ABSTRACT

The promise of criminology is to reverse these positions: to use reason for emotion, rather than emotion against alleged reason. The reason for criminology can then be to make justice more rational about its effects on the emotional causes and prevention of crime. The “Age of Reason” that gave birth to criminology offers many lessons for reinventing justice. Research in other settings also suggests that talking can have major emotional effects on future criminal behavior matters. The hope that criminology might build a new paradigm of justice comes from many sources, most notably the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales. Beccaria reinvented the values of justice as more deterrent than retributive, but failed to open the values of justice to the methods of experimental science. The normative theories of restorative justice may be found in many theological and philosophical sources, such as Gandhi’s famous dictum that “an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind.”