RESTORATIVE JUSTICE: AN ANALYSIS OF ALTERNATIVE PRACTICES IN THE RN'S JUSTICE SYSTEM
restorative justice; justice system; alternative justice.
Brazil has the third largest prison population in the world, accounting for 748,000 prisoners – in a structure that only supports 442,349 (Anuário de Segurança Pública, 2020). Data such as the ones presented corroborate the perspective that the current justice system has not been efficient. In practice, institutions filled with demands, slow and selective, have been created over the years, restricting crime to the violation of the law, in which the main purpose is to penalize the offender, neglecting the relationships that were broken, the victims, the community and repairing the damage and, above all, the social issues involved. However, arising from an international agenda that the federal government has been following on the recommendation of the United Nations (UN), some initiatives have been discussed and developed against the reality of punishment as the only alternative, including in the justice system in Rio Grande North (Prosecutor's Office and Court of Justice). One of them is the central theme of this work, Restorative Justice (JR). JR can be understood as a set of practices, procedures, techniques and actions based on structured principles, in which the intention is to deal with conflicts in a consensual manner, with the participation of the offender, victim and community, in order to meet the needs of the involved, in order to repair the damage through accountability and recomposition of the social fabric broken by the infraction in a way that implies the future. Therefore, in an attempt to understand a practice considered an alternative in the justice system, this research aims to analyze the implementation of Restorative Justice as an alternative to traditional practices developed in the justice system in RN (Public Ministry and Court of Justice of Rio Grande do North), considering aspects such as the history of development in the RN justice system; the structure and epistemological theoretical basis used by the nuclei working with JR; as well as the JR in RN from the perspective of the actors (potentials and difficulties according to the professionals who perform the restorative practices in both institutions) and, finally, the flow of the JR in articulation with the public assistance service. This work is a qualitative research, inspired by historical-dialectical materialism. In addition to the documentary research in public repositories about the implementation of the program, data collection was carried out via virtual means with the Self-Composition nuclei of the Public Ministry and the Court of Justice of RN, using semi-structured interviews (with the members of the nuclei who work directly with the JR practice - facilitators, judges and prosecutors). The information was submitted to thematic content analysis. Furthermore, the project was approved by the Ethics Committee and for its execution, all legal requirements were respected, including the use of the Informed Consent Form for the interviewees.