Definition
Peace-making criminology treats crime as one expression of human suffering and argues that the criminal-justice system, by inflicting further suffering through arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment, often reproduces the conditions it claims to remedy. The framework calls for non-violent, transformative responses — mediation, restorative practices, community healing — that address the underlying conditions of harm rather than amplify them.
The position was formalised in Harold Pepinsky and Richard Quinney's edited collection Criminology as Peacemaking (1991). It draws on religious traditions (Buddhist, Christian, Quaker), critical-theory critiques of state violence, and feminist work on care. Quinney in particular linked peace-making explicitly to a Marxist analysis of structural violence, arguing that warmaking criminal justice mirrors the warmaking logic of capitalist competition.
Why it matters
How it works
The framework reorients each stage of the system around a different question: not what does this offender deserve, but what would reduce the suffering this situation has produced. In practice that points toward victim-offender dialogue, community conferences, sentencing circles, drug courts oriented to treatment rather than punishment, and prison practices grounded in human-development rather than warehousing. Each substitutes a transformative aim for a punitive one.
Critics make two complaints. The first is that peace-making relies on the goodwill of perpetrators and the patience of victims and so is mismatched to serious violent crime. The second is that it can romanticise community, ignoring that communities themselves enforce patriarchal, racialised, and class-based hierarchies. Practitioners reply that the framework supplements rather than replaces sanctions for the most serious harms and that careful design can mitigate its weaknesses.