Keynote Abstracts
John Braithwaite
Regulatory Institutions Network
RSPAS, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific
How Might Transformed Policing Have Prevented the Global Financial Crisis, Better Confronted Climate Change, Transnational Sexual Abuse of Children, Terrorism and Armed Conflict in our Region? A Restorative Justice Analysis
The nature of contemporary capitalism is that many of its largest problems start in its peripheries. Think of Southern Afghanistan as an example with both terrorism and heroin. A mistake the world made after 1829 was to utterly globalize the Sir Robert Peel’s model of metoropolitan policing pioneered in London. As a result, policing became overly preoccupied with the problems of cities and with crime. It moved away from regulatory and restorative models of policing that dominated the repertoire of the village constable. This presentation discusses how a move back to elements of these approaches might better tackle some of the big problems that incubate at metropolitian capitalism’s peripheries.
Paul Dwyer
Performance Studies
University of Sydney
The theatre/theory of restorative justice
The terms for theatre and theory shared a common root word in Ancient Greek: the theatre was conceived as ‘a place for seeing’ and theory as the act of ‘contemplation, speculation and spectating’. Taking its cue from this often overlooked etymology, this paper wonders how close we come to reality when we try to re-present the workings of restorative justice in research papers, in training role-plays and in the theatre.
Australia’s most successful playwright, David Williamson, has received considerable acclaim in recent years for a trilogy of ‘docudramas’ in which he attempts to reproduce faithfully a model of restorative justice conferencing to which he was exposed through the work of David Moore, John McDonald and Terry O’Connell. Williamson explicitly acknowledges his interest in proselytising such practices and his conferencing plays can certainly make for compelling performance, offering strong theatrical form to a kind of ‘passion play’ scenario that often appears in restorative justice theory. At the same time, I want to argue, it is the ‘wrinkles’ in Williamson’s theatre practice—the moments in which the seams of his ‘radical naturalist’ portrayal of restorative justice show through—that offer particular insights into where this theory may need some repair work.
The second part of the paper, reporting on fieldwork observations in the NSW juvenile justice system, will build on these insights to suggest that conferencing is a more strongly regulated genre of social interaction than it appears to be in the ideal-typical examples given by many restorative justice theorists. Indeed, a strong regulatory discourse is arguably key to the genre’s efficacy as a mode of ritualised action designed to address the harmful consequences of crime.
Diana Eades
University of New England
Courtroom Talk, Language Ideologies and Inequality
Over the course of nearly three decades of research, sociolinguistics has documented a number of specific ways in which defendants and witnesses are controlled, coerced and manipulated through the rigid and asymmetrical discourse structure of courtroom hearings. The focus of most of these studies has been on situational inequality and imbalance, often interpreted within an approach which sees power as static, one-sided and fundamentally institutional. More recently sociolinguists have asked about the social consequences of this situated imbalance, within an approach which integrates structure and agency, and which examines courtroom talk in its social, cultural and historical contexts. This presentation will be situated within this critical sociolinguistics approach. In particular, I will look at assumptions about how language and communication work (= language ideologies), focusing on language ideologies which enable courtroom discursive practices that perpetuate social inequality.
This examination of courtroom talk and social inequality will lead to a number of questions about similarities to and differences from restorative justice practices. In particular, I will ask about some of the language ideologies that have been found to underpin courtroom talk: How significant are these language ideologies to restorative justice practices? How can restorative justice play a role in redressing social inequalities? What light can sociolinguistics shed on the ways in which restorative justice practices might impact on law reform in relation to courtroom evidence?
Peter Gray
Federal Court of Australia
Restorative justice: the unfulfilled promise of the civil justice system
The promise of the civil justice system has always been full compensation for a wrong done. The promise is not fulfilled. The steps taken to prepare a case for trial are expensive. There is a tendency for those steps to proliferate. This involves considerable expense, partly because lawyers charge their clients on a time basis. A successful party recovers by way of costs substantially less than the amount spent. There are also the personal effects of involvement in litigation. Litigants whose own money is at risk are under particular stress. Witnesses face with the possibility that they will be labelled as liars. Expert witnesses may have their reputations damaged. The vast majority of cases are resolved without trial and judgment, yet courts continue to manage cases as if they will all be tried. This paper discusses case management strategies aimed at resolution, rather than trial, and seeking to minimise expense. Powers conferred by a recent Federal statute might assist.
Frances Rock
School of English Communication and Philosophy
Cardiff University
Language and restorative justice in the early stages of criminal investigations
In this plenary talk, I will consider connections between conventional policing procedures and restorative justice asking whether and how each might learn from the other.
The paper will take a qualitative perspective which is informed by interactional sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. From this perspective, I will examine data in the form of transcripts of naturally occurring conversation, ethnographic observation of policing encounters and interviews with both suspects and witnesses. The data have been gathered around a number of rather different activities including telephone calls for police assistance, police interviews with witnesses and instances of explanation during police detention procedures. The activities have in common their place early in the justice process and for this reason they have not been the classic focus for restorative justice work. Using examples from these areas of conventional legal processes and research literature concerned with them as well as data and literature from restorative justice settings, the paper will ask two interacting questions. First, what can existing research on language, communication and policing contribute to restorative justice? Secondly, how can the restorative paradigm contribute to policing, particularly to the language of investigation. In order to address these questions, the paper will consider issues of power, control, autonomy, representation and accountability.
Julie Stubbs
Professor of Criminology, Faculty of Law
University of Sydney
Subordination, competing interests and the challenge of communication
in restorative justice practices, through the lens of gendered violence
Restorative Justice is often promoted as a response to the failings and limitations of conventional criminal justice. Within conventional criminal justice the parties are seen to have competing and probably irreconcilable differences, and criminal justice processes offer obstacles to effective communication. The open, discursive character of restorative justice offers new opportunities for dialogue between the parties and the potential for reparation. Story telling is said to be central to Restorative Justice, but also carries risks. Whose stories will prevail? What are the consequences of the ‘wrong story’ or a story that is not well received? Non-domination is said to be a core value of Restorative Justice, but If we acknowledge that asymmetrical social relations position people differently, and ‘shape what can be known, thought and said’ (Razack 1998: 10), what are the implications for restorative encounters? Canadian sociologist Sherene Razack has examined ‘how relations of domination and subordination stubbornly regulate encounters in the classrooms and courtrooms’ (1998: 10); I wish to extend this to other rooms, including those that are the settings for Restorative Justice.
We still know relatively little about how differential social relations play out within the dynamics of restorative processes, and in turn shape the meanings that emerge. I examine these issues through the lens of gendered violence as a means of displacing the approach common in much Restorative Justice literature of working with an undifferentiated concept of victim (and offender).
Razack, S (1998) Looking white people in the eye: Gender, race and culture in the courtrooms and classrooms, University of Toronto Press, Toronto.