Back to Where We Started? The Expansion of the Saskatchewan Justice Alternative Measures Guidelines as an Opportunity to Explore Program Delivery Issues
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Restorative justice was first used in Saskatchewan in 1985 and experienced a meteoric rise over the next two decades. In Saskatchewan, the use of restorative justice is not authorized for certain ‘serious’ offences, including sexual assault and family violence. While the overriding sense is that restorative justice programs have been successful, the momentum surrounding restorative justice has begun to taper off. Exploration into the use of restorative justice with more serious offences is being contemplated to combat the movement’s stagnation. Despite the rapid expansion of restorative justice agencies and organizations in Saskatchewan, little research has been conducted on these programs. In other jurisdictions, the research conducted has largely focused on program outcomes rather than the processes involved. There is also a gap in the research respecting how justice professionals view restorative justice and, in particular, how certain issues, such as safety and power imbalances, are currently addressed and will be addressed if more serious offences are referred to programs. To fill this gap, I conducted a qualitative study to determine how well those involved with Saskatchewan restorative justice programs, such as Crown prosecutors, police and program staff, believe programs are handling the offences currently referred. I also sought their views on the prospect of authorizing the use of restorative justice for more serious offences and what, if anything, must be changed in current programs to meet additional needs. The study revealed a mix of views across the professions, but generally justice professionals in Saskatchewan are resistant to the idea of referring more serious offences to restorative justice programs. Participation in a restorative justice process most deeply influenced views on whether restorative justice is appropriate for more serious offences. The concerns expressed about programs are poor practice or administrative in nature, and are fixable by employing best practices. A provincial strategic plan is needed for restorative justice to move forward. The plan should focus on determining clear goals and measures of success; committing to a set of best practices; more evaluation of programs and the effect of restorative justice on recidivism rates; expanded training for all justice professionals; and a greater investment in ensuring the ‘right’ person is in the room during restorative justice processes. The plan will gain the confidence of justice professionals, policy makers and the public in the ability of restorative justice to handle more serious offences.
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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 | 0.044 | 0.088 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.020 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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".