ABSTRACT
Advocates of restorative justice face legal and jurisprudential challenges, among these the challenge to abolish criminal law, the challenge to rank multiple goals, the challenge to determine harm rationally, and the challenge to structure community-government cooperation. This chapter considers these four challenges in turn and suggests ways in which they might be addressed. The criminal justice system faces the challenge of balancing multiple goals, usually expressed as deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and retribution. The more holistic perspective of restorative justice may actually help society successfully manage multiple goals because it identifies restoration as the overarching goal of criminal justice. The paradigm of criminal justice gives scant attention to the harm resulting from the offense and focuses instead on the offender’s actions and state of mind. Community programs themselves have affected the structure and the goals of the criminal justice system. Peter Kratcoski has outlined a pattern of evolving volunteer activity in criminal justice.
