Thank you, Peter and good morning, everybody, or good afternoon wherever you are. Let me backtrack a little bit on the restorative framework. There's a larger umbrella, I think, that's probably relevant to many of you on the call. That restorative justice, I think, is deeply related to and it's called community justice. When we think about community justice, we think about community safety, community well-being, and that community in life depends on the community's capacity or to engage in collective action in three ways, as far as I'm concerned: Socialization, informal social control, and external resource leveraging.
A central feature of socialization and that informal control is what the criminologists might call shame. There's an Australian criminologist by the name of Braithwaite who has determined that there are two types of shame and this is where the restorative framework begins to enter the picture. He first calls disintegrative or stigmatizing shame is where shame is not … You don't simply shame the act but you also shame the person. The second type of social shame he calls reintegrative shame that features the expression of rebuke and community disapproval followed by gestures of re-acceptance back into the community as a norm and as law abiding citizens.
Disintegrative shame by contrast divides the community by creating a class of outcasts. Now, in this country we know this stigmatizing shame pretty well. I mean it's a lot of what our criminal justice system is predicated upon.
Enter this idea of reintegrative shame in through a concept called restorative justice, which I'm assuming, many of you on this call have either practiced, have heard about, have read about, it's gotten fairly well integrated over the last 30, 40 years. We now see it not just in our justice systems but we see it in our schools, in our institutions. Where things to separate from traditional justice is that a restorative view, [inaudible 00:05:31] crime, delinquencies, social violations as not just a violation against the state, rather it's a violation of relationship in one's community. That accountability is not just the breaking the law, it's rather for the harm associated with your actions.