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Paradigms Lost: Repairing the Harm of Paradigm Discourse in Restorative Justice

NCJ Number
217379
Journal
Criminal Justice Studies: A Critical Journal of Crime, Law and Society Volume: 19 Issue: 4 Dated: December 2006 Pages: 397-422
Author(s)
Ross D. London
Date Published
December 2006
Length
26 pages
Annotation
This article discusses the damage caused to criminal justice policy debates by labeling and promoting "restorative justice" as a "new paradigm" for criminal justice that is destined to replace the existing concepts and procedures for criminal case processing.
Abstract
The expression "paradigm shift" was originally coined by Thomas Kuhn to describe major intellectual revolutions such as the theory of evolution or the heliocentric view of planetary movement. Subsequently, the term has been applied in almost every field of human endeavor. When restorative justice advocates began advancing their concepts of the nature of crime and how society should respond to it, they portrayed it as a "new paradigm," which, as used by Kuhn, implied that restorative justice was a revolutionary view of criminal justice destined to render the current system obsolete. A paradigm shift implies that one system is superseded by another. For restorative justice advocates, this means that values present in the current criminal justice systems must be rejected and discarded to be replaced by structures and procedures reflective of the restorative justice ideology. This rejection of the attributes of the "old" system in favor of a new way of operating tends to reduce complexity to simplified contrasts between the "old" and the "new." In the process, efforts to install the "new paradigm" tend to precede objective scientific evaluations of the effectiveness of the new policies and practices compared to the old ways. Under testing, it may be that the old and the new are most effective as complements, or the old may be more effective than the new in some respects. 5 notes, 155 references

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