RESTORATIVE JUSTICE

A PARADIGMATIC CHANGE IN THE MISDEMEANOR OFFENSES SYSTEM

Resumo

The research approaches the concern with the human rights of children and teenagers, especially regards to teenagers in judicial conflict, so that law recognize and protect them. The attention that should be given to them is worldwide, even more so at the present time in which globalization is increasingly intensely. The countries must strengthen cooperation in this aspect, through international treaties and conventions, which serve as a basis for Constitutions and infra-constitutional laws, in a true dynamogenic process. It was adopted a descriptive and exploratory method to the objective, qualitative as to the approach and bibliographic as to the procedure, having as theoretical basis the specialized literature on the subject and the Brazilian legal doctrine. As a result, it was possible to verify that in Brazil is no longer used Minors' Code of 1979, which embraced the doctrine of the irregular situation in which children and teenagers were treated as objects of law. Nowadays it is adopted the Child and Teenager Statute of 1990, supported by the Federal Constitution of 1988, which started to treat them as subjects of law by accepting the doctrine of integral protection. In this way, the treatment received by juvenile offenders has changed, especially with regard to sending them to special types of prison, which has ceased to be the rule, to be the exception, despite some resistance from members of the Prosecutor’s Office and the Courts. The Child and Teenager Statute also made it possible to implement restorative justice in misdemeanor offenses, through trained mediators, which is a method of conflict resolution that can and should be used on a larger scale in the Courts, in order to cure the consequences of the crime through the understanding between the offender and the victim, leaving the sentence for extreme cases.