Conditions of successful reintegration ceremonies: Dealing with juvenile offenders

This chapter offers an optimistic view of at least one area—the punishment of juvenile offenders. It argues that it is possible to develop practices that ‘work’—both in the sense of reducing recidivism and reintegrating offenders into a wider web of community ties and support and, at the same time, in giving victims a ‘voice’ in a fashion that is both satisfying and also socially productive. Shame and shaming is commonly used in both programmes to describe what is going on; reintegration is commonly used in Wagga, while healing is more commonly used in Auckland for this aspect of the process. Courtroom ceremonies tend to degradation rather than reintegration—that is, they remove both event and perpetrator from the everyday domain in just the way suggested by Garfinkel. Reintegration ceremonies succeed when one side makes an early gesture of self-blame or self-deprecation.