RESTORATIVE JUSTICE AND COERCIVE POWER?

Stanley Basler, Criminal Justice & Mercy Ministries of the Oklahoma Conference, United Methodist Church

Abstract

In Discipline and Punish The Birth of the Prison Michel Foucault presents a history of the development of the Enlightenment sciences of criminal justice and as experienced in modernity and post-modernity. In summary, a purpose of criminal justice is to correct and train. Corrections, through observation determines the existence of norms and deviancy and by the application of coercive power seeks to transform a deviant into a norm. Restorative Justice, on the other hand, emphasizes the role of voluntariness in the crafting of justice. It seeks to avoid or bypass the enormous coercive power reservoir of the nation state. Obviously this cannot be avoided in its entirety. The purpose of this paper is to explore the two poles, the two extremes of coercive power and to hypothesize where the tipping point lies for restorative justice. In other words at what point is coercive power so integral in a restorative justice model that it is only a different expression of retributive justice and at what point does it preserve its identity as a “paradigm shift?”