Restorative Justice and the Jewish Question

The basic premise of restorative justice seems completely sound. If the goal is to reduce crime, harsh punishment alone seems unlikely to work. You cannot teach a child to avoid hitting others by hitting him; it is hard to believe that you can teach a people to not kill by killing, or teach criminals to respect the law and rights of others by violating the rights of the accused, or teach them to get a job by making them unemployable. Axes of Evil not with standing, most evil is done by people who are enmeshed in a system that invites them to do it; one taskof thinkers about criminal law is to understand why and how.

Bringing criminals and potential criminals back into the web of constraints that is a functioning society is precisely the track that seems likely to work for the legitimate function of criminal law: to reduce crime.