Bringing Race Relations Into the Restorative Justice Debate

Abstract

Restorative justice was reborn in the 1970s with a promise to provide a better sense and experience of justice, especially for those who are let down the most by the criminal justice system. And yet, despite well-evidenced disproportionality and race inequality issues within criminal justice institutions, restorative justice research and practice within the context of race are almost nonexistent. This article aims to unravel this paradox while looking at the scant extant literature to explore the alternative and more personalized restorative justice vision of “the other” and cultural differences. An expansive conceptual model that is aligned with the integrative nature of restorative justice is then posited for further pilots and research. The article warns that if restorative justice continues to ignore the challenges raised within a race equality context, the power structures inherent within our current structural framework of criminal justice will lead to its demise.

Four Challenges in the Future of Restorative Justice

“…Outside of Indigenous peoples, RJ research and practitioners have been mostly silent on questions of how restorative programs may or may not be culturally appropriate or relevant for other racial and ethnic minorities (Daly and Stubbs, 2007;Gavrielides, 2014).…”

Four Challenges in the Future of Restorative Justice

“…In its inception, RJ was seen by many people as a promising means of addressing not only problems of victim exclusion and offender accountability, but also meso and macro social problems as they intersected with criminal justice. These included a focus of many early RJ supporters on prison abolition (Ruggiero, 2011), as well as racial and gender equality (Cunneen, 1997;Daly, 2000;Gavrielides, 2014;Stubbs, 2014;Tauri, 2009). …”

“…Outside of Indigenous peoples, RJ research and practitioners have been mostly silent on questions of how restorative programs may or may not be culturally appropriate or relevant for other racial and ethnic minorities (Daly and Stubbs, 2007;Gavrielides, 2014). Scholars have raised concerns over the degree to which RJ may represent a white or Eurocentric view of view of justice (Cunneen, 2003;Daly, 2002;Tauri, 2014).…”

Is Family Group Conferencing a Culturally Adequate Method outside the Origin of New Zealand? A Systematic Review

“…However, when social services implement FGC in minority and indigenous communities outside New Zealand, few studies question these assumptions (Backe-Hansen, 2006;Gavrielides, 2014). In this article, we question these presuppositions through analyzing the trend of FGC research in indigenous contexts.…”