LAWS IN U.S

Restorative Justice as an Alternative to Incarceration: Values, Arguments and Legislation of Laws in the U.S

Restorative Justice as an Alternative to Incarceration: Values, Arguments and Legislation of Laws in the U.S

Introduction

One of the significant international developments in our current thinking about crime is the growing interest in restorative justice. So to speak, this form of making justice offers a fundamentally different framework for understanding and responding to crime and victimization in society than the criminal justice. The term itself was coined by criminologist Albert Eglash in his article discussing restitution that was published in 1977 (Ness & Strong, 1997; Eglash, 1977).

According to restorative justice scholars and criminologists, the definition of restorative justice is that it is a form of justice that outlines the importance of elevating the role of crime victims, and community members, while holding offenders directly accountable to the people they have violated and restoring the emotional and material losses of victims by providing a range of opportunities for dialogue, negotiation and problem solving whenever possible that can lead to a greater sense of community safety, conflict resolution and closure for all involved parties (Wright, 1996; Zehr & Mika, 1998; Johnston, 2004).

In this respect, Marshall (1996), a British criminologist emphasized the collaboration in the restorative justice process where all the parties with a stake in a particular offense come together to resolve collectively how to deal with the aftermath of the offense and its implications for the future. While this definition is helpful in presenting the significant differences between the punitive justice and the restorative justice, it also raises many questions about the operational definition of each of the element that composes the definition. For example: which parties does the definition refer to? And how the collective resolution is achieved?

Accordingly, a goal for many scholars was to set forth the requirements of restorative justice, so that the efforts that are made in reaching a resolution would be classifiable according to the presence or absence of a set of principles of restorative justice in an approach and/or practice (McCold, 1996; Marshall, 1997; Sharpe, 1998). In this regard, Sharpe (1998) suggested five key principles of restorative justice as follows:

First, restorative justice invites full participation and consensus. Second, restorative justice seeks to heal what is broken. Third, restorative justice seeks full and direct accountability. Fourth, restorative justice seeks to reunite what has been divided. Finally, restorative justice seeks to strengthen the community in order to prevent further harms. Nevertheless, some scholars appear to limit restorative justice to a face-to-face process, involving victim, offender and other stakeholders, while some others have proposed a “relational justice” to emphasize the personal dimensions of restorative justice, and a “restorative justice community”, which emphasizes the community`s central place in the restorative justice process ((Burnside & Baker, 1994).

In the first case scenario of advocators, restorative justice is confined to a form of diversion, because it is a belief that some crimes can only be responded to by the use of some ...