Bibliographic record
Abstract
The criminal justice system, we are often told, is in crisis. Over the past twenty years, there has been a growing chorus of voices, including many religious organizations, aboriginal advocates, feminist scholars, communitarians and others who say that it is too concerned with its own procedures and that it ignores the particular human needs and concerns of the people whose lives it so deeply affects. Many of these critics have taken up the banner of restorative justice (RJ) as a loose description for their more optimistic alternative, which they claim has deep roots in Christian theology, in ancient aboriginal conceptions of justice, in feminist ethics of care and in an anti-statist politics of community empowerment. This essay (which is, in part, a review of Annalise Acorn's 2004 book, Compulsory Compassion: A Critique of Restorative Justice) places the RJ movement within a larger historical context of critiques of the criminal justice system stretching back at least to the birth of the prison in the early nineteenth century. Like the early nineteenth century reformers, RJ advocates seek not only to vindicate norms of conduct and to deter undesirable conduct, but also to redeem errant human beings. In many ways, however, RJ advocates have more in common with more recent prison abolition movements, for their purpose is to do away with criminal punishment as such. This essay takes on a dual perspective on the RJ movement. On the one hand, it rejects RJ as an alternative framework for conceiving of criminal justice. Upon close examination, it amounts to little more than a collection of optimistic slogans. Nevertheless, in a culture that is increasingly punitive despite clear evidence that this approach is counter-productive, the message of restorative justice - that we ought to consider all plausible alternatives to punishment - is more pressing than ever.
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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 | 0.015 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.165 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.028 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.017 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.027 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".