The Question of Restorative Justice
Is Restorative Justice justice
The Question of Restorative Justice
It seemed as if there were signs posted all over campus at UMBC directing people to something called a conference on “Restorative Justice”.
I have to say that I am bothered by the term since “Restorative Justice” since this is a new term for something that is very old. “Restorative Justice” is a new term for “Peonage” which is also called “Debt Bondage” and also “Debt Slavery”. When it is said that it is not possible to repay the debt this is just “Slavery”.
To show how quick “Restorative Justice” (AKA “Peonage”) become slavery, consider the case where in 1936 my Grandfather prosecuted and got the conviction of a Sheriff in Arkansas who had tried to use the claim of “Peonage” (AKA: “Restorative Justice”) to justify the fact that the Sheriff had enslaved several poor African-American farmers.
My apologies if anyone is offended by the terminology used by the Newspaper but the article is from 1936 and times have changed)
The facts of the case were that P.D. Peacher, the marshal for Earle City Arkansas arrested poor sharecroppers and then forced them to work on his farm, saying variously that he had arrested them as vagrants or that he had then work on his cotton farm because they owed him money.
The ideas in “Restorative Justice” are old, they were the ideas that once created the large scale use of prison farms and chain gangs and were the original rational for convict labor in prison industries (such as can be found at the Baltimore City Jail). However there is more than a little truth to allegations from the past that some people were kept in prison because they were needed to keep the prison industry going, and so the economic need of the prison industry trumped justice. It is one of the reasons that chain-gangs were largely eliminated until their recent revival.
Whether it is called “Restorative Justice”, peonage, debt-bondage or debt-slavery, and even if there is a utility for society in it, it is also a slippery slope and easily subject to abuse. To work, it would have to be enforced by people of good conscience, but people do not always have good conscience. However, just having the word “Justice” in the name will not ensure that the result will be “Justice”.
