"More conciliation, less punishment: possibilities and obstacles for an extended use of Restorative Justice." A brief report (Oñati/09).

As I’ve promissed, I’ll post a brief report about the workshop “More Conciliation, Less Punishment – Possibilities and obstacles for an extended use of Restorative Justice”, which took place at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law (IISL - www.iisj.es), located in Oñati, Spain, during the 21st and 22nd May this year.

The workshop was organized by Hedda Giertsen and Kjersti Ericsson, from the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law – University of Oslo, and there I’ve met people from Poland, Norway, Finland, The Netherlands, Albania, United States, Russia, England, Denmark, Sweden, Greenland and Belgium. I believe I was the only one from the south hemisphere.

I’ll try to be as honest as possible, but I’m sure I’ll forget important details, and I anticipate my apologies for it. I apologize also for my English, which is not that great too, as you’ll see.

The workshop was really interesting: everybody presented their own reserches about RJ, and I could listen and discuss about them all, which was very good to me: the discussion about RJ is very rich in all these countries, and it’s not that good to discover that, unfortunately, brazilian empirical surveys are not on the same level, and this could help us a lot in the hard work of exploring the problems of our broke criminal justice.

I can say, also, that it was a great honor to meet Nils Christie! He is a symbol of the abolicionism thinking to me since I was in the graduation studies, and I have no words to describe my happiness on meeting him personaly. I’ve met his wife too, Hedda Giertsen, who is also very caring and receptive. I could meet also Lode Walgrave and Ivo Aertsen, both from Leuven Institute of Criminology - Belgium, who are great references for me in the field of RJ (and Walgrave is coming to Porto Alegre-Brasil on 28th and 29th September!). I could mention many other participants, like John Blad (Erasmus University Rotterdam – The Netherlands), Yngvil Grøvdal (Norwegian Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies – Norway), Birger Poppel and Mariekathrine Poppel (University of Greenland), Bas van Stokkom (Radbound University - The Netherlands), Chris Powell (University of Southern Maine – USA), Joanna Shapland (University of Sheffield – England), Adem Tamo and Rasim Gjoka (Conflict Resolution and Reconciliation of Disputes Foundation - Albania), Monika Platek, Kacper Tomasz Gradon, Grzegorz Borek and Agnieszka Kloc (University of Warsaw – Poland) and Per Jørgen Ystehede (Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law, University of Oslo – Norway). I cannot mention all the participants, but this list is enough to show the great variety of researches was presented there.

Of course it’s not possible to keep in touch with everybody, but Lode Walgrave is coming to Porto Alegre in September, and Facebook enables the communication with my distant friend Agnieszka Kloc. Of course my wish is to see and listen all this people again, but the workshop was amazing: I’ve not only learned a lot with them, but I also met extraordinary people. Listening and knowing different views and cultures should be required to everybody who are in a PhD course: it enables the student to discover that our point of view is always limited, and that are many people all around the Globe studying the same subject, but with another way of thinking things and a completely different way of describing their point of view.

I really don’t know how to describe all the learning the workshop and the participants gave to me, because it’s not measurable or reportable, but it was a great academic moment to me.

Now, back to Porto Alegre and to PUCRS and to the PhD studies on Criminal Sciences, I’m always available to everyone who wants to discuss about RJ and all the other themes we are working on.

Best regards,
Daniel Achutti.
dachutti@terra.com.br