Restorative Justice

Restorative justice is a unique framework for understanding and responding to crime that [Page 1389]attempts to balance the rights and interests of crime victims, offenders, and the community. It involves and respects victims, who traditionally have been ignored. It holds offenders accountable to their victims, their families, and their communities. It provides valuable learning experiences that offer law-abiding lifestyles as realistic alternatives to criminality. The community takes an active role in the justice process, which results in an environment of peace and safety and an atmosphere of unity. Albert Eglash is generally credited with coining the term “restorative justice” in his 1977 article “Beyond Restitution: Creative Restitution.” In it, he identified three types of criminal justice: retributive, rehabilitative, and restorative.

The first type, retributive justice, views crime primarily as acts that violate criminal laws established by governments. In this view, the state is the victim, and the state determines guilt, demands accountability through punishment, and administers sanctions through which the punishment is achieved. This occurs in an adversarial system between the offender and the state governed by a series of rules in which one side wins while the other side loses. The retributive system has a number of shortcomings: It is based on punishment, concentrates on the actions of the offender, and denies victim and community participation in the justice process. Retributive justice meets neither the needs of the victim nor those of the offender. The process neglects victims and fails to achieve accountability or deterrence.

The second type, rehabilitative justice, is based on a therapeutic approach to offenders. Like retributive justice, it views the state as the victim and emphasizes accountability through punishment, but it also addresses the offender's need for treatment. Rehabilitative justice shares many of the shortcomings of retributive justice in that it also concentrates on the actions of the offender and denies victim and community participation in the justice process.

The third category of criminal justice is restorative justice, a restitution-based system that Eglash presents as an alternative to the two others. Rooted in biblical principles, restorative justice differs from them in viewing crime as a violation of people and relationships. It concentrates on the harmful outcomes of offenders' actions. The restorative justice process actively engages victims, communities, and offenders in a process whose main objectives are to restore, repair, and promote healing.

The perspective we use to examine crime and justice determines what gets included as relevant variables, what we consider their relative importance to be, and what we consider proper outcomes. Accordingly, the fundamental principles of restorative justice are derived from its focus, process, and outcome.