Restorative Justice: social service, paradigm shift, or social justice movement?3
In this essay, Restorative Justice has been referred to as a social justice movement. However, this designation is contested and does not by any means share consensus among everyone who espouses Restorative Justice.
The contemporary beginnings of the field of restorative justice were pragmatic. For the most part, the term ‘Restorative Justice' referred to a values-based practice that was honed out of necessity in a time period (1970s) when strong impulses to find alternatives to the current criminal legal system were calling for innovation. And, as such, the first few decades of Restorative Justice growth could be characterized by the efforts to mold a technical, relational skill-set that was hoped to be universal, standard, and carefully accredited in order to find its way into the echelons of other professional development and social service provision. In short, the primary focus of the restorative justice field in its early years was to repair the interpersonal relationships of the parties most directly affected by the harms of crime; with the needs of family, community or structural transformation as secondary concerns.With the advent of the seminal work by Dr. Howard Zehr (1990; 2002), a new vision was given language and credence. Zehr introduced the idea of Restorative Justice as providing the philosophical values and principled practices to lay the foundation for a paradigm shift in the whole western legal system. This ‘shift’ was away from the reliance on retribution and punishment, to the priority of reconstruction and repair. At that time, the notion of a paradigm shift (Kuhn, 1962) was often imagined as requiring a mammoth task of designing an entirely new system with a detailed blueprint that would guide a full methodical overhaul of the current legal system. For some people, this was idealistic and impossible, for others it meant working for comprehensive legislation, for others it meant building a critical mass, one case and one nonprofit organization at a time, and for others still it meant resisting the criminal legal system and advocating for its abolishment.
A resulting split between those who believed change required incrementalism and those who believed that change required transformation developed among the proponents of Restorative Justice. Incrementalism suggests that change occurs over time, in small steps, and as a part of a slow shift of the values and structures that internally undergird the system.Transformation, on the other hand, suggests a dismantling of oppressive structures and a rechanneling and/or reconstruction of new formations.This debate between Restorative Justice ‘reformists’ and ‘revolutionaries’ continues to this day.In the last two decades, an iterative turn has taken place in the language and application of Restorative Justice morphing from containment of a professional field of study and praxis, to a social justice movement (Van Gelder, 2016).A social movement assumes a number of important markers — namely, it needs a clear political opportunity, a visible increase in the mobilization of human and material resources, and a mass popular framing message (Moyer et al., 2001). Restorative Justice as a movement currently seems to exhibit all these identifying elements.With regards to political opportunity, there has been a global ground-swell of restorative justice local organizing and advocacy in response to increased authoritarian governance, cultural hate speech, social polarization, racial/ethnic violence, and many other political threats to the values and principles of the ‘common good’ that shapes a shared humanity of co-existence (Dashman et al., 2019; Stauffer and Turner, 2018).
There has also been a substantial increase in the mobilization of human and material resources around Restorative Justice. Firstly, there are widespread applications of Restorative Justice beyond the criminal legal system and reaching into a myriad of public sectors (Lewis and Stauffer, 2019). Secondly, formerly marginalized and disenfranchised voices of indigenous peoples and communities of color are engaging the Restorative Justice movement and calling for the transformation of structures of racial/ethnic violence and cultural oppression across the Globe (Llewellyn, 2008; Hoffman, 2008).
Thirdly, in the US, there is a national movement calling for truth-telling and healing of the historical harms of Native-American genocide and the enslavement of African people in the founding of the nation (DeWolf and Geddes, 2019; Davis, 2019). Finally, the structures that are emerging for this work are both de-centralized and de-institutionalized, and yet widespread in societal impact (Stauffer, Shah and King, 2017).Restorative Justice as a framing message for a social justice movement has given reformist and activist groups a shared peacemaking framework in which to hold dialogue and build partnerships that bring together the key pillars of human justice:Truth-telling, accountability, repair, healing, and reintegration. Multiple authors are delineating the theory and building the applied practice that makes up the scaffolding for an effective restorative justice social movement to go forward (Hooker and Czajkowski, 2012; Hooker, 2016).
In summary, this section has explored the momentum of Restorative Justice as a global social movement to influence the potential shift in cultural attitudes and actions away from punishment and toward restoration. For this Restorative Justice cultural shift to happen, however, this essay argues that a parallel shift toward a ‘culture of humility' would need to occur simultaneously.
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