Izvorni znanstveni članak
https://doi.org/10.3935/ljsr.v22i1.25
RESTORATIVE JUSTICE IN PRISONS. “DO NOT ENTER WITHOUT PRECAUTIONS”
Leo Van Garsse
; Ghent University Department of Social Welfare Studies, Ghent, Belgium
Sažetak
Over the past decades the notion of restorative detention has become quite popular amongst policymakers and scholars. Restorative justice promoters might consider this development as an enormous step forward in the shift from retribution and vengeance to a more human approach to the execution of punishment. For many years in fact, restorative justice had to struggle with an embarrassing gap between its far-reaching ideological promises of introducing a criminal justice paradigm shift on the one hand, and the lack of practice that goes beyond the level of measures of diversion in cases of minor crime on the other hand. Unmistakably, the sudden access to the prison population is an opportunity to demonstrate the restorative justice potential in exactly those kinds of cases it was originally meant for, i.e. situations in which the formality of the traditional procedure is likely to overrule the subjective needs for information, communication and restoration of dignity of those involved. However, the brief restorative justice history clearly demonstrates the risk of cooption, turning it into a justification of the old penal justice paradigms instead of introducing a new one. The author of this article was for many years closely involved in the development of victim-offender mediation and restorative justice in Belgium. He only partly shares the common enthusiasm for the upcoming restorative detention. Instead, he observes that the few restorative justice programmes which were welcomed within the penitentiaries generally are the ones which focus upon the morality of the offender by promoting victim awareness. At the same time, the victim selectively welcomed is not that much a concrete person with mixed and critical feelings and with developing standpoints, but preferably a stereotype of a suffering vulnerable individual, a suitable object for protection and care. Restorative justice was never said to be value free. But still, in what kind of pedagogy does restorative justice want to play a role? This article is a plea for radicalising the critical potential of restorative justice, deliberately focussing not only on the parties’ very personal needs, but also on the paradoxical context of a self-defined ‘restorative detention’, claiming to address them.
Ključne riječi
Restorative detention; responsibility; participative justice; cooption; democratic citizenship
Hrčak ID:
139958
URI
Datum izdavanja:
1.6.2015.
Posjeta: 2.370 *