Criminal Justice, Indigenous Youth and Social Democracy

Abstract

The political question of how the will of a community is to be democratically formed and adhered to, the question of social democracy, is norma- tively tied to the mode of criminal justice employed within that democratic public sphere. Liberal, republican, procedural and communitarian forms of democratic will-formation respectively reflect retributive, restorative, procedural and cooperative modes of criminal justice. After first elaborating these links through the critical response of republican and procedural theories of democracy to the liberal practice of democratic will-formation and its retributive mode of justice, our discussion considers the recent practice of restorative and procedural justice with respect to Indigenous youth; and this in the context of a severely diminished role for Indigenous justice agencies in the public sphere. In light of certain shortcomings in both the restorative and procedural modes of justice, and so too with republican and procedural understandings of the democratic public sphere, we turn to a discussion of procedural communitarianism, anchored as it is in Dewey’s (1989) notion of social cooperation. From here we attempt a brief formulation of what a socially cooperative mode of justice might consist of; a mode of justice where historically racial and economically coercive injustices are sufficiently recognised.