As always I find deep and challenging questions in your blog, and any of them suggests me plenty different thoughts and ideas. I’ll try to stay coherent to the final questions of this post, though.

Yes, I do agree: western legal culture has tended to widely underestimate the inter-personal characterization of human behaviors and institutions (and, therefore, of legal rules as well). In my understanding of the problem, such a tendency is mainly due to a highly individualistic anthropological model and to a (deeply connected) rationalistic attitude to knowledge.
One of RJ’s main and most important contributions to the debate on justice lays right in this: showing how crime deeply impacts personal and interpersonal dimensions, and how these are vital both in the genesis and in the resolution of conflict. RJ helps remembering that persons and relations are not ‘over-structural’ to law: rules are conceived for persons and relationships, and not the opposite (precious suggestions by this way come both from the sociological-communitarian ideas and from the humanistic approach of the ‘classical’ and Christian tradition).
For the highly formalistic and technicistic world of legal theory RJ represents – no doubt – a revolution, and a challenge which is worth to be taken.
(By the way what did Jesus say about saturdays? Was humanity made for saturdays, or were saturdays made for humanity?)

This said, I tend to be slightly suspicious to transformative approaches, since I fear that they might induce us to forget about personal responsibilities in favour of social ones.
This would become – poles inverted – the same mistake of modernity: forgetting that personal and interpersonal dimensions are related and co-implicated. Still, they are different.
Moreover, social and structural problems are certainly important and should be addressed, but I wonder whether this is the goal (and justification) of criminal justice. I mean: is this what CJ is meant for? Wouldn’t it be instead the field of political and social action?
Behind a transformative approach I see the risk of widening the net of control of CJ-systems, so, in the end, the risk of betraying much of RJ’s important criticism to the unacceptable extension of CJ’s net of control in western countries.

And.. how about each person’s free-will?
Yes, there are certainly many factors that influence human behavior and being conscious of them helps preventing from embracing a naive view of human choices: this does not mean, anyhow, that personal choices are not relevant and that – at the parting of the way – we are all someway called to choose a direction (back to the Gospel, although we all know how crowds and mass-movements can influence personal behavior, we also know that when Pilatus asked the people, not everybody shouted ‘Barabbas’, but some shouted ‘Jesus’.. and the meaning of their words was pretty much different, as well the consequences of them).

Final question, connected to the lenses example. Could ‘widening our view’ have side effects, as, e.g., neglect important details, or make us blur the over-all picture? Out of metaphor, what if we ended to forget about real victims and real damages? (Just an example: yesterday at Padua station a young man from Morocco was arrested for attempting a robbery against an old woman. We might likely learn from this man’s biography that he has been himself quite a difficult situation, but this does not mean that what he did can be justified. I mean: his personal story is not irrelevant, it should be taken into account, it should never serve as a justification for what he did). Still, social action and social assistance are surely relevant for crime prevention: but it is not criminal justice).
I cannot forget, in facts, that here in Italy, for instance, much of the marxist approach to CJ (especially during the ’70s) tended to depict criminals as ‘victims’ of social inequalities. Maybe this is the reason why it took 40 years to make our first, shy steps in starting to talk about the victims of marxist-oriented terrorism.

I was hoping to read more articles by Mr Dyck and others, along the lines of how structural violence can be brought into the frame by CR practitioners (in practice, not only during their training), but cannot seem to find any. This is why I am trying to understand how one can intervene AND attempt to cast a light on structural violence without being regarded as biased by any one of the parties. To date I have not found peace about the matter and I have simply stopped mediating in our context because i needed time to examine my role as peacebuilder. I concentrate now on training and other peacebuilding roles and I am attempting to answer questions about the structural aspects through my research.

I wonder if others have similar inner conflicts about mediating in unjust and unequal contexts.

how narrow the focus of the current criminal justice system is. I would like to know

however if would be fine to deduce from your post that the type of system currently

in place would only have the effect of pushing us as a society to act in a certain way

i.e. individualize crime and hence not only supporting the institutionalization process

but rather demanding for it! If so one of the main tenets of restorative justice would

be not only to affect the criminal justice system but essentially to affect or help

change the societal behaviour to one that looks beyond the individual elements of

crime and also has the ability to empathize with the victims. I say the restorative

justice movement has a duty to affect the societal mindset because other than that

as already critiqued(in paragraph 9 of your post) the restorative practices such as

victim offender mediation and family circles will suffer the same ‘telephoto’ view of

the crime or offence committed.

This brings me to my question . Howard to what extent does the general societal

mindset/ attitude have the ability to either make restorative justice successful or

break it. Put in another way can the society’s attitude dramatically mar the goals of

restorative justice? In that instead of restoring justice as its name implies, it

perpetuates societal inequalities?

So, Howard, if we “take responsibility, acknowledge errors, value personal identity and integrity as much as group acceptance, and cultivate an ability to distinguish between just and unjust authority,” will we be on the way toward opting out of the loop of wrong-doing? Zimbardo’s Ten-Step Program does sound like a good place to start, good steps to post on our refrigerator, good reminders as we move through the various compromises that all of us must make (while weighing which ones should we refuse to make) … Thanks for making this your message for New Year’s Day 2010.