Offender-based Restorative Justice and Poetry: Reparation or Wishful Thinking?
| Author | Dina Poursanidou,Lynn Froggett,Alan Farrier |
| Published date | 01 April 2009 |
| Date | 01 April 2009 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1473225408101432 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
ARTICLE
Copyright © 2009 The National Association for Youth Justice
Published by SAGE Publications
(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC)
www.sagepublications.com
ISSN 1473–2254, Vol 9(1): 61–76
DOI: 10.1177/1473225408101432
Offender-based Restorative Justice and Poetry:
Reparation or Wishful Thinking?
Alan Farrier, Lynn Froggett and Dina Poursanidou
Correspondence: Dr Alan Farrier, Psychosocial Research Unit, International School of
Health and Postgraduate Medicine, University of Central Lancashire, Faculty of Health,
Harrington Building, Preston, PR1 2HE, UK. Email: AFarrier@uclan.ac.uk
Abstract
Increasingly, arts-based interventions are being implemented as a means of engaging young
offenders, resulting in a public debate over the value of such projects. Whilst there is evidence that
many Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) throughout England and Wales endorse such approaches,
the processes by which they may benefi t young people and have the potential to change attitudes
to offending remain under-theorized. In this article we examine a YOT-related creative writing
project that embraces an offender-based restorative justice model that depends on a reparative
mind-set. We argue that such arts-based projects are complex and potentially far-reaching in
their effects.
Keywords: arts-based interventions, creative writing, reparation, restorative justice, young offender
Introduction and Context
Arts and restorative youth justice: defi nitions and key issues
A number of studies and reviews in the UK (McLewin and Gladstone, 2002; Miles, 2003, 2004;
Wrench and Clarke, 2004; Hughes et al., 2005) and internationally (McArthur and Law, 1996;
Fiske, 1999) have attested to the successful use of the arts in crime prevention, as well as treatment
and rehabilitation of offenders throughout the criminal justice system. The arts appear to lend
themselves well to community-based interventions with young offenders, offering opportun-
ities for engagement and individuated programmes. They also have the ability to draw in skilled
community artists and produce works for public consumption, offering a communicative bridge
between a potentially excluded and stigmatized group of young people and a population who
are wary of them. The arts may therefore have particular salience within a restorative justice (RJ)
model. Many current overviews of RJ highlight its growing popularity in dealing with criminal
behaviour, tracing a dramatic growth in the last quarter of a century from:
… some sympathetic utopian ideas advanced by a few academics [to] a crucial fi eld of renovating
practices and empirical evaluation, a central issue in theoretical and socio-ethical refl ection, and
an unavoidable theme in debates on juvenile and criminal justice reform all over the world.
(Walgrave, 2003: vii)
62 Youth Justice 9(1)
There is concern amongst practitioners that public support for arts-based initiatives will never be
more than a ‘marginal or exotic fad’ (Schwarzman, 2002). This is partly due to the implications
of taxpayers’ money being allocated to arts-based projects in youth justice. ‘L'art pour l'art’ and
fi nancial investment in cultural activities is often met with disdain in the public forum, with a
distinction being made between work-related (appropriate) and leisure-related (inappropriate)
interventions. In local and national media these latter initiatives are often demonized. Clearly
any restorative justice framework needs to take into account how the opinions of communities
are formulated and why they may be so resistant to change.
Everyday usage in the fi eld tends to blur the distinctions between forms of RJ. It has gained
widespread acceptance to denote a model of justice in which the principle of retribution –
although not necessarily entirely absent – is subordinated to the restoration of the relationships
between offender, victim and community. Any specifi c restorative intervention may combine
elements of reparation and restitution. Each involves a different mind-set and implies different
social relationships between parties to the restorative process.
We take the principle of restitution to involve paying of dues, where the restitutive elements
are directed at redressing victim harm to the community, hence restoring the principle of personal
responsibility and social reciprocity that is undermined by criminal or anti-social behaviour.
The YOT – whilst not avoiding restitutive practices – works instead with a concept of repar-
ation as actions that aim to make amends for harm the offender may have caused – a somewhat
broader principle than the paying of dues. There may involve a restitutive ‘concrete means of
repair’ (Walker, 2006: 377) in the sense of putting right the actual damage done to victim’s
property, but the YOT also focus on offender-based reparation that does not have such an
explicit form of ‘pay back’ to the community. The focus of some of the YOT-organized projects –
including the writing project that is the focus of this article – is on ‘micro’ individual-level
psychological reparations (Hamber, 2006) of the offender as part of the process of reintegration
into the community to which they have become estranged.
This concept of reparation is congruent with our psycho-social research framework. We use
the term ‘reparative’ in the light of the richer meanings given to it by the Kleinian (Klein, 1940)
and Object Relations traditions where the subject’s impulse to repair wrongs arises out of care
and concern for (and the wish to protect) others from the consequences of one’s own aggression.
Reparation can be freely made only after the achievement of a moral responsibility that arises
out of a sense of living connection to the other and a capacity to imaginatively perceive others’
predicament and empathize with their suffering. Such empathy demands recognition of the
other as a complex and confl icted subject and entails the wish to be recognized in turn and
forgiven for one’s imperfections. In the context of these young offenders, it may take the form
of a symbolic exchange in which the offender and community signal recognition of each other’s
moral worth and honour a fundamental interdependence. Creative endeavour may have a two-
fold function here: fi rstly in providing a medium of self-representation and communication;
secondly – and in our view fundamentally – in providing an activity in which severed con-
nections can be repaired in terms of both damaged interpersonal relationships and the inner
world of the offender.
Daly (2001: 32) argues that amongst the general public the idea of repairing the harm for
victims and offenders remains predominantly ‘novel and unfamiliar’. The restorative work that
appears to be best tolerated by victims and policy makers is that in which a restitutive element
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