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Linking Crime Prevention to Restorative Justice

Braithwaite, John
June 4, 2015

Source: (2002) In, John G. Perry, ed. Repairing Communities Through Restorative Justice. Lanham, MD : American Correctional Association. Pp. 55-66.

“There is a temptation to generalize these analyses to the claim that all the benefits of restorative justice are rather like the benefits of being spontaneous, the more directly we try to be spontaneous, the less spontaneous we will be. In some ways, our work may have fallen victim to a generalized tendency to expect the benefits to flow as an indirect outcome of simply pursuing restoration. This paper [will] discuss the linkage between crime prevention interventions and restorative justice. Its argument will be that crime prevention must be directly pursued as and objective of conferences. Crime prevention benefits do not flow inevitably simply as a result of a restorative dialog.

“Before moving on to explaining why the best way to make crime prevention work may be to link it to restorative justice, this author will make some remarks about why crime prevention programs that are not linked to restorative justice generally fail.” (excerpt)

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