Abstract
Restorative justice — the idea that something can be repaired once an offense, a violation, an injustice has already been lived through by those it touched — is the thread running through the dialogue we've built together, weaving in our different disciplinary perspectives.
Looking through the lenses of psychology, the sociology of law and deviance, and criminal law, we found ourselves drawn to a handful of questions that struck us as essential — questions worth asking not just to understand restorative justice, but to help shape it. What, exactly, gets repaired here? How does repair actually happen? And just as importantly, what doesn't count as repair? Each of us answered from within her own discipline, trying to get at what "repairing" really means while also helping to sketch the outer edges of this model of justice — where it stops being restorative justice and becomes something else.
What emerged from our exchange is that repair, in the restorative justice sense, is not a single thing. It carries multiple meanings, or perhaps more accurately, it proves meaningful on several different levels at once. This conversation isn't meant to offer final answers — that was never the point. Instead, it's meant to open up a space where our disciplines can meet, sometimes in agreement and sometimes in productive tension, around what restorative justice actually does as part of the legal system's broader response to crime.