ABSTRACT
Throughout this book I have focussed mainly on the campaign for a systemic shift from punitive to restorative criminal justice as the routine response to crime. I have looked at how such a shift would affect the goals, techniques, procedures and values of criminal justice. The main priority of criminal justice would change from making offenders pay for their crimes through suffering to ensuring that they repaired the harm, both material and symbolic, which they had caused. Reducing reoffending and enhancing public safety would still be central concerns, but the methods of achieving such goals would change. Instead of isolating offenders and seeking to deter them through threats of punishment, a restorative criminal justice would hold offenders accountable to those they had harmed, subject them to the disapproval of people who care about them, establish circles of support and accountability around them, and attempt to restore repentant offenders to full membership of the law-abiding community. Restorative criminal justice would differ significantly in its ‘sentencing’ procedures from conventional criminal justice: in place of formal courthouse justice it would use informal, participatory, consensual, community-based mediation of conflicts. Behind all this, there would be a shift in the values which guide and are expressed through the practice of criminal justice. A restorative criminal justice would be ‘about healing rather than hurting, moral learning, community participation and community caring, respectful dialogue, forgiveness, responsibility, apology and making amends’ (Braithwaite 1999a: 6; cf. Consedine 1999).
