CONDITIONS OF SUCCESSFUL REINTEGRATION CEREMONIES: Dealing with Juvenile Offenders

Shifting criminal justice practices away from sligmalization and toward rcintegration is no small challenge. The innovation of community conferences in New Zealand and Australia has two structural features that are conducive to reinlegralive shaming: (a) selection of the people who respect and care most about the offender as conference participants (conducing to rcintegration) ; and (b) confrontation with victims (conducing to shaming). Observation of some failures and successes of these conferences in reintegrating both offenders and victims is used to hypothesize 14 conditions of successful reinlegration ceremonies. The spectre of failure haunts modern criminology and penology. Deep down many feel what some say openly—that nothing works: that despite decades of study and debate, we are no nearer deterrence than we ever were and/or that more humane forms of treatment are mere masquerades concealing a descent into Kafaesque bureaucracy where offenders suffer a slow and silent suffocation of the soul. Worse still, we fear that even when something does work, it is seen to do so only in the eyes of certain professionals, while outside the system ordinary citizens are left without a role or voice in the criminal justice process.