Restorative Justice: A Passing Trend or a Fundamental Change in Public Response to Crime.

Source: (2006) Thesis. Doctor of the Science of Law in the School of Law. Columbia University.

This thesis describes and analyses the restorative justice paradigm and its various practices in the United States and its role within the criminal justice system. More specifically, it argues that restorative justice practices are compatible with dominant punishment theories and can improve the current public response to crime, but only if they are held accountable and applied in the appropriate cases. The dissertation consists of three articles entitled “Justifying Restorative Justice: A Theoretical Justification for the Use for Restorative Justice Practices,” “Holding Restorative Justice Accountable: Using Democratic Experimentalism to Monitor and Evaluate Restorative Justice Programs in the United States,” “Exploring the Limits of the Restorative Justice Paradigm: Restorative Justice and White-Collar Crime,” and a fourth essay that highlights the overarching themes and explains the connections between the three articles. (author’s abstract).