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10.15: Restorative and Transformative Justice Approaches

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    Beyond reforms to the existing criminal legal system, some advocates and scholars propose more fundamental shifts toward restorative justice models that emphasize healing, accountability, and community engagement rather than punitive exclusion. Restorative practices—including victim-offender mediation, family group conferencing, and peacemaking circles—originated in Indigenous traditions and have been adapted in various communities as alternatives to conventional criminal processing. Research suggests these approaches can reduce recidivism while providing greater satisfaction for victims, though questions remain about their scalability and potential for net-widening.

    Transformative justice frameworks go further by seeking to address the root causes of harm through community-based responses that do not involve the state criminal legal system at all. These approaches, often developed within communities of color and LGBTQ communities, aim to build capacity for preventing and addressing violence without relying on policing or incarceration. While still experimental in many respects, transformative justice initiatives represent growing recognition that meaningful responses to racial injustice in the criminal legal system may require looking beyond that system entirely.


    10.15: Restorative and Transformative Justice Approaches is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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