From Terra del Fuego to Ungava Bay, the history of betrayal continues to today. The spirit of Almighty Voice, the ghost of Anna Mae, call like thunder from the mountains—you can hear them say: ‘it’s a stolen land!’
If you’re like me, you’d like to think we’ ve learned from our mistakes enough to know we can’t play God with others’ lives at stake. So now we’ve all discovered, the world wasn’t only made for whites, what step are you gonna take to try and set things right in this stolen land? Bruce Cockburn, Stolen Land (1986)
Abstract
Conservative crime control measures, such as incarceration, capital punishment, and boot camps, have done little, if anything, to prevent and control crime in North America and elsewhere. What, then, is to be done? Like other progressive criminologists, I contend that we need to radically rethink the administration of justice and seek insight from First Nations societies and communities that rely on informal means of resolving a wide range of conflicts. The main objective of this essay is to demonstrate that such ‘AlterNative’ social control strategies are more effective and humane means of curbing crime and achieving social justice. The progressive initiatives proposed here are heavily informed by the Inuit model of restorative justice and John Braitwaite’s theory of reintegrative shaming. These have the potential to alleviate much pain and suffering caused by crime and other symptoms of structured social inequality.
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Tomaszewski, E.A. ‘AlterNative’ approaches to criminal justice: John Braithwaite’s theory of reintegrative shaming revisited. Critical Criminology 8, 105–118 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02461160
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02461160