Research Seminar: Breaking the Penal Equation: Reconciliatory Restorative Justice 

Breaking the Penal Equation: Reconciliatory Restorative Justice 

Restorative justice is often heralded as a radically different approach to conventional criminal justice that claims to provide an alternative to dominant retributivist ethics, in particular, the punitive penal equation that ‘crime plus responsibility equals punishment’. Yet, despite its longstanding presence in the criminal justice arena, restorative justice has failed to properly challenge, let alone, break that equation. On the contrary, it remains complicitous both in theory and in practice. In this paper, I argue that one of the reasons it has been unable to break this equation is because it lacks an adequate, independent ethical foundation. The upshot is a legal conception of restorative justice that repeats the status quo. This paper pursues a different conceptualisation of restorative justice—what I call ‘reconciliatory restorative justice’—that can be contrasted to legal restorative justice. Reconciliatory restorative justice provides a robust challenge to retributivist ethics that breaks the penal equation.