THE SOCIO-PHILOSOPHICAL POTENTIAL OF THE CONCEPT OF RESTORATIVE JUSTICE IN THE PREVENTION OF RECIDIVIST CRIME
Keywords:
restorative justice, recidivist crime, reintegrative shaming, stigmatisation, moral subjectivity, communicative rationality, theory of recognition, desistance, social capital, penal paradigm, mahalla, legal culture.Abstract
The article offers a socio-philosophical examination of the heuristic and practical potential of the concept of restorative justice in the prevention of recidivist crime. The author proceeds from the thesis that the reproduction of repeat offending is not merely a technical malfunction of penal administration but a logical consequence of the ontological and anthropological premises upon which the retributive paradigm of punishment is constructed. By interpreting the offence as an abstract violation of a legal norm rather than as the rupture of a concrete intersubjective relation, the retributive model reduces the offender to the status of an object of coercive influence and thereby institutionalises the very exclusion that subsequently manifests itself as recidivism. Relying upon the dialectical, comparative-historical, hermeneutic and axiological methods, the article reconstructs the philosophical architecture of restorative justice as a communicative and ethical project grounded in the categories of recognition, responsibility, dialogue and reintegration. Particular attention is devoted to J. Braithwaite’s theory of reintegrative shaming, to N. Christie’s interpretation of conflict as expropriated property, and to the conceptual resonance between these constructions and A. Honneth’s theory of recognition. The author demonstrates that the anti-recidivist effect of restorative practices is generated not by the mitigation of punishment as such but by the restoration of the offender’s moral subjectivity and the reconstruction of his narrative identity. The concluding propositions substantiate the conditions under which restorative mechanisms may be organically integrated into the legal culture and the spiritual-educational environment of New Uzbekistan.
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