La Restorative Justice come proposta di ripensamento della pena. Spunti di pensiero a partire dall’iconografia della giustizia

The following essay offers an introduction to Restorative Justice as a theory of justice. Such perspective, often depicted as an autonomous conceptual ‘paradigm’, significantly challenges and changes the founding premises around which the modern approaches to punishment have shaped many criminal justice systems, mostly (but not only) in the Western World, with evident projections also in the contemporary penal theory and practice. In order to better understand how, and in which terms, Restorative Justice provokes to ‘change our lenses’ in the way we envision wrongdoing (crime) and the reaction to it, the essay proposes a ‘art-based’, visual approach, in which the symbols associated to justice in the western iconography of justice are analysed in their possible meaning(s) and ambiguities, and further reframed within a restorative understanding. The purpose of this argumentative path is to show the conceptual cornerstones of such proposal, in order to better understand and valorise its potentials (and possible limitations), now that in many countries, including Italy, legislative reforms have widened the space of intervention of restorative processes within their systems.