Restorative Justice

I'm in the middle of reading Desmond Tutu's No Future Without Forgiveness, but I needed to post now, rather than later about a new concept I learned about:  restorative justice.  Somehow, I've lived my whole life thinking that justice was punishment and that was all it could be.  And then I found this wonderful book about South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Wikipedia gives some helpful information here, but I think it is most beautifully described in these two quotes from the book.  Desmond Tutu writes,

"Here the central concern is not retribution or punishment.  In the spirit of ubuntu, the central concern is the healing of breaches, the redressing of imbalances, the restoration of broken relationships, a seeing to rehabilitate both the victim and the perpetrator, who should be given the opportunity to be reintegrated into the community he has injured by his offense." 

He later quotes Marietta Jaeger whose daughter had been killed and kidnapped,

"...I had finally come to believe that real justice is not punishment but restoration, not necessarily to how things used to be, but to how they really should be."

Justice doesn't have to be just about punishment.  Justice can be about healing, and restoration, and reintegration.  Somehow, justice doesn't seem so harsh anymore. Is restorative justice easy? Definitely not.  But it has the potential to heal all parties involved in ways that punitive justice cannot.