Situating restorative youth justice in crime control and prevention
| Jurisdiction | South Africa |
| Citation | 2007 Acta Juridica 1 |
| Pages | 1-21 |
| Author | Adam Crawford |
| Date | 15 August 2019 |
| Published date | 15 August 2019 |
Part I
INTERNATIONAL TRENDS IN
RESTORATIVE JUSTICE
Situating restorative youth justice in crime
control and prevention
ADAM CRAWFORD*
University of Leeds
I INTRODUCTION
Restorative justice has been one of the most significant developments in
criminal justice practice and criminological thinking to have emerged
over the past two decades. It offers both a philosophy of conflict
resolution and a model of justice. It is said to have implications for
governance at local, national and international levels, and relevance in
guiding the settlement of non-criminal quarrels, minor infractions and
serious interpersonal violence, as well as international disputes, state
violence and cases of mass genocide in societies in transition. Yet, in large
part it constitutes either a practice (often at the margins) in search of a
theory or alternatively, a philosophy desperately seeking implementation.
Despite important steps to reconcile theory and practice, the ‘gap’
between ideal and reality remains a considerable one.
1
In part, this dissonance has allowed restorative justice to meet with
enthusiastic reception from across the political spectrum and amongst a
variety of professional, non-governmental and community groups.
However, the divergent interests promoting restorative justice have
resulted in practical initiatives often representing distinctive attractions to
different constituents. For some proponents, restorative justice has its
origins deeply rooted in the victim movement, to which it must adhere.
From this perspective, providing victims with a process that meets (or at
least seeks to meet) the emotional and affective needs of victims of crime
* BA MPhil (Cambridge) PhD (Leeds) Professor of Criminology and Director of the
Centre for Criminal Justice Studies, University of Leeds. This article was written with the
generous support of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship.
1
K Daly ‘Mind the gap: Restorative justice in theory and practice’ in Avon Hirsch et al
(eds) Restorative Justice and Criminal Justice (2003).
1
2007 Acta Juridica 1
© Juta and Company (Pty) Ltd
is the primary barometer of value and worth. For others, restoring the
deliberative qualities of dispute processing to ordinary people and, by
implication, out of the hands of (state) professionals, is the ultimate
lodestar.
2
For still others, restorative justice represents a powerful
normative yardstick with which to critique the failings of a largely
punitive criminal justice system, notably with regard to the way it blames,
punishes and stigmatises people caught up in its machinations. On one
level, this breadth of appeal has allowed restorative justice to gain support
from diverse audiences and to find accommodation within different
political programmes and prevailing institutional rhetoric. However, in
practice it also means that specific initiatives can be, and often are, pulled
in different, and sometimes competing, directions as they attempt to
meet multiple aims and objectives and to satisfy the divergent demands of
different constituencies. In its capacious allure the danger is that
restorative justice initiatives may raise false expectations only to end up
being disappointing on a number of fronts.
Furthermore, the spread and internationalisation of restorative justice
highlights a particular problem for conceptual analysis and evaluation,
particularly where contributors from different jurisdictions come
together to talk or write about plural development around the restorative
justice theme, namely the tendency to extract practices from the cultural,
political and institutional environments in which they are situated and
through which they make sense. Family group conferencing, sentencing
circles, community panels, peace-making committees and truth and
reconciliation commissions are often discussed as if they have a universal
sense that can move easily between different settings without taking on
new meaning and with little implications for practices. It is as if, like
butterfly collecting, restorative justice practices are easily understood
abstracted from the habitat which nourishes them.
3
And yet, the
relationships between cultures, crime and responses to it are both crucial
and complex. By contrast, we need to understand more, rather than less,
about the differences and similarities in connections between responses to
crime and cultures, as well as the manner in which such strategies derive
their sense and meaning from their cultural ties. For, the limits to the
transferability of crime control mechanisms or policies, which advocates
may claim to be universal, often derive from precisely such cultural
connections.
In this paper I use the example of a particular recent development in
the youth justice system in England and Wales to draw out broader issues
and themes with regard to three central questions. First, what are some of
2
N Christie ‘Conflicts as property’ (1977) 17 British Journal of Criminology 1.
3
A Crawford ‘The state, community and restorative justice’in L Walgrave (ed) Restorative
Justice and the Law (2002).
2
RESTORATIVE JUSTICE
:
POLITICS
,
POLICIES AND PROSPECTS
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