Dimensions of Restorative Justice

Abstract

Restorative justice proponents tend to focus their attention on criminal justiceinitiatives in a small number of developed countries, but restorative processes (which encourage citizens to negotiate among themselves, rather than rely on professionals to adjudicate), and restorative values (which emphasize the importance of repairing and preventing harm), can be found across a wide range of regulatory fields. Teachers, social workers, corporate regulators, civil mediators, members of truth commissions, diplomats, and peacekeepers all-at least some of the timepractice a variety of restorative justice. Consideration of these often-neglected examples can help refine current restorative justice theory and practice, which in turn has insights to offer practitioners and researchers in these fields.

Justice and forgiveness: Experimental evidence for compatibility

“…From a justice perspective, the relevance of retributive justice to various everyday relationships is of course well-established: a typical human reaction to a transgression is to retaliate and/or seek some form of compensation or punishment (e.g., Darley & Pittman, 2003). Restorative justice, meanwhile, is no longer the preserve of criminologists; it has now captured the imagination of psychologists who see its potential for understanding responses to transgressions in our everyday lives (e.g., Ahmed & Braithwaite, 2006;Roche, 2006;Wenzel, Okimoto, Feather, & Platow, 2007). For example, when a couple, or co-workers, respond to a transgression by one of the pair by dealing with the transgression in a collaborative, inclusive manner (e.g., talking about it and working out what to do about it) we might say this is reflective of restorative justice.…”

Female Delinquents and Restorative Justice

“…Although restorative justice had been around for about 20 years under different names (see Roche, 2006), in the 1990s prominent books by Zehr (1990) and Van Ness and Strong (1997) gave the movement preeminence. These and other writings articulated the concept of restorative justice as one based around recognition of the personal dimension of crime.…”

Preliminary results from voices of the Mada'in: a tribal history and study of one of Baghdad's six rural districts

“…Every sheikh we interviewed described the tribal courts and the inter-tribal mediation systems as a basically restorative and re-integrative justice system (Roche 2006; see also Olson and Dzur 2004). Moreover, they use an adversarial system-each party to the dispute gets to pick a sheikh or elder as an advocate, who then argues and presents evidence before a panel of sheikhs.…”