Restorative Justice

Read this article, which describes the key differences between retributive and restorative justice. In social and political philosophy, there are traditionally two major types of justice: distributive justice describes how the status, wealth, and goods in society will be portioned out from the beginning, and retributive justice describes punishments, penalties, and restitution for situations where someone wrongs someone else and breaks a social contract. In recent years, retributive justice theory has been contrasted with restorative justice: retributive justice focuses on punishment and penalty, while restorative justice focuses on restitution and restoring community relationships.

1. Definition

1.1. Difference from other approaches

According to Howard Zehr, restorative justice differs from traditional criminal justice in terms of the guiding questions it asks. In restorative justice, the questions are:

  1.  Who has been hurt?
  2.  What are their needs?
  3. Whose obligations are these?
  4. What are the causes?
  5. Who has a stake in the situation?
  6. What is the appropriate process to involve stakeholders in an effort to address causes and put things right?
In contrast, traditional criminal justice asks:

  1. What laws have been broken?
  2. Who did it?
  3. What do the offender(s) deserve?

Others, however, have argued that there are several similarities between restorative justice and traditional criminal justice, and that some cases of restorative justice constitute punishment from the perspectives of some positions on what punishment is.

Restorative justice is also different from the adversarial legal process or that of civil litigation.

As Braithwaite writes, "Court-annexed ADR (alternative dispute resolution) and restorative justice could not be philosophically further apart". While the former seeks to address only legally relevant issues and to protect both parties' rights, restorative justice aims at "expanding the issues beyond those that are legally relevant, especially into underlying relationships".