Albert’s research in restorative justice focuses on the value of lay participation in the professionalized and expert domain of criminal justice. 

The collaboration between professionals and lay people in restorative justice programs helps bridge the distance between criminal justice professionals and the communities they serve, to encourage mutual trust, develop skills, and share information.

Albert’s concept of “democratic professionalism” points to the importance of sharing previously professionalized tasks and encouraging lay participation in ways that both enable and enhance broader public engagement and deliberation about major social issues like crime and punishment. 

Criminal justice policy issues, traditionally dominated by political elites and court professionals, are made remarkably concrete for those citizens taking part in neighborhood restorative justice initiatives.  

Albert is especially interested in the ways restorative justice programs share responsibility for criminal justice and transform the meaning and significance of punishment.  These interests have led to qualitative studies of restorative justice programs and to normative studies of their core objectives.

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What is distinctive and appealing about restorative justice is not that it “restores” rather than “punishes,” but that it attempts to make an inherently coercive process more consensual, transparent, constructive, and communicative.  In addition to these substantive and procedural values, restorative justice offers a picture of how a democracy might become more accountable for punishment.  The possibilities it offers citizens for understanding and owning up to the punishment that is meted out on their behalf are central to and not peripheral to restorative justice as a normative theory.  Restorative justice is both a case study and a normative framework for discussing how democracies punish.

(Alber Dzur. Adapted from “Restorative Justice and Civic Accountability for Punishment.” Polity: The Journal of the Northeastern Political Science Association 36: 3-22.)

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Albert is currently working on the connections between theories of public deliberation and normative justifications for punishment, focusing on the question of whether a contestatory, deliberative process of civic participation in the criminal justice domain is part of what legitimate punishment requires.  He is also doing research on the contemporary movement in the US pressing for a more “active” jury--by allowing note-taking during trials, permitting juror questions for witnesses, and the like.

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Reach Albert Dzur at awdzur@bgnet.bgsu.edu

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