Redefining justice

At its heart, ‘Redefining Justice’ asserts that victims are individuals
and need joined-up support across health, education, housing and social
services, as well as the criminal justice system (CSJ). It observes
that “Redefining justice to meet the needs of victims will often go
beyond the CJS to areas where no existing code or pledge is in place.”
The truth is that we would do well to redefine justice in even more
radical ways.

For a start, we need to reconnect crime control and criminal justice
with broader themes of social justice and social reconstruction. Many
of those caught up in the system are people whom the criminal justice
process is ill-equipped to deal with: for instance, it is estimated
that 47 per cent of male sentenced prisoners ran away from home as a
child; 49 per cent were excluded from school; 72 per cent suffer from
two or more mental disorders; 66 per cent used drugs in the previous
year; and 67 per cent were unemployed prior to their imprisonment.
Biblically, these are people who deserve compassion not vengence; for
them retribution brings not justice but further injustice.

….The criminal justice process can by itself have only a limited
effect on the general level of crime. Justice should be a community
responsibility, bringing with it community obligations. If citizens,
local communities and courts are to exercise these, then the State
needs to devolve responsibility and give us all a greater role in
securing justice.

By renewing civic society, we might well expect to find crime being
dealt with more effectively. Again, such action is far beyond the scope
and capacity of the statutory criminal justice agencies.

As we have noted previously, in contrast with the trend of 64 per
cent of prisoners who are reconvicted within two years of being
released, another government report into restorative justice schemes
last year found that “offenders who participated in restorative justice
committed statistically significantly fewer offences (in terms of
reconvictions) in the subsequent two years than offenders in the
control group”.

Read the whole article.