What is a method of dispensing justice involving discussion between offenders victims and members of the community?

What is restorative justice?

Restorative justice is a set of principles and practices that create a different approach to dealing with crime and its impacts. Restorative justice practices work to address the dehumanization frequently experienced by people in the traditional criminal justice system. Instead of viewing a criminal act as simply a violation of a rule or statute, restorative justice sees this action as a violation of people and relationships.

Restorative justice seeks to examine the harmful impact of a crime and then determines what can be done to repair that harm while holding the person who caused it accountable for his or her actions. Accountability for the offender means accepting responsibility and acting to repair the harm done. Outcomes seek to both repair the harm and address the reasons for the offense, while reducing the likelihood of re-offense. Rather than focusing on the punishment meted out, restorative justice measures results by how successfully the harm is repaired.

Additionally, restorative justice seeks to include those most directly affected by a crime in the justice process, namely victims and survivors. Rather than a process focused on the offender, restorative justice focuses on those who have been harmed and the harms they have experienced. In the restorative justice process, victims are empowered to participate more fully than in the traditional system. Likewise, the community plays an important role in the restorative process by establishing standards of conduct, helping to hold an offender accountable, and providing support to the parties involved and opportunities to help repair the harm that has occurred. The opportunity to express the harm a victim has experienced, full participation in decision making, and support from the community all aid in the healing in the aftermath of a serious crime.

Restorative Justice Principles

1. Crime is a violation of people and relationships. Crime hurts individual victims, communities, and offenders and creates obligations to put things right. Restoration means repairing the harm done and rebuilding relationships in the community.
2. Victims and the community are central to the justice process. All parties should be a part of the response to a crime—victim (if he or she chooses to be involved), community, and the offender.
3. A primary focus of a justice process is to assist victims and address needs. The victim’s perspective is key to determining how to repair the harm resulting from the crime.
4. The secondary focus is restoring the community to the degree possible. The offender has a personal responsibility to victims and to the community for wrongs committed. Parties involved in the restorative justice process share responsibility for repairing harm through partnerships for action. The community has a responsibility for the well-being of all its members, including both victims and offenders.
5. All human beings have dignity and worth. Victim and offender are both able to move forward with respect, and dignity, and are re-integrated into the broader community as much as possible.

Comparing Two Different Views

Three Different Questions For Each View

(Howard Zehr, Little Book of Restorative Justice, pg. 21)

By
Michelle Maiese
Originally published October 2003, Updated June 2013 by Heidi Burgess and Sarah Cast, Current Implications added by Heidi Burgess in July, 2020.

Current Implications

After the May, 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, calls for "racial justice" were voiced around the world.  What the protestors meant by "justice," however, was seldom stated, and now, two months later, I still haven't heard anything that sounds much at all like a call for restorative justice. But it is worth considering whether restorative justice has a role in this situation.  Certainly there is a need for other types of justice as well.  American society is too familiar with and committed to retributive justice to abandon that approach.  The calls for holding the officers involved to account should certainly be headed, lest there be even more outrage that the officer, again,"got away with murder."   So too should there be procedural changes, so that finally, this kind of event becomes less frequent.  More...

The Aims of Restorative Justice

Restorative justice is concerned with healing victims' wounds, restoring offenders to law-abiding lives, and repairing harm done to interpersonal relationships and the community. It seeks to involve all stakeholders and provide opportunities for those most affected by the crime to be directly involved in the process of responding to the harm caused.

A central premise of restorative justice is that victims, offenders, and the affected communities are all key stakeholders in the restorative process.[1] Victims include not only those directly affected by the offense, but also family members and members of the affected community. The safety, support, and needs of these victims are the starting points for any restorative justice process. Thus a primary objective is to attend to victims' needs: material, financial, emotional, and social.[2] Addressing these needs and the needs of the community is necessary if public demands for severe punishment are to be quelled.

This requires the assumption that crimes or violations are committed against real individuals, rather than against the state. Restorative justice, therefore, advocatesrestitution to the victim by the offender rather than retribution by the state against the offender. Instead of continuing and escalating the cycle of violence, it tries to restore relationships and stop the violence.[3]

"How can justice be found in the face of genocide, a crime so vast and evil that it defies simple justice? Is there restorative justice beyond retribution and revenge? Must some kind of justice be done before healing can take place?"

"[In Rwanda] something different had to be invented, a different way of defining justice, a different way of dispensing it." -- Jane Ciabattari

A restorative justice process also aims to empower victims to participate effectively in dialogue or mediation with offenders. Victims take an active role in directing the exchange that takes place, as well as defining the responsibilities and obligations of offenders. Offenders are likewise encouraged to participate in this exchange, to understand the harm they have caused to victims, and to take active responsibility for it. This means making efforts on their parts to set things right, to make amends for their violations, by committing to certain obligations, that may come in the form of reparations, restitution, or community work. While fulfilling these obligations may be experienced as painful, the goal is not revenge, but restoration of healthy relationships between individuals and within communities that have been most affected by the crime.

Restorative justice is a forward-looking, preventive response that strives to understand crime in its social context. It challenges us to examine the root causes of violence and crime in order that these cycles might be broken.[4] This approach is based on the assumption that crime has its origins in social conditions, and recognizes that offenders themselves have often suffered harm. Therefore, communities must both take some responsibility for remedying those conditions that contribute to crime and also work to promote healing.[5]

Healing is crucial not just for victims, but also for offenders. Both the rehabilitation of offenders and their integration into the community are vital aspects of restorative justice. Offenders are treated respectfully and their needs are addressed. Removing them from the community, or imposing any other severe restrictions, is a last resort. It is thought that the best way to prevent re-offending is re-integration.[6]

The justice process in this way strengthens the community and promotes changes that will prevent similar harms from happening in the future. It is generally thought that restorative justice should be integrated with legal justice as a complementary process that improves the quality, effectiveness, and efficiency of justice as a whole.[7] Because they focus on the needs of the victim, the offender, and the community, restorative processes can help to determine how the law should be applied most fairly.

Processes in the United States

Restorative justice in the United States takes on various forms. Victim-offender mediation is perhaps the most common, and involves face-to-face dialogues between victims and offenders. Victims' needs, including the need to be consulted, are the focus. In victim-offender meetings, offenders have a chance to take active steps to make reparation to their victims. This extends further than monetary compensation, and includes an apology and an explanation of how the crime occurred. The offender might also do some work for the victim, or for some community cause selected by the victim.

In addition, offenders have to listen to victims' stories and face up to the reality of what they have done. They are often deeply affected by this experience, and have positive motivation to make reparations. Because this process brings victims and offenders together and enables them to talk to one another, it can allow them to see the other as a person rather than a stereotype. For this process to be effective, a skilled mediator should facilitate these meetings.

Group conferencing is an extension of victim-offender mediation and includes more parties, such as family members of the victim or offender, community contacts, teachers, neighbors, or counselors. The involvement of extra parties can make conferencing more forceful than one-on-one mediation.

Community victim-support organizations work to provide victims with material, psychological, and social support and aid in the healing process. Other organizations offer support services for offenders, including literacy education, relationship counseling, drug counseling, and housing accommodation. Some agencies assist in reintegration for offenders and help them to find employment. Still other groups work to help communities as a whole become less prone to crime.[8]

U.S. school districts plagued by segregation and gang violence are increasingly implementing restorative justice programs for students to develop mutual empathy and address past wrongs through meaningful reparations. An Oakland, California school program that facilitates student conversations by hosting talking circles, for example, is offered as an alternative to "zero tolerance" policies like expulsion.[9] The program thus seeks to replace punitive responses to violence with opportunities to address the root causes of school and community-wide disputes.

Restorative Justice Around the World

Restorative justice might also have an important role in responding to severe human rights violations or cases of genocide. A crucial step toward restorative justice is taken when governments tell the truth about past atrocities carried out by the state.[10] It is thought that true healing requires three steps:

1. Remembering the atrocities committed,
2. Repenting, and
3. Forgiving.

War crimes inquiries and truth commissions can aid in the process of memory and truth telling, and help to make public the extent to which victims have suffered.

Restoration often becomes a matter of restitution or war reparations. In cases where clear acts of injustice have taken place, some type of compensation can help to meet the material and emotional needs of victims and begin to remedy the injustice. Repentance can also help to re-establish relationships among the conflicting parties and help them to move toward reconciliation. In some cases, conflicts can end more peacefully when parties acknowledge their guilt and apologize than when formal war crimes adjudication or criminal proceedings are used.

In cases of civil war, because the line between offenders and victims can become blurred, a central goal of peacebuilding is to restore the community as a whole. In Northern Ireland, for example, the adoption of restorative justice techniques and practices helped transform destructive practices of punishing various actors into more constructive, non-violent mechanisms of dispute resolution.[11] Restoration often becomes tied to the transformation of the relationship between the conflicting parties. However, such restoration cannot take place unless it is supported by wider social conditions and unless the larger community makes restorative processes available.

Restorative justice in the international context is therefore linked to social structural changes, reconstruction programs to help communities ravaged by conflict, democratization, and the creation of institutions of civil society.

Current Implications

After the May, 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, calls for "racial justice" were voiced around the world.  What the protestors meant by "justice," however, was seldom stated, and now, two months later, I still haven't heard anything that sounds much at all like a call for restorative justice. But it is worth considering whether restorative justice has a role in this situation.  Certainly there is a need for other types of justice as well.  American society is too familiar with and committed to retributive justice to abandon that approach.  The calls for holding the officers involved to account should certainly be headed, lest there be even more outrage that the officer, again,"got away with murder."   So too should there be procedural changes, so that finally, this kind of event becomes exceedingly rare, rather than all too common. 

However, it seems to me that there is also a role for restorative justice, the goal of which is to restore relationships between the victim(s) and the offender(s). There, obviously, is no way to restore relationships between Derek Chauvin (the officer who killed George Floyd) and Floyd himself. It is conceivable to restore the relationship between Chauvin and the Floyd family—restorative justice has been used effectively in the case of violent crime, although usually years after the event when the offender is still incarcerated as a result of retributive justice. [12]

Of more immediate interest is how it might be used to restore the relationship between the citizens of Minneapolis and the Minneapolis police department, and/or how it might be used in other cities nationwide or even worldwide to address the tension between the police and the communities that they serve. Consider the description of restorative justice from Maiese's original article.

A central premise of restorative justice is that victims, offenders, and the affected communities are all key stakeholders in the restorative process.[1] Victims include not only those directly affected by the offense, but also family members and members of the affected community. The safety, support, and needs of these victims are the starting points for any restorative justice process. Thus a primary objective is to attend to victims' needs: material, financial, emotional, and social.[2] 

Retributive justice, which is what will happen when Derek Chauvin and the other involved officers are tried (and, presumably convicted), doesn't address the needs of the community.  It doesn't even address the needs of the Floyd family, except perhaps for giving them the sense that "[retributive] justice" was done.  Defunding (or significantly scaling back) the Minneapolis police department also seems unlikely to address the needs of the community.  Crime is unlikely to go away when there aren't police around; indeed, the opposite is likely to occur.  (See, for example, this story of what happened to Baltimore's police pulled back from their law-enforcement efforts. [13]) But if the community and the police were to sit down in an extended series of dialogues about citizens' emotional and social needs (the police most likely can't influence material and financial needs), meaningful changes might well occur.  Maiese continues:

A restorative justice process also aims to empower victims to participate effectively in dialogue or mediation with offenders. Victims take an active role in directing the exchange that takes place, as well as defining the responsibilities and obligations of offenders. Offenders are likewise encouraged to participate in this exchange, to understand the harm they have caused to victims, and to take active responsibility for it. This means making efforts on their parts to set things right, to make amends for their violations, by committing to certain obligations, that may come in the form of reparations, restitution, or community work. While fulfilling these obligations may be experienced as painful, the goal is not revenge, but restoration of healthy relationships between individuals and within communities that have been most affected by the crime.

This paragraph was written assuming the offenders are private citizens, not police, but it takes on particular power when the offenders are the police and the victim is not seen as just George Floyd or the Floyd family, but the entire city of Minneapolis, or more broadly, citizens of all U.S. cities where relations between the police and the citizens are strained.  If this paragraph came to pass, police would come to understand the harm they are causing their cities, and would take active responsibility for it, making amends for their violations and making efforts to "set things right." In this context, restorative justice would also include an opportunity for police to tell their side of the story and for the public to better understand the difficult positions in which officers are commonly placed. This seems to be a much more promising approach than the one that was taken in Baltimore and described in the MacGillis article—where the reforms were ordered from the top down (by the U.S. Department of Justice) without input from local police.  According to that article, the reforms did not make sense in the Baltimore context and weren't seen as appropriate by the police. And, they did not diminish violent crime--it has been on the increase since the reforms were imposed.

Again quoting Maiese:

Restorative justice is a forward-looking, preventive response that strives to understand crime in its social context. It challenges us to examine the root causes of violence and crime in order that these cycles might be broken.[4] This approach is based on the assumption that crime has its origins in social conditions, and recognizes that offenders themselves have often suffered harm. Therefore, communities must both take some responsibility for remedying those conditions that contribute to crime and also work to promote healing.[5]

This, too, is interesting when read from the point of view of the police being the offender.  It suggests that police violence "has its origins in social conditions" and that the police "themselves have often suffered harm. Therefore, communities must both take some responsibility for remedying those conditions that contribute [to police violence] and also work to promote healing." This has a lot of truth in it.  Most police aren't violent and they took the job really hoping to help their communities stay safe.  But the hostility of the community can frighten police and make them over-estimate the chances of them being harmed or killed.  As a result, particularly over time, police can begin to over-react and to increasingly view themselves as "the good guys" in a constant battle with "the bad guys," a highly stressful us-versus-them relationship where all citizens become "the bad guys." With restorative justice, this us-versus-them relationship gets transformed into a "we" relationship where all sides together work to remedy harms and promote healing of the relationship and the people themselves.

Finally, the original article said:

Healing is crucial not just for victims, but also for offenders. Both the rehabilitation of offenders and their integration into the community are vital aspects of restorative justice. Offenders are treated respectfully and their needs are addressed. Removing them from the community, or imposing any other severe restrictions, is a last resort. It is thought that the best way to prevent re-offending is re-integration.[6]

Read from the point of view of the police being the offender, "the rehabilitation of the police and the integration into the community are vital aspects of restorative justice. The police are treated respectfully and their needs are addressed.  Removing them from the community (i.e, defunding the police) or imposing any other severe restrictions, should be a last resort.  It is thought that the best way to prevent more police violence is re-integration.  

Restorative justice, thus, has the potential to help accomplish the needed procedural justice much more effectively than if the changes are imposed by one side on the other.  If the victims are enabled to work directly with the police—instead of against the police—to design crime-fighting units and actions that will actually meet community needs, restorative justice theory and research suggests that the outcome is likely to be much more effective.

--Heidi Burgess, July 23, 2020

Back to Essay Top

[1] Howard Zehr and H. Mika. 1997.  "Fundamental Concepts of Restorative Justice." Contemporary Justice Review: Issues in Criminal, Social, and Restorative Justice, Volume 1, Issue 1, pp. 47-56. <http://www.beyondintractability.org/library/external-resource?biblio=14829>.

[2] Tony F. Marshall. "Restorative Justice: An Overview," (Home Office Research Development and Statistics Directorate, 1999). <http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110218135832/http://rds.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs/occ-resjus.pdf>.

[3] Peggy Hutchison and Harmon Wray. "What is Restorative Justice?" (New World Outlook, 1999). <http://gbgm-umc.org/nwo/99ja/what.html>.

[4] Hutchison and Wray.

[5] Marshall, 6.

[6] Zehr and Mika, 2.

[7] Marshall, 7.

[8] See section on "The Cornerposts of Restorative Justice" in Daniel W. Van Ness and Karen Heetderks Strong, Restoring Justice: An Introduction to Restorative Justice. (Elsevier, 2010). <http://books.google.com/books?id=AZv2MVkHBTcC>.

[9] Patricia Leigh Brown. "Opening Up, Students Transform a Vicious Circle" The New York Times. April 3, 2013. <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/04/education/restorative-justice-programs-take-root-in-schools.html>.

[10] Hutchison and Wray.

[11] Graham Ellison and Peter Shirlow, "From War to Peace: Informalism, Restorative Justice and Conflict Transformation in Northern Ireland," in Restorative Justice: From Theory to Practice. (Emerald Group Publishing, 2008). <http://books.google.com/books?id=4sttqCszsngC>.

[12] Mark S. Umbreight, William Bradshaw, and Robert B. Coates "Victims of Severe Violence Meet the Offender: Restorative Justice Through Dialogue" International Review of Victimology. September 1, 1999. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/026975809900600405?journalCode=irva

[13] Alec MacGillis. "The Tragey of Baltimore." New York Times and ProPublica. March 12, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/magazine/baltimore-tragedy-crime.html

Use the following to cite this article:
Maiese, Michelle. "Restorative Justice." Beyond Intractability. Eds. Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess. Conflict Information Consortium, University of Colorado, Boulder. Posted: October 2003 <http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/restorative-justice>.

Additional Resources

What are the 3 principles of restorative justice?

What is the restorative justice model?

What are the 4 goals of restorative justice?

What peacemaking model addresses the victims harm and needs holds offenders accountable and involves victims offenders and communities in the process?