Social Rehabilitation through Restoration? Old Issues and Transformative Perspectives in the Relationship between Restorative Justice and the Criminal Justice System

For a long time, the rehabilitative ideal and its practice were based on a theoretical paradigm and on operational methods that did not foresee any role for the victim. Re-education, resocialization, rehabilitation have been approaches mainly focused on selective interventions on the perpetrator of the crime, not far from the logic of atonement, nor from those of discipline and management of poverty and marginality.
Restorative justice builds a bridge between victims’ protection, attention to their needs and emotions, and rehabilitation.
Through inclusive and participatory models of conflict handling – which are typical of restorative justice and have as their main aim a renewed attention to victims, their emotions – it is possible to revisit the concept of rehabilitation. Thus, transformative effects of restorative justice may be observed not only at the microlevel of conflict handling, but also at the macro-level of the criminal justice system.