Construction Of Community Correctional System Under The Concept Of Restorative Justice

The pilot project and propulsion of community correction are important for reformation of the penalty system of our country with the significance of cross-century and milestone; and as a brand new judicial social work practice, it has aroused wide concern of practical departments and learners of our country. Community correction is not only limited in the execution of community punishment, with the extension and development of the operation of community correction, it also involves in the reformation and perfection of the punishment method pf our country, and covers the punishment method that taking social protection as the core and balancing the idea transferring to the direction of social protection and protection of perpetrator and victim's civil rights. From the view of developing 6-year practice of community correction pilot system, In comparison with traditional execution method of imprisonment punishment, the advantages of community correction are obvious. Although community correction work in all districts has obtained a certain achievement, there are still many issues revealed in reality. Due to insufficient direction in theoretical reference and imperfect legal reference, it is only doing community correction for community correction, paying over attention on the function of punishment and the function of correction, and not paying enough attention on the restoration of the social relation, so that the correction is always invalid, its execution appears deviation, and the effect is only adequate. Now, how to perfect community correction has been the exigency. If constructing community correction operation mode in accordance with the conditions of our country, we shall look for the concept of punishment behind community correction. The exposed issues of community correction are just the concentrated reflection of retributive justice idea, so it is deviated that community correction need to be perfected by the concept of restorative justice. The concept of restorative justice is dedicated to recover social relation that is destroyed by crime in order to provide value basis for community correction. Using the concept of restorative justice to build an idealized model of community correction, we can reconstruct it through four aspects such as subject, arrangement, procedure and legal system in order to reach a better level of community correction. Combining with the practice, this paper discusses on the issues existed in community correction of our country and reconstruction of community correction system under the concept of restorative justice.This paper is divided into three parts:The first part discusses on the basic issues of community correction. The author elaborates the concept of community correction firstly, proposing that the definition of community correction has difference of broad sense and narrow sense. And the author also expounds the domestic authoritative definition. At present, the applicable objects of community correction have five types, including supervision and control of political rights, deprivation of political rights, probation, conditional release, and serving sentence outside the prison under surveillance. After that, the author set forth on the characteristics of community correction which are non-imprisonment of criminal sanction, community participation, specificity of correction object, and particularity of correction method. And then the author researches the historical development of community correction combining with community correction origin of foreign countries. For our country, community correction is exotic completely. Again, the author discusses the theoretical references of community correction mainly.The theoretical references of community correction have evolution of the theory in penalty goal, principle of humanitarianism of punishment, principle of individualization of punishment, principle of penal modest, labeling theory in criminology, deepen rehabilitation theory, theory of restorative justice, and etc. At last, the author discourses the advantages of community correction. The greatest advantage of community correction lies in avoiding the abuse of imprisonment punishment. The second part discourses the situation of community correction in our country. In this part, the author elaborates the pilot project's situation of community correction in our country firstly. Since developing the pilot project, the practice of community correction in all districts obtained much obvious effect, and got the reorganization and support of the community in a certain extent. And then the author quotes the situation of empirical investigation in local district to expose the existed issues mainly. That community correction is invalid is the most typical performance, showing the main issues existed in community correction of our country at present such as less applied proportion of community correction, attention on management, inattention on correction and restoration, lacking of participation of victim and community, insufficient legal references, limited arrangement and etc. after that, the author analyzes the reason for the issues production. Many learners always find the reason from community correction pilot itself, but the author considers that, out-of-date judicial idea is still the deep and nature reason of imperfect community correction system in our country, the root cause of the issues is the impact of retributivism and severe punishment on the punishment of our country for a long period. The issues in community correction are the reflection of retributive judicial idea; we can say that community correction system in our country is only the outer coat by absorbing advanced technology from foreign countries but not absorbing the spirit of the advanced judicial idea from foreign countries. Thus it is elicited that community correction system originated from the concept of restorative justice need to be perfected by using the concept of restorative justice.The third part discourses the construction of community correction system under concept of restorative justice. Firstly, the author discusses on the basic issues of restorative justice and considers that restorative justice is a brand new judicial idea at first, the basic concept of restorative justice is an idea of restorative justice replacing retributive justice. The basic idea of restorative justice lies in the crime should not be considered as the violation of public regulation or the infringement of the abstract moral order, but should be considered as the damage to victim, menace to the community and security and challenge to social public order. The author considers that the concept of restorative justice provides idea value basis for community correction system. At present, the core issue of community correction in operation process lies in that there is still little impression of the concept of restorative justice in the people's mind. In addition, establishing the concept of restorative justice in community correction shall contain four aspects of value idea, including establishing interest balance idea of victim, perpetrator and community, establishing the concept of restorative justice and value of social standard and thought of punishment restraint, and establishing the principle of caution in imprison punishment. Through contributing to theoretical value of community correction by the concept of restorative justice, we should rescan current community correction system. If constructing a correction mode in accordance with the concept of restorative justice, it is only reconstructed from four aspects. The first is that subject reconstruction should absorb community correction of victims and community participation and discuss on the intention of community correction of victims and community participation. The second is that arrangement reconstruction should expand applied arrangement of community correction and discuss on adding the class of punishment, pecuniary punishment and execution diversion and adding relative correction measures. The third is procedure reconstruction. The author considers that it should draw lessons from existed restorative justice procedure in the period of community correction, and it should build evaluation process before community correction and in the period of community correction. At last, it is discussed on reconstruction of legal system. Community correction must be carries out in the legal based track, amending relative regulations of Criminal Law and Criminal Procedural Law, and accelerating the formulation of Community Correction Law.