Review: Restorative Justice-Theories and Practices of Moral Imagination

The journey starts with a 32 page introduction which proclaims that criminal justice is in a state of dysfunction or crisis. No one disputes that our nation incarcerates too many and often mindlessly follows sentencing guidelines more than common sense. The Rockefeller era like sentencing mandates and a zero tolerance mentality is condemned with the firm claim that ‘fixing the harm’ RJ is far better that what has been N. American criminal and juvenile  justice in the past half century. Levad concludes that RJ offers “space for vivid and expansive moral imagining that can foster justice as equity in order to respond to the crisis in our criminal justice / juvenile justice systems.” She pulls some of the moral imagination verbiage from the 2005 work by former Eastern Mennonite University professor (and Howard Zehr colleague) John Paul Lederach. The application of moral imagination allows judges, lawyers, probation staff and others to ‘repair the harm’ by seeing crime and conflict as a situation where  those effected by  crimes (victims and the community)  can be best served by the application of the emotion, imagination and perception lacking in what she refers to as the current “nail em – and -jail em” system.

Levad does a good job in sharing the characteristics of the rehabilitative, the retributive, and restorative models of justice delivery. The chart comparing these three R’s (retribution, rehabilitation, restoration) is in and of itself worth study, memorizing and sharing. The majority of the book is a well annotated overview of past and future promise in a narrow field or the much larger RJ, mediation and conflict resolution arena. She offers points of caution where appropriate in a segment on the dangerous uses of restorative justice. This author, now an assistant professor with the St. Thomas University in St. Paul, Minnesota, uses John Braithwaite’s 2002 pyramid of restorative justice to show the needed concerns for public safety and the balance between incapacitation and restoration and rehabilitation.