Punitive restoration and restorative justice.

Criminal justice policy faces the twin challenges of improving our crime reduction efforts while increasing public confidence. These challenges are exacerbated by the fact that at least some measures popular with the public are counterproductive to greater crime reduction. How to achieve greater crime reduction without sacrificing public confidence? While restorative justice approaches offer a promising alternative to traditional sentencing with the potential to achieve these goals, they suffer from several serious obstacles, not least their relatively limited applicability, flexibility, and public support. Punitive restoration is a new and distinctive idea about restorative justice modeled on an important principle of stakeholding, which states that those who have a stake in penal outcomes should have a say about them. Punitive restoration is restorative insofar as it aims to achieve the restoration of rights infringed or threatened by criminal offences. Punitive restoration is punitive insofar as the available options for this agreement are more punitive than found in most restorative justice approaches, such as the option of some form of hard treatment. Punitive restoration sheds new light on how we may meet the twin challenges of improving our efforts to reduce reoffending without sacrificing public confidence, demonstrating how restorative practices can be embedded deeper within the criminal justice system

Restorative Justice 4th annual conference: Criminal Justice Panel Chair

Over the past two years we have all experienced unprecedented challenges through the imposed restrictions on our day-to-day lives but we have also witnessed many examples of communities coming together to provide support, heal and rebuild. Despite this, we are still living in troubled times. We are increasingly seeing cases of interpersonal violence within our communities and find ourselves in times where war, conflict and premeditated acts of violence are becoming more commonplace. Class, gender, generational, religious, racial differences, political and social polarisation continue to leave our communities divided and disconnected and the notion of a just society all the more out of reach. This is why during this year’s conference we want to explore the potential for restorative justice and practices as an approach to building resilience within our communities. Thus, the theme of the 4th annual RJC conference is ‘Living in Troubled Times - Restorative approaches to building resilience