Democratic Professionalism: Citizen Participation and the Reconstruction of Professional Ethics, Identity, and Practice

6. Restorative Justice

6   Modern criminal control systems represent one of the many cases of lost opportunities for involving citizens in tasks that are of immediate importance to them. — , “Conflicts as Property” () This chapter focuses on a second case of democratic professionalism in practice : restorative justice. Like public journalists, restorative justice advocates seek a different mode of professionalism that involves citizens as partners rather than consumers and contributes needed “associated intelligence,” as Dewey would put it, to the public culture of democracy. Also like public journalists, restorative justice advocates have had to confront practically the complexity, trade-off issues, and ambiguities about the roles of both practitioner and layperson under the democratic professional model. Beginning with a brief discussion of the history and practice of restorative justice, this chapter reveals the main motivations for democratic professional reforms within the criminal justice domain. Like public journalism, the restorative justice movement affirms the relevance of integrity, professional efficacy, and civic concerns as motivations for reform. This chapter turns to examine the dialogue within the movement about the values of lay participation and task sharing.This dialogue provides a good deal of support for collaboration between professional and layperson within the criminal justice domain, emphasizing the professional efficacy, civic empowerment, and public education benefits of such a collaboration. It also raises a number of interesting questions of interpretation regarding the meaning, purpose, and scope of lay involvement that have relevance for democratic professionals in this and other domains. To show how restorative justice practitioners have settled some of the internal difficulties of democratic professionalism, this chapter briefly considers a “best case” example, Vermont Reparative Probation—one of the most participatory restorative justice programs in the United States. Vermont Reparative Probation shows how democratic professionalism reforms in criminal justice need not come at the cost of important traditional professional values that protect individual rights. Restorative justice provides another face of democratic professionalism and both supports and complicates the theory. The sophisticated division of labor between layperson and professional built into Vermont’s and other states’ programs shows how this sort of collaboration can take place even in highly sensitive areas such as criminal justice. Like public journalism, though, restorative justice raises the issue of how “the public” is to be understood. Different from the problem of whether and how professionals can represent or give voice to the public, restorative justice advocates wonder about the status of lay participants within criminal justice, what they represent, exactly, and how their beliefs and norms are to be treated by professionals. Along with obvious sources of contention between professional and lay values, beliefs, abilities, and norms, this chapter shows that in the background of democratic professional efforts may also be a contest about what the values, beliefs, abilities, and norms of lay and professional really are and whether and how they should change. Lay involvement and task sharing, then, may be continuously contentious not merely because they pose challenges to professional cultures of specialized knowledge and expertise, but in themselves, as democratic professionals and lay citizens struggle to define what it means to be a citizen, a member of a public responsible for life-altering measures such as punishment. Opening Criminal Justice to New Voices History and Practice of Restorative Justice Restorative justice is a practitioner-led reform movement calling for changes in the criminal justice domain that place greater emphasis on communication and reconciliation among victim, offender, and community. In North America, restorative justice is the product of informal justice experiments in the s, such as victim-offender reconciliation and neighborhood justice programs, and reflects the frustration with mainstream criminal justice experienced by victims’ rights groups, prison reformers, and other activists.1 
  1. John Braithwaite, Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation (New York: Oxford University The birth of the restorative justice movement in North America has been traced to the victim-offender mediation projects in the mid-s in Kitchener, Ontario, and Elkhart, Indiana, run by members of the Mennonite Central Committee in collaboration with probation officers.2 The prison reform efforts of the American Friends Service Committee in the s and s also contributed to the movement.3 These religiously based reformers found kinship with other reform-minded critics, such as victim-advocates who were calling for restitutiontype penalties, expanded victim services, and a more active role for victims in criminal...