Gerry Johnstone

Restorative justice for victims: inherent limits?

ABSTRACT Campaigners for restorative justice suggest that we should deal with criminal behaviour by encouraging those responsible to repair the harm they have caused and that those who cause and suffer harm should be at the centre of deliberation and decision making. This paper explores ‘internal’ obstacles to achieving this goal: structural weaknesses in the case for restorative justice. The focus is on contradictions in the way the campaign for restorative justice has thought about the role of victims in restorative encounters. Involvement of victims is crucial for two quite different reasons: they have an essential role to play in the reform of offenders and they need to be involved to benefit from the healing effects of restorative encounters. Tensions between these two ways of thinking about the rationale for victim involvement have been insufficiently acknowledged. This hampers the campaign for restorative justice from achieving its loftier ambitions.

Twenty-five years of Changing lenses—a symposium

Changing lenses: a new focus for crime and justice—to use the original subtitle—was first published in 1990. It has been a major stimulus to, and has had a profound influence upon, restorative justice as a field of study and practice. To mark the 25th anniversary of its appearance, we asked some of the field’s leading scholars and practitioners to write a short piece reflecting upon how Changing lenses influenced both their own thinking and that of the country or setting in which they work. We aimed to include contributions by people from different backgrounds and regions. Accordingly, the five reflections published here come from different regions (France, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the USA) and from scholars representing diverse disciplines as well as from a grassroots organiser. We also asked Howard Zehr, author of Changing lenses, to provide some of his own reflections and to respond to pieces published in this symposium. In publishing the symposium we hope to stimulate readers—especially those relatively new to the field—to read (or reread) this classic text and to engage with its ideas and arguments. With this in mind, we will start the symposium with a brief introduction to this influential book. Changing lenses is a book intended to provoke thought—to encourage critical reflection upon our most basic assumptions and ideas about crime and justice and about how we live together. Part one, titled ‘the experience of crime’, opens with a story: At the age of sixteen a young man, from an unhappy background but with no history of violence, in

Towards a ‘justice agenda’ for restorative justice

In an essay published in 2003, Paul H. Robinson commends restorative processes, but argues that for all their benefits these processes do not deliver justice in the aftermath of crime (Robinson, 2003). To achieve justice, he claims, it is necessary to inflict upon offenders the punishment they deserve. Hence, he concludes, restorative processes should be seen and used as a useful supplement to, but not as a substitute for, punishment of the guilty (p. 377). Robinson then presents a scathing critique of ‘leaders of the restorative justice movement’ for whom, he contends, giving offenders the punishment they deserve is never an appropriate goal of interventions in the aftermath of crime. By seeking to abolish or marginalise punishment and to replace it with restorative processes, these leaders are—according to Robinson—pursuing an ‘anti-justice agenda’ which is objectionable, odd and dangerous (p. 378). This is a serious challenge to the restorative justice movement and demands a response. There are, however, a number of different ways in which advocates of restorative justice might reply. Hence, in this editorial, I will outline and seek to clarify two quite different ways in which restorative justice advocates could answer—and to some extent have answered—such challenges. These represent fundamentally different ways of positioning restorative justice with regard to more traditional conceptions of criminal justice. I want to draw attention to this difference and encourage debate, in this journal, about which stance the restorative justice movement should adopt. At the moment, the second of these responses seems to be the preferred one amongst leading restorative justice scholars and personalities. However, I will go on to suggest that there is something lacking in it, before indicating—very briefly—a third response that might be fruitful. One way of responding to Robinson would be, not to dispute his claim about the requirements of justice in the aftermath of crime, but to insist that: