Why Restorative Justice is Not Compulsory Compassion: Annalise Acorn's Labour of Love Lost [A Review of 'Compulsory Compassion: A Critique of Restorative Justice,' Annalise E. Acorn (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004)]
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Annalise Acorn has produced an immensely engaging book about love, sexuality and law, written with verve and elan; however, it paints a hugely misleading picture of restorative justice that could be seriously damaging to what is arguably the most significant development in criminal justice since the emergence of the nation state. Restorative justice is changing the nature of criminal justice systems the world over. The Canadian criminal justice system is a leader in this regard, though it is far from being alone. Simplistic and dysfunctional systems of punitive criminal justice are being altered and supplemented by restorative programs that are capable of obtaining high rates of offender compliance with sanctions as well as high rates of satisfaction for victims. Moreover, restorative justice, when judiciously used, has demonstrated a capacity for reductions in both recidivism rates and the costs of criminal justice. Annalise Acorn's Compulsory Compassion: A Critique of Restorative Justice does not reflect these important realities. It is a peculiarly fascinating but fundamentally flawed book. The effort to demonstrate why this is the case is worthwhile, since the book is written with such an attractive style and enthusiastic energy that it could easily beguile the unwary reader into acceptance of its author's jaundiced assessment of restorative justice. The problems begin with the book's title. First, to be effective, restorative processes must be and are voluntary, not compulsory. Secondly, at its core, restorative justice is about accountability for wrongful behaviour, not about compassion. This critique, of course, may sound tedious by comparison to the alliteratively striking and paradoxically pointed description of restorative justice as "compulsory compassion." Nonetheless, the alluring appearances of this faulty nomenclature are dangerously deceiving.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".