Relation to others· Power and justice

Restorative justice

Axis: The meaning of punishment — Why punish: to repay the wrong, to deter, or to rehabilitate?

Punishment should first of all repair the harm and restore what the crime has broken: acknowledge the victim, hold the offender accountable to them, and re-establish the order and bonds of the community. Justice aims less to inflict suffering than to repair, reconcile, and remake the social fabric.

Problems

PrescriptiveMoral
Settle the debt or mend the bond
Is the crime a debt to the order, settled by making the offender suffer, or a rupture between persons, repaired only by acknowledging the victim and restoring the bond? And how would added suffering pay for a wrong?
the crime
PrescriptivePolitical & legal
Do we need prisons?
Does incarceration truly reform the offender, or does the whole penal apparatus do little more than produce and manage delinquency, in the service of an order and a power?
the penal apparatus