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20 Critical Criminology 1 (2012)

handle is hein.journals/ctlcrm20 and id is 1 raw text is: Crit Crim (2012) 20:1-7
DOI 10.1007/s10612-011-9148-6
A special issue on restorative justice: unravelling
the mystery
Diane Sivasubramaniam
Published online: 29 November 2011
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
In restorative justice, crime is recognised fundamentally as a violation of people and
relationships, rather than as a violation of law (Zehr 1990). When criminal justice systems
shift to framing crime in this way, there is a consequent recognition that an appropriate
response to crime is to allow those affected by crime to discuss the event and arrive at a
consensus about reparation (Latimer et al. 2005). With the increasing incorporation of
restorative justice approaches and processes into mainstream criminal justice systems,
researchers have recognised the need for thorough evaluations of the impact of restorative
justice on various important outcomes, such as recidivism rates and participants' percep-
tions that restorative justice procedures and their outcomes are fair and satisfactory. A wide
and varied body of restorative justice research has been developing to meet this challenge
over the past two decades, including program evaluations (Trimboli 2000), literature
reviews (Braithwaite 1999), and meta-analyses (Latimer et al. 2005). In this special issue,
we call for researchers to meet the next important challenge in restorative justice schol-
arship, framed eloquently by Kenneth Polk in 1994: Why does restorative justice work in
the desired ways, for whom is it working or not working, and does it work differently for
different people? Note that Polk presented us with these challenging questions in 1994-
nearly two decades ago. Since that time, relative inattention to these questions in restor-
ative justice research has left us with a strong understanding of the powerful effects of the
restorative justice process as a whole, but without an equivalent understanding of why the
process is so powerful, or the elements of the process that are more or less powerful. This
relegates the transformative power of restorative justice to the realm of mystery. In order to
develop restorative justice procedures and policy most effectively in the future, we seek a
greater understanding of the basic mechanisms that drive the success or failure of
restorative justice processes, and a more nuanced insight into the specific factors of
In November, 2011, Diane Sivasubramaniam will join the Department of Psychological Sciences and
Statistics at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia.
D. Sivasubramaniam (E)
Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, University of Ontario Institute of Technology,
Oshawa, ON, Canada
e-mail: Diane.Sivasubramaniam@uoit.ca

Springer

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