A Balance Between Rehabilitation and Punitive Justice Systems

Restorative Justice is a system centred on reparative aspects rather than only punitive ones. Indeed, the crime should be fixed, not just punished. It has become progressively more popular over the years and its apparition can be explained from the failures of the traditional models of criminal justice. The actual criminal justice system has more than proved the problems it raises and its inefficiency in a number of matters: “We have never resolved the equation of punishment and retribution on one side and reformation on the other. I seriously doubt we ever will” . Therefore a balance between a rehabilitating system and a punitive system need to be struck, a system which would have both fairness in punishment and effectiveness in stopping reoffending.

Restorative Justice as a whole in a very large subject, so we are going to critically analyse it throughout one of its restorative practice: victim-offender mediation. Because, it focuses on both the victim and the offender and actually implies an interaction between both parties, analysing victim-offender mediation is the best way to assess the impact of restorative justice as a whole.

Victim-offender mediation emanated from Canada, in Ontario precisely where in the early 1970s, two young offenders who committed vandalism were asked to meet the victims their crime had affected . Following the meetings, the judge decided that the two offenders should pay restitution to those victims. The justification for victim-offender mediation was therefore initially that it would benefit both the victim and the offender, it is based on the value of reconciliation that is lacking in the traditional system and it was brought by the way of probation. Mediation can be seen as a progress from the...

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...sfactory, they still demonstrate a progress from the punitive system and they must be taken into account with the satisfaction and perceived fairness factors which are highly positive. Surely, it is too soon to know the future of victim-offender mediation and restorative justice as a whole. It may be that victim-offender mediation has had a limited success in terms of stopping crime (reoffending) and has encountered a number of important issues such as resources or participation but we can definitely learn something from it. Indeed, if it can be argued that mediation is not perfect, nor is the traditional criminal justice system, which means that something must be done and hopefully we can progressively move from a punitive and repressive system towards a more reparative system whose benefits have been put forward by the experience of victim-offender mediation.