Justice, Primitive and Modern: Dispute Resolution in Anarchist and State Societies by Bob Black

Author:Bob Black
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

IX. “RESTORATIVE JUSTICE.”

“Restorative Justice” (RJ) is the latest in informal justice. (Actually, it was invented before NJCs, but it hasn’t faded.) Once again, the leftist longing for peace, harmony and reconciliation has been turned against the left. Once again, the left – the academic left: nobody else has even heard of restorative justice – has been compromised, co-opted, and duped.[188] Think of the criminal justice system as Lucy, the credulous academics as Charlie Brown, and the football as, successively, the juvenile court, small claims court, pretrial diversion, neighborhood justice centers, and now restorative justice. Every time Charlie Brown runs up to kick the football, Lucy pulls it away at the last moment, and Charlie Brown ends up on his ass. And every time, he thinks that next time will be different. It’s like voting.

The pioneer or, as he is often called, the “grandfather” of RJ is Howard Zehr, the Distinguished Professor of Restorative Justice at Eastern Mennonite University. From 1979 to 1996, he directed the Office on Crime and Justice under the Mennonite Central Committee.[189] He describes himself as “a white, middle-class male of European ancestry, a Christian, a Mennonite.”[190] The Mennonite cult, whose background is Anabaptist, is pacifist and, in principle, like the Quakers, antinomian. [191] Obviously pacifists cannot collaborate with the state.[192] But that has not kept the Mennonites (or the Quakers) from collaborating with the state’s criminal justice system: “Mennonites and Quakers, for example, often work with judges, lawyers, probation officers, and bureaucrats to create reform, while protesting the institutions they are working in.”[193] Mennonites, Quakers and Brethren (the “peace churches”) invented RJ in the late 1970’s. It is a “faith-based” process.[194]

Without trying to make too much of it, there is much more religious influence and involvement in RJ than in the NCRs or other ADR programs. The methods of RJ – reconciliation through confession, repentance and forgiveness[195] – are overtly Christian. An Anglican bishop, introducing a book on RJ, explains: “This speaks to me of New Testament principles . . . “[196] Even secular RJ supporters mention the “evangelical” zeal of some of its advocates,[197] and their “self-righteousness.” [198] According to the Executive Director of a South African RJ center: “Restorative justice is by its very nature spiritual” – and by spiritual he means, experiencing and relating to the supernatural.[199] But there is no such thing as the supernatural.

If RJ essentially involves recourse to the supernatural, it violates, in the United States, the Constitutional separation of church and state, if it is implemented by the state. Long before I knew that what I was talking about was RJ, I wrote: “Obviously there are first amendment limitations on implementing this Gospel philosophy governmentally.”[200] Obvious to me, but not obvious to the inventors of the Florida Faith- and Community-Based Delinquency Treatment Initiative in the state Department of Juvenile Justice. Nor did the issue of the separation of church and state occur to the keenly-treated minds of three college professors who talked up the program at an annual meeting of the Southern Sociology Society.

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