement of the community in one selected practice of restorative justice and also considers the implications of the English and Welsh experience for development of a more coherent framework for operationalizing community involvement in restorative justice practices. It is argued that restorative justice programmes need to start from a more concrete and up-to-date notion of community. While operationalizing community involvement, they need to acknowledge, all at once: the importance of place; the importance of family links, friendship and other social ties; and the importance of similar social traits and identities.

This book is essential reading for students, researchers and academics in the fields of criminology, criminal justice, sociology, community studies, policy studies, social policy and socio-legal studies. This book will also be valuable reading for a variety of practitioners and policymakers, particularly working with restorative justice and youth justice.

1 The restorative justice ‘spirit’

DOI: 10.4324/9781315717623-2

Restorative justice is probably one of the most talked about topics in contemporary criminology. In fact, ‘it is now the rare professional conference, journal, or textbook dealing with criminal justice that does not make room for restorative justice topics’ (Dzur and Olson 2004: 92).¹ There has also been a considerable development in academic courses devoted to the field – to the point that there now exists a graduate school entirely devoted to restorative practices.² Restorative justice has also achieved a great deal of recognition outside the academy. Indeed, governments are increasingly incorporating ‘restorative justice language’ into their laws and political discourses and, while not without problems, restorative justice is drawing support from both liberal and conservative policymakers (Levrant et al.1999). Also, criminal justice systems increasingly proclaim themselves to be embracing the ‘restorative justice philosophy’ through a variety of practices adopted at different stages of the criminal process, and performed by people who are allegedly trained to think and act more ‘restoratively’ (Johnstone 2011).

In this context, some commentators claim that restorative justice has been ‘one of the most significant developments in criminal justice and criminological practice and thinking over the past two decades’ (Crawford and Newburn 2003: 19; see also Walgrave et al.2013). Others suggest that ‘no movement in recent memory has captured the imagination of those interested in crime, society, and governance in the way that restorative justice has’ (Wheeldon 2009: 91). Be that as it may, restorative justice ‘is now not only an ideal proposed by a small group of progressive criminologists and criminal justice practitioners’ (Hudson 2005: 64). The campaign for restorative justice has moved far beyond that.

How far? Well, probably further than Howard Zehr would have imagined when he wrote his classic Changing Lenses (1990) to propose a ‘restorative model’ of thinking about crime and justice. Indeed, while some authors (e.g. Walgrave 2008) remain faithful to a more restricted notion of restorative justice wherein the focus is invariably on crime, or suggest a theoretically conservative model of restorative justice where only a few practices can be considered restorative or ‘fully’ restorative (e.g. McCold 2000), others now have a broader focus on the potential of restorative justice for ‘social transformation’ (e.g. Woolford 2009). Caught by such enthusiasm, campaigns have gone so far as to promote the creation of ‘restorative cities’, or even ‘restorative counties’.³

The campaign for restorative justice has not only expanded in terms of focus, but also geographically. Indeed, restorative justice debates are now taking place in countries all over the world and on every continent,⁴ and resonating even at the supra-national level (see Roberts 2003), whereas 30 years ago it was ‘a largely white, North American and European vision to fundamentally change [their] juvenile and criminal justice systems’ (Umbreit and Armour 2011: ix). Today, initiatives under the label of ‘restorative justice’ are flourishing all over the world to deal with criminalisable matters and non-criminal quarrels (e.g. in schools), to cases of interpersonal violence and of mass victimisation (e.g. cases of genocide in societies in transition), to adults and young people; covering a range of different practices provided by criminal justice agencies and third sector organisations; and being promoted by victimled as well as offender-led initiatives (Cunneen and Hoyle 2010; Johnstone 2011; Wachtel 2013; Weitekamp et al.2006).

Not surprisingly, it follows that restorative justice advocates do not all have precisely the same thing in mind when they speak of restorative justice (McCold 1998). In fact, restorative justice is a difficult concept to grasp, let alone to summarise. Having said that, this chapter hopes to achieve the following aims: first, to give a rounded view of what I have in mind when I refer to restorative justice; and second, to provide a brief overview of restorative justice's main attributes – which will inevitably reflect my own personal vision of restorative justice. Whilst I hope that this book will make a significant contribution to the literature on restorative justice, the present chapter will not provide new theories or concepts for those who are already familiar with the topic. It was designed to provide information on the basic concepts necessary for understanding the more specific and in-depth discussions of the later chapters.

1.1 Restorative justice as a response to crime

Could restorative justice be a model of substantive and/or procedural justice? A philosophy of conflict resolution? An alternative to punishment? An alternative form of punishment? A modality of governance? A form of responsive regulation? A political project? A transformative social movement? A lifestyle? There are many possible starting points for a definition of restorative justice, and authors often slip from one premise to another over time or even throughout the same piece of writing. The truth is that restorative justice still means ‘different things to different people’ (Fattah 1998b: 393; see also Peters and Aertsen 2000), and it has become quite difficult to be clear about what, precisely, it means to whom. It is probably the case that ‘when people now talk about restorative justice, we should not assume that they have in mind an organised activity which occurs at a specific time in a specific place’ (Johnstone 2011: 155). Such blurred visions of restorative justice, though, are ‘detrimental for the development of restorative justice in practice, the quality of restorative research and for the credibility of restorative justice in policy’ (Walgrave 2012: 35). Therefore, without claiming to tell ‘the real story’ (Daly 2002), I shall make clear from the outset what I have in mind when I refer to restorative justice.

Until about a decade ago, the predominant focus of restorative justice advocates was on crime and on the ways in which the aftermath of a criminal act should be handled. The feasibility (and/or desirability) of restorative justice to deal with non-criminal matters – in schools, in the workplace, or in residential care, for example – is markedly not discussed in the literature of the 1990s. So although the meaning of restorative justice has never been entirely clear, while the focus was on crime, ‘it was possible to form a fairly clear impression of what people had in mind when they referred to “restorative justice”’ (Johnstone 2011: 154). In general, they meant a (new) way of dealing with crime. Accordingly, restorative justice debates were largely over the principles – or values – upon which criminal (or youth) justice systems could be reformed, or even replaced, so as to become ‘restorative’ (see, for example, Bazemore 1996; Bazemore and Walgrave 1999; Fattah 1998a, 1998b; Walgrave 1995, 1998; Weitekamp 1992; Wright 1996b; Zehr 1990).

Nevertheless, as previously mentioned, the focus of the campaign for restorative justice has changed significantly over recent years. Indeed, there has been a fairly widespread view among campaigners that restorative justice has the potential to be part of ‘something bigger’, as Johnstone (2011: 144) states:

[…] the focus of the campaign can be understood as having expanded ‘downwards’ from crime towards more everyday problems of disruptive behaviour and underperformance in schools and workplaces and harmful conduct in everyday life, and ‘upwards’ from crime towards problems such as political violence, gross violations of human rights, genocide and large-scale historical injustices.

Not everyone shares such ambitions though. Again, according to Johnstone (2011: 157), there is a continuum of minimalist and maximalist thinking about how extensive the views of restorative justice should be:

At the minimalist end [restorative justice is] seen as applicable to the way we think about and handle crime. Towards the middle, [it is] seen as applicable also to an array of social and political problems and professional tasks. At the maximalist end, [it is] seen as applicable to the way we approach any situation and live our everyday lives.

Within this continuum, scholars such as Walgrave and Vanfraechem, for example, would stand at the ‘minimalist’ end. They do acknowledge that other deliberative practices (for example, aimed at resolving conflicts in schools) may share much in common with restorative justice, but draw attention to how intrinsically different criminalisable matters are from other injustices and conflicts (Vanfraechem and Walgrave 2009; Walgrave 2008). Moreover, for them, the restorative justice notion ‘has been so filled up with meanings, that it risks becoming empty of significance’ (Vanfraechem and Walgrave 2009: 2). Therefore, in the name of clarity, the aforementioned authors insist that only practices aimed at dealing with the aftermath of crime should fall under the restorative justice umbrella.

At the other, ‘maximalist’, end of the continuum stand Hopkins and Wright, for example, according to whom restorative justice should be about ‘responding restoratively to all forms of harmful or criminal behaviour in communities, schools, commercial organisations and other contexts’ (Hopkins and Wright 2009: 3). Also Roche (2006: 234), for whom restorative justice ‘is not just a criminal justice policy, but also a policy for regulating child welfare, schools, corporations, civil litigants, and authoritarian regimes that abuse human rights’. Probably also Braithwaite, who once stated that restorative justice ‘is not simply a way of reforming the criminal justice system, it is a way of transforming the entire legal system, our family lives, our conduct in the workplace, our practice of politics’ (Braithwaite 2003: 1).

Although at first glance didactic, Johnstone's ‘taxonomy’ is probably not the most enlightening nor practical of its kind. Unless one clearly expresses an opinion for or against a wider vision of restorative justice, it is nearly impossible to figure out where most scholars stand in this continuum. For example, those in the field of criminology, as a matter of course, tend to talk of restorative justice as a method for dealing with crime – not necessarily because they have a restricted view of restorative justice, but probably to remain within their (and their readers’) areas of interest and expertise. Even an abolitionist such as Fattah, for whom there is no qualitative difference between criminal and non-criminal behaviour (Fattah 1997), has consistently referred to restorative justice as a reaction to crime (see Fattah 1998a, 1998b, 2012).

According to Johnstone (2011: 144), ‘[i]t is probably not an exaggeration to say that Walgrave and others who prefer to focus only on crime no longer represent the mainstream of the campaign for restorative justice’. For me, the bulk of restorative justice literature has been generated from a criminal justice context and it is probably not an exaggeration to say that the mainstream restorative justice literature still tends to focus its attention on criminalisable matters without even reflecting on the possibility of widening the concept of restorative justice. This does not necessarily mean that the majority of resto...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of statutes
• Foreword
• Acknowledgement
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The restorative justice ‘spirit’
• 2 Restorative justice’s problematic appeals to community
• 3 Selecting a case study of community involvement in restorative justice
• 4 Notes on an empirical study
• 5 Youth offender panels: A play in three acts
• 6 The role of community in youth offender panels
• 7 Towards a coherent framework for operationalising community involvement in restorative justice programmes
• Conclusions
• Index