What's it all about
What is Smart Justice?
Smart Justice refers to a range of new ideas and approaches on how the justice system could work differently. These include therapeutic jurisprudence and restorative justice.
Therapeutic Jurisprudence
Until recently there has been no general theory concerning the impact of legal processes upon participant wellbeing and its implications for attaining justice. Therapeutic Jurisprudence (TJ) has filled this gap.
Therapeutic jurisprudence says that the processes used by courts, lawyers and other justice system personnel can impede, promote or be neutral in relation to outcomes connected with participant wellbeing. Developed by Professors David Wexler and Bruce Winick in the United States in the 1980s in the context of mental health law, it is now seen to apply to all areas of the law and across cultures and is the subject of international study and development.
Therapeutic jurisprudence is practical, using findings from the behavioural sciences to suggest techniques that legal professionals can use to do their job better. It acknowledges that when considering a therapeutic approach, legal actors must consider other justice system values, for example, in determining whether to imprison an offender who receives no services in prison or to place the person in community supervision and approach the root causes of offending in a holistic manner.
Restorative Justice
Restorative Justice places the victim with the offender at the centre of the criminal justice process. In a typical restorative justice process, the parties affected by harmful behaviour meet in order to seek a common understanding of what has happened and to determine collectively how best to deal with the aftermath.
Restorative justice has developed in contrast to "retributive justice", whereby authorities respond to social problems by imposing punishment on individuals who breach social rules. It is a “bottom up” system rather than an imposition of consequences from on high.
Instead of defining crime in terms of a violation against the state, it defines crime in terms of the violation of one person by another within the community. The focus is upon providing a forum for the offender to take responsibility and to make amends rather than to establish guilt and exact punishment. Principles of restorative justice may also be applied to civil disputes.