REPRESSIVE VERSUS RESTORATIVE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE: A CASE FOR INTEGRATIVE PRAXIS was published in Contemporary Justice Review, 2000, Vol. 3(1).This short essay was written in response to Bruce A. Arrigo's "Social Justice and Critical Criminology: On Integrating Knowledge" in the same issue of CJR.

ABSTRACT: The thesis of this essay is that the emancipation of theory and practice proceed together. The latter does not wait for the former and the former does not lead the latter. Rather, a balanced and integrative approach compels simultaneous attention to both because, when it comes to the social realities of criminal justice, the theories and practices of repressive, restorative, and social justice already exist. Therefore, to postpone one's engagement in the everyday struggles of criminal justice, while working out the evolving theories of critical criminology, is to engage in the luxury of armchair criminology.


In capturing four core knowledge dimensions and representing the commonly shared themes or points of convergence among tweleve critical criminological orientations, Bruce Arrigo has admirably and successfully taken the initial steps toward conceputalizing a synthetic or integrative approach to an "evolving theory of social justice." Situated within an existential and humanistic framework, Arrigo maintains among other things, that the "person-world dialectic," the "demystification of disciplinary systems," and the "narrative of crime, justice and community" come together to inform the integrative theme of "restoration and reconciliation." In short, struggles to be human and to be free, and narratives on being and becoming and on redemption, serve as linkages between these diverse yet complementary interpretations of crime and social justice.

At the same time, at the very end of his essay Arrigo tells us:

social justice must not be something forever abstract; an artifact of philosophy removed from all human praxis. Thus, in the midst of such invaluable conceptual analysis, the place for social action must not be forgotten. For now, however, this emancipatory enterprise must wait. The struggle for critical criminology is one of developing better, more theoretically sophisticated integrative inquiries.

I beg to differ with this last substantial point but not to dwell on it. Simply put, the alleged dichotomy between theory and practice is not only a fallacious one, but it seems to me that it flies in the face of integrating critical knowledges. More particularly, it seems contradictory to Arrigo's argument as I understand it, since his four domains of knowledge each revolve around practice and active engagement. In other words, the emancipatory enterprise of social justice need not wait because as the theory and practice of critical criminology both struggle to evolve, each informs the other.

STYLES OF JUSTICE

Elsewhere and in the context of the intersections of class, race, and gender, Barak, Flavin, and Leighton (2001) have categorized three fundamental scenarios for controlling crime and enhancing justice: "repressive," "restorative," and "social." Each of these modes or styles or approaches to "criminal justice" rests on implicit and explicit assumptions about the nature of human beings, social organization, crime, power, control, and so on. As Arrigo points out: "critical criminologists envision a dramatically different social order than their non-critical counterparts." In part that difference is expressed in the types of social policies that are articulated by criminologists and non-criminologists alike.

Very briefly, repressive scenarios of justice include images of criminals as "other" and images of crime as "catastrophic." Restorative scenarios of justice include images of criminals as "self" and images of crime as "commonplace." Moreover, repressive styles of justice emphasize policies of "target hardening," "proactive policing," "judicial restraint," and the "new penology." Restorative styles of justice emphasize policies of "reconciliation," "reparation," "reintegration," and "habilitation" (see also Garland, 1999). By contrast, social scenarios of justice include images of criminals as "social" and images of crime as "political." Social styles of justice emphasize policies of "education," "health care," "social capital," and "corporate regulation."

In practical terms, restorative justice is about victim-offender encounters, offenders recompensating victims, victims taking an active or participatory role in the criminal justice system, and the reintegration of victims and offenders and the community. For example, victim-offender, reconciliation programs offer a context in which the two parties to the crime have an opportunity to face one another. An encounter offers victims and offenders the chance to decide "what they consider relevant to a discussion of the crime, tends to humanize each of them to one another and permits them substantial creativity in constructing a response that deals not only with the injustice that occurred but with the futures of both parties as well" (Van Hess and Heetderks Strong, 1997: 89).

Restorative justice, in other words, desires that both offenders and victims be allowed to actively participate in the formal criminal justice process. Reintegration of both victims and offenders recognizes their common needs to find wholeness and to establish themselves in the community as participating members. Unlike repressive criminal justice that separates formal and informal aspects of social control, polarizes the parties and limits their contact, and reduces their conflicts to only legally relevant material, restorative criminal justice is about bringing the state and the community together again for the purposes of empowering victims, offenders, and communities.

Like restorative justice, social justice views crime as social harm and social injury. It goes further, however, in recognizing that there are "crimes against humanity" or crime as a violation of fundamental human rights, such as the right to life, liberty, happiness, and self-determination or as Herman and Julia Schwendginer (1970) maintained, the right to be free from exploitation, oppression, hatred, racism, sexism, imperialism, and so on. Scenarios of social justice refuse to accommodate or to ignore the production of inequalities in society and the role of law in that construction. Rather than accept the limited views of justice contained in the procedural and substantive criminal justice as both repressive and restorative justice do, social justice incorporates both the behavioral violations of human rights that have not necessarily been prohibited by criminal, regulatory, or civil law, as well as those abuses, evasions, or perversions, domestic and international, in the application of law by states and their agents. In short, policies of social justice are not limited to the formal and informal policies of criminal justice and the administration of the criminal law.

More specifically, scenarios of repressive justice focus almost exclusively on selective and stricter law enforcement and punishment, scenarios of restorative justice focus on the victim as well as the offender and on the relations between them as actual people and the community, and scenarios of social justice focus on the social ecologies of crime and market society in their relations with the more impersonal policies and macro-sociologies of political economy and inequality. Although different policies flow from each of the styles or scenarios of justice, it can be argued that on a "continuum of justice," that restorative justice would be in the middle as it shares some assumptions in common with both repressive justice and social justice. As the same time, it can be further argued that in terms of reducing crime and enhancing justice, the scenarios of restorative and social justice may be viewed as part of the critically-based integrative praxis for an evolving theory and policy of social justice.

AN INTEGRATIVE SCENARIO OF RESTORATIVE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

Barak, Flavin, and Leighton (2001)conclude in their recent study of class, race, gender, crime, and the American criminal justice system that the U.S. needs to scale back its repressive styles of justice as these are emotionally charged and racially divisive, exclusive, and often counterproductive efforts in crime control. We also conclude that the U.S. would benefit from expanding the styles of restorative justice with its emphasis on healing, responsibility, and reintegration of self and community. However, without integrating more fundamental and braoder styles of social justice whose policies address the inequalities in the delivery of goods and services generally, then inequalities of class, race, and gender will continue to shape the social and political realities of criminal justice in America.

As for the scenarios of restorative and social justice interacting together, they provide for a two-pronged approach to reducing crime and enhancing justice. In addition to their styles of justice engaging in a qualitatively more humane and inclusive approach to crime control than the styles of repressive justice, they allow for a more comprehensive exposure to justice inside and outside of its legal-criminal administration. By taking a more holistic and integrative approach to the social ecologies of crime, these connected models encourage and actively support the participation of offenders, victims, and communities of interest in the processes of justice. From these altered and reinforcing perspectives on the larger relations of crime and punishment, come a differently oriented crime control, one based on healing and the struggle for equality and inclusiveness of peoples as opposed to one based on pain and the struggle for law and order, hierarchy and privilege.

Thus, within the context of integrating knowledges and evolving theories of crime and social justice, lies the required feedback loops between theory and practice as well as the necessary sites for the actual testing and developing of policy applications. This brings me full circle to my thesis: the emancipatory emterprises of theory and practice proceed together as they are truly interdependent. The latter does not wait for the former, and the former does not lead the latter. A balanced and integrative approach compels simultaneous attention to both theory and practice. In sum, theory and practice must struggle in tandem, and so must critical criminology and social justice.

For example, with the developed nation-states, while there is a great deal of "risk analysis," "actuarial examination," and "legal rationalization" of the criminal justice system, there are no clear-cut directions toward either repressive, restorative, or social justice in general, or of trends in criminal sentencing and punishment in particular. So, on the one hand, we witness the United States and the the United Kingdom experiencing tougher and longer sentencing schemes; whereas, on the other hand, Germany and the Netherlands have resisted such tendencies, keeping their punishment schemes in line with their more "liberal" practices of the post-World War II generation (Barak, 2000).

Similarly, the USA and the UK have started down the roads of profitability and of privatizing some of their responses to crime, whereas Germany and the Netherlands have not done so. At the same time, all four of these developed nation-states have been experimenting with restorative forms of justice and with victim compensation schemes, not to mention other forms of community law enforcement and corrections, reminiscent of some of the practices characteristic of post-traditional societies, like Ghana or the Navajo Nationa (Barak, 2000). The point is that the theories and practices of repressive, restorative, and social justice already exist in the various worlds of criminal justice. Therefore, in term of the victims and beneficiaries of these ongoing policies, it is a luxury of "armchair criminologists" to disengage from the everyday realities of criminal justice, and to assert that the emancipatory practices of social justice must be patient and wait for the evolving theories of critical criminology to work out the problems of crime and justice.

References

Barak, G. (Ed.). (2000). Crime and Crime Control: A Global View. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press.

Barak,G., Flavin, J. and Leighton, P. (2001). Class, Race, Gender, and Crime: Social Realities of Justice in America. Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Company.

Garland, D. (1999). "The Commonplace and the Catastrophic: Interpretations of Crime in Late Modernity." Theoretical Criminology, 3: 353-364.

Schwendinger, H. and Schwendinger, J. (1970). "Defenders of Order or Guardians of Human Rights?" Issues in Criminology, 5:123-157.

Van Ness, D. and Heetderks Strong, K. (1997). Restoring Justice. Cincinnati: Anderson Publishing Company.