Justice in Restorative Justice

Source: (2005) Paper presented at “Building a Global Alliance for Restorative Practices and Family Empowerment, Part 3”, co-hosted by the International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP) and Real Justice Australia, March 3-5, in Penrith, New South Wales, Australia. Downloaded 14 April 2005.

In the last twenty years many sectors of democratic society expressed dissatisfaction
with institutionalised systems of justice. They realised that prisons were being used as warehouses exclusively for the incarceration of offenders rather than places of
training and reformation, and that the needs of victims were largely ignored. The expected improvement in reconviction rates had not occurred, and the rising prison population drained more community resources at the expense of education, health, and social services.
The authoritarians did not abandon their position, but advocated the use of longer sentences and more repressive prison conditions. But the less conservative, through what came to be called the restorative justice movement, introduced alternative measures to produce more positive outcomes for offenders, their victims, and the community.
While many other conference presenters outlined the procedures they found useful to resolve issues at grass roots between specific parties, this paper focussed on the fundamental need for justice per se. It argued firstly that the need was so profound as to denote that justice deserved equal recognition with other such needs in a major theory of personality, and secondly that the resolution of injustice required remedies for a range of interacting factors beyond those that currently came into consideration. Author’s abstract.