The Vagaries of Restorative Justice: Borders Between Restorative Justice and Justice as Punishment

This paper explores the complex interplay between restorative justice and traditional punitive justice systems. While proportional and rationalistic justice focuses on establishing some kind of disturbed equilibrium between crime and a normal state of affairs in society, or on preventing future crimes by increasing the costs of committing it for the offender, restorative justice focuses on the actual restoration of the type of social capital that has been degraded by time. Restorative justice thus works on healing and reconciliation, and tends to contrast sharply with punitive justice, which emphasizes retribution and deterrence. One of the main obstacles to a broad implementation of restorative justice is connected with community expectations. Most communities have been habituated to expect punitive justice and have internalized these expectations as their psychological way to achieve “closure” after a crime has victimized some members of the community or, indirectly, the community as a whole. Thus one of the challenges of modern restorative justice in practice is how to integrate it with more traditional views on punitive justice, which is the preoccupation of this brief paper.