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A series of action steps are also proposed for the victim community, including its practitioners and advocates, suggesting pivotal and catalytic roles in the following six areas:
To reiterate, while these items are nominally assigned to either the restorative justice or victim communities of interest and practice, they are nonetheless highly interdependent. At the end of the day, the commonality of this multifaceted agenda is most likely to produce the desired result of effective and responsive justice for victims.
Retribution is the focus on “punishment of lawbreakers and compensation of victims” and is intended to have a punishment of equal weight to the crime
Principles of Retributivism
Four elements of punishment:
Retributive justice has a range of issues or criticisms by those who do not understand it
Words like restorationist are slippery, and the primitivist impulse appears in a number of different religious movements in the first centuries after Europeans colonized the American continent, few had detailed or accurate knowledge about that ancient, original order, insofar as such a thing existed.
Often, then, the restorationist impulse has served as a way to lend the authoritative rhetoric of history to a certain set of religious values, not as a way to accurately reproduce the past. Thus, exploring the impulse reveals a great deal about how these religious movements imagine and construct themselves.
Richard Hughes distinguishes among three impulses restorationist rhetoric might serve.
Code of Ur-Nammu (c. 2050 bce), the Laws of Eshnunna (c. 2000 bce), and the better-known Babylonian Code of Hammurabi (c. 1750 bce) are the earliest forms of cuneiform law where crime is considered a breach of human rights and victims would be compensated for intentional and unintentional harm.
lex talionis = law of retaliation is formed from Exodus 21:24 “eye for an eye” → Branders would be punished for helping slaves remove their slave marks by getting hands chopped off
Mens Rea → forbids the punishment of those who cannot be held responsible for their actions
“True deterrence doctrine, according to the utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham, allows for the punishment of innocent individuals if doing so would serve a valuable societal function (e.g., creating and maintaining an image that crime is detected and punished so that others are deterred from crime).” →
Restorative justice lacks specificity and detail to guide the system and does not provide substantial claims or reasoning to define their principles and purpose.
Restorative justice is tied to religion, more specifically Christianity, and was founded around 1800 during the Second Great Awakening. With the rise of institutionalized religions came the rise of restorationism. It operates on the belief that responses to criminal activity must be based upon holistic healing that includes the offender, victim, and community.
Where financial restitution remains the primary objective of mediation practice, it is questionable whether mediation is at all appropriate for personal crimes involving violence. Domestic violence and sexual assault are certainly ill suited to an intervention with restitution as its centerpiece. Restorative justice presumes to be a rational, contemplative process in response to events (crimes).
The emphasis of restorative justice on how crime affects the community tends, in the view of some, to again marginalize those immediately affected by crime, distorting and diverting justice responses to victim needs. Not unlike conventional justice programming and policy, restorative justice uses victims to promote and rationalize its agenda.
Without credible evaluation of restorative justice programs, there will continue to be resistance to their blanket implementation and reluctance in the victim community to embrace them. "Turf" disputes about the ownership of restorative justice ideas and programs will deflect from their impact and potential. In a relatively short period of time, some perceive that restorative justice has become overly professionalized, undermining its professed goals of inclusiveness and accessibility.