Creative Justice

This edited collection brings together contributors from criminology, health, psychology, drama, business, art, and design, to examine how creative practice can facilitate transformational change within the criminal justice system through making as art, design, drama, storytelling, restorative justice, and related approaches. The volume asks not only what enables people affected by the criminal justice system to lead crime-free lives, but also how creative methods can reshape relationships, identities, institutions, and justice itself. The book charts new territory, understanding justice not only in relation to past harms, but as a generative process that creates the conditions through which better futures can be imagined and realised. The ultimate contribution of the book is a new definition of Creative Justice as a participatory and relational approach to justice in which creative processes of making, dialogue, and co-production bring people, communities, and institutions together to rehabilitate, restore, and regenerate. Working across individual, relational, and systemic levels, it generates recognition, trust, empathy, voice, agency, responsibility, belonging, solidarity, resilience, hope and generativity. Through these qualities, Creative Justice creates the conditions for meaningful and lasting personal, social, and institutional change.