Restorative Justice: Origins, Practices, Contexts, and Challenges

Abstract

With all the activity surrounding restorative justice and the diverse forms it is taking, it seems appropriate to address core areas concerning its its origins, practices, contexts, and challenges. Origins and PracticesTwenty years ago, when the first victim-offender reconciliation programs were being set up in Canada and in the midwestern U.S., and when few academics or practitioners were aware of indigenous justice traditions, the term restorative justice did not exist.In subsequent years, it gradually emerged as a concept in the writings of Colson and Van Ness (1990), Mackey (1981, 1992), Van Ness and Heetderks Strong (1997), Wright (1991), and Zehr (1985, 1990).Victim-offender mediation, family group conferences, sentencing circles, victim impact panels, and other "restorative justice" processes have evolved, at least to this point, largely as a result of specific practices rather than research and theory.At the core of "restorative justice" is an interest to involve victims, offenders, and communities in a new philosophy and practice of criminal justice that is anchored, we believe, in three major streams of ideas and activism: social movements of the 1960s, particular practices and programs, and academic research and theories.In sketching these paths of development, we draw largely on U.S.-centered activities, but we also report on the influence of international developments. A. Social MovementsOur history of restorative justice does not begin with the victimoffender reconciliation program in Kitchner, Ontario, as most histories do, but rather with the civil rights and women's movements of the 1960s.The civil rights movement was based, in part, on critiques of racism in police practices, in courts, and in prisons.Racial domination by whites was maintained, many claimed, by the overcriminalization and imprisonment of African-Americans and other racial ethnic minority groups.This analysis use of restorative justice is slight in comparison to the overall reliance on punitive responses to crime, especially incarceration.