This article considers Christopher D. Marshall’s proposal to draw a connection between the ethics of care and restorative justice. The ethics of care tradition is critical of the modern liberal interpretation of morality as a rational endeavor based on universal principles. The article attempts to spell out the ethical and political implications of adopting this fundamental viewpoint in the context of restorative justice. On the ethical level, the ethics of care may remind the tradition of restorative justice of its essential reliance on the concrete moral practices and competences of people that precede any conceptualized normative ethics. On the political level, an ethics of care approach to restorative justice seems to lead to a certain deadlock in that it fails (and refuses) to offer a rational justification of restorative justice practices. On a closer look, the ethics of care can provide such a justification, be it a ‘communitarian’ one.

Christopher Marshalls is convinced that restorative justice has to do with care for relational involvement. That view is intuitively convincing but not particularly clear. Recent psychological and philosophical research has recently devoted much attention to notions such as ‘collective intentionality’ (Searle, Tomasello) and ‘joint commitment’ (Gilbert). This kind of research is situated and discussed in this paper. We indicate how the restoration of mutual involvement can be reinterpreted from the perspective of this research. This exercise shows that caring for relationships should not be interpreted in a sentimental way. In law and in restorative justice, it does not have to be the intention to enter into more personal relationships with each other. Rather, it is the intention to make it possible once again to develop mutual understanding, respect and compassion from our common universal human commitment.

As an approach to law and justice, restorative justice focuses squarely on addressing human needs; it acknowledges the equal dignity of all parties, irrespective of their role in the harmful act; it accepts responsibilities for addressing the disadvantages or inequities that crime has bequeathed to victims and that often have contributed to offending on the part of the perpetrator; and it derives its creative potential from the shared vulnerability and reciprocal exchange of concern that occurs through respectful face-to-face encounter. Therefore restorative justice constitutes a relational justice of care.

In this article the authors reflect upon Judith Shklar’s classic book The Faces of Injustice. They maintain that injustice is wrongly confined to the absence or counterpart of justice. The authors discuss the relationship between and the difference between injustice and justice. According to the authors, injustice has more intensity than justice. Legal rules have only limited power to fight extreme forms of injustice. They argue that there is an asymmetry between justice and injustice, also because the law introduces values as predictability and regularity that, in concrete situations, are badly equipped to eliminate injustice. They claim that injustice is rooted in the idiosyncratic perspectives of those who suffered harm and argue that injustice has a ‘playful’ character, while the law has the character of a game. Finally, they argue that injustice is at the core an intimate experience, whereas justice is primarily about relationships between people. The authors outline the implications of these points for thinking about restoration and the relationship between restoration processes and the law.

Adherents to restorative justice are to be commended for systematically questioning whether the manner in which criminal law is currently organised is a good thing. The debate about criminal justice and restorative justice is therefore an important one. It is also a debate which is occasionally marred by a reliance on ideology. In this article, a number of ideological claims are identified and discussed. First, both adherents to criminal law and supporters of restorative justice invoke an ‘origin story’ to defend their view. The origin story of criminal law consists of the idea that without criminal law the world would be a chaos, i.e. the world would resemble the state of nature as depicted by Hobbes. In contrast: the origin story of restorative justice revolves around the idea that without central authority people tend to resolve their conflicts harmoniously. I argue that neither types of origin story can withstand scrutiny. Secondly, in both the context of criminal law (e.g. Antony Duff) and restorative justice (e.g. Jacques Claessen), it is claimed that an individual by violating the rules harms himself as a person. The point of punishment (criminal justice) respectively reparation (restorative justice) therefore is to enable the offender to restore himself and to once again take up his role of citizen. I argue that the claim of self-harm may be based on a primitive worldview. Moreover, I show that this claim can be used to describe criminal law respectively restorative justice in terms that are too harmonious. In this way we lose sight of the coercion and violence that is involved in both contexts.

The author analyses and compares several distinct models of doing justice to find out which is serving ‘sustainable justice’ the best. Sustainable justice could be defined as justice that produces conflict resolutions that last for a long time and in this way contribute to a more sustainable society. Modern developmental methods for organisations make use of assessments to measure, compare and improve the effectiveness of organizational cultures. These methods are used in this contribution to analyse the organizational cultures of mediation, the traditional accusatorial (penal) procedure, problem-solving courts (with a focus on drug courts) and restorative justice conferencing. The comparison results in conclusions indicating that mediation and problem solving courts have a sound and effective organizational culture, due to healthy conflict management styles, characterized by managing both opposition and competition constructively and by a stimulating person-oriented focus. Restorative justice conferences bring together many stakeholders in a conflict and its resolution and facilitates in this way the awareness of the connections between many problems behind the actual conflict at hand: for this reason the resolutions may have a deeper societal impact and a greater sustainability.

In this article, the authors summarize some important methodological problems that may be encountered when studying the crime preventative effects of restorative justice. Studies mostly focus on tertiary preventative effects, namely the reduction of recidivism. Empirical research is in that regard mainly dealing with the effects of victim-offender mediation and conferencing practices. Some problems include the definitional issue (what can be considered as a restorative justice intervention?), the (quasi-)experimental design, the small size of samples and issues of comparability between different studies due to differences in e.g. follow-period or criteria for measuring recidivism.

Conceptions of what ethics are about inform the expectations one has when consulting ethicians. To illustrate this Pattyn shows how two different conceptions of ethics generate two opposite expectations. One could either consider ethics as a specific disciplinary domain that can evaluate and judge decisively about a certain phenomenon on the basis of fundamental criteria, or see ethics as the study of the ways in which a phenomenon – such as restorative justice – can appear as a morally accountable praxis in a specific cultural setting or ‘situated understanding’. Pattyn argues that only the second view makes sense and discusses several types of settings and understandings in relation to various types of judicial settlement. The conclusion following from the analysis is that the ambitions of restorative justice amount to an everyday moral strategy to heal the damaged cohesion of social groups after a transgression and to offer offender and victim alike the opportunity to rehabilitate.

This study revolves around the broad question: can religion prevent crime? In the first part the (possible) impact of religious faith on social behaviour (or the prevention of certain behaviours) is discussed. Respectively the following aspects are dealt with: religion as a source of activism, religion as protective factor to keep people from crime, and the impact of crime on tolerant or intolerant and forgiving or punitive attitudes. The second part deals with deliberately organized faith-based-interventions, intended to support and help inmates. The role of identity change via redemption narratives is examined, as well as the question how professionals and volunteers may stimulate rehabilitation and reintegration of (ex-)prisoners.