The Effects of Regulated Discretion on Police Referrals to Restorative Justice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Nova Scotia Restorative Justice Program relies heavily on referrals from police who are authorized to refer a range of property and both violent and non-vioient offences. Federal legislation and provincial protocols guide referral decisions. Both are designed to ensure that police consider extra-judicial measures, including restorative justice. This article reports the findings of a survey of police officers on their views of restorative justice and the types of cases they consider appropriate for a referral. The findings confirm what other researchers have found about the types of cases police officers prefer to divert from mainstream criminal justice responses. Placed in the context of the Nova Scotia Restorative Justice Program, the current survey findings shed light on how efforts to structure discretion and decision-making will have limited effect.Le programme de justice reparatrice de la Nouvelle-Ecosse compte beaucoup sur les dossiers transmis par les policiers qui sont autorises a y orienter des delinquants coupables d'infractions violentes et non violentes. Les lois federales et les protocoles provinciaux orientent leurs decisions. Tant les lois que les protocoles visent a faire en sorte que les policiers envisagent le recours a des moyens extrajudiciaires, y compris la justice reparatrice. Cet article fait etat des conclusions d'un sondage effectue aupres de policiers sur leurs vues de la justice reparatrice et des types de cas qu'ils considerent comme appropries pour le transfert. Les conclusions confirment ce que d'autres chercheurs ont constate quant aux types de cas que les policiers preferent ecarter des reponses usuelles de la justice penale. Dans le contexte du programme de justice reparatrice de la Nouvelle-Ecosse, les conclusions du sondage expliquent comment les efforts visant a structurer le discernement et la prise de decision auront un effet limite.IntroductionI. ContextII. Literature reviewIII. Data collection and research designIV. FindingsV. Support for restorative justiceVI. Eligible offencesVII. Discretionary factorsVIII. DiscussionConclusionsIntroductionPolice forces across Canada have been open to restorative justice and other extrajudicial measures. In the 1990s, for example, the RCMP officially adopted a restorative justice response to non-violent offences and developed a program of Community Justice Forums.1 Other police forces across the country have, at least ostensibly, endorsed restorative justice and encourage its use under certain circumstances.2 These examples are consistent with some research that shows police officers themselves support the values of restorative justice.3In Nova Scotia, police forces participate directly in the province's restorative justice program. They refer youth to the program and, at times, attend sessions.4 In Flalifax, the municipal police force, who participated in the survey reported in this article, has taken several measures to support the restorative justice program. For example, they have assigned a Youth Court Officer who reviews files relating to youth and may refer a case to restorative justice even if the attending officer initially chose to lay a charge.The Nova Scotia Restorative Justice Program (NSRJ) relies heavily on referrals from police services across the province. Between 1998 and 2010, of the almost 10,000 referrals involving a Criminal Code offence, sixty per cent have come from police.5 The rate of referrals from police (compared to other sources) has remained fairly stable over time with a low of forty-five per cent in 2002 to a high of seventy-one per cent in 2010.6 High levels of referrals from the first point of contact with the criminal justice system are consistent with the underlying principles of restorative justice, and many people working in the system believe that referrals should, for the most part, come from police.7While police make up a large proportion of the referrals to restorative justice, restorative justice agency directors have suggested that police sometimes fail to refer eligible cases. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".