Portia and Persephone Revisited:

Abstract

This paper seeks to establish connections between John Braithwaite's theory of reintegrative shaming, the recent interest in `relational justice' and the `ethic of care' of feminist philosophy. Following Heidensohn (1986), it uses the figures of Portia and Persephone to represent, respectively, the ethics of justice and of care, and presents empirical material on victim-offender mediation, Family Group Conferencing (FGC), and Japanese approaches to social control to argue that procedures which allow for the expression of caring as a response to offending are both theoretically well-founded and practically feasible. The paper concludes with some reflections on the dangers of the current trend of penal policy in Britain. It is our hope that this paper will be considered not as a finished argument but as an encouragement to further debate and theorizing.

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