This chapter explores the relationship between education and a school’s punishment and disciplinary practices. Distinct from discipline, punishment is defined partly in terms of its attempt to express moral disapproval. While there are serious criticisms of the use of punishment in educational settings, punishment is largely justified in school in terms of its ability to foster certain sorts of educative conversations. Not all punishment is justified: the particular sort of punishment, and the context that surrounds it, must match the educational nature of the school environment. The punishment must send the right educational messages and accomplish legitimate educational goals. The context of punishment that best supports these goals can be found in the restorative justice framework.

At the core of any legal decision is an assumption that the decision will be “fair,” yet this is an elusive term. A close study of cases involving criminal defendants with mental disabilities shows that many (perhaps most) of the decisions involving this cohort are not “fair” in the contexts of due process and justice. If legal decisions reflect principles such as procedural justice, restorative justice, and therapeutic jurisprudence, the chances of such fairness will be significantly enhanced. This chapter explains why this goal of fairness, in the context of these cases, can never be met absent a consideration of the virulence of sanism and pretextuality, along with the misuse of heuristics and false “ordinary common sense.” These factors enable much of society to ignore gray areas of human behavior, and predispose fact-finders to endorse beliefs in accord with their prior experiences.

This chapter explores private institutions that adjudicate criminal disputes, from professional organizations to universities to religious organizations. These institutions can choose the level of due process they want to follow, although universities are bound by Title IX requirements and face some constitutional restrictins. The institutions also follow their own distinctive interests in meting out punishment if they adjudicate the accused as guilty. Their procedures often provide a level of procedural justice and restorative justice beyond what the public criminal justice system provides.

This chapter examines the phenomenon of private criminal settlements, in which the alleged criminal gives the victim of the crime some consideration in exchange for keeping the incident out of the public criminal justice system. These agreements may occur between two private individuals who have (and wish to maintain) a preexisting relationship, such as when the victim and the perpetrator are family members. They may involve a corporate client of a private police officer who decides that referring the case to the public criminal justice system is too expensive and time consuming. The witness may not even be the victim of the crime; the witness could be a third party who either accidentally discovered evidence of the crime or actively sought the information in order to extract a payment from the perpetrator. The chapter sets out the motivations that lead individuals to enter these agreements and argues that these agreements offer benefits to society that outweight their costs. It also compares these agreements to public plea bargains, comparing the arguments for and against plea bargains with the arguments for and against private criminal settlements.

John Rawls has been sharply criticized, most notably by Charles Mills, for not sufficiently addressing questions of racial justice. Specifically, Mills has argued that it is a deep flaw in Rawls’s framework (and in much liberal theory that has followed Rawls’s example) that it cannot account for the legitimacy of reparations claims for past racial injustices. In response to this influential charge, the present chapter argues that reparations for racial injustice can be understood and defended within the framework of justice as fairness. It discusses the political morality of reparations and its relation to racial justice. It also explores the often-misunderstood relationship between reparative justice and distributive justice.

The current retributive system of school punishment conflicts with the aims of democratic education because it impedes the cultivation of essential democratic values and capabilities. To be legitimate, however, school punishment in democratic societies ought to align with, or at least not impede, the aims of democratic education. This suggests that punishment should be consistent with the communicative and inclusive nature of democracy and support the cultivation of essential democratic capabilities. Restorative justice provides such a model of school punishment by prioritizing communication and inclusion, facilitating the cultivation of democratic capabilities, and legitimizing punishment as a means of communicating remorse instead of inflicting retribution to wrongdoers. The authors argue that for school punishment to align with and support the aims of democratic education, it must shift from the retributive justice model currently employed in most schools to a restorative justice model.

Chapter 1 introduces the topic of historical abuses of states and churches. The chapter outlines the existing and related conceptions of justice that may inform a response to historical abuses and positions transitional justice as the dominant but flawed approach to addressing the violent aspects of the past. The third section considers the application of these justice approaches to the context of historical abuses of Western states and Christian churches. The final section previews the remaining chapters of the book.

Chapter 10 argues the practices and discourses of reconciliation have tended to operate as a form of inappropriate and premature settlement or closure of the grievances of victim-survivors and their descendants. To encourage victim-survivors and a society to pursue reconciliation in the absence of addressing other elements of transitional justice may operate as a reaffirmation of the power structures of states and churches. While the experience of Canada and Australia contains an explicit reconciliation discourse and practice, in the absence of significant change in and imagination regarding power relationships in those societies, they join the United States, Ireland, and the United Kingdom in remaining deeply unreconciled societies. In addition, the reconciliation practice of the Catholic church regarding historical abuse demonstrates its inability to effectively self-critique in its processes of reconciliation.

Chapter 7 conducts part two of the deeper dive into the new regulations, but here the focus is on the changes made to the investigation and adjudication of sexual assault. The chapter explains the ways in which the new procedures differ from those under the 2011 Dear Colleague Letter, and how they better protect complainants and the accused. In considering the fairness of the new procedures, the chapter compares them to the consensus recommendations of the 2017 ABA Criminal Justice Section Task Force on Campus Due Process and Victim Protection. Along the way, suggestions are offered for how schools can implement the new regulations in a way that is compliant with those regulations but better protects the rights of victims and the accused.

Shakespeare shows how violence can be prevented by replacing retribution, or revenge, with “restorative justice”: renouncing punishment toward others and the self, thus transcending both shame and guilt ethics, and giving violent offenders the opportunity and means to restore to the community what they had taken from it, thus reconciling with their community. In Measure for Measure, Duke Vincentio conducts a psychological experiment showing how the “retributive” apparatus of the state produced an attempted (judicial) murder and rape, whereas the Duke’s approach prevented all violence, by individuals and the state. The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale illustrate the same principles and outcome. The Merchant of Venice, however, shows how severely restorative justice is compromised when the primary cause and constituent of violence is ignored, and attention is paid only to its symptom or consequence (Shylock’s anger at Antonio’s anti-Semitism).

The concept of resilience is best understood as a process whereby individual capital and social capital intersect in ways that create optimal outcomes in stressed environments. As a process, resilience can look very different in different contexts, with any single system (including systems that promote economic and environmental justice, human rights, and law enforcement ) showing patterns of persistence, resistance, recovery, adaptation or transformation depending on the resources that each system has available to support positive change. This chapter explores these processes and how they affect systems simultaneously at multiple levels. This understanding of resilience as a multi-systemic concept can help to explain how transitional justice processes and the broader systems with which they interact (both judicial and non-judicial) respond to stressors, thereby shaping how individuals, communities and institutions deal with adversity and shocks. Brief case examples are used to show how resilience changes depending on a population’s exposure to extreme forms of potentially traumatising events like war, forced migration, genocide and chronic economic disruption.

Authoritarian and retributive discipline policies that characterize the crime control model of school discipline feed into a cycle of harm whereby aggressive behaviors, including retribution and revenge, are likely to be reinforced as normative responses to an unjust and unequal environment. These policies are ineffective at reducing violence and delinquency, can result in poor academic outcomes, are disproportionately applied, and have negative impacts on the school climate. They also fail to capture the importance of teaching students the social and behavioral skills that are associated with better academic and behavioral outcomes. By contrast, the school climate is an important malleable component that can have positive impacts on a variety of outcomes. Whole school approaches to positive discipline such as Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports and Restorative Justice are far more promising policies to improving the school climate and associated student outcomes, including retaliatory behavior.

Desiring vengeance against those that hurt us is deeply human; justice systems are one means by which those desires can be contained and addressed in ways that avoid cycles of revenge. However, such systems require that people have trust in them. We begin with the relationship between institutional trust and the reduction of vengefulness. We then consider how youth develop their sense of institutional trust, with a particular emphasis on school justice systems in the K-12 context. We propose that a narrative approach to institutional trust might complement existing work, and outline strengths of that approach. We contrast retributive disciplinary and restorative justice systems in schools and consider how each of these systems looks from a narrative lens. Finally, we make recommendations for future research and practice based on ways that institutional trust, narrative, and school-based approaches to justice and discipline may reduce vengeful behavior and promote youths’ development.