Restorative justice in a prison community : or everything I didn't learn in kindergarten I learned in prison /

As used by criminal justice scholars, the term "restorative justice" is both suggestive and misleading--suggestive because it implies the possibility of an alternative to punitive harshness, but misleading because there is frequently little to restore in the case of crime, particularly homicide. Swanson (criminal justice, Univ. of West Florida) has written a book that exhibits both features of the restorative justice movement. Her specific subject is particularly attractive: unlike many restorative justice scholars, she is concerned not with sentencing issues, but with incarceration. Through interviews and questionnaires, she presents a lively, carefully etched picture of inmates in a restorative justice dorm at an Alabama prison. All prison inmates with no prior disciplinary record and a willingness to study for the GED are eligible for the dorm. Swanson writes that many inmates experience a substantial change in orientation while taking the honor dorm's restorative justice classes and living by its inmate-enforced rules. Overshadowing the book, however, are the misgivings generally associated with the restorative justice movement. In particular, because the book is so light on social science methodology, readers are left with the misgiving that this book is as much a piece of partisan advocacy as it is a piece of careful scholarship. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through practitioners. W. C. Heffernan John Jay College