Restorative Prisons?

Source: (2006) M.A. Thesis. Department of Criminology. Univeristy of Ottawa.

In my study, I have identified 277 initiatives that claim to be in the business of restorative justice, many of which are either funded, administrated or receive their case loads from institutions within the existing ‘criminal justice’ system. In these cases, we must ask ourselves whether the restorative justice initiatives operating within the parameters of the ‘criminal justice’ system adhere to the objectives, values and principles outlined in the philosophy of restorative justice. To begin to address this very question, which is the central objective of this study, I examine one particular pilot project administered by Correction Service Canada (CSC) from April 2001 to November 2005 called the Restorative Justice Unit (RJ Unit). This program, which was housed in Grande Cache Institution (GCI), was created by CSC to determine whether or not it would be feasible to transform the prison into a restorative correctional environment. In my analysis of this program, I unpack this notion and demonstrate that CSC has merely adopted the descriptors of the restorative approach to legitimate punishment and control under the guise of restorative justice and the rehabilitative rhetoric of the cognitive behavioural approach. (author’s abstract)