Policy Sciences 36: 279^306, 2003.

2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 279

Civic implications of restorative justice theory:

Citizen participation and criminal justice policy

ALBERT W. DZUR
Department of Political Science, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH 43403
E-mail: awdzur@bgnet.bgsu.edu

Abstract. Restorative justice, a normative theory and reform movement emphasizing dialogue and
reconciliation between victim, o¡ender, and community, is a widespread, if experimental, part of
the practice of criminal justice in the United States. This essay argues that restorative justice draws
connections between civic engagement and punishment practices that distinguish it as a normative
theory of criminal justice. Advocates of restorative justice expect the growth of non-punitive
attitudes and the weakening of support for incarceration to emerge from a public and lay-oriented
context of adjudication. The role of lay participation in achieving social change, although prom-
inent in restorative justice critiques of mainstream criminal justice norms and practices, has not
been clearly articulated in practical terms. Signi¢cant ambiguities remain regarding the degree of
lay participation, scope of authority, and the focus of restorative justice forums. The essay argues
that an adequate assessment of restorative justice experiments should include an analysis of their
impact on public attitudes towards crime and crime control policy and not simply on their impact
on the speci¢c victims and o¡enders involved. The link between less incarceration and restorative
justice forums is public willingness to grant them the authority to hear and sanction o¡enses that
would ordinarily receive incarceration. Whether and how they can in£uence broader public atti-
tudes, then, is a critical test of restorative justice e¡ectiveness.

‘Let the crime then become a starting point for a real dialogue...’
Nils Christie, 1981

Introduction

Restorative justice is a normative theory of criminal justice and an evolving

reform movement. Advocates are critical of the dominant retributive and reha-
bilitative theories of criminal justice and they reject professional control. They
propose a form of dialogue that is outside regular criminal justice institutions,
free from the domination of procedures and professionals, where victims can
communicate with o¡enders, and where o¡enders can acknowledge wrong-
doing and accept responsibility. Restorative justice takes shape in family group
conferences, victim-o¡ender reconciliation programs, sentencing circles, and
reparative boards, practices that draw on the experience of many cultures. All
these forms of restorative justice are voluntary, participatory, dialogue ori-
ented, and seek to produce some form of mutually satisfactory resolution or
healing to a harm or con£ict.
The birth of the restorative justice movement in North America has been
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traced to the victim-o¡ender mediation projects in Kitchener, Ontario (1974)

and Elkhart, Indiana (1978) run by members of the Mennonite Central Com-
mittee in collaboration with probation o⁄cers (Van Ness and Strong, 1997:
p. 21; Zehr, 1990: pp. 158^159). The prison reform e¡orts of the American
Friends Service Committee in the 1960s and 1970s also contributed to the
movement (Van Ness and Strong, 1997: pp. 22^23). These religiously-based
reformers found kinship with other reform-minded critics, such as victim-
advocates who were calling for restitution-type penalties, expanded victim
services, and a more active role for victims in criminal justice proceedings.
Restorative justice experiments also appealed to many as a way out of the
pendulum swings of criminal justice policy between rehabilitative and retribu-
tive models of crime control. In the ‘nothing works’ era of the 1970s and 1980s,
critics asserted that neither rehabilitative treatments nor retributive penalties
e¡ectively curbed crime or increased the public’s sense of security (Garland,
2001: pp. 61, 104).
In the 1990s, restorative justice has found support across the political spec-
trum (Levrant et al., 1999). Liberals are attracted by the humanistic, non-
punitive elements of restorative justice and see in these a potential for broad
social change. Conservatives, seeking more justice for victims, more responsi-
bility for o¡enders, and less cost for communities, recognize the limits of
contemporary criminal justice in securing these goals and lean towards restor-
ative justice as a promising alternative. Restorative justice programs, however,
are rarely the subjects of political campaigns. Although there are some grass-
roots e¡orts, many are advocated in a top-down fashion, by reformers in city
and county prosecutors’ o⁄ces, in departments of corrections, in legal defender’s
o⁄ces, and in probation services departments. 1 These reform-minded profession-
als seek innovation for various reasons, but a strong motivation is a desire to
share responsibility for the costs and other social consequences of criminal
justice institutions (Bazemore, 2000: pp. 239^242). As for the non-professionals
involved, there is some evidence that victims, o¡enders, and lay facilitators and
board members from the community appreciate their expanded roles in the
process and the opportunity to have their voices heard. 2
A prominent part of the criminal justice landscape in Australia, New Zea-
land, and Canada, restorative reforms have strong roots in these countries in
the area of juvenile justice and are beginning to a¡ect how adult o¡enses are
adjudicated (Braithwaite, 2002: p. 8). In Europe, restorative justice programs
are thriving. In Finland, 20% of the caseload is handled by victim-o¡ender
mediation programs (Kurki, 2000: p. 269). Victim-o¡ender mediation in Ger-
many and Austria handle serious adult o¡enses; around 70% of the cases
mediated in these countries were violent crimes (Kurki, 2000: p. 269). Less
prominent in America, even there restorative justice programs have become
fairly common on the ground, with nearly 300 victim-o¡ender mediation pro-
grams throughout the U.S. (Umbreit, 2000). There are statewide community
reparative boards in Vermont that handle more than a third of that state’s
caseload, prominent city programs in Minnesota and New York, and statutory
 281

changes in Maryland juvenile justice programs that re£ect restorative justice

ideas (Kurki, 2000: p. 283). Other state, county, and local governments
throughout the country are experimenting with a wide array of small-scale
programs.
As to be expected under American federalism, there is considerable varia-
tion in how, where, and to what extent restorative justice programs take root
within the criminal justice establishment of states, counties, and municipalities.
In Vermont, for example, the department of corrections has primary responsi-
bility for restorative justice reforms, while in Salt Lake City the mayor and city
prosecutor are principal actors. O¡enders enter restorative justice programs in
di¡erent ways: by a referral from judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, or
police. Some programs send o¡enders to restorative proceedings only after
guilt has been established by the court, other programs divert cases from tradi-
tional prosecution to restorative proceedings with the caveat that the o¡ender
successfully complete the requirements there. 3 O¡enders thought suitable for
restorative justice have, in some but not all programs, been restricted to juvenile
o¡enders; few programs in the U.S. accept repeat adult o¡enders or violent
o¡enders (Kurki, 2000: p. 290). 4
Although restorative justice has begun to develop roots in the U.S., it is still
very much an experiment. I argue here that an accurate assessment of restora-
tive justice ought to judge it as a democratic experiment attempting to encourage
greater public knowledge of criminal justice, more widespread responsibility
for crime control, and, ultimately, less punishment in the form of incarcera-
tion. 5 Because these are their normative goals, restorative justice experiments
have to be assessed with non-traditional indicators of success beyond those
ordinarily used to gauge criminal justice e¡orts ^ such as victim satisfaction
and o¡ender recidivism rates. Indeed, restorative justice is di⁄cult to analyze
because the positive linkages between the public and lay-oriented context of
adjudication it advocates and the goals of less punishment have not been
adequately drawn. In fact, I argue that there are signi¢cant ambiguities regard-
ing the degree of lay participation, scope of authority, and the focus of restor-
ative justice forums. In the ¢rst part, below, I analyze the arguments of leading
theorists of the movement ^ Nils Christie, Howard Zehr, and John Braithwaite
and Philip Pettit ^ to draw out the core arguments of restorative justice and to
show how lay participation and social change link to the overarching goal of
less punishment. Then, in the next section, I see how they address practical
questions about degree, scope, and focus of lay participation within actual
restorative justice forums. Next, I argue for an open-ended set of expectations
for restorative justice in practice. Whereas restorative justice practitioners tend
to see ‘repairing harm,’ ‘achieving forgiveness,’ and ‘reintegrating o¡enders’ as
primary indicators of success, I suggest that a more political benchmark should
be added: whether restorative justice forums have had an impact on public
awareness of criminal justice policy. For there to be more talking and less
incarcerating in American criminal justice, restorative justice forums must
have distinct e¡ects on public attitudes. In short, this paper claims that the
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success of restorative justice be judged, at least in part, by the political and not
merely juridical e¡ects of speci¢c programs.
Two general purposes guide this narrative. First, the paper seeks to focus
debates in criminal justice in general and restorative justice in particular on the
meaning and signi¢cance of lay participation and civic engagement for policy
making in this domain. Just as in domains like health care or the environment,
public policy in the criminal justice domain should serve public interests, as
seen and articulated by re£ective, engaged citizens. The second goal is to
suggest connections between discussions of lay participation and civic engage-
ment in other policy domains to the restorative justice reform movement in the
criminal justice domain. Research on the democratization of expert authority
and on lay participation in collective decisions tends to pass over the criminal
justice domain, even though it has such a strong e¡ect on so many lives. 6

Restorative justice as a normative argument: Three accounts

Restorative justice is more than a criminological argument about what societies

need to do to have less crime. It is a theory of criminal justice, a normative
critique of mainstream ideas and methods. Although restorative practices are
held to be more e¡ective at crime control and more e⁄cient in terms of
resources spent on crime control, these are not the most important grounds for
advocates. More important than these for advocates are its moral grounds.
Even if restorative practices were slightly less e¡ective and e⁄cient, they would
still be choiceworthy because of their moral advantages. To paraphrase Nils
Christie, the ¢rst of the advocates I discuss in this section, criminal justice is
not merely about crime control, it is about the values we wish to pursue through
crime control. In this section I want to sift out the moral advantages restorative
justice advocates see in their theory.
The following three accounts stress two central advantages restorative ap-
proaches have over mainstream criminal justice. The ¢rst is the replacement of
punishment as incarceration with dialogue and restitution. For these thinkers,
even legally sanctioned punishment is, normatively speaking, less desirable
than non-punitive reconciliation. The second advantage claimed by restorative
justice advocates lies in the replacement of state agents of crime control with
community agents. Community informal social control is to be preferred,
wherever possible, to the professionalized formal social control of the state.
Although the accounts share these positions, we will soon see that they di¡er in
the values they emphasize as support.

Nils Christie: The value of participatory justice

For Christie, the moral logic that rejects punishment is simple: even though an
action caused harm or pain, this is no reason to respond in kind. If we are
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against harm and pain we are against it whether it is caused by the crime or
caused by the response to the crime (Christie, 1981: pp. 10-11). Alternatives to
punishment, such as apology or restitution, are preferable simply because they
break out of the circle of pain in£iction. Non-punitive alternatives are prefer-
able, too, because of how limited pain in£iction is at deterring future o¡enses,
educating o¡enders, and compensating victims. We moderns are, in fact,
squeamish about pain in£iction, choosing to mete it out carefully and in doses
of time rather than physical su¡ering. This squeamishness, Christie believes, is
a signal that non-punitive solutions may (all things considered) correspond
better with our considered moral beliefs than punishment.
Rigid notions of crime and punishment permeate mainstream criminal
justice, yet there are other values that might hold sway:

Our criminal policies should re£ect the totality of the basic values of the
system. It is an a¡ront to my values, and I think to many people’s values, to
construct a system where crimes are perceived as so important that they
decide, in absolute priority to all other values, what ought to happen to the
perpetrator of a particular crime. (Christie, 1981: p. 45)

The contrast of value pluralism held in the polity with the value monism
re£ected in the criminal justice system provides Christie a good response to
the conventionalist who sees non-punitive alternatives as being inadequate for
dealing with the natural feelings of resentment harbored by victims of harmful
acts. 7 Christie can reply that a more civilized approach channels these natural
feelings of resentment into dialogue rather than through the more primitive
response of pain in£iction. ‘Much deviance is expressive, a clumsy attempt to
say something. Let the crime then become a starting point for a real dialogue,
and not for an equally clumsy answer in the form of a spoonful of pain’
(Christie, 1981: p. 11). Crime control policy, like all policy, should re£ect our
considered judgments and the balance of our values, not our unre£ective pre-
ferences for revenge.
Far from being a natural response to harmful acts, formal crime control
measures like imprisonment are the product of social distances that open up in
modern urban life (Christie, 1981: p. 74). In traditional rural settings residents
know one another through proximity and frequent social interactions, and
‘crime’ there is not the default label for a breach of normal or expected behav-
ior. Consider this narrative about a Norwegian rural sheri¡, or lensmann:

A report came in on breaking and entering into a store of weapons for the
home guard. The lensmann jumped into his car, drove far up into the
mountains in the direction of the store, met a car high up there, stopped the
car, found Ole drunk as usual, with a carload of guns to irritate his father.
He brought Ole home and took the guns to a more safe depot. What a cli¡-
hanger story lost for the mass-media! Helicopters and anti-terrorist police
might have been engaged in the crime-hunt of the century. Now it was only
Ole. An old story of misery and family quarrels. (Christie, 1981: p. 74)
284

‘Crime’ and the crime control measure of ‘punishment’ are symptoms of moder-
nity. We do not know the stories of ‘o¡enders’ because we do not know much
about anybody outside our small circles of family, friends and colleagues. We
respond to the ‘crimes’ of others with a call for punishment because ‘crimes,’
‘o¡enders,’ ‘sentences,’ ‘punishments’ are all abstractions for us. The more we
know about and are connected with our neighbors, the less comfortable we are
with such abstractions (Christie, 1981: p. 81).
In addition to their value as non-punitive approaches to harmful acts, restora-
tive justice procedures are valuable because they return the responsibility for
con£ict resolution to communities. Aside from their role in helping us avoid the
use of punishment, the fact that they are de-professionalized and de-centralized
are real values of restorative justice procedures for Christie. They are values
because they reduce the alienation of victim, o¡ender, and community in
modern criminal justice administration.
Victims are alienated in mainstream procedures in three ways. First, victims
play no role other than witness in the proceedings, since their interest in
responding to their harm is taken up and represented by a prosecutor (Christie,
1977: p. 3). Second, victims have lost the possibility of anything but symbolic
compensation for the harm or loss su¡ered through the crime (Christie, 1981:
p. 96). Third, victims have lost possibilities for reducing any anxiety and cor-
recting any misconception about crime and criminals resulting from their
victimization. They have no chance in ordinary criminal proceedings to speak
with o¡enders and come to understand more about the reasons for their
harmful acts (Christie, 1977: p. 8).Victims may get justice as an outcome of the
mainstream system, but it is largely symbolic and in Christie’s view less valu-
able than the good of participation in the justice process, which is lost.
As for o¡enders, they too are alienated by being so thoroughly represented
by professionals. In Christie’s account, o¡enders lose the possibility of authen-
tically resolving the con£ict they have instigated, the harm they have caused.
They have no chance to explain themselves, to discuss the context and possible
reasons behind their actions, and to ask the victim directly for forgiveness
(Christie, 1977: p. 9). Although they might symbolically pay their debt to victim
and society via the punishment to which they are sentenced, any non-symbolic
debts to the victim remain unpaid.
Just as victim and o¡ender remain passive subjects of criminal justice action
rather than active agents, so the larger society is rendered merely a client of
professionals and state o⁄cials.

[T]he big loser is us ^ to the extent that society is us. This loss is ¢rst and
foremost a loss in opportunities for norm-clari¢cation. It is a loss of peda-
gogical possibilities. It is a loss of opportunities for a continuous discussion
of what represents the law of the land. (Christie, 1977: p. 8)

‘Norm clari¢cation’ means coming to know just why we do what we do in the

criminal justice domain, it means re£ecting on what consequences ought to
 285

follow what sorts of norm violation, it means taking responsibility for what the
state o⁄cials and professional agents do who work on our behalf. ‘Pedagogical
possibilities’ implies that we all have a lot to learn about each other, about
those who deviate from social expectations, and about our formal and informal
mechanisms of social control.
Christie is arguing for a more democratic criminal justice process. Citizens
are to take charge of the awful power of criminal prosecution and sentencing to
prevent the wrong sorts of values from taking precedence. Just as in domains
like health care or the environment, public policy in the criminal justice
domain should serve public interests, as seen by re£ective, engaged citizens.
But it is to be more democratic in another sense too. Criminal justice ought to
treat o¡enders as citizens, not as deviants or others or abstractions. Democra-
cies have no place for social categories of that sort.

Howard Zehr: The value of a healing dialogue

Like Christie, Howard Zehr criticizes contemporary criminal justice ap-

proaches for being punitive and state dominated. Zehr’s vision of restorative
justice, however, is less political than Christie’s. He puts a heavier emphasis on
the psychological losses resulting from the punitive and professionalized nature
of mainstream criminal justice and de-emphasizes the democratic losses so
central to Christie’s account. Further, in Zehr, the large-scale pedagogical
possibilities of participating in restorative justice forums emphasized by Christie
are muted because of Zehr’s view that the state rather than society needs to
change. 8 Nonetheless, even Zehr’s account draws attention to the connection
between lay participation and the goals of restorative justice.
For Zehr, punishment is not the obvious evil it is for Christie. He agrees in
principle with Murphy and Hampton, among others, that the moral force of
punishment stems from both the need to elevate the victim out of a degraded
position ^ degraded because the victim has su¡ered sub-human treatment,
treatment as less than the worth of the o¡ender ^ and the need to release the
natural, but harmful, feelings of resentment at being in such a position (Murphy,
1988; Murphy and Hampton, 1988). Yet he sees punishment as being a much
less preferable solution to the problems that crimes produce. Punishment ‘seeks
to right the balance by lowering the o¡ender to the level to which the victim has
been reduced,’ while a non-punitive measure like restitution ‘seeks to raise the
victim to his or her previous level’ and ‘acknowledges the role of the o¡ender
and possibilities for repentance’ (Zehr, 1990: p. 93). Punishment does not give
victims a real experience of justice and it does not give o¡enders a chance at
real accountability.
For a real experience of justice and for real accountability, the criminal
justice process ought to be more dialogical. Crime is traumatic for victims
because it undermines their sense of personal autonomy and belief in social
order. For Zehr, the punishment of o¡enders is inadequate as a way for victims
286

to overcome trauma. To regain a sense of power over their world and to

rea⁄rm a sense of social order he thinks victims need answers and information
about the crime. Why did the o¡ender choose me as a victim? Was there some-
thing about me in particular, or was it merely a random or circumstantial
choice? Victims also need to express their emotions in a way that a⁄rms their
validity and directs them constructively. As Zehr argues,

[V]ictims need opportunities to express and validate their emotions: their

anger, their fear, their pain. Even though such feelings may be hard for us to
hear and may not square with what we would wish them to feel, these
feelings are a natural, human response to the violation of crime... . The
su¡ering and pain are part of the o¡ense and need to be expressed and to be
heard. Victims need opportunities and arenas to express their feelings and
their su¡ering, but also to tell their stories. They need to have their ‘truth’
heard and validated by others. (Zehr, 1990: p. 27)

The punishment and o¡ender orientation of mainstream criminal justice pro-

ceedings makes it di⁄cult for such dialogue to take place.
For a real experience of justice, the dialogue between victim and o¡ender
cannot be dominated by the state or by criminal justice professionals. The
others who hear and validate the victim’s truth and the o¡ender’s remorse are
not state o⁄cials. Like Christie, Zehr sees the dominant role of state o⁄cials
and professionals in the criminal justice system as hindering the satisfaction of
victims’ needs. At every turn, as the initial harm turns into a crime and runs
through the procedural rules needed to adjudicate it, it becomes more and more
abstracted, more and more alienated from the actual experience of victim and
o¡ender. The loss of autonomy experienced by victims during crime is paral-
leled in their ‘second victimization’ by the state: ‘Instead of returning power to
them by allowing them to participate in the justice process, the legal system
compounds the injury by again denying power’ (Zehr, 1990: p. 31). This abstract
and alienating experience of justice for victims has a negative e¡ect on them
because it frustrates the sort of communicative action that would ful¢ll victims’
needs for information and emotional expression.
Professionalization and abstract proceduralism also hinder the reintegration
of o¡enders into law-abiding society. As with victims, o¡enders are largely
bystanders once the criminal justice system has taken hold. Critical decisions
about accountability and responsibility for their actions are made by others:
how they will explain, defend, excuse, or admit their actions is determined by
defense counsel, and the consequences for their actions are determined by
prosecutor, judge, and jury. Because the process is adversarial and non-partici-
patory, it does little to challenge any stereotypes or rationalizations o¡enders
have built up about their victims and about society in response to their crimes,
encouraging them to focus on their own legal situations and how to minimize
penalties. ‘At minimum, because the criminal process is so complex and so
o¡ender-oriented, they are caught up entirely in their own legal situations.
 287

Consequently, o¡enders rarely are encouraged or allowed to see the real human
costs of what they have done’ (Zehr, 1990: p. 41).
Reintegration requires, above all else, the opportunity for o¡enders to rec-
ognize the harm they have caused. This dovetails well with the need for victims
to communicate with o¡enders, to ask o¡enders questions about their inten-
tions, motivations, and choices as well as express their su¡ering and anger. By
participating in such a dialogue, o¡enders start to take responsibility for what
they did and erode whatever stereotypes and rationalizations they have con-
structed. Through such a communicative process o¡enders can admit their
wrongful degradation of their victims so that repentance and forgiveness can
take place. This active role in dialogue, it is hoped, can contribute to o¡enders’
sense of self-esteem, and the mending of interpersonal relations can help
establish their place in society.
Mainstream professionalized and state dominated criminal justice also im-
pacts the community. Without validating and channeling retributive emotions,
without enacting a dialogue between victim and o¡ender, the need for retribu-
tion can ¢nd expression in public demands for draconian punishment. The lack
of public participation inherent in professionalization results in stereotypical
views of o¡enders and defensive fears about crime (Zehr, 1990: pp. 58^59).
Unlike Christie, however, Zehr places the onus of change on the state rather
than society. For Zehr, punitive attitudes are the result of state domination
rather than the result of deeper shifts in social organization. He sees commun-
ity-based restorative justice as a natural form of dispute resolution that is
displaced by the founding of modern states. Zehr has hope that such a tradi-
tional role for the community will re-emerge once the state retreats.

John Braithwaite and Philip Pettit: The value of dominion

For Braithwaite and Pettit, punishment is an inferior response to crime because

it threatens what they call ‘dominion.’ Dominion, put simply, is freedom con-
ceived as a social and political value: ‘the condition of citizenship in a free
society, a condition under which each is properly safeguarded by the law
against the predations of others’ (Braithwaite and Pettit, 1990: p. 57). Now it is
true that crimes themselves can threaten dominion, and this in three ways:
crime can compromise and interfere with the victim’s freedom, it can condition
victims and reduce the ‘extent of undominated choice’ they enjoy, and crime can
compromise the larger community’s freedom by communicating the idea that
citizens ‘are not protected against arbitrary interference of the sort represented
by the crime’ (Pettit, 1997: pp. 68^70). Nonetheless, state responses to such
threats to freedom must not themselves become threats to dominion: ‘Domina-
tion is the main evil against which the state sets itself, after all’ something that
‘argues in favour of ¢nes and community service and against prison, since
domination is all too likely, if not logically inevitable, under prison regimes’
(Pettit, 1997: pp. 71^72).
288

Punitive responses to crime threaten freedom in a number of ways. Clearly,

they threaten the freedom of convicted o¡enders who must serve prison time.
Less obviously, but also quite signi¢cant, punishment threatens the current and
future prospects for freedom of o¡enders and their dependents because it
removes them from the mainstream labor market directly through prison time
and indirectly through the stigmatization of the conviction. But apart from
adversely a¡ecting the freedom of o¡enders and their dependents, punitive
responses to crime present high opportunity costs for society with other ways
to use public resources. Worse, a state committed to punishment threatens even
innocent citizens, who fear being caught up in prosecution. For these reasons,
Braithwaite and Pettit think that the default response to harmful acts ought to
be mercy and non-intervention, with punishment and intervention requiring
serious justi¢cation (Braithwaite and Pettit, 1990: p. 79).
Like Zehr and Christie, Braithwaite and Pettit think that the right response
to harmful acts is a de-centralized and de-professionalized process that engages
the victim and o¡ender in dialogue. 9 They see such a process as being better at
addressing the three threats to dominion posed by many crimes ^ the initial
assertion of domination over the victim, the future e¡ects of the crime that
condition the victim’s choices, and the e¡ects on the larger community.
The ¢rst step is for o¡enders to recognize the wrongfulness of their acts. The
best way to do this, for Braithwaite and Pettit, is not by attaching coercive
sanctions to certain acts, but by communicating social norms through educa-
tion and dialogue. Proper socialization into norms like fairness and non-vio-
lence is the main reason most people do not commit criminal o¡enses
(Braithwaite and Pettit, 1990: p. 82). Now, presumably, prior socialization has
failed to some extent in the case of o¡enders. So the trick is to remind them of
the social norms they have violated, to engage in a dialogue of reprobation and
‘moral reasoning’ (Braithwaite and Pettit, 1990: p. 89). In such a dialogue,
ideally involving the victim and supporters of both victim and o¡ender, the
o¡ender admits it was wrong to threaten the victim’s dominion and recognizes
the victim’s right to live without such threats (Pettit, 1997: p. 75).
The second step is for o¡enders to repair the damage done. O¡enders can
o¡er recompense in the form of restitution to victim or victim’s family, or, if
that is impossible, in the form of community service. In either case the goal is to
lift both victims and o¡enders out of a state of mutual loss.
Third, o¡enders owe the community reassurance that they will not re-o¡end.
This will be more or less di⁄cult depending on the severity of the o¡ense. To
gain such reassurance from o¡enders, as well as to achieve recognition and
recompense from them, the community has a role to play both in communicat-
ing reprobative sentiments and in o¡ering avenues for reintegrating into the
norm-abiding life of society.
Braithwaite and Pettit argue for what they call repeated decrements to all
layers of state criminal justice intervention: ‘less criminal law, less police sur-
veillance, less prosecution, less punishment ^ until solid evidence emerges that
crime increases as a result’ (1990: p. 11). They believe that by vacating these
responsibilities the state will encourage informal social control:
 289

Handing an o¡ender back to his community gives the community wherein

the o¡ence occurred ^ be it the o¡ender’s class at school, his workplace, his
family, or his football club ^ control over ¢nding the best way to help the
o¡ender to solve the problem he has created. A world in which the criminal
justice system took over all the ugly con£icts of local communities would be
a world in which communities would be enfeebled in their power to reprove
o¡enders and also to reintegrate both o¡enders and victims. While the
criminal justice system is uniquely concerned with the protection of domin-
ion, it does not have a monopoly on this mission. In fact, most protection of
dominion is secured by informal social control in the community, a type of
social control the criminal justice system should seek to foster rather than
supplant. (1990: pp. 117^118)

Like Zehr, Braithwaite and Pettit seem to think that once the state vacates some
criminal justice responsibilities, a¡ected communities will eagerly take them
up, become more involved, and maintain a less punitive system than before.

The role of lay participation and civic engagement in restorative justice

Democratic questions

In all three accounts we see a critique of punishment and of state and profes-
sional dominance of criminal justice procedures. In all three, too, we see a
connection drawn between these critiques: If criminal justice were less state
oriented and if the voices of lay people like victims, o¡enders, and community
representatives were dominant instead of professionals and o⁄cials, we would
have a system that talked more and incarcerated less. Restorative justice, then,
as a normative theory, points to lay participation in the criminal justice process
as the way to achieve its goals. But there are three key questions that need to be
answered. To what degree does lay participation in£uence a decision? What is
the scope of authority of lay proceedings? What is the focus of lay proceedings?
These questions, common to democratic political theory, are left open in
restorative justice advocacy. 10 To answer them we turn to the exemplary forums
articulated by our three accounts. First, though, we need to see the dimensions
of the questions.
The degree of lay participation simply registers the balance between lay
people and professionals or o⁄cials in a restorative justice forum. Are lay
people in the majority or are professionals? Does the dialogue of lay people
hold sway in the proceedings or does mainstream juridical language prevail?
Scope of authority has to do with what sorts of cases and what sorts of issues
are deemed appropriate for lay forums. Is it appropriate to consider violent
o¡enses committed by adults or should a lay forum simply stick with misde-
meanors? Is it appropriate for a lay forum to address underlying social prob-
lems that could be factors in crime or should it simply focus on the crimes
themselves?
290

Focus has to do with the purposes of the dialogue in the forum. Is it to be

focused on the transformation of the o¡ender or might it also include the
transformation of the social order? Does lay dialogue in a restorative justice
forum take for granted the social norms that have been violated by an o¡ender
or can the legitimacy of the norms be part of the dialogue?
How these questions get answered in the practice of criminal justice matters.
Forums with a high degree of lay participation, large scope of authority, and
broad focus will have a very di¡erent impact on punishment practices, on state
control of criminal justice, and on public attitudes than forums with a low
degree of participation, small scope, and narrow focus. Without adequate scope
of authority, for example, restorative justice forums will be merely handling
cases for which incarceration is not traditionally an option and therefore could
not be said to have any impact on punishment practices. 11 So, if restorative
justice advocates desire less punishment in the form of incarceration and a
change in the state’s role, the practical, political dimensions of participation
become important.

Model forum I: Participatory justice

Of the three accounts, Nils Christie scores the highest in terms of the degree,
scope, and focus of lay participation. Consider the model forum he uses as an
example, an explicitly lay oriented court. Christie’s court proceeds in four
stages. In the ¢rst stage the court determines guilt, using traditional procedures.
In the second stage, the court closely considers the victim’s situation to deter-
mine the compensation made by the o¡ender and to assess victim needs,
resulting from the o¡ense, which could be addressed by local community and
government services (Christie, 1977: p. 10). This second, victim and compensa-
tion oriented stage, will take some time. Once it does pass, it is time for the
third stage and a decision on punishment. Punishment in Christie’s court is
what the participants deem necessary over and above the compensatory acts of
the o¡ender (Christie, 1977: p. 10). In the fourth and ¢nal stage the court
discusses and seeks remedies to o¡ender needs brought to light during the
proceedings. For Christie, it is critical that the o¡ender needs stage be distin-
guished from the punishment phase to avoid the problem of treatment meted
out like punishment (Christie, 1977: pp. 10^11).
In terms of degree of lay participation, Christie’s court maintains a balance
of traditional, professionalized criminal justice and participatory justice. He is
concerned with the rights of individuals and with the problem of imbalances of
power between the actors involved in criminal cases. Equal standing under the
law may require lawyers from time to time, and may require some state involve-
ment ^ at least the threat of state involvement. Yet Christie is determined that
the forum be a lay oriented court: ‘let us reduce specialization and particularly
our dependence on the professionals within the crime control system to the
utmost’ (1977: p. 11).
 291

Let variation blossom when it comes to the selection of personnel, rotation,

training, etc. Let us remember some of the basic lessons from their prede-
cessors: Let us make them vulnerable. Let us not give them power. Let them
not become experts. Let them not become distant. (Christie 1981: p. 97)

So it is clear that lay members of the court should be dominant, even if state
o⁄cials must be involved at some levels.
Christie’s court has wide scope. In his descriptions of the sorts of cases that
would be appropriate he o¡ers no constraints; homicides, repeat o¡enses, adult
and juvenile o¡enders are all mentioned as appropriate. And it is clear that the
fourth stage (attention to o¡ender needs) brings into the domain of the court
consideration of larger social issues that relate to crime.
The focus of Christie’s court is also broad. This comes across clearly in cases
where punishment is deemed necessary as an addition to whatever compensa-
tion the o¡ender has been ‘sentenced’ to perform for the victim. Punishment for
Christie is too problematic morally to be handed o¡ to professionals as part of
the modern division of labor. Punishment should be decided and enforced by
lay participants and the decision to punish broadcast to the widest possible
public audience (Christie, 1981: p. 104). The decision to punish is to be deliber-
ative and public so as to ‘create an opening for that fundamental discussion of
moral matters where norm-clari¢cation would become the central task’ (Chris-
tie, 1981: p. 104). Even though the initial focus of Christie’s court is the tradi-
tional guilt and sentencing focus of mainstream criminal justice, there must be
openings to question the act of punishment itself. Indeed, the very lay compo-
sition of the court is meant as an educative device, in the hope that the more
people know about crime, criminals, and punishment, the less willing we will be
to apply these labels to others and the less willing we will be to have profession-
al representatives apply these labels to others for us.

Model forum II: VORP

Howard Zehr scores the lowest of our three accounts in terms of degree, scope,
and focus of lay participation. He takes victim-o¡ender reconciliation pro-
grams (or VORPs) as practical embodiments of restorative justice ideals. 12
VORPs have three primary actors: the victim, the o¡ender, and a mediator.
Mediators are ideally community volunteers trained to give some structure to
the dialogue between victim and o¡ender but without dominating the proceed-
ings with their own perspectives (Zehr, 1990: p. 161). The goal is to set up a ‘face
to face encounter between victim and o¡ender’ that will focus on ‘facts, feel-
ings, and agreements’ (1990: p. 161). Zehr writes:

Both parties [victim and o¡ender] are encouraged to tell their stories. Both
get a chance to ask questions, to discover from the other just what happened.
They also talk about the impact and implications of this experience. When
292

they have done this, they decide together what will be done about it. Once
they come to agreement, they sign a written contract. Often this takes the
form of ¢nancial restitution, but that is not the only possibility. (1990: p. 161)

This is to be a voluntary process on all sides, although there may be incentives

for o¡enders to choose VORPs over traditional court proceedings and it may
take some encouragement for victims to be involved.
Like Christie’s model participatory justice forum, Zehr’s VORPs are lay
oriented. Mediators are ideally drawn from the community rather than from
the criminal justice system. The dialogue is not the formal dialogue of courts
and is to allow the ‘opportunity for expression of feelings, exchange of informa-
tion, and recovery of losses’ missing from traditional criminal courts (Zehr,
1990: p. 161). Mainstream professionals and o⁄cials are absent from the face-
to-face encounter between victim and o¡ender. However, they play a consider-
able role in the background. O¡enders are channeled to VORPs mostly as
referrals from courts or police. They are candidates if and only if they have
pled guilty to their o¡ense. Further, a good deal of administrative work contin-
ues to be done by traditional criminal justice o⁄cials and sta¡: mediators must
be trained, places of mediation need to be located and maintained, contact
must be made with victim and o¡ender, background information must be
collected for use by mediator, dialogue between traditional courts and VORPs
must be kept open for referrals to run smoothly, and, last but not least, follow-
up checks must be done to see if o¡enders are living up to their agreements
(Zehr, 1990: p. 163). 13
Zehr’s forum is narrower in scope than Christie’s. VORPs tend to handle
mostly property cases. At the same time, Zehr does not restrict VORPs to such
cases and notes that some have begun to handle cases involving violence. As for
social issues, the three-person structure of the forum makes it di⁄cult to be a
forum for discussing the roots of crime. Further, the primary goal of the
mediator is to promote reconciliation between the two parties, not host a
political debate about the meaning of community norms.
On the issue of focus, VORPs score fairly low since their focus is almost
exclusively on victim and o¡ender. The victim is to have a real experience of
justice by communicating with the o¡ender and the o¡ender, in turn, is to
experience true accountability. The social background of public opinion on
crime and crime control is not part of VORP’s focus. Now, Zehr can argue
that the more VORPs there are the more community members will be able to
have contact with the driving issues of criminal justice. He himself notes that
‘VORP forced me to meet and listen to crime victims, and that caused me to
begin rethinking what crime is and what ought to happen’ (1990: p. 172). So
even though any individual VORP forum may not have much widespread
educative e¡ect, an aggregation of VORP experiences could ^ so long as
Christie’s dictum about letting variation blossom in the selection of mediators
is followed. Unfortunately, given how large state and national electorates are in
the U.S., this would require many more VORPs than currently in existence to
have any in£uence on criminal justice policy.
 293

Model forum III: Family group conferences

The role of lay participation in Braithwaite and Pettit’s account is more signi¢-
cant than in Zehr but less than in Christie. Their exemplary restorative justice
forum is the family-group conference. As with Zehr’s VORPs, family group
conferences deal only with cases where ‘defendants ‘‘decline to deny’’ their guilt’
(Braithwaite and Pettit, 1994: p. 770). Unlike VORPs, conferences involve quite
a few actors:

[C]onferences are meetings of citizens (generally seated in a circle) to discuss

a criminal o¡ense and agree on a plan of action for the problems caused by
the o¡ense. A facilitator invites the o¡enders to nominate as participants the
people most important in their lives, the people for whom they have most
respect and a¡ection. Victim(s) also attend and are invited to nominate
participants with a special relationship of care to support them. The selec-
tion principle for participants reverses that which applies in trials: The
citizens invited to participate in trials are those who can in£ict maximum
damage on the other side; citizens invited to participate in conferences are
those who can provide maximum support to their own side... . [T]he selec-
tion principle is designed to structure both shaming and reintegration of
both o¡enders and victims into the conference. Participation of victims who
confront o¡enders and their families with the hardship and insecurity they
have su¡ered as a result of the crime structures shaming into the conference;
participation of supporters of both o¡enders and victims is intended to
structure reintegration into proceedings. (Braithwaite and Pettit, 1994:
p. 770)

Like VORP proceedings, family group conferences are to be voluntary for

victims, o¡enders, and their supporters.
Braithwaite and Pettit are clear that the dialogue that is fostered in confer-
ences is to be organic to the parties themselves and not to be dominated by
mainstream concepts of criminal justice. Conference communication directed
by lay participants can be authentic in a way that traditional court discourse is
not. Conferences allow the expression of emotions that can help produce
shame, remorse, and, ideally, forgiveness (Braithwaite and Pettit, 1994: p. 771).
Still, like VORPs, conferences require the background of professional admin-
istrative support described above.
Family group conferences are fairly broad in scope. Braithwaite and Pettit
see them as applying to ‘most of the action currently handled by the courts’
(1994: p. 770). And they are broad in the sense of connecting participants to
larger social issues related to crime but not traditionally addressed in criminal
cases. Conferences, according to Braithwaite, can be like ‘micro-institutions of
deliberative democracy that allow citizens to discuss the consequences of crim-
inal acts, who is responsible, who should put them right and how’ (2000: p. 128).
Although conferences deal with local issues and are quite narrowly focused on
294

individual criminal acts, they can link to macro-level social relations and gen-
eral issues of democratic politics. Participation at the local community level in
restorative justice proceedings can help citizens address the pieces of larger
social problems that intersect with the criminal act being discussed. Braithwaite
writes, ‘I have known restorative justice conferences where supporters of a boy
o¡ender and a girl victim of a sexual assault agreed to work together to
confront a culture of exploitative masculinity in an Australian school that
unjustly characterized the girl as ‘‘getting what she asked for’’ ’ (1999: p. 37).
Again, although this language is optimistic, as with Zehr’s VORPs the key
question is whether the number of citizens directly participating in family
group conferences in a given year will constitute enough of a critical mass to
have any e¡ect on public opinion and therefore crime control policy.
The focus of conferences is primarily on the victim and o¡ender, but the
additional participants drawn from the community allow for a broader focus
than VORPs. Indeed, Braithwaite and Pettit hope that participation in confer-
ences will teach citizens to be less punitive: ‘Conferences bring victims a big step
closer to o¡enders than courts, because conferences replace choreographed
encounters designed to exaggerate the evil of the other with face-to-face dia-
logue that aspires to understand the other’ (1994: p. 772). Further, as noted
earlier, they hope that participation in conferences will empower communities
to reclaim the responsibility of crime control ceded to the state. To use their
language, lay participation in criminal justice returns dominion to citizens.

Achieving the goals of restorative justice: Widespread, contentious, and

policy oriented participation in restorative justice forums

Crafting an immanent and realistic measure of restorative justice

Here we return to the question of assessment: how are we to judge the success
of the variety of restorative justice experiments currently on the ground in the
U.S.? If the goal is less incarceration, then, at ¢rst glance, the experiments can
be said to have failed. Few, if any, restorative justice programs handle o¡enses
that might normally receive incarceration. But I take a di¡erent view: restor-
ative justice in the U.S. must be assessed as democratic experiments in progress.
We need to develop an immanent and realistic measure that comports with the
values and goals distinguishing restorative justice as a normative theory, but is
able to ¢t those values and goals to di¡erent political cultures. We start by
critically examining how well the model forums are likely to contribute to
restorative justice goals, then turn to critically examining the goals themselves.
Of the three models, Christie’s participatory forum is most likely to enhance
civic dialogue and minimize state involvement, goals that all three accounts
favor. Although VORPs and family group conferences embody these values in
their day-to-day practice, and therefore count as restorative justice practices,
they are likely to do little to alter the social background that has supported
 295

traditional punitive and professionalized criminal justice. Without widespread

public participation restorative justice forums are likely to have only minimal
impact on public opinion of crime and crime control. So the best case for
judging the desirability of restorative justice goals would be a forum that, like
Christie’s, maximized participation.
For assessment, then, the ¢rst question is whether the restorative justice
experiment is primarily victim-o¡ender mediation oriented, or whether there
are other, more participatory forums being used. The next question is what is
being achieved by the forum. Alongside traditional indicators like victim satis-
faction and o¡ender recidivism we need restorative justice-speci¢c measures.
The theorists considered here point to decline in punitiveness as a goal, but this
goal, once disambiguated, may be better captured by the phrase ‘civic account-
ability for punishment.’ 14 Each approach can be seen, in its own way, as an
e¡ort at making criminal justice less procedural, less a matter of course, more
deliberate, more transparent, and more constructive for all parties involved.
Disambiguated, the ‘decline in punitiveness’ goal points to three ‘civic ac-
countability’ thresholds that engaged and participatory publics might reach
regarding punishment and criminal justice:

1. The rationality threshold: our views of punishment, sentencing, and crim-

inal justice process are tested against others’ views, challenged, pressed
for grounding in principles, reasons, and facts.
2. The responsibility threshold: we come to recognize that what is done to
o¡enders (and victims) in criminal justice proceedings is a matter of
policy and therefore is ultimately the democratic responsibility of all
citizens.
3. The punitiveness threshold: we come to realize that punishment is less
rational or less morally desirable than other forms of resolving harms to
victims and communities caused by o¡enders.

My view is that because the ¢rst two thresholds are di⁄cult, but possible to
cross in contemporary American political culture, they are fair game in assess-
ing restorative justice. Because crossing the last threshold will be more di⁄cult,
and indeed may be less desirable, this may not be a good way to judge restor-
ative justice ^ even though it is what restorative justice theory would seem to
indicate as a measure.
Although measures of success should be true to the theory they purport to
judge, the political culture and institutional history of di¡erent restorative
justice sites make some goals less realistic than others. Notice that the most
participatory of the three model restorative justice forums is advocated by
Christie, a Norwegian criminologist; the second most participatory advocated
by Braithwaite and Pettit, academics based in Australia; and the least partic-
ipatory o¡ered by Zehr, an American. Although we should not make too much
of an ad hominem point, it does introduce the critical issues of political culture
and institutional history. Crossing any of the three thresholds above will likely
296

be more or less di⁄cult depending on participants’ local, regional, and national

political culture.
Barriers to rationality and responsibility may be high in the U.S., but they
may also be susceptible to the learning e¡ects of lay participation. Tonry asserts
that current U.S. criminal justice policies ‘are the harshest in American history
and of any Western country’ (1998: p. 3). Most Americans currently think that
sentences are too lenient and favor ‘get tough’ constraints on judicial and
probation discretion like mandatory minimums and three-strikes sentencing
(Roberts and Stalans, 1998). But what we currently think may be a product of
recent political history and therefore vulnerable to rational debate. In the
American political culture of the past three decades crime has been used as a
campaign issue to wedge voters away from lenient liberals and towards ‘get
tough’ conservatives. Because of this history and for fear of losing even more
voters to the Republican party, Democratic campaigns scarcely deviate on the
topic of criminal justice from the Republicans’ tough-minded stance. In short,
common sense views of crime control policy have not been given much rational
challenge in recent times.
If dialogue oriented restorative justice forums were widespread, citizens
would come in contact with real cases, real victims, and real o¡enders, rather
than the abstractions popularized in campaigns and in media treatments. There
is some evidence that punitive attitudes do diminish with such direct experience
(Braithwaite and Pettit, 1994). And some public opinion researchers believe
that American public opinion skews towards the punitive because of misinfor-
mation, lack of knowledge, and overly abstract survey questions. When polled
about whether they support ‘get tough’ legislation like three-strikes policies,
people are rarely presented with the ¢nancial costs and therefore do not face
the very real budget trade-o¡s such policies mandate. 15 When asked survey
questions with robust characterizations of o¡enders and o¡enses, less punitive
responses emerge (Cullen et al., 2000: p. 7). Although there is no doubt that
American public opinion is consistently punitive, it is also ‘mushy’ ^ vulnerable
to argument. Americans know that punishment is a lose-lose proposition and
are open to alternatives, at least for some classes of o¡enders (Cullen et al.,
2000: pp. 46^47). Widespread participation, if structured so that people’s views
are debated respectfully but forcefully, may correct unreasonable policy prefer-
ences created by campaign and media misinformation, popular stereotypes,
and lack of knowledge. 16
Like the rationality threshold, the responsibility threshold is fairly high in
the U.S. Advocates of restorative justice do not want criminal justice adminis-
tration to work like a normal bureaucracy, ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ smoothly
providing public goods. Public safety is a good, of course, but punishment is a
bad that we need as a public, they think, to re£ect upon more rather than less.
We need to have more discussions rather than fewer about criminal justice
policy. But this ‘into sight, into mind’ perspective is on the margins of contem-
porary American political culture. According to indicators listing the issues of
importance to most Americans, we seem to want to think and talk little about
 297

crime and crime control unless mobilized by media or politicians. 17 At least in

contemporary America there is little sign of an eager, participatory community
base that will take up criminal justice responsibilities evacuated by state actors.
Such a base will need to be developed, and at some cost of time and social
resources.
The responsibility threshold is also vulnerable, and is something that wide-
spread participation might help citizens cross, albeit with some di⁄culty. We
cross it when we realize that criminal justice procedures are not set in stone,
that they express values we may or may not endorse, and therefore that we have
a responsibility to develop policy that does further the values we endorse. We
cross it when we understand that what is done to o¡enders and victims in the
criminal justice process is the responsibility of all citizens. We do not tend to
think this way, since criminal justice is so often seen as a ¢xed and logical set of
rules enforced by legal professionals. More lay participation in the process,
however, should reveal the political origins of the rules and the process and
therefore the responsibility citizens have in a democracy to make sure criminal
justice expresses the values under which they truly wish to live.
The punitiveness threshold is high and may be less vulnerable than the other
two. In addition to misinformation, stereotypes, and lack of knowledge, atti-
tudes towards criminal justice may remain punitive because they are related to
other moral and political beliefs that we expect many people in pluralistic
social conditions to disagree upon, such as beliefs about individual moral
responsibility, desert, and the moral signi¢cance of a willed harmful act. For
these reasons, dialogue in Christie-like restorative justice forums is likely to be
persistently contentious along the following sorts of issues, among others:

Purposes: is the purpose of sentencing rehabilitation, deterrence, or retribu-

tion?

Responsibility: how responsible are o¡enders for their harmful acts, espe-
cially when committed under the in£uence of drugs, mental distress, or
dysfunction?

Social Justice: is there a dominant social background of patriarchy, acquis-

itiveness, and racism that must be changed as prerequisite for an adequate
system of crime control?

Further, one consistent ¢nding in public opinion research is that violent and
repeat o¡enders are seen in a much more solidly punitive light than non-violent
and ¢rst-time o¡enders (Cullen et al., 2000: p. 59). Therefore, because of value
pluralism it may not necessarily be desirable that the punitiveness threshold be
crossed and because of deep-seated views about violent o¡enders it may not be
possible. Yet some o¡enses may get ‘downgraded’ once citizens get involved and
learn more about crime and justice. In this way, although a public may still be
punitive and wish to incarcerate, it would incarcerate a narrower range of cases.
298

Vermont Reparative Probation: A best case

How far a public can cross the thresholds discussed above may be in£uenced by
and, in turn, in£uence the degree, scope, and focus of the restorative justice
forums in which it is involved. Consider one of the most participatory restor-
ative justice programs in the U.S., Vermont’s reparative probation program.
Reparative probation is a large-scale reconstruction of Vermont’s criminal
justice system led principally by the Vermont Department of Corrections with
the support of the courts, state’s attorneys, and defense attorneys. A major
motivation for the reconstruction, on the part of the Department of Correc-
tions, was a sense that public opinion in Vermont supported a restorative
approach to criminal justice even though the popular politics of criminal justice
policy pointed in a di¡erent direction (Perry and Gorczyk, 1997). Public fear of
crime and dissatisfaction with early release of o¡enders led to ‘get tough’
legislation that increased incarceration and imposed more rigorous parole
recommendations, but limited resources for prison expansion created over-
crowding and pressures for early release of o¡enders. Although crime rates,
arrests, and convictions had dropped, the incarceration rate ^ the number of
convictions sentenced to prison ^ was up and parole rates were down. Repar-
ative probation that o¡ered intermediate sentencing options between incarcer-
ation and probation was a way out of this vicious cycle (Dooley, 1995). Public
opinion research sponsored by the Department of Corrections supported the
idea that community members could become more involved in sentencing non-
violent o¡enders (Doble and Greene, 2000). This idea appealed to Vermonters
surveyed because they believed citizens could handle nonviolent o¡enders bet-
ter than the criminal justice system.
Born in a spirit of civic accountability that sought to share responsibility for
criminal justice, Vermont currently has 67 citizen reparative boards spread
throughout the state, sta¡ed and led by about 400 citizen volunteers. 18 They
have handled 7742 cases since 1995, when the program began. Vermont repar-
ative probation works as follows. After establishing guilt, judges sentence non-
violent o¡enders to a ‘reparative programs’ track that involves sanctions such
as community service, victim reparation, and formal and informal apology. An
o¡ender then meets with a community reparative board in an informal public
place, such as a public library, community center, or town hall. Boards are
made up of ¢ve or six citizen volunteers assisted by a sta¡ coordinator. O¡enders
are called up, one by one, to answer board members’ questions, to form an
agreement on the requirements for successful completion of the program, or to
check in with the board. If victims attend, they are invited to sit with the board
and interact with the o¡ender.
Although degree of lay participation is high in the Vermont program, focus
and scope are somewhat lower. The restorative justice dialogue that is to be
encouraged by the community board is indeed to be focused on repairing the
speci¢c harm caused by the o¡ender. Board members are guided by the follow-
ing rough guidelines:
 299

1. Victims (if present) describe the impact of the o¡enders’ behavior;

2. O¡enders make amends to victims and a¡ected parties;
3. O¡enders make amends to the community;
4. O¡enders demonstrate healthy behaviors and learn ways to avoid reof-
fending;
5. The community o¡ers reintegration.

Restitution or apology might be deemed an appropriate way of making amends

to victims and the community. Demonstrating healthy behavior can be ful¢lled
by classes tailored to the o¡ense or general tasks such as writing essays on the
social consequences of o¡enses like the ones they committed. Although it is
possible that the reparative board encounter could be used to discuss the
rationality or desirability of the social and legal norms that grant the board
authority, the harm-repair focus of the forum on the particular o¡ense operates
against such a tendency (Karp, 2001; 2002).
Turning to scope, most of the cases heard by reparative boards are o¡enses
that would not receive incarceration under traditional court settings. 19
Although reparative o¡enses technically can include some relatively serious
crimes, such as burglary unoccupied, attempted grand larceny, driving to
endanger, and DUI ¢rst and repeated o¡ense, in a study that videotaped one
meeting from nearly all the community reparative boards statewide, the cases
heard included 17 drunk driving, 11 thefts or frauds, 8 underage drinking, 5
simple assaults, 4 furnishing alcohol to minors, 4 miscellaneous driving of-
fenses, 2 harassments by telephone, 1 controlled substance possession, and 1
false identi¢cation (Karp, 2001). 20 If the restorative justice goal of diminishing
or gaining accountability for punishment were at the forefront of the program,
reparative probation would ideally handle more serious o¡enses, namely, those
traditionally warranting incarceration. But to increase the scope of reparative
probation would require policy changes, and policy changes require public
support.
Public opinion research performed before (1994) and after (1999) the intro-
duction of Vermont reparative boards indicates that there is the potential for
movement across all of the civic accountability thresholds discussed above.
Taking the rationality threshold ¢rst, Vermonters in both surveys revealed
striking misconceptions about criminal justice in Vermont: holding the crime
rate to be on the rise, believing that dangerous o¡enders convicted of violent
assaults sometimes receive no prison time for their o¡ense, and thinking that
many violent o¡enders are released early because of prison overcrowding
(Doble and Greene, 2000: p. 14). But the number of Vermonters making these
mistaken judgments has decreased over the ¢ve-year span. 21 As for responsi-
bility, Vermonters in both surveys overwhelmingly endorsed reparative boards
as a matter of policy, viewing them as a way for citizens to handle low-level
o¡enses more e¡ectively than courts, as a way to ease the courts’ workload, and
as a way of strengthening the community (Doble and Greene, 2000: p. 52).
Punitiveness is a more complex story. On the one hand, Vermonters surveyed
300

clearly worried about the courts’ leniency and about early release of dangerous
o¡enders, but they also recognized that prison is a last-resort option, some-
thing that is likely to make o¡enders worse, not better. Therefore, Vermonters
want only high-risk o¡enders in prison and are open to non-incarcerative,
community-based sanctions for certain violent o¡enders (Doble and Greene,
2000: pp. 66^69).
To assess adequately the e¡ects of reparative boards, research needs to be
done on the experiences of board members. Some evaluative research has been
done on board members, but not on the dimensions of rationality, responsibil-
ity, and punitiveness and not on changes in these indicators over time (Karp
et al. 2002). More signi¢cantly, although numbers of community volunteers
involved in reparative probation have increased (the program grew by 74 mem-
bers, 11 new boards in 10 new communities from 1999 to 2000), awareness of
reparative probation in the general public is relatively low. Only 11% of Ver-
monters surveyed in 1999 ^ four years after the program began ^ were aware of
reparative probation.
The Vermont best case shows that the democratic experiment o¡ered by
restorative justice programs is a long-term process in the U.S. that may end
with widespread participation and contentious dialogue about the need for
punishment ^ both in restorative justice forums and in the political and policy-
making domains that in£uence criminal justice policy ^ but surely will not
start that way. To take root in a way that lives up to its normative goals,
however, restorative justice must be thought of as a series of widely discussed
policy decisions rather than simply a matter of criminal justice administration.
Here, perhaps, a ratcheting e¡ect is possible. Forums like VORPs, family group
conferences, and community reparative boards, if publicized and politicized
might spark debate in state and local political campaigns and policymaking
initiatives, which, in turn, might produce funding for more widespread and
robust restorative justice forums. Public support must grow for there to be a
genuine test of restorative justice goals, for without this support forums will
have neither the focus nor scope to have a meaningful impact on public ration-
ality, responsibility, and punitiveness. Christie is right to see criminal justice as
a process not a solution, but processes are not neutral; they are debated,
resisted, funded and unfunded. To achieve the goals that make it distinct,
restorative justice will have to become politicized, in the best senses of the term.

Conclusion: Tocqueville’s jury

Alexis de Tocqueville, who came to the U.S. with fellow magistrate Gustave de
Beaumont ostensibly to study the criminal justice system, had a strikingly
participatory view of the American jury as a mode of civic task sharing that
led to healthy relations of authority. 22 He saw independent, self-con¢dent 19th
century Americans socialized into orderly habits of formal decision making
simply by taking part in collective decisions. He saw that lay participation in
 301

township governance, in the small-scale associations of civil society, and in the

justice system helps citizens achieve real political freedom by cultivating neces-
sary habits: capacities, interests, and norms of behavior. ‘The jury ... serves to
give to the minds of all citizens a part of the habits of mind of the judge; and
these habits are precisely those that best prepare the people to be free’ (Tocque-
ville, 2000: p. 262). Habits of mind of the judge include an awareness and
respect for procedures, the complexity of law, and the norm of impartiality
(Lively, 1965: p. 181). As Tocqueville states frequently throughout Democracy
in America, the risk of not cultivating such habits is instability. ‘It [the jury]
spreads to all classes respect for the thing judged and the idea of right. Remove
these two things, and love of independence will be no more than a destructive
passion’ (Tocqueville, 2000: p. 262).
Participating in legislation and administration in township government, and
sharing tasks like calling meetings to order in civil associations provide both a
general political education and an education in the competencies needed in
those domains. Similarly, jury duties teach both about government and about
what is needed in the judicial sphere:

It [the jury] teaches men the practice of equity. Each, in judging his neighbor,
thinks that he could be judged in his turn.

The jury teaches each man not to recoil before responsibility for his own acts
^ a virile disposition without which there is no political virtue.

It vests each citizen with a sort of magistracy; it makes all feel that they have
duties toward society to ful¢ll and that they enter into its government. In
forcing men to occupy themselves with something other than their own
a¡airs, it combats individual sel¢shness, which is like the blight of societies.

The jury serves incredibly to form the judgment and to augment the natural
enlightenment of the people. There, in my opinion, is its greatest advantage.
One ought to consider it as a school, free of charge and always open, where
each juror comes to be instructed in his rights, where he enters into daily
communication with the most instructed and most enlightened members of
the elevated classes, where the laws are taught to him in a practical manner
and are put within reach of his intelligence by the e¡orts of the attorneys, the
advice of the judge, and the very passions of the parties. (Tocqueville, 2000:
p. 262)

Now Tocqueville did not see lay participation in township government, civil
society, or in the jury as necessarily leading to better administration, better
public services, and better justice. On the contrary, he thought township govern-
ance merely competent and held that judge dominated justice proceedings were
probably superior strictly from the perspective of justice: guilty are convicted
and innocent are not (Tocqueville, 2000: pp. 196; 258). Yet, although lay partic-
302

ipation in the justice system and in the administration of other governmental

tasks may not be as e⁄cient, and may, at times, not be as fair or as intelligent as
o⁄cial-made decisions, because of its importance as a form of political educa-
tion Tocqueville thought the trade-o¡ well worth making. Lay participation in
jury decisions tightens the bonds of accountability between citizens and be-
tween citizens and the institutions that act in their name.
This paper argues that assessments of restorative justice should follow Tocque-
ville’s shift in focus. He does not assess the American jury merely on the basis
of traditional juridical values, but adds new, democratic values. He recognizes
the jury is a democratic experiment that has to be judged, at least in part, on
the civic accountability it engenders. Now Tocqueville sees the juridical domain
as being an expert realm into which professionals socialize lay participants. For
Tocqueville, then, civic accountability is satis¢ed when lay participants learn
general competencies, norms of behavior, and develop general political inter-
ests but they in no way share power in this domain as equals with professionals.
My view, by contrast, is that civic accountability is a kind of power-sharing.
Because of the stigmatizing and other harmful e¡ects of criminal penalties,
crime control policy is something democratic citizens need to own up to by
crossing the rationality and responsibility thresholds. Although we may still
wish to punish, even after participating in dialogue oriented restorative justice
forums, if the forums have been structured properly we will have good reasons
and not just instincts behind our choices. Participation in criminal justice
proceedings allows us to take up our democratic responsibility and own up to
the values embodied in our collective use of the awful power of criminal justice.

Notes

1. For more on administrative stakeholders, see Olson and Dzur (2003; 2004).
2. In a four site study of victim-o¡ender mediation programs for juvenile o¡enders in the U.S.,
Umbreit (1994) found that victims in mediation programs were more likely to be satis¢ed with
the criminal justice system than similar victims who went through traditional proceedings
(79% compared to 57%), that victims in mediation programs were less fearful of being
revictimized, that o¡enders in mediation programs were more likely to complete their restitu-
tion agreement (81% compared with 58%) and less likely to re-o¡end (18% compared with
27%). In a critical review of research on Australian and New Zealand restorative justice
programs, Daly (2002) ¢nds signi¢cant bene¢ts for victims: ‘Drawing from the victim inter-
views in 1998 and 1999, over 75 percent of victims felt angry toward the o¡ender before the
conference, but this dropped to 44 percent after the conference and was 39 percent a year later.
Close to 40 percent of victims were frightened of the o¡ender before the conference, but this
dropped to 25 percent after the conference and was 18 percent a year later. Therefore, for
victims, meeting o¡enders in the conference setting can have bene¢cial results’ (p. 71). Com-
pared with o¡enders in mainstream court procedures, those attending restorative conferences
have a stronger sense that they were treated fairly and a greater respect for the police and the
law (Daly, 2002: p. 69). Not much research has yet been done on community perspectives, but
there is some evidence that lay participants experience a good deal of satisfaction (Olson and
Dzur, 2003; 2004).
3. The two cases I have studied in some depth,Vermont Reparative Probation and Salt Lake City
 303

Passages Program, are variations on the same theme. In Vermont, low-level o¡enders are sent
to restorative proceedings post-conviction, while in Salt Lake City defendants are o¡ered a
‘plea in abeyance’ by the prosecutor ^ in e¡ect a guilty plea, but the prosecution asks the court
to dismiss the case once the requirements of the restorative justice program have been met.
4. In Salt Lake City, for example, adult o¡enders were considered candidates, although felony
o¡enders, o¡enders with a history of violence, or those with a history of failure to appear for
court hearings were excluded. See Olson and Dzur (2003; 2004).
5. Dorf and Sabel (1998) use this term to describe the legitimacy-granting e¡ects of bringing local
knowledges into expert decision making. Following John Dewey, they argue that lay partic-
ipation in many domains can help shape public policy that suits public needs more adequately
than expert-crafted policy.
6. When deLeon (1992) and Fischer (1993; 2000), for example, discuss the democratization of
policy expertise, one domain that is absent, even as a passing illustration, is criminal justice
policy. This is not surprising, as we will see later in this paper, given traditional public
discourse on criminal justice policy. Breaking with mainstream discourse, restorative justice is
a reform movement seeking to democratize expertise through the use of lay participation.
Given the social and economic costs of the U.S. criminal justice system, such a development is
certainly worth attention.
7. ‘Conventionalist’ is my term for theories such as retributivism and expressivism, which main-
tain that harms must be somehow reciprocated in order to even things out for the victim.
Helpful discussions of retributivism and expressivism are found in Nozick (1981) and Feinberg
(1970), respectively.
8. Zehr also has a more ‘traditionalist’ view of community than Christie, meaning that he sees
less of a need for social norms about crime, responsibility, and punishment to be challenged
and to change in order for restorative justice to £ourish. See Dzur and Olson (2004) for more
on restorative justice notions of community.
9. It is noteworthy that on the issue of de-professionalization, restorative justice practice di¡ers
signi¢cantly from restorative justice theory. Restorative justice forums in the U.S. tend to be
led by professionals who do not so much evacuate their roles as modify them to encourage lay
participation. See Olson and Dzur (2003) and (2004).
10. Dryzek (1997; 2000), for example, writes of three dimensions of democracy: franchise, scope,
and authenticity. Franchise means those who can participate in a collective decision, scope is
the range of issues that can be decided, and authenticity means that participation is real, not
symbolic.
11. As mentioned earlier, most restorative justice programs in the U.S. in fact have fairly limited
scope of authority.
12. Zehr himself helped develop the ¢rst VORP in the U.S.
13. Zehr glosses over this complex arrangement when he writes, ‘VORP is an independent organ-
ization outside the criminal justice system. But it works in cooperation with this system’ (1990:
p. 161). This understates the considerable dependence VORPs have on mainstream procedures,
o⁄cials, sta¡, and other administrative resources.
14. O¡enders who go through restorative justice rather than mainstream procedures are still
subjected to the discomfort and shame of being charged by police, put on trial, and forced
into conferencing or other programs. And the outcomes of these programs ^ although less
severe than incarceration ^ will not be optional. Indeed, o¡enders surveyed about their
restorative justice experience liken it to punishment (Daly, 1999). Finally, none of the theorists
considered here eschews incarceration as a last resort penalty for hard-core repeat o¡enders.
See Dzur (2003) for more on the idea that restorative justice points to civic accountability for
punishment rather than rejection of punishment outright.
15. Roberts and Stalans write, ‘When asked directly whether they support such [recidivist statutes
such as three-strikes] legislation, three-quarters of Americans respond a⁄rmatively. However,
more re¢ned research reveals important limits to the public support’ (1998: p. 48).
16. By ‘unreasonable’ is not meant to imply that there are clear-cut standards of rationality that
304

can solve all criminal justice policy dilemmas; however, information and analysis emerging
through dialogue can show current policy preferences to be mistaken ^ inaccurate, incoherent,
or incomplete. Inaccurate preferences are held only when we are unaware of evidence that
would produce di¡erent preferences (Miller, 1993: p. 82). Incoherent preferences are incompat-
ible with each other, such as a desire for universal health care and for a sharp decrease in taxes.
Incomplete preferences re£ect initial indi¡erence to issues that deliberation would reveal to be
important (Manin, 1987: p. 350). These ‘unreasonable,’ because mistaken, choices result from
gaps between current policy preferences and considered interests that can be bridged through
deliberation.
17. Roberts and Stalans write, ‘Until recently, when placed in the context of other major public
policy problems, crime has not assumed a very high pro¢le in America... . Over the decade
1985^1994, crime was never identi¢ed as the country’s top problem by more than 2 percent of
the population.’ Since 1994, however, even although crime rates were declining, crime in-
creased in importance as a political issue, with one survey putting it at the third most
important social problem. The answer is clear: ‘These statistics seem to attest to the impor-
tance of the media and the in£uence of politicians in setting the nation’s agenda’ (1997: pp. 53^
54).
18. These data come from personal communications with the Vermont Department of Correc-
tions.
19. As mentioned earlier, restorative justice programs in the U.S have a relatively narrow scope
and many have an even narrower scope than Vermont’s. Kurki writes, ‘Most restorative justice
practices are targeting ¢rst-time, misdemeanor juvenile o¡enders’ (2000: p. 290). For more on
the Vermont program see Perry and Gorczyk (1997) and Dzur and Wertheimer (2002).
20. Similar percentages and types of o¡ense are found in Karp et al.’s recent evaluation of
Vermont reparative probation: In their sample from the 2000 program year, 32% of the
o¡enses were DWI; 22% miscellaneous drinking o¡ense; 19% miscellaneous driving o¡ense;
12% theft/fraud; 6% harassment/assault/disorderly conduct; 4% mischief/trespass; 3% drug
possession (Karp et al., 2002: p. 9).
21. There was no tool available in the survey that could adequately determine the e¡ect of Vermont
restorative justice reforms on the change in rationality. Doble and Greene do show, however,
that Vermonters have become more rational in that ¢ve year span than citizens of the other
states that they studied: New Hampshire, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Oregon (2000:
p. 27).
22. Tocqueville’s admittedly ‘republican’ argument can be compared to the Anti-Federalist argu-
ment of the Federal Farmer:

The trial by jury in the judicial department, and the collection of the people by their
representatives in the legislature, are those fortunate inventions which have procured for
them, in this country, their true proportion of in£uence, and the wisest and most ¢t means
of protecting themselves in the community. Their situation, as jurors and representatives,
enables them to acquire information and knowledge in the a¡airs and government of the
society; and to come forward, in turn, as the centinels and guardians of each other... .
(Storing and Dry, 1985: pp. 58^59, Letter IV)

The Federal Farmer is primarily interested in power sharing and in keeping lay people inside
institutions of power as watchdogs on elites. Tocqueville, although certainly interested in task
and power sharing, emphasizes the use of lay participation as a mode of socializing citizens to
hold functional roles within government and to accept a degree of deference given to those
occupying higher roles.
 305

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