Immature offenders. A critical history of the representations of the offender in restorative justice

Abstract

This paper reconstructs and discusses how the ‘offender’ is represented within policy documents, legal statutes and scholarly literature on restorative justice, published and circulated in England and Wales over the last thirty years. The research first outlines the most wide-ranging and recurrent images and implicit assumptions of the offender in restorative justice. A set of specific offender’s features will be singled out, and the ‘ideal offender’ of restorative justice will be profiled. The final step of this work consists of mapping out the cultural context within which this ideal has emerged, in a historical perspective. The overall goal is to shed light on some taken-for-granted images surrounding the offender in restorative justice, and on the cultural context within which they have developed. In this way, it is possible to contribute toward the critical re-assessment of restorative justice whilst considering implications beyond the British context.

Keywords:

• Restorative justice
• offender
• Michel Foucault
• archaeology
• ‘conventional’ criminal justice

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Kirsty Boutle for her invaluable help.

Notes

1. The wide timespan considered could suggest that the images of the offender in RJ may have changed over time. However, it should be clarified that the majority of documents analysed here have been published between 2000 and 2015. In this more limited time frame no significant changes can be identified while continuity seems predominant. The small amount of documents between 1980–2000 does not allow for an analysis of changes over time of the representations of the offender.

2. In England and Wales the vocabulary of victim-offender mediation arose independently from the RJ. These two vocabularies converged during the late 1980’, whereby victim-offender mediation came to be conceptually linked as a specific practice to the RJ theory, also thanks to the reception of Howard Zehr’s work (Marshall, 1996; Wright & Galaway, 1989).

3. The paper also includes an examination of the North American research on RJ as well as of EU and UN policy/legal regulations, due to their well documented influence on the UK research (Marshall, 1996, p. 23; Marshall & Merry, 1990, p. 7; Newburn, 1995, p. 232) and legislation.

4. RJ processes based on the theory of reintegrative shaming were introduced in the UK in the mid-1990s by the Thames Valley Police and have since been used by many other UK police forces ‘so that in the UK, RJ has come to be identified for many years with Braithwaite’s theory of reintegrative shaming and the Wagga model of conferencing’ (Johnstone, 2011, p. 4).

5. In this regard, see the case studies in the policy documents produced by the Home Office or by the RJ Council which often portray juvenile offenders as paradigmatic examples of RJ processes participants.

6. The criterion followed to select these conditions has been the presence of overlapping similarities between the discourses on the offender in RJ and the very discourses which constitute these conditions.

7. For a more thorough analysis of these factors please see Maglione, 2017b.