The Strangers in Criminal Procedure: Restorative Justice as a Possibility to Overcome the Simplicity of the Modern Paradigm of Criminal Justice

Abstract

T he present paper addresses the crisis of penal procedure in the contemporary s ociety from its epistemological basis to, then, present restorative justice as a c oncrete alternative to the traditional criminal procedure. The intention is to d escribe how criminal procedure got established since its modern scientific roots a nd, then, to show the impossibility of a satisfactory management of social conflicts a ccording to its standardized rules. After it, is argued that restorative justice is able t o better deal with social conflicts than criminal procedure, once that system does n ot have standardized rules and allows the stakeholders to decide the situation a ccording to their own deliberation, instead of being obliged to follow a decision from another person, usually a judge.