Paradigm Muddle or Paradigm Paralysis? The Wide and Narrow Roads to Restorative Justice Reform (or, a Little Confusion May Be a Good Thing)

Abstract

McCold (2004, this issue) argues that community justice and balanced and restorative justice (BARJ) models confuse people and distort the restorative justice movement. We argue that there are many sources of confusion and explain the differences between these approaches. Neither model poses any threat to restorative justice, and both community justice and BARJ can garner new support for restorative justice. We respond to misleading portrayals in McCold’s account of these movements (and of our writings about them) and suggest that more time should be spent on truly critical debates within the restorative justice movement, and in confronting real barriers to restorative justice reforms.

Keywords:

• Restorative Justice
• Balanced and Restorative Justice
• Community Justice

Notes

Gordon Bazemore is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice and Director of the Community Justice Institute at Florida Atlantic University. Mara Schiff is an Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida Atlantic University. Correspondence to: Gordon Bazemore, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Florida Atlantic University, 111 E. Las Olas Blvd., HEC #1009, Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301, USA. E‐mail: [email protected]

This discussion itself may well result, on the one hand, in furthering questioning of the capacity of restorative justice advocates for peacemaking. But such an event may, on the other hand, gain a whole new audience for the movement; especially if we can persuade the former governor of Minnesota to host it. It was a bit revealing that Paul shared with Gordon Bazemore the fact that his biggest disappointment in the last exchange (Contemporary Justice Review, 2000) was that ‘You just agreed with me on everything.’ That wasn’t true—and Bazemore prefers to say that McCold agreed with him on most things—but the reality is that it may be harder to mount an attack when one is forced to acknowledge common ground; so much for that.

Because the ‘academic leadership’ of BARJ that McCold refers to (that is, Bazemore and Umbreit) at the time of the initial planning meeting in 1993 had read Howard Zehr’s book, and because Umbreit was a long‐time practitioner of victim‐offender mediation, we saw the BARJ project as a way to incorporate VOM as a restorative practice into the already popular balanced mission and to introduce restorative justice principles to a broad audience of juvenile justice practitioners. By the time family group conferencing and other models gained attention in the US in the mid‐1990s, a number of BARJ adherents and project consultants were already experimenting with these practices (Hines & Bazemore, 2003; Pranis, 1996). A few academic colleagues (David Karp, Mara Schiff, Carolyn Boyes‐Watson, Mark Umbreit, and Howard Zehr) have occasionally provided training and/or written monographs for the project. To the extent that he has apparently misunderstood some aspects of BARJ, McCold is unfortunately not alone among researcher/academics in his apparent confusion. Though the BARJ model has been mentioned in a few textbooks and a handful of academic journals on criminal justice reform, with a few exceptions (such as Braithwaite, 2002; Brown & Polk, 1996; Hahn, 1996; Whitehead & Lab, 2002) most accounts are very superficial, and a few demonstrate clear misinterpretations of the model and the BARJ agenda—for example, equating ‘accountability’ in the BARJ model (essentially accountability in the restorative sense, cf. Bazemore & Umbreit, 1995; Braithwaite & Roache, 2001) with support for harsher punishment (Moon et al., 2000; Fader et al., 2000).

The first author’s observation that some portion of the difference between otherwise quite similar models of restorative decision‐making amounted to a ‘dubious kind of product differentiation’ (Bazemore, 2000, pp. 477‐478), for example, apparently struck a nerve with McCold (2004). The word ‘dubious’ in the quote should imply that the author does not view all product differentiation in a negative way and, indeed, the BARJ project itself might have benefited from better product differentiation, though because the project is publicly funded, we have no financial interest in our marketing strategy. However, McCold’s suggestion that we ever said anything close to, ‘any effort to distinguish peacemaking circles from citizen panels amounts to a kind of product differentiation’ is of course absurd, and represents yet another effort to discredit what we did say about basic similarities between programs representative of different models, with different names that utilized very similar processes—making allowances for important process and structural differences (Bazemore & Schiff, 2001). Regarding McCold’s allegation that our statement about product differentiation amounts to an ‘ad hominem attack, impugning the motives of those who value careful definition,’ rather than presenting ‘a logical argument,’ we continue to refuse to name names‐in part because we view product differentiation as a generic concern and not necessarily as a bad thing that only ‘evildoers’ get involved in. However, if he wants a logical argument about the negative part, here it is: product differentiation is a problem when someone says something like, ‘Our model is the one true restorative justice model,’ or ‘To do restorative justice, you must follow the guidelines of this program,’ or ‘If you adopt this model, your program or agency will be restorative.’ These statements, by the way, have nothing to do with careful definition and everything to do with product differentiation in its most negative manifestation.

By that time, the first author had already begun using the term in some of the writings McCold (2004) references—which included discussion of these Aboriginal practices as well as US models that could be loosely described using the terms restorative or community. And based on the Canadian understanding of the term, we had also begun using the name for our own small university policy research institute in part because we were doing a lot of evaluation, training, and advocacy work that didn’t have anything to do with restorative justice (such as community policing studies), and in part because we thought the term had wider appeal.

We can appreciate the scholarly arguments against the community focus; see for example Walgrave (2002) who argues for Braithwaite’s republican theory emphasis on dominion as a way of incorporating communitarian values without the need to mobilize citizens and neighborhoods (see also Bazemore & McLeod, 2002; Crawford, 1997). However, McCold (2004) doesn’t reference any of these, and his complaint about neighbors participating in restorative decision‐making processes does not apparently build on any empirical data or on either normative or theoretical rationales.

But models that seem initially to lack potential—we would include in this category most neighborhood board programs whose origins predated the restorative justice movement—are capable of improvement. On the one hand, we report our surprise that some of our most negative case examples in our qualitative national study of restorative conferencing happened to be taken from highly respected victim‐offender mediation and family group conferencing programs, presumably on a bad day. On the other hand, we profiled what appear to be highly effective board programs, including one granted almost complete discretion by a judge in recommending dispositions for even the most serious cases, and others that could not be distinguished from family group conferencing in the decision‐making process employed (Schiff & Bazemore, 2003). While we continue to believe that structural and process differences do account for some of the difference in restorative conferencing outcomes, hybridization seems to continue to blur model distinctions.

Our national survey of restorative group conferencing programs (Schiff & Bazemore, 2003) found that, on average, seven persons including the facilitator participate in restorative conferencing programs (the survey included VOM/D, FGC, peacemaking circles, and neighborhood board programs). Although a majority of our sample (51%) were victim offender mediation programs (which on average reported a low of only five participants), we estimated that four participants beyond victim, offender, and facilitator participate in the typical conference.

Regarding the dreaded BARJ/community justice connection—because most BARJ leadership is local and practitioner‐based, individuals are free to devise their own interpretations of their own state and local reforms. Some, for example, have followed Dennis Maloney’s lead in placing BARJ under a community justice umbrella (Maloney & Holcomb, 2001). Despite McCold’s (2004) allegation of a carefully plotted BARJ effort to merge community and restorative justice, no one in the 1993 initial project planning meeting had heard the former term. Our practitioner colleague, Dennis Maloney, began much later (about 1998) to integrate the term in his own county probation system and began speaking of community justice in national trainings. Though a few others use the term and make connections in training today, community justice is not a part of any BARJ curriculum or formal project publication we are aware of. Hence, with regard to ‘academic leadership’—though we might like to think that what two academics wrote in 1999 (Bazemore & Schiff, 2001) could transform the BARJ agenda—we suspect that hundreds of practitioners in the dozen or so states, and many other local jurisdictions active in BARJ, would have something to say about that. Though the project provides guidelines and shares information about what we have learned, BARJ staff have never provided any prescriptive model or specific recipe for implementing the model.

For that matter, while we are in questioning mode, does writing about community justice make one an advocate? We and many of our colleagues have been involved in evaluations of, and at times been advocates for, a variety of progressive changes in criminal justice such as juvenile detention reform, reducing disproportionate minority confinement, and community policing (before it was called community justice) that have nothing—at least directly—to do with restorative justice. While we have never heard anyone refer to these as restorative justice reforms, we have never been accused of being anti‐restorative for such advocacy and research, nor has anyone ever suggested that restorative justice is, for example, vulnerable to being subsumed under detention reform.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gordon Bazemore

Gordon Bazemore is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice and Director of the Community Justice Institute at Florida Atlantic University. Mara Schiff is an Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida Atlantic University. Correspondence to: Gordon Bazemore, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Florida Atlantic University, 111 E. Las Olas Blvd., HEC #1009, Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301, USA. E‐mail: [email protected]