Restorative Justice Policy in Context: A Legal-Archaeological Analysis

Maglione, Giuseppe

Abstract

This paper provides an original, in-depth analysis of English and Welsh criminal and penal policy on restorative justice. By using a historically-discursive approach—legal archaeology—this study firstly outlines the overarching representations of restorative justice within policy, unpacking their internal organisation. Then, it interprets such patterns of knowledge in light of specific cultural, political and professional transformations involving the Anglo-Welsh criminal justice field over the last 30 years. Along these lines, it generates a historically documented policy map whilst problematising the taken-for-granted images of restorative justice which populate regulations, codes and laws. This has implications for the study of the relationships between restorative justice policy and practice and for future research on the institutionalisation of this ‘new’ frontier of penality. More generally, the exploration of (unexpected) links between policy, politics and culture, provides material for a critical assessment of how state agencies appropriate community-based and practice-led forms of justice.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Online Publication Date: Jul 21, 2020
• Publication Date: 2022-04
• Deposit Date: Jul 22, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 22, 2020
• Journal: International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique
• Print ISSN: 0952-8059
• Electronic ISSN: 1572-8722
• Publisher: Springer
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 35
• Pages: 493-517
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09747-0
• Keywords: Restorative justice, Reparation, Legal archaeology, Discourses, England and Wales
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2676850