Talking About The Plights And Prospects On The Application Of Restorative Justice In China

The restorative justice we are now talking about was put into practice in 1970s in North America. The innovators of western countries advocated restorative justice for the punishment mitigation and the protection of the victims' rights. Until 1990s, tens of Western European countries and countries in North America, even more than 1000 countries over the world, have applied the restorative justice.In the traditional criminal justice system, the application of national punishment is the only way to approach justice; the victims' function in the criminal litigation is usually weakened; the competition in the litigation, on a large scale, takes the place of the attempt between the wrong doers and victims to solve the disputes on their own. Reflecting on the scrape of the victims from the perspective of the retributive justice was the accelerating agent of the naissance of restorative justice. The emergence of the restorative justice made the progress from "offensive justice" to "inoffensive justice" without menacing the authority of the written laws. In our country, the legislation and the judicatory of the criminal system used to insist on the collectivism. Thus, the positive factors for introducing the restorative justice into our society are not so many as it is supposed to be. There exist quite a few obstacles in the construction of the restorative justice.Yet, the restorative justice did do an excellent job in upgrading the work efficiency of the judicatory system. Hence, introducing this new toy into our old system to reach the golden apple does seem reasonable, while comparing the differences between the domestic legal culture and the overseas can be crucial to the incoming reformation.It is true that the traditional legal culture in our country keeps us so far from establishing a perfect system based on the restorative justice in the near future. Nevertheless, another truth is that the reformation in the past years tried to lead the old system toward the right track.Besides, functionally speaking, the restorative justice may play a positive effect on our criminal judicatory system. The old system has done a poor job in criminal prevention and neighborhood renewal, which can be mended by the restorative justice.Things happen for some reasons. So does the restorative justice, which was pregnant by the naissance of the Humanism and the penalty lightening in western countries. Despite of the virtual environments of justice, crafting it directly into our legal system can be a large disaster. Besides, introducing restorative justice into our country as assistance under the premise of recognizing the retributive justice can make up for the shortcomings of which, thereby improving China's criminal justice system.