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Here's something annoying I found on liberal part of reddit (doesn't matter where, and I don't want to accidentally create drama by linking to it):
Here's the part I found annoying. People have basically never been more atomized in the entire human history and the above text is unironically talking about repairing relationship between a criminal and some made up community. Back when communities were actually tightly knit, criminals were hanged.
I don't even care about restorative justice all that much. I can even see myself supporting it in certain situations. For example, If I happen to be a criminal.
What I absolutely find grating is that this person takes the existence of community for granted when it's for most people no more real than bigfoot. At least conservatives recognize this lack as a problem (tho they don't have any real solutions ) while liberals kinda always assume that communities exist when they mostly don't. They don't even realize that they are talking about phantasm.
It gets even more annoying when they talk about e.g. fandoms as "communities." Are people you met on comic book convention going to build you a house? Help you find a wife? Are they going to watch over your children?
Could we have tightly knit communities without brutal punishments? Should we? I have no idea. But any analysis has to start from the fact that we mostly don't have communities right now.
Admirable, but by you quoting it, I needed <10 seconds to find the post via Google.
There's probably a lot to unpack there, since the undergirding factor of most if not all leftists is their ideology is collectivist and considers the primacy of the group's interests over the those of the members that compose it. So in the criminal justice realm, the harm a criminal does to an individual seems strictly less important than the harm done to the 'fabric' of the community and thus repairing the relationship between the offender and the victim is a smaller step in restoring the community to health and enabling the offender to re-enter the community and continue to contribute to the group.
(Or so I interpret the lefty approach to criminal justice)
And you nail it, this falls apart entirely when there is no coherent 'society' or 'community' and long term relationships in general are nigh-impossible to maintain.
Victims suffer the harm directly, in the meantime, and this does, indeed, contribute in the aggregate to a toxic social environment which is bad for the community. But does anybody genuinely feel as though they have a stake in the community that is somehow more important than their own personal loss?
Seems unlikely. The victim wants compensation for the loss, and maybe some psychic pleasure from seeing the miscreant suffer. After that, as long as said miscreant doesn't reoffend against them, personally, I doubt they care what eventually becomes of them.
Certain exceptions would exist, in the many cases where the offender is immediate family or friend, but in that case there IS an extant community (albeit a small one) which the individual victim might feel loyalty which overrides their own immediate interests.
The collectivist is starting with the assumption that the community is the most important factor, and how the victim's interest is slotted into that framework, which in this case comes down to the 'relationship' between the victim and the perp, and the victim and perp to the society, and how it is 'good' to restore those relationships rather than simply punish the perp and move on.
But if there is no community in which the victim has a stake, what exactly is the purpose of attempting to restore relationships that never existed and indeed the victim will presumably feel affronted if you're clearly subordinating their interests to a 'social good' that is hardly real.
I make no real normative claims here, but I do observe the while it is better for society to rehabilitate criminals where possible, the basic first step towards achieving that outcome is for someone to give a shit. And under current conditions there is not likely many who are invested enough to really care.
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