Vol. 14 No. 1 (January 2004)

A RESTORATIVE JUSTICE READER: TEXTS, SOURCES, AND CONTEXT, edited by Gerry Johnstone. Devon, UK: Willan Publishing. 520 pp. Paper £26.00 / US $37.50. ISBN 1-903240-81-6. Hardback £50.00 / US $69.95. ISBN 1-903240-82-4.

Reviewed by William Lyons, University of Akron Department of Political Science. Email: wtlyons@uakron.edu .

Thinking About Restorative Justice

Edited volumes work for our students when they combine three essential characteristics, as A RESORATIVE JUSTICE READER succeeds in doing. This volume combines classic readings with the best recent work in the field to frame current controversies within an ongoing conversation. It also compares several competing positions with each other and juxtaposes them against a discrete set of thoughtful, coherent, and challenging themes developed by the editor and sustained throughout the book. Finally, this volume takes every opportunity to clarify the relevance of past and present theoretical controversies for the obstacles we face today in our efforts either to improve the ways we manage conflict or advance a paradigm-shifting challenge to the prevailing culture of control. By successfully doing each of these, the editor has assembled a useful compendium. I recommend it for use in either advanced undergraduate or graduate courses examining crime, justice, and governance issues with an eye toward understanding one of the most important alternative discourses available to challenge the power of punitive politics and a culture of fear.

Johnstone has brought together in a single volume a wonderfully rich selection of classic and contemporary texts on restorative justice. Selections from classic essays written by Nils Christie, Howard Zehr, Tony Marshall, Randy Barnett, and John Braithwaite clearly focus on the themes Johnstone highlights in his introductory essays, and together create a wonderfully seamless sense of an ongoing, critical, and significant conversation about crime and politics. Including Barnett and Christie remind readers of the real fear of state capture, professional colonization, and the associated loss of opportunities to develop the skills necessary for an effective democratic citizenship. Christie's 1977 essay (p.62), describing the consequences of state-centered crime control, provides powerful discursive resources for making sense of current debates about crime and punishment. When "conflicts become the property of lawyers," disputants' loss of control over their own lives can create a popular demand for the criminal stereotypes that are readily supplied by public and private leaders willing to, as Braithwaite's essay (p.90) puts it, "rule through fear and by crushing deliberative democracy," by amplifying those fears that enhance state agency and strengthen police powers.

This volume not only links a variety of old and new texts by framing current controversies within an ongoing conversation, it also highlights the sometimes deep and divisive issues that define the the policy and the politics surrounding restorative justice. Part B provides selections from Berman, Weitekamp, Ross, Yazzie and Zion, and Allard and Northey, that are designed to show that restorative justice has a rich and varied past, filled with vigorous debate and practical innovation. Johnstone is able to develop significant themes without excessively intruding upon or failing to provide useful direction for the reader's examination of restorative justice. The editor highlights the emergence of restorative justice concepts in the form of innovative programs developed by practitioners, both historically (with selections on the practices within various indigenous cultures) and currently as a social movement, although including a selection from Tiger and Levy (1977) or a similar text that places these micro reforms within their larger context would have been a useful addition. This developmental theme is captured, albeit with some subtlety, in a comparative context, recognizing the importance of subsequent scholarly inquiry and the connections between theory and practice, law and social movements, religious and secular politics.

A second theme identified by Johnstone and developed in the selected texts is the importance of debates about the meaning of key terms like restorative justice, community, and conflict. Essays in Parts C and D by Peachey, Wright, Morris and Maxwell, Moore and O'Connell, Bazemore and Umbreit, critically assessing contemporary programmatic and political controversies, provide valuable direction for readers interested in understanding restorative justice. At the same time, these essays draw the reader's attention to significant scholarly and political debates about justice, punishment, and agency. One extremely interesting aspect of this theme, central to both evaluating restorative justice and to advancing democratic politics, is the attention given to discussing the relative merits of more socialized or more privatized forms of conflict management. Because some see restorative justice as resulting in an undesirable privatization of conflict management, and others argue that socializing conflicts can only mean ceding control to state agents and contributing to the atrophy of community, the many essays in this volume that address these controversies provide critical insight into the promise and risk of reforms like restorative justice. Walgrave (p.265), for instance, notes that "giving priority to reparation rather than retribution," instead of amplifying dis-empowering fears, is less about privatizing crime control and more about giving disputes back to disputants within a cultural context more likely to ensure that effective settlement involves repairing relationships and compensation for harms to the community (pp.256-257).

In addition to bringing together a provocative set of texts, woven into a conversational fabric portraying the many policy conflicts central to understanding restorative justice, this volume also draws attention to the political forces that the restorative justice movement reflects and challenges. The final section, Part E, includes essays from Daly, Duff, Young, Levant et al, Ashworth, Hudson, Pavlich, and Morris, that provide some of the most thoughtful and provocative reading in this superb volume. These essays pick up on Johnstone's promise in his introductory essay where he presents the familiar description of the prevailing-excessively punitive and state centered-official definition of the relationship between crime and crime control. Johnstone then moves away from official concern for efficiency in the criminal justice system and toward an examination of how this narrow set of perennial questions-this menu of fears and the particular publics whose interests are served by responding to them, while muting others-has come to dominate and impoverish public deliberations. Restorative justice, Johnstone suggests in his essay, ought to be framed as a struggle, as a set of ideas and practices, both aspiring to become more than an innovative tool enhancing state criminal justice.

In Johnstone's words "an increasingly significant and influential social movement has emerged which questions both the idea that dispensing justice and controlling crime are jobs for the criminal justice system and the notion that the best tool for performing these tasks is judicial punishment. Advocates of restorative justice suggest that, instead of relying entirely upon the criminal justice state and its professional employees to handle crime, ordinary citizens affected by crime should participate in defining and handling their own crime problems. The role of criminal justice agencies and officials should be to facilitate processes whereby ordinary people do justice, rather than to take over complete responsibility for the task" (p.1).

Many readers will appreciate that Johnstone provides this useful framing device, and that the selections in Part E pick up on this, particularly because the perspective brings to light important controversies regarding state agency, community empowerment, and the politics of reform. But the contributions on these issues serve more to tantalize than to analyze. The book leaves us painfully aware of important questions, but in my view, provides too little analysis to advance our thinking on them. Essential issues are presented, providing the reader with plenty to think about and an introduction to many of the important writers in this field that can lead to further assessment. For all these reasons Johnstone's A RESORATIVE JUSTICE READER is quite valuable, and I highly recommend it.

REFERENCES:

Michael Tiger and Madeleine Levy. 1977. LAW & THE RISE OF CAPITALISM. New York: Monthly Review Press.

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Copyright 2004 by the author, William Lyons.