Retributive and restorative justice.

Source: (2008) Law and Human Behaviour

The emergence of restorative justice as an
alternative model to Western, court-based criminal justice
may have important implications for the psychology of
justice. It is proposed that two different notions of justice
affect responses to rule-breaking: restorative and retributive
justice. Retributive justice essentially refers to the
repair of justice through unilateral imposition of punishment,
whereas restorative justice means the repair of
justice through reaffirming a shared value-consensus in a
bilateral process. Among the symbolic implications of
transgressions, concerns about status and power are primarily
related to retributive justice and concerns about
shared values are primarily related to restorative justice. At
the core of these processes, however, lies the parties’
construal of their identity relation, specifically whether or
not respondents perceive to share an identity with the
offender. The specific case of intergroup transgressions is
discussed, as are implications for future research on
restoring a sense of justice after rule-breaking. (authors’ abstract)