SPECIAL ISSUE: Evidence for Restorative Justice
Even at that level of enhanced focus, the
most useful kind of research is on the effectiveness of different kinds of rehabilitative or preventive strategies that might be
selected in a restorative circle. Restorative
justice and responsive regulation are strategies for choosing multidimensional approaches to solving problems. As already
explained, the success of restorative justice may depend less on those strategies
of selection than on the success of the approaches they select. If restorative justice
is applied to a particular problem with frequent agreements to do things that the evidence indicates is effective for that problem, then restorative justice will be a more
potent delivery vehicle for reducing that
problem.
Conclusion: Restorative Learning
Restorative and responsive regulation listens to the wisdom of stakeholders as to
what should be done about the problem in
a context where those stakeholders have a
lot of contextual experience. It follows up
interventions through monitoring by the
stakeholders as to whether they are working and ideally a “celebration conference”
when an agreement is successfully completed. It is a strategy that is responsive to constantly changing regulatory environments
and frequent changes in the responsiveness
of those who are regulated. The response
that issues is therefore flexible, multidimensional, and layered into trying one strategy after another. Some of the responsively chosen strategies will be duds, counterproductive, others will reflect brilliant contextual problem solving by the stakeholders. Again, outcomes will probably depend
more on the substantive choices made at
different stages of the restorative justice
process than on whether restorativeness
was the strategy for choosing them.
More profoundly, restorative and responsive regulation is a strategy that assumes that most regulatory approaches fail
in most contexts of their application. Business strategy for becoming more productive and innovative has taken up this prescription in recent years with guidelines
like “fail fast, learn fast, adjust fast” and
“try, learn, improve, repeat.” Even strategies strongly supported by systematic reviews, as we know from drug therapies in
medicine, can fail more often than succeed
in practice because doctors do not get the
diagnosis quite right, do not get the dosage quite right, get dosage right but forgetful patients take the wrong doses at the
wrong time (before rather than after meals,
with alcohol), the doctor prescribes the
drug too early or too late, prescribes it for
patients taking other drugs with which this
one has adverse interactions, or simply that
the side- Y