Vol. 15 No.8 (August 2005), pp.644-646
CRITICAL ISSUES IN RESTORATIVE JUSTICE, Howard Zehr and Barb Toews (eds). Devon, UK: Criminal Justice Press/Willan Publishing, 2004. 436pp. Paper. £21.24/$38.50 ISBN: 1-881798-51-8.
Reviewed by William T. Lyons, Jr., Department of Political Science, University of Akron. Email: wtlyons@uakron.edu .
This edited volume is the product of a rather elaborate process of structured dialogues involving many practitioners across the globe. The editors, Howard Zehr and Barb Toews, developed a series of questions from these “palavers” and asked a wide variety of practitioners and scholars to briefly share their thoughts. The enforced brevity allowed for the inclusion of many different voices, a strength of the volume. It also prevented individual authors from fully developing their ideas, seriously weakening the scholarly appeal of the collection. The pieces are simply too short to explore meaningfully the critical issues raised, making the editors’ introductory essay (and introductions to each section) all the more critical. But the editors’ contributions were similarly truncated, leaving a collection that may have some limited value for practitioners new to the field who are just starting their examination of the issues, but I cannot recommend this to serious scholarly readers.
There are a few contributions (given their length, it would be inaccurate to call them essays or articles or even chapters) that stand out, in particular the paired pieces by McCold and Pavlich examining the complexities surrounding the role of community in restorative justice practice. On the whole, however, the great majority of the contributions are too thin, vastly under theorized in ways that beg more questions than they address, to warrant serious attention.
A second weakness of this collection is the absence of contributions examining the political and historical contexts from which restorative justice emerged. There is no treatment of concerns about access to the law that contributed to a wide variety of efforts to develop less formal approaches to conflict management, sometimes linked to courts and sometimes as an alternative to courts. There is no serious analysis of the due process or related problems that have often resulted from such experiments with informal justice. In place of this type of examination the collection is heavily weighted with short pieces that, in my view, confuse restorative justice with the victims’ rights movement. Although there is a section of contributions titled “Stakeholder Issues,” this section is almost entirely devoted to defending the proposition that restorative justice is, and ought to be, about removing the blindfold from lady liberty by ensuring a priority position at the table for the voice of victims.
Doing restorative justice is reduced to hearing from victims or, for some contributors, to developing a parallel justice system designed to overcome what they see as an offender-orientation in even existing restorative justice [*645] efforts by matching our investment in prosecuting offenders with a parallel investment in trauma recovery and assisting victims in rebuilding their lives. This skew toward victims’ rights is indirectly recognized by a contribution co-authored by one of the editors that very tentatively investigates whether or not restorative justice advocates (victims’ advocates from the perspective of this volume) have been adequately attentive to offender needs. This piece is structured as a series of questions for future consideration, rather than a serious examination of the degree to which a victim-focus might obscure seeing restorative justice as an effort to restore or repair the relationships constitutive of resilient communities. Instead, even this piece places efforts to attend to offender needs in opposition to ongoing efforts to give priority to victim needs, rather than as an opportunity to examine the ways restorative justice might be impacting relationships between disputants, and between both and the larger communities they inhabit.
Even in a contribution focusing on the relationship between restorative justice and offender treatment, the authors are adamant that “restorative justice practice must focus most attention on involving and meeting the needs of victims first and communities second” (p.119). Likely due to the lack of space, this claim is not defended in the text and it remains unclear (yet interesting), given the (far too terse) treatment of restorative justice as social contract earlier in the volume, why efforts to restore relationships must focus on victims first or communities second. This formulation denies the centrality, indeed the existence, of relationships to repair, at least any relationships that might include the offender. And it is certainly not a formulation with much connection to the social contract suggestions earlier or to forms of justice that restore relationships and the communities these relationships are embedded within.
A later contribution that might have contributed to remedying this weakness by building on Braithwaite’s distinction between reintegrative and disintegrative approaches to shaming, merely replicates this restorative justice as victims’ rights movement bias. They argue first that since the psychological evidence on shaming (a concept that makes ignoring the relationship to the offender much more difficult) is mixed and “likely to contribute to further reoffending” (p.139). Then they conclude that, while this might invite us to follow Braithwaite and be attentive to the impact (reintegrative or disintegrative) of restorative justice on offenders and relationships, the authors conclude the risk is too great. If we assume that restorative justice is about advancing the victims’ rights movement, then we might accept this at face value. But the mixed findings presented do not support the conclusion that shaming is likely to increase reoffending; instead, they support the conclusion that the relationship is mixed, contingent in ways that ought to make critically examining various contexts (such as those that might reintegrate versus those that might stigmatize) a key element in improving restorative justice.
On the whole, for the reasons identified, this collection is unlikely to satisfy students or scholars interested in a serious examination of the critical issues central to restorative justice. For readers interested in a far superior edited collection on this topic, I refer you to the [*646] collection titled, A RESTORATIVE JUSTICE READER.
REFERENCE:
Johnstone, Gerry (ed). 2003. A RESTORATIVE JUSTICE READER: TEXTS, SOURCES, AND CONTEXT. Devon, UK: Willan Publishing.
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© Copyright 2005 by the author, William T. Lyons, Jr.