Linking Crime Prevention to Restorative Justice

Source: (1998) Paper presented at the First North American Conference on Conferencing. Minneapolis, 6-8 August 1998.

Braithwaite argues that restorative justice will never become a mainstream alternative to retributive justice unless long-term research and development programs show that it does have the capacity to reduce crime. He further argues that restorative justice advocates may have fallen victim to a generalized tendency to expect the benefits to flow as an indirect outcome of simply pursuing restoration. Hence, in this paper Braithwaite discusses the link between crime prevention interventions and restorative justice. His contention is that crime prevention benefits do not flow inevitably from restorative practices; they must be directly pursued as objectives of those practices.