….What restorative justice offers, he says, is not so much new justice practices but a different view of crime and a new goal for justice: crime is seen as a source of harm that must be repaired. Moreover, the essential harm of crime is the loss of trust, on both interpersonal and social levels. What victims and communities need is to have their trust restored. The essential obligation of offenders is to show that they are trustworthy. The purpose of justice should be to encourage this process.
The overriding goal of justice, then, ought to be the restoration of trust. The attempt to achieve this on both personal and social levels, he argues, can provide a unifying umbrella for our response to crime. Rather than replacing other, more traditional goals, it would become the overriding consideration in sentencing, providing rationales for and limits to the application of goals such as incapacitation and punishment.
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