Rethinking Restorative and Community Justice: A Postmodern Inquiry

Source: (2004) Contemporary Justice Review 7(1): 91-100.

Restorative justice and community justice have often been conflated in the extant literature and the practice community, particularly when assessing how best to respond to the problems posed by crime and wrongdoing. In contrast, however, McCold (2004, this issue) argues that merging both models is misguided, as this absorption significantly dilutes, undermines, and undoes the healing and reparative effects intended by the restorative justice approach. This article examines whether and to what extent McCold’s thesis is correct. By utilizing selected insights from postmodern social theory, several challenges to the restorative-community justice distinction are presented. Along the way, a number of strategies for fashioning a more critically animated model of victim-offender-community reconciliation are tentatively proposed. Author’s abstract.