Constructing the 'ideal' and 'non-ideal' offender in restorative justice


Konstantin Petoukhov, Carleton University

Ever since the publication of Nils Christie’s seminal text ‘The Ideal Victim’ (1986), the concept has taken on a life of its own and criminal justice scholars has paid a great deal of attention to the constructions of ‘ideal’ and ‘non-ideal’ victims in the criminal justice system. By contrast, critical victimological research on victims in restorative justice has enjoyed much less theoretical and empirical attention, while research exploring offender experiences in restorative justice has been seemingly absent altogether. Drawing on a critical victimological approach, this article considers the complexity of offenders’ social identities and how the categories of ‘ideal’ and ‘non-ideal’ offenders are constructed through interactions with restorative justice caseworkers. This presentation advances a series of theoretical and empirical arguments by considering the constructions of ‘ideal’ and ‘non-ideal’ offenders in restorative justice and exploring how their statuses as offenders are formulated by restorative justice practitioners. Specifically, its objective is to examine the role of power that circulates in dominant restorative justice discourses and how it operates through the work of restorative justice practitioners to complicate, disrupt, challenge, or lend support to the existing body of critical victimological research in relation to ‘ideal’ and ‘non-ideal’ offenders in restorative justice. Drawing on the research data collected as part of 21 qualitative interviews with offenders, victims, and restorative justice practitioners, this presentation challenges the neutrality of restorative justice mediation and interrogates the law’s power to structure the field of potential actions by means of discourses that regulate the parameters around the emergence of subject positions. To this end, I argue that restorative justice tends to privilege particular narratives that fit favourably within its agenda, while marginalizing others, and agreements between partiicpants are built on the semantic and moral grounds of the dominant story. Restorative justice mediators, in this context, engage in the production of consensus within a highly politicised process characterised by struggle over the meaning of narratives whereby the social construction, performativity, and management of meaning all represent constitutive elements of the restorative justice practice as a political activity.  

This paper will be presented at the following session: