International Journal on Criminology Volume 4, Number 2, Winter 2016 | Page 139

International Journal on Criminology
than a criminal or penal procedure, the origins or effects of personal and/or social
discord. Relatives, the indirect environment, and even the entire community can have
a place or be given the role of full party in programs such as circles, family group
conferences, or detainee-victim meetings in particular.
The community—never fully defined (Rossi 2012), except based on the
common interest shared by its members (Cario 2016)—has a prime role in restorative
justice (McCold 2004; Rodriguez 2005), because the restorative process should have
never been taken away from it (Zehr and Mika 1997). When a minor offense or major
crime is committed, social ties are broken and the social break extends beyond the
perpetrator of the act or the direct victim. Every event has immediate consequences
on the parties and repercussions for their relatives, and also has an effect on the entire
community (Rossi and Cario 2013). By opening up new channels for communication,
by re-creating an informal network of solidarity and mutual assistance, restorative
justice makes it possible to work on reconstructing these broken social ties. It also
allows the community to recapture a real form of control, which sometimes can be
cruelly absent (Crawford and Clear 2001; Karp and Clear 2002). Restorative justice
is increasingly demonstrating its particular ability to promote a much safer society,
by being the unquestionable source of a proven decrease in crime rates (Sampson,
Raudenbush, and Earls 1997).
Aside from purely criminal conflicts, restorative justice has also become the
model for preserving and developing social harmony. It has been shown to work
for social, urban (Jaccoud 2009), and educational issues, 4 where it is often used
as a guide for communication, and no longer just as an easy method for conflict
resolution. On this point, McDowell et al. (2014) have studied the role played by the
use of restorative modes to resolve disagreements in social microcosms, for example,
in a community of university residents. The results speak volumes: restorative
programs enable members of the community studied to better understand each
other’s perspectives. In this case, after the program was implemented, students were
more ready to communicate with others and to have contact with them, they acquired
better methods for managing their disagreements, and they progressed considerably
in the matter of living together. While such results are interesting, it is not so much
because they demonstrate the success of the practices, but rather because, contrary to
adversarial or judicial procedures, restorative mechanisms become integrated as they
are systematized: they become a part of the daily routine. They embody much more
than justice: they construct social justice.
Finally, we should not forget that one of the great successes of restorative
justice is to have shown that, in order to supplement criminal justice (in the case of
serious crimes and offenses), it is capable of flourishing in the field of prevention,
and even operating completely in parallel with traditional proceedings with regard to
4
See, for example, the "Passerelles" program created by ROJAQ: http://www.rojaq.qc.ca/les-oja/services-offerts/le-projet-passerelle/.
138