Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Aboriginal Communities, Restorative Justice, and the Challenges of Conflict and Change - Book Review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Will the Circle be Unbroken? is an important and timely contribution to the ongoing debates about restorative justice practices in Canada. In particular, it begins the essential task of closely examining particular models of restorative justice in context, rather than the generalist approach that much of the literature within this debate has taken. In this case, Carol La Prairie and Jane Dickson-Gilmore take an in-depth look at sentencing circles, a practice that usually takes place within Aboriginal communities, but that is initiated and controlled by the non-Aboriginal judiciary. The basic premise of the book is that restorative justice generally, and sentencing circles in particular, have made huge promises of healing and rejuvenation to vulnerable and dependant Aboriginal communities without delivering. La Prairie and Dickson-Gilmore assert rightly that restorative justice practices such as the sentencing circle have not been sufficiently scrutinized and evaluated up to this point. Central to their argument is the notion that Aboriginal culture is a problematic fulcrum on which to rest legal reforms such as sentencing circles. While I agree with much of the book's analysis, particularly its critique of the on-the-ground practice of sentencing circles, there are a number of places where the authors and I part company. Specifically, the authors posit the notion that Aboriginal culture and tradition are depleted and dead due to colonialism, and no longer a viable basis for legal reform. The roots of my discomfort with this assertion lie in two places, first in their definitions and understandings of what actually constitute restorative justice, and second in the notion that colonialism has decimated and rendered impotent Aboriginal culture.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.003 |
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".