It’s not very often the concept of restorative justice gets much play outside scholarly publications or reformist criminal justice circles, so first, some credit for Max Fisher at The Atlantic for giving it an earnest look
last week. In seeking to explain Norway’s seemingly measly
twenty-one-year sentence for remorseless, mass-murdering white
supremacist Anders Breivik—a sentence that is certain to be extended to
last the rest of his life—Fisher casts a critical eye on the underlying
philosophy that animates that country’s sentencing practices, finding it
to be “radically different” from what we’re used to in the United
States. When it comes to criminal sentencing, he notes, the United
States favors a retributive model—in which an offender must be duly
punished for his crimes—over a restorative model that “emphasizes
healing: for the victims, for the society, and, yes, for the criminal
him or herself.”
“I don’t have an answer for which is better,” he says at the outset,
acknowledging that his own sense of outrage over Breivik’s sentence—like
that of many Americans—“hints at not just how different the two systems
are, but how deeply we may have come to internalize our understanding
of justice, which, whatever its merits, doesn’t seem to be as
universally applied as we might think.”
Read on...
No comments:
Post a Comment