“Infancy, adolescence, and restorative justice: Strategies for promoting organizational reform.”

Source: (2001) In Restorative community justice: Repairing harm and transforming communities, ed. Gordon Bazemore and Mara Schiff, 151-169. With an introduction by Gordon Bazemore and Mara Schiff. Cincinnati, OH: Anderson Publishing Co.

Carey makes the point that application of restorative justice in most of the world is now only a few years old. Efforts at change from retributive criminal justice to restorative criminal justice have run into challenges and barriers. While there are successes, there are also significant failures. How then can an agency or system effect this transformation and sustain it? Carey uses a human developmental model to describe transition from a criminal justice agency or system characterized by retributive justice to one characterized by restorative justice. He contends that agencies or systems go through three phases which can be termed infancy, adolescence, and adulthood. An agency, for example, must sustain the drive for change over developmental stages, and it must modify its policies and procedures in interaction with its changing needs as it evolves through developmental states. To detail this, Carey examines the following key topics: restorative justice principles with respect to justice agency cultures; the nature of organizational culture; developmental stages toward cultural shift (infancy, adolescence, adulthood); managers. Leaders, and restorative justice reform; and the role of joy in organizational transformation.