Book Review: Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation, Why Restorative Justice? Repairing the Harm Caused by Crime, Restorative Justice for Juveniles: Conferencing, Mediation and Circles, Restorative Justice: Philosophy to Practice
| Date | 01 December 2002 |
| Published date | 01 December 2002 |
| Author | David Smith |
| DOI | 10.1177/147322540200200307 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Book Reviews
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Youth Justice. If you are interested please contact the Book Reviews Editor, Denis Jones,
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John Braithwaite, Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation, Oxford
University Press, New York, 2002, 0 19 513639 X.
Roger Graef, Why Restorative Justice? Repairing the Harm Caused by Crime,
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, London, 2001, 0 903319 92 6.
Allison Morris and Gabrielle Maxwell (Eds.), Restorative Justice for Juveniles:
Conferencing, Mediation and Circles, Hart Publishing, Portland, Oregon, 2001, 1
84113 176 8.
Heather Strang and John Braithwaite (Eds.), Restorative Justice: Philosophy to
Practice, Aldershot, Dartmouth, 2000, 0 7546 2147 2.
Reviewed by: Professor David Smith, Department of Applied Social Science,
Lancaster University.
To read these four volumes is to be reminded both of how far restorative justice has developed
across much of the world in the past ten years and how persistent are the arguments and
practical difficulties that have accompanied this development. Thus there are indications here
not only of (a) continued incomprehension in the judiciary of the values and aims of restorative
justice, as in the first chapter of the Strang and Braithwaite collection, but (b) of rivalries
between different versions of restorative justice within a single country (Australia), as in
Kathleen Daly’s chapter in the Morris and Maxwell collection, (c) problems of implementation
and doubts about the capacity and suitability of the police as the facilitating agency for
restorative justice, as in Young’s chapter on the Thames Valley scheme in the same volume,
and (d) continued argument, of a kind already familiar in Britain in the early 1980s, about the
compatibility or otherwise of retributive and restorative justice and the place of punishment in
a restorative framework.
These disagreements and disputes may well be a sign of the continued intellectual liveliness
of restorative justice theory and practice, but it may also be reasonable (despite the arguments
of some contributors to the edited volumes under review) to treat some of the arguments as
settled –for example, those under (d) above. I think this is the position of the chapter by
Morris and Young, and of Braithwaite and Strang’s concluding chapter, in their edited
collection, which originated in a conference in Canberra in February 1999. It is hardly
conceivable that restorative justice outcomes should not be subject to some form of judicial
scrutiny as a protection against excessive, cruel or humiliating punishment of the offender, and
it is equally difficult to imagine a restorative justice process that excluded outcomes that most
people would regard as having a painful and difficult, and in that sense punitive, element.
Braithwaite and Strang rightly observe (p206) that arguments about the place of punitive
outcomes tend to have ‘less bite at the level of practice than . . . at the level of philosophy’.
But this is not the same as claiming that retributive proportionality in punishment is compatible
as an aim, with the aims of restorative justice: the latter necessarily entail a rejection of the
retributive claim that equal sentences for offenders have a higher value than equal concern for
victims. A related issue, and one on which a consensus may be closer to being reached, is
whether the fundamental purpose of restorative justice is the shift from punitive to restorative
outcomes or the empowerment of the stakeholders. Barton’s chapter in the same collection
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