The Laboratorio de Saberes held its second morning session on July 11th. The cycle that IRICE-CONICET-UNR organizes together with Universidad Liberté devoted two hours and fifty-two minutes to two forms of justice that are often named together and are not the same: restorative justice and therapeutic justice.
Miguel Ángel M. and Claudia Perlo, a CONICET researcher at IRICE, opened the session. Before starting, Perlo read out reflections from the previous gathering: out of the forty-seven people who answered the survey, she chose those written by a person in prison, by people outside, and by prison staff. One of them describes herself as a student. Another, a Liberté graduate, clarifies that they are not ex-convicts.
From Colombia, Luis Alberto Triana Llano introduced the people who were about to speak and read the text that opened the round: the hegemonic outlook led us to believe that the pain of some deserves the punishment of others, and that punishing does not inflict pain on both.
Five specialists, two countries
Diana Esther Márquez, lawyer and mediator, secretary of Liberté's Board of Directors. María Jimena Monsalve, national judge of criminal enforcement. Silvana Greco, who directs the postgraduate program in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution in Law at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Gabriel Fava, who developed the Restorative Approaches Program of the Buenos Aires City Public Defender's Office. And from Brazil, Célia Passos, PhD in Social Psychology, consultant for the Integrated Program for Violence Prevention and Reduction (PReVio), of the government of Ceará and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).
Two forms of justice that are not the same
The distinction took up much of the morning. Passos drew it with precision: the restorative kind tends to the harm and rebuilds bonds; the therapeutic kind seeks for judicial institutions' interventions to favor recovery and social integration. Monsalve added that the therapeutic approach goes looking for the cause beneath the conflict, and that the law leaves openings for that which almost no one uses.
Participation isn't learned by declaring it: it's learned by participating. What is proper to the restorative approach is being able to be summoned under conditions that usually aren't there.
Fava steered the conversation toward security as a good that is bought and sold, and toward an underlying fragmentation that ends with no one taking responsibility for anything. Márquez closed that round with a warning: if restorative justice becomes depoliticized, it becomes hollow.
The voices of the gathering
We asked each of them to revisit what they had said that morning.
When she closed that round, Márquez had left a warning: if restorative justice becomes depoliticized, it becomes hollow. We asked her to expand on it.
It becomes depoliticized when it's sold as a management tool — it's used to relieve congestion, to shorten deadlines — and right there it's already lost: if the merit is that the court works less, the day a faster method shows up we get replaced. It becomes depoliticized when it's reduced to a scene between two people, which is moving and gets the photo, while nothing changes: not the neighborhood, not the school that expelled someone, not the prison that hands people back worse than when they went in. And above all when it's translated into clinical language: this person has to heal, that one has to manage their trauma. If it's all individual health, the State and the community are left out of the responsibility.
Then she opens a question she leaves unanswered.
And there's something that bothers me, and I'll leave it out there, because I haven't resolved it myself: when restorative justice is written into law, does it become more effective, or less? Does it become politicized, or depoliticized? We fight for those laws and we need them, but we also know how the system works: it grabs you, it absorbs you, and what it gives back isn't always better than what went in.
And she closes.
Restoring dignity and repairing bonds is personal and political at the same time; you can't choose only one half. Without the political half, what's left is a gentle technique that no one fights, and a justice that no one fights is a justice that gave nothing back to anyone.
The morning had also left another thread: Monsalve focused on those who operate the system, from the courtroom to the cellblock, and on how much they can change the wellbeing of the person in front of them.
We asked Greco what is, inside a prison unit, the first of those conditions that are almost never met: the one that, if missing, means nothing else can hold. She started there.
It implies offering a space for listening without censorship, where no form of knowledge —legal, religious or disciplinary— colonizes the listening or the speech. It requires a facilitating function so that whoever participates can exercise their own narrative capacity through recovering their own voice, listening to themselves and to others, in order to understand what they lived through in situations of violence and harm to people and relationships.
And she marks where the restorative approach happens, which is not on the list of commitments signed at the end.
The restorative approach comes about both through participating in the process and through the decision that results from that «doing together»; it happens on a symbolic, relational plane, and it does not have a single correspondence with the provisions committed to in the agreements. Reparation, forgiveness or reconciliation are part of a restoration, but the restoration transcends them.
On access to rights she draws a distinction: access to rights is one thing, and «the human right to restore and be restored» is another. It isn't possible to ask someone to answer for the harm done to another and restore «when in their life they have only experienced deprivation, absence of basic care, violence and punishment». Human rights standards establish that, when it comes to people who have been suffering serious human rights violations, the obstacles must first be removed and the obligations of institutions and the State —which must share responsibility— must be met, «only then to ask for individual accountability».
And why this weighs especially inside the prison.
The penal system —as Rita Segato holds— and, in its fullest expression, the prison, uses a notion of legal responsibility that suppresses the dimension of personal relationships: answering is transposed onto the State through its authorized representatives; one does not answer to situated, concrete others, but to an abstract society, reduced to functions. There is a market-logic conception of guilt and punishment, a debt to be settled through the relative positions of debtors and creditors. There is no relationship between persons; it is a system without fellow human beings: if it has been paid, the account is settled.
From there, the rest follows.
This narrative brings about a linguistic impoverishment, a scarce vocabulary; the words of the language are replaced by utilitarian signs meant for instrumental communication: there are no longer persons, only the accused, the defendant, the victim. Words are missing, there's no resource for understanding, and so the act remains opaque, unintelligible. What isn't put into words isn't understood; what isn't understood generates a tendency toward repetition.
We asked Fava where he would start dismantling, if he had to choose a single point, that fragmentation that ends with no one taking responsibility for anything. He started at the origin.
Faced with the State's withdrawal or the deficiency of state responses through the traditional justice system —in which most criminal cases do not end with an oral, public, continuous and adversarial trial—, private individuals, and above all private individuals with access to certain resources, have generated and continue to generate their own security systems.
He doesn't dispute the underlying criterion. What he disputes is who ends up bearing it.
It's true that the fundamental criterion is that security is something we all build together, just as freedom is built, and democracy too, not so much as a form of government but as a way of life. Now, the paradigm behind these new responses is that the risk is assumed of leaving security in the hands of private individuals who, however concerned, turn out to be inexperienced; and that leads to a situation where, with many of the measures they attempt to adopt, no one is responsible and, at the same time, everyone is responsible.
And that, far from closing, feeds back on itself.
This generates more and more fractures, fragmentations and polarizations, both at the social and the state level, which directly results in the issue being treated with less and less seriousness and having greater consequences in everyday practice, which increase the existing levels of harm and violence.
To illustrate it he chose a story: «Mis muertos tristes», by Mariana Enríquez, the first in A Sunny Place for Shady People (Un lugar soleado para gente sombría). There, the spaces, devices and security dynamics that the neighbors themselves put together end up harming those who meant to protect themselves, and instead of protecting the lives of the other neighbors, they put it at serious risk or put an end to it outright. «This work of fiction, which is the reality running through us, sets the tone for an individuality that leads us to question ourselves as a social body and, above all, as a social body that must live in community, generating positive actions rather than actions of false self-protection and of effective self-harm».
Fragmentation at this point leads us to rethink the way we want to be present in each social space we happen to live in —school, neighborhood, prison, family— so that it doesn't end in the social sadness and communal desolation the end of the story lays out for us: «…outside, a future of dead children and a city that no longer knows what to do».
For Passos, confusing one form of justice with the other isn't a vocabulary problem: it has consequences in practice. And among those consequences there is one that doesn't happen to either of them separately.
The confusion also produces a loss that affects both methodologies: instead of complementing each other, one ends up taking over the other's conceptual place.
And what would be left out is precisely what both are for: «both can help shift the exclusive focus from punishment toward human transformation. RJ strengthens conscious accountability, the rebuilding of bonds and community participation; TJ seeks for judicial interventions to favor recovery, social inclusion and wellbeing».
That's why the difference shouldn't be understood as an absolute separation. To differentiate doesn't mean to radically separate. To differentiate means preserving the identity of each methodology so that they can be in dialogue and complement each other.
The upshot: «by confusing them, both lose their specificity and, with it, the possibility of complementing each other properly». And a clarification that puts everything before it in order: neither of the two comes to replace anything. «Neither replaces the current (hegemonic) system; rather, they complement it by placing people, their needs and their bonds at the center of decisions».
It fell to Zarza to listen to the nearly three hours and give back the synthesis, and that morning she said the conversation needed to be listened to several more times. One of the things that kept turning over in her mind afterward wasn't any of the presentations, but something that ran through all of them.
I think one of the aspects that stayed with me most after the conversation was the idea of flexibility. Each panelist had different backgrounds, interests and areas of work, and yet, in their presentations there appeared the same shared interest in finding concrete tools to address each case in its complexity and in all its dimensions.
What didn't appear was a method.
In that search it became clear that there were no recipes, no single ideas, no finished answers about how to work in a restorative key. What did appear, instead, was a strong commitment to creativity, to the possibility of opening paths and finding, in each situation, the most fitting approaches.
And there she pins down exactly what flexibility she's talking about.
Maybe that's exactly what kept resonating with me most: flexibility not as a lack of criteria, but as the capacity to hold onto principles while, at the same time, finding different answers for different situations.
The chat didn't stop
Juan Matías Bongiovanni, from the cycle's editorial team, had to read through the chat twice: halfway through the morning and near the end. That's where the other half of the conversation showed up.
Seventy-two people wrote, a hundred and eighty-two messages. Richar Martínez argued that prison is not a community but a society, and that the punitive has stopped being physical and become mental: a psychological terrorism exercised by power. Lucas Cura added that the law is one, but admits millions of interpretations depending on the interests of judicial actors, and that until prisons are democratized, the struggle will be endless.
Integrating the community into a restorative plan isn't asking it to forgive from a position of moral superiority, but inviting it to become co-responsible for the fabric that repairs.
Andrés Castagno wrote that the paradigm shift is a tortuous path, bombarded by the media and by an entertainment industry that aims at the vindictive even more than at the punitive. And later, near the end, he left a line that two other people completed: that kindness today is a very brave attitude. Sonia Laura Mora added love; Mónica González Bigetti, tenderness.
To work with pain you need an inner structure. If it isn't there, the tendency is to disconnect so as not to feel.
Several people wrote from inside a prison unit and described what they're living through: days without water, public defenders who neither share their strategy in advance nor answer, sentences that get signed without being understood. Those contributions don't appear here by name: they were said in a closed gathering, and publishing them is a different matter. We are checking with each person.
The cycle continues
After Zarza's synthesis, Ricardo Augman and Miguel Ángel M. closed the session.
Perlo announced something that arrived as a request from the first gathering: starting with the next Laboratorio, the worldview of Indigenous peoples will be added. The cycle runs for nine gatherings and ends in a collective book the team will publish in 2027.
