MAKING SENSE OF TOM: SEEING THE REPARATIVE IN RESTORATIVE JUSTICE

Abstract

This paper considers the contribution of a creative writing project to restorative youth justice though a case study in which a young offender is filmed working on a one‐to‐one basis with a poet over a number of weeks. The restitutive and reparative dimensions of restorative justice are identified and the article shows reparative processes at work through transcribed extracts of video data. The analysis is informed by a psycho‐societal perspective which attends to the dialogue around social roles and identities and the intersubjective process of the sessions. It considers the liminal role of the poet in relation to the youth justice system and the moral community which surrounds the young man in question. Conclusions from short‐term case‐based studies are necessarily tentative and must await larger longitudinal studies. However, the material presented here shows how in using the position of the artist to good effect, the poet succeeds in helping the young offender find a language in which he begins to develop self‐reflective capacity, moral responsibility and hopes for a better future.

Keywords:

• self‐reflection
• restitution
• reparation
• restorative justice
• arts‐based interventions
• creative writing
• poet
• young offender
• moral responsibility

Notes

1. The Home Office has a historic preference for quantitative outcome based research. However, a case study based approach is indicated where the research question requires a view of research subjects as unique, complex, situated wholes. It may be especially suitable for the study of human service interventions where rich particularity is essential even though the purpose of the study may be to address questions of general policy or practice significance. A case study is an object of inquiry rather than a methodology and a variety of methodic strategies may therefore be used. Multi‐method approaches are particularly fruitful bringing different ‘lenses’ to bear on the field and these can be of varying scale and ambition. This article concerns a small study in which the observational data recorded on video are considered alongside secondary data in the form of ASSET core profiles — tools used by Youth Offending Teams to standardise referral and assessment information.

2. In the UK ‘psycho‐social’ and ‘psycho‐societal’ are used somewhat interchangeably, and in practice the intra‐ and inter‐subjective, the institutional and the socio‐political‐economic are imbricated. We use the term psycho‐societal in accordance with emerging European discourses and because it points to the development of forms of social and psychological analysis which describe an arc extending between the inner world individual and the global context in which s/he is embedded.

3. Re‐integrative shaming refers to processes by which the disapproval of moral communities is brought to bear on deviant acts with the purpose of inducing regret in the actor. In contrast to stigmatisation, censure is directed at the act whilst the actor is a candidate for forgiveness and re‐integration once moral responsibility has been assumed.

4. Third position thinking is a developmental achievement which allows the thinker to observe self and other in interaction. It a precondition of a self‐reflective consciousness (Britton, 1989).

5. Under the right conditions these partisan interpretations could have been examined in terms of the counter‐transference of the individuals concerned but this requires established and consenting research teams.

6. There is much to say of these processes and a full development and illustration of the argument must consider methodological issues of transference and counter‐transference in the research process and the psycho‐social status of gestalt which will be published in the sequel to this paper.

7. Alongside observations/analysis of video data, the research also involved interviews with Bob and the YOT's Restorative Justice Coordinator.

8. Free association is creative destruction. An over‐determined phenomenon — dream text or psychic intensity — is bursting with many ideas that break up into differing meanings upon free association. It is essential to one's personal freedom to break up lucid unities of thought, lest consciousness become a form of ideational incarceration. Indeed, the more profound a psychic intensity, the less permanent its registration in consciousness, for the ideas deriving immediately from it soon give birth to a plenitude of further and divergent thoughts which disseminate in countless ways (Bollas, 1995, p. 53).

9. Some of the analytical procedures used were adapted from the Biographical Narrative Interview Method (see Wengraf, 2001) in which identification of gestalt is key to the understanding of both the particular and general properties of a case.