27. Confronting Restorative Justice in Neo-Liberal Times: Legal and Rape Narratives in Conditional Sentencing

Gillian Balfour and Janice Du Mont investigate one criminal justice response to perpetrators of sexual assault already problematized by Holly Johnson: the use of conditional imprisonment — or house arrest — for those few men who become convicted offenders. The authors are careful to disavow any claim that prison works or that such restorative measures should be eschewed entirely, but they argue that these decisions ordering house arrest reproduce the rape narratives discussed by Susan Ehrlich earlier in this volume. Gillian and Janice show how women are rendered invisible in these cases, even when they have submitted victim impact statements, and how they are assigned blame for their own rapes through the rationalization of the sentence. Their analysis of the decisions reveals how, through house arrest, the state reallocates the responsibility for policing and protection to individuals, much like the deployment of “police warnings” that assign women the impossible task of protecting themselves from rape, as discussed in the chapters by Lise Gotell and Meagan Johnston in Part