Reconciling the needs of victims and offenders with the needs of the community is the underlying goal of restorative justice. Unlike retributive justice, which is primarily concerned with punishing crime, restorative justice focuses on repairing the injury that crime inflicts.
Although juvenile courts have always administered punishment to youthful offenders, parens patriae and the individual treatment mission have historically assigned an ambivalent role to sanctioning. In the absence of a coherent sanctioning framework, a punitive model has recently gained dominance over dispositional decision making in juvenile court. This article examines the limitations of sanctioning choices presented by both the individual treatment mission and what some have referred to as a “retributive justice” paradigm. We then consider the implications of an alternative model—restorative justice—as a framework for a new approach to sanctioning consistent with a revitalized juvenile justice mandate.
The author provides a comprehensive discussion of the roots of the new reintegrative and restorative justice theories as well as the success of current, preliminary applications of these theories. Arguing that the traditional and opposing theories of the retributive paradigm and the treatment model offer only a simplistic choice between helping or hurting offenders, the author contends that these systems fail to address adequately the needs of communities and victims. In place of these two paradigms, he suggests a new model that he terms reintegrative or restorative justice. This new theory, based on specific cultural approaches to crime found in New Zealand, Japan, and elsewhere, seeks to address the needs of communities and victims through apology and reparation, a process that hopefully leads to the reintegration of offenders into society.
Although there is currently considerable activity around improving the reentry process for former prisoners returning to society, much of this work lacks a strong theoretical and empirical foundation. With its well-developed theoretical grounding and its growing evidence base, the restorative justice movement provides an obvious place to start when thinking about reintegration. Yet there has been relatively little application of restorative models in the reentry context. We argue that restorative justice interventions are too often focused on the "soft end" of the justice process, when a growing body of evidence suggests that restorative practices might be more effectively focused on the reintegration process for more serious offenses. We provide examples of Canadian and U.S. programs that could be considered emerging models of "restorative reentry."
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