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ening democracy. It is also about strengthening communities, families, and schools,
which have profound value in themselves,
independent of the contributions they
make to democracy or justice. We have a
long way to go in learning how to evaluate
more effectively how restorative justice can
be improved so as to be more effective in
strengthening individual people as human
beings, as well as the families, schools, and
communities that nourish their humanness.
Methodological Challenges
The evidence is convincing that restorative justice can be powerfully effective.
At the same time, the evidence is thin that
these strategies are consistently effective
as regulatory strategies. It seems likely that
this pattern will always prevail even as the
empirical evidence becomes more illuminating about the limits and strengths of restorative justice. Why is this?
First, it is a general strategy of regulation
where regulation is conceived very broadly as “steering the flow of events.”28 By my
theoretical lights, restorative justice is conceived as relevant to very micro behaviors
such as bullying in schools and workplaces, to intra-family relationships, to intermediate forms of regulation such as the regulation of gangs that engage in crime, of
small businesses paying tax or complying
with environmental laws, up to the macro regulation of capitalism, its commanding heights, global financial crises and up
to the regulation of international conflicts
between states and the global war on terror. Reviews of the evidence for the effectiveness of general strategies of this kind
can only be systematic if they are focused.
So a review such as that of Weatherburn
that counts studies that assess whether restorative justice reduces “crime” is no longer the most useful kind of work to do because we know that the effectiveness of
restorative justice is weak at best with minor property crimes that account for most
of the restorative justice in Weatherburn’s
timid and conservative jurisdiction (New
South Wales); equally, the evidence for restorative justice being effective with serious
crime, particularly violent crime, is most encouraging.29 So we need reviews of the evidence for the effectiveness of restorative
and responsive regulation on something as
focused as small business tax compliance,
as Valerie Braithwaite began to assem