An overview of research on non-western experiences of restorative justice, what they are like, how they work, what can we learn from them. Obviously there is no claim of comprehensiveness here. This section aims just at providing insights from recent works published around trhe world into context-specific applications of restorative justice. For these reasons this section is very much a work-in-progress…
Huang, H. F., Braithwaite, V., Tsutomi, H., Hosoi, Y., & Braithwaite, J. (2012). Social capital, rehabilitation, tradition: Support for restorative justice in Japan and Australia. Asian Journal of Criminology, 7(4), 295-308.
Abstract
‘This paper investigates the attitudes and beliefs that the public hold about criminal behaviour in Japanese and Australian society, with a view to uncovering sources of resistance to, and support for, restorative justice. The study draws on a survey of 1,544 respondents from Japan and 1,967 respondents from Australia. In both societies, restorative justice met with greater acceptance among those who were (1) strong in social capital, (2) believed in offender reintegration and rehabilitation, (3) saw benefits for victims in forgiveness, and (4) were advocates for victims’ voices being heard and amends made. The alternative ‘just deserts’ and deterrence models for dealing with crime were grounded in attitudes of punitiveness and fear of moral decay, and reservations about the value of reintegrating and rehabilitating offenders. Like restorative justice supporters, ‘just deserts’ and deterrence supporters expressed concern that victims’ voices be heard and amends made. Winning public support for competing institutional arrangements may depend on who does best in meeting expectations for meeting the needs of victims.’
Commentary
The development of restorative justice in Japan presents numerous interesting aspects. Among these are some cultural motives such as the belief in offender rehabilitation and shaming. This valuable article explores some of these aspects, in depth.
Yoshida, T. (2012). Confession, apology, repentance and settlement out-of-court in the Japanese criminal justice system–is Japan a model of ‘restorative justice’?. In Restorative Justice in Context (pp. 201-224). Willan.
Abstract
‘Apart from bodily injury or manslaughter caused by negligence in traffic offences, the Japanese police registered 2,033,546 Criminal Code offences in 1998. The ratio of frequency, that is, the number of criminal cases registered by the police per 100,000 residents amounts to 1,608. Japan’s crime rate decreased from 1948 to 1978 almost continuously (1948: 2,000; 1973: 1,091), but since then it has gradually increased (1974: 1,095; 1997: 1,506). Still, Japan shows lower figures when compared to Western industrialized states (Research and Training Institute of the Ministry of Justice 1999).2 Japan’s crime rate, being the lowest of all advanced nations, may astonish Western observers. Some criminologists in foreign countries, such as Haley (1989, 1991, 1999) from the United States and Braithwaite (1989) from Australia have looked for the causes of the low Japanese crime rate. They say that it results mainly from the underlying assumption of ‘restorative justice’ that has traditionally been practised in Japanese criminal justice. Haley states that ‘victim-offender mediation’ ‘is an essential feature of Japan’s success and should be expanded in the United States and other criminal justice systems along with other elements of the restorative model, while ‘there are no victim-offender mediation programs in Japan. No mediator training agencies exist. There are no statistics or studies. Mediation is a normal aspect of daily life.’ So the practice and theory of Japanese criminal justice deserves a closer look.‘
Commentary
Another critical study unpacking and challenging the supposed culturally-rooted ‘restorativeness’ of Japan’s criminal justice
Wong, D. S. W., & Mok, L. W. Y. (2010). Restorative justice and practices in China. British Journal of Community Justice, 8(3).
Abstract
‘Restorative justice is developing robustly within the criminal justice system particularly in the field of juvenile justice. With the efforts devoted to policy development and intervention practices, activities at government and community levels suggest that restorative justice is emerging as an increasingly important element in mainstream criminal justice. Though restorative justice initiatives are one of the new initiatives for dealing with offending in many western countries, there has been relatively little experience of actual use of restorative practices in controlling juvenile offending and criminal justice intervention in China. In this paper, we first describe key themes of restorative justice and practices. We then highlight how restorative justice and practices been operated in the present juvenile justice in China. Finally, we discuss the way ahead for the development of restorative justice.’
Commentary
A ground-breaking study of the development, cultural underpinnings and operational aspects of restorative justice in China
Yuan, X. (2017). Restorative justice in China: Comparing theory and practice. Springer.
Excerpt
‘The field of restorative justice (RJ) is bustling today, full of legal philosophers, spiritual leaders, project managers, empirical researchers, mediators and facilitators, and others. Eglash (1977) has often been credited with coining the term, but RJ did not achieve wide acceptance until the 1990s. Zehr (1990), a key figure in this movement, called for a lens change, setting its tone as a different paradigm from retributive justice. There are unsettled debates over the relationship between restoration and retribution and between process-oriented conceptions and outcomefocused conceptions. In this context, another study of RJ is likely to make this chaotic world more turbulent rather than to restore order and soberness. Yet restorative justice is a buzzword that is not easy to avoid’…
Commentary
Perhaps the most comprehensive work on restorative justice in China. The book considers both cultural and practical aspects characterising restorative justice in context, providing precious and stimulating insights.
Achutti, D. (2020). Restorative justice in Brazil: Possibilities from the Belgian experience. Civitas-Revista de Ciências Sociais, 13, 154-181.
Abstract
‘The paper presents the restorative justice system adopted by the Belgian law, and demonstrates the ways in which restorative mechanisms interact with the criminal justice system. Describes the initial difficulties faced in the early 1990s, during the first experiences with conflicts mediation in Belgium, as well as how they were overcome. At the end, from a critical perspective, designs possibilities for the adoption of restorative justice in Brazil.‘
Commentary
A recent exploration of restorative justice in Brazil, which adopts a critical and comparative outlook.
Paulo, A. R. D., & Silva, V. C. (2022). The implementation of the posts of restorative justice within brazilian criminal. Sequência (Florianópolis), 42.
Abstract
‘The objective of the present work is to analyse the normative discourses pertinent to Restorative Justice within brazilian criminal in accordance with Resolution n. 225 of 31th May 2016 of the National Council of Justice, which proposes to regulate the theme in Brazil. This research uses the inductive approach, with document analysis and literature review techniques. This article theoretical framework harmonises with Foucault’s archaeology. This work concludes that the sovereign power, for centuries, prohibited intersubjective agreements and imposed the monopoly of criminal jurisdiction and, at the same time, as the emergence of the international postulates of Restorative Justice, the National Council of Justice, even without competence to legislate on matters of criminal and criminal procedure, tries to appropriate and control the practices of conflict resolution that should occur outside the formal scope of the State.‘
Commentary
A very interesting, theoretically-informed critical analysis of legal discourses on restorative justice in Brazil, drawing on Michel Foucault.
Irazábal, C. (2018). Counter land-grabbing by the precariat: Housing movements and restorative justice in Brazil. Urban Science, 2(2), 49.
Abstract
‘Social housing movements in Brazil, whose majority members are part of Brazil’s precariat or lowest-income class, are courageously pressing for true urban reform in Brazil, whose old promise has been systematically delayed and subverted, even by some of those who were put in power to realize it. By occupying vacant and underutilized land and buildings, not only are these movements confronting neoliberalism in Brazil at a time of the model’s highest level of hegemony in the country and the world, they are also unveiling the impossibility of the system to deliver sociospatial justice to the poor and are enacting an alternative. Through restorative justice practices, they go beyond critique and press for an alternate sociopolitical project that would allow millions of people in Brazil access to decent housing, and through it, to a myriad of other opportunities, including the right to the city. As shown in the experiences of those participating in housing struggles, restorative justice deserves further exploration as an alternative planning mode that can combine the strengths of advocacy planning and communicative action while reducing their drawbacks. These reflections focus on the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sen Teto (MTST) and partially feed from team ethnographic and planning studio work on several building and land occupations in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in Brazil in 2016. ‘
Commentary
A rather unique application of restorative justice in housing struggles in Brazil
Pereira de Andrade, V. R. (2018). Restorative justice and criminal justice: Limits and possibilities for Brazil and Latin America. Int’l J. Restorative Just., 1, 9.
Abstract
‘This article is based on the 2017 RJIJ annual lecture and seeks to examine the development of the restorative justice movement within the judiciary in Brazil (‘judicial restorative justice’) in the last decade or so (2005-2017). The focus is on its relation to penal justice, listing the main possibilities and challenges in the Latin American context. The main question I wish to address is how does restorative jus‐ tice, being led by the judiciary in Brazil, look like? When, where, how and under which theoretical and methodological angles is it being developed? What are the human and material resources being used? How can the relationship between restorative justice and the current Brazilian criminal justice system be understood? My hypothesis is that judicial restorative justice in Brazil is going through a process of expansion and development, framing a paradigm that is under construction and in which, despite the possibilities of challenging and transforming the current jus‐ tice system, it has been nevertheless colonised by this same justice system. There‐ fore, restorative justice is being left to deal with low-level crimes and facing struc‐ tural and conjectural limits to the concretisation of its objectives. In addition, the field in Brazil is hit by a structural lack of dialogue with other Latin American countries, which results in a mutual impoverishment of sorts, as the ‘restorativism’ currently experienced, hither and thither, is heated up by the intersection of eman‐ cipatory principles and values,
Commentary
An excellent overview of the potential and possibility of restorative justice in Latin America and Brazil particularly
Traguetto, J., & Guimaraes, T. D. A. (2020). Therapeutic jurisprudence and restorative justice in Brazil. International journal of offender therapy and comparative criminology, 64(6-7), 654-673.
Abstract
‘The Brazilian prison population in 2016 had increased by more than 700%, compared with the situation in the early 1990s, from 90 thousand to 726.7 thousand. The ordinary response to prison overcrowding came through changes to the justice system, such as Therapeutic Jurisprudence and Restorative Justice. Although these new processes are socially relevant, there are few studies about them anywhere, but especially in Brazil. This study seeks to discuss the perceptions of Brazilian judges upon these new ways of dispensing justice from the perspective of institutional change theory. The data collection involved document analysis, court-hearing observations, and interviews with 14 key-actors in the Brazilian justice system. The results show four dimensions—beliefs, motivations, commitment, and intergroup relations—that characterize the roles played by Brazilian judges working with Therapeutic Jurisprudence and Restorative Justice. This movement can be classified as the modal type of institutional change called layering and “radical” frame blending.’
Commentary
An original take on restorative justice in Brazil, which includes a comparison with therapeutic jurisprudence practices.
Reyes-Quilodran, C. A., LaBrenz, C. A., & Donoso, G. (2019). A path to peace: A comparative study of practitioners’ views of juvenile restorative justice in Chile, England, Italy, and Sweden. International Social Work, 62(1), 255-270.
Abstract
‘Recent attention to juvenile delinquency has led to calls for alternative approaches for youth offenders that can reduce recidivism. This research analyzes how practitioners in Sweden, England, Italy, and Chile perceive the implementation of victim offender mediation (VOM). An emphasis is given to challenges and strategies that practitioners in Sweden, England, and Italy report, in order to provide a framework for implementation of VOM in a country in the early stages of implementation and consideration, such as Chile. An instrumental comparative case study design was used to compare the four cases of VOM implementation, conducting in-depth interviews in each country with key informants about the implementation process. The results suggest that practitioners are overwhelmingly satisfied with VOM in each European country, and that their experiences can be incorporated as lessons learned for practitioners in other countries seeking to implement VOM. Implications for adapting VOM to a different cultural context are described in the discussion, as well as a critical analysis of the need for more empirical evidence and further research on VOM and its underlying philosophy of social justice and accountability.’
Commentary
Research on restorative practitioners is still limited in extent, particularly in a comparative perspective. This paper is an updated comparative analysis of practitioners focussing on the youth justice sector
González Ramírez, I. X. (2021). The Transition from an Inquisitorial to an Adversarial Criminal Justice System: An Opportunity for Restorative Justice in Chile. In Gavrielides, T. (ed.) Comparative Restorative Justice (pp. 155-179). Springer, Cham.
Abstract
‘The chapter aims to analyse the differences in the application of restorative justice in Latin America and particularly in Chile after 20 years of transition from an inquisitorial criminal justice process to an adversarial one. During this time, some countries made penal mediation a normative part of the penal reform process, along with other more communitarian penal conflict management mechanisms as a way to put the opportunity principle into practice, granting prosecutors the freedom to take decisions on penal action. By contrast, in other countries these restorative mechanisms were not regulated, producing highly diverse effects. For this study a dogmatic and qualitative methodology was used, with a descriptive and exploratory design. Our conclusion is that in Latin American countries where restorative mechanisms were regulated by norms and in some cases the Constitution, their development and the acceptance of its operators was much higher, with a better perception of the people who took part in them vis-à-vis justice. By contrast, in other countries where no full regulation existed and these mechanisms only operated as pilot programmes, they tended to disappear after only developing alternative options and abbreviated or simplified trials, without using restorative methods, but rather with quick and superficial negotiations between the prosecutor and the defender, with little victim participation and no fulfilment of the goals and quality intended in their design. These outlets focused on judicial decongestion, which the parties involved to no understand and the general public considers negligence by the state apparatus faced with citizen safety, granting no effective solution to penal conflicts.’
Commentary
An excellent study which provides critical insights into the role of restorative justice in Chile
Uprimny, R., & Saffon, M. P. (2006). Transitional justice, restorative justice and reconciliation: Some insights from the Colombian case. Coming to Terms’ with Reconciliation–Working Paper Library.
Abstract
‘This paper aims at answering the following question: is it appropriate and convenient to use the restorative justice model as the dominant paradigm to analyze and solve the problems of transitional justice and reconciliation? We believe this is a relevant question, since many argue, especially after the South African transition, that transitional processes should be founded on restorative justice. This is the case of Colombia, where the restorative justice model has been defended by many as the best way to face the atrocities committed by paramilitary groups, which are currently negotiating peace with the government.’
Commentary
A fascinating analysis of the relations between restorative and transitional justice using Colombia as a case study
Bueno, I., Parmentier, S., & Weitekamp, E. (2016). Exploring restorative justice in situations of political violence: the case of Colombia. In Restorative justice in transitional settings (pp. 37-55). Routledge.
Abstract
‘Restorative justice has rapidly developed over the past decades as an alternative to existing criminal justice systems around the world and their way of dealing with common crimes. In a maximalist view, particular importance is attached to ‘restorative accountability’, which implies the accountability of offenders aiming at restoration of the harm inflicted to all concerned on the one hand and the eventual reintegration of offenders on the other hand. In this chapter, we take the emerging field of international crimes and serious human rights violations as objects of analysis, and wish to understand what a restorative justice ‘lens’ to such crimes and violations might look like and to what extent a ‘restorative transitional justice’ approach can be developed. We illustrate these aspects through the situation of ongoing violent conflict in Colombia, and look at the restoration of the harm to all concerned and the reintegration of offenders. We argue that the Colombian reality definitely holds potential to deal with international crimes and serious human rights violations in a restorative way, but that the existing mechanisms need to be further developed to achieve this.‘
Commentary
An original paper aiming to develop a ‘restorative transitional justice’ focussing on the Colombian case.
Galain Palermo, P., del Castillo, F., & Fraiman, R. (2019). Restorative Justice in Uruguay: A Change of Lenses in a Reform of Criminal Justice?. European Journal for Security Research, 4(1), 131-147.
Abstract
‘In recent decades, several countries have adopted restorative justice as a means of conflict resolution. While this tradition has deep roots in English-speaking and European countries, the use of restorative justice has been limited in Latin America. In an innovative effort, the Uruguayan Ministry of the Interior developed a restorative justice program as part of a comprehensive reform of the criminal justice system that entailed significant transformations, mainly in the legal system (from an inquisitorial to an adversarial one) and the Uruguayan National Police Force. This article examines this restorative justice initiative in detail, describing the context of its implementation, its implications for the reform of the criminal justice system, its preliminary results and future challenges that lie ahead.‘
Commentary
Uruguay, differently from Brazil, Colombia and Chile, is a South American state wherein the development of restorative justice has been little studied, probably due to the limited practical diffusion. This paper provides an informative and interesting overview of this unexplored context.
Macfarlane, J. (2006). Working towards restorative justice in Ethiopia: integrating traditional conflict resolution systems with the formal legal system. Cardozo J. Conflict Resol., 8, 487.
Abstract
‘Most legal scholars study the formal legal system, focusing on principles of law and state-sanctioned procedures and institutions.1 However, we know that this is only one aspect of the complex landscape of dispute resolution. In every country, community, and organization, systems of informal dispute resolution systems – often based on community customs or familial relationships, or embedded in institutional practices – run alongside the “official” state sanctioned processes…’
Commentary
An original work on restorative justice is a rather unexplored geographical context – Ethiopia. Particularly valuable for the attempt to explore the relations between restorative justice and local traditional dispute resolution mechanisms
Regalia, C., Pelucchi, S., Paleari, F. G., Manzi, C., & Brambilla, M. (2015). Forgiving the terrorists of the Years of Lead in Italy: The role of restorative justice beliefs and sociocognitive determinants. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 18(5), 609-623.
Abstract
‘The period of political terrorism named the “Years of Lead” (Anni di Piombo) started in Italy at the end of the 1960s and lasted until the late 1980s. The social wounds of this bloody time are still not healed, and there is a social debate about the opportunity to concede forgiveness to those responsible for those crimes. Drawing from the intergroup forgiveness literature, we tested a model explaining under which conditions forgiveness towards terrorists could be supported by Italian citizens. The model was tested in two generations: 331 Italian citizens who were adolescents or adults during the terrorism period and 208 Italian young adults born after the end of the Years of Lead. Findings showed that restorative justice beliefs and sociocognitive variables, like outgroup empathy and trust, were uniquely linked to forgiveness towards the terrorists.’
Commentary
A very interesting work on one specific experience of restorative justice and a historical case of terrorism in Italy.
Tomasek, J., Krulichova, E., & Sachova, P. M. (2022). Restorative Justice Programs in Czech Prisons: The Role of Perceived Usefulness and Familiarity with the Program. The Prison Journal, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/00328855221136198
Abstract
‘The main objective of this study is to examine interest in the implementation of five restorative justice programs as reported by 225 employes of the Prison Service of the Czech Republic and to identify the factors that underpin such interest. The results show that perceived usefulness and familiarity with the program are crucial factors that influence the respondent’s interest in program implementation. Additionally, awareness of the concept of restorative justice and agreement with its principles are likely to have an indirect effect, mediated through perceived usefulness.‘
Commentary
We know very little on restorative justice as applied in Eastern European countries. this article focussing on Czech Republic, provides informative insights into this little known geographical and applicative context.
“The question of hegemony is always the question of a new cultural order.”
Stuart Hall