Restorative Justice and Procedural Justice: Dealing with Rule Breaking

This article identifies similarities among three approaches to dealing with rule breaking: the procedural justice model, the restorative justice model, and the study of moral development. Each argues that the long-term goal when dealing with rule breaking is to motivate rule breakers to become more self-regulating in their future conduct. This goal is undermined by punishment-focused models of sanctioning. Sanction-based models, which dominate current thinking about managing criminals, have negative consequences for the individual wrongdoer and for society. It is argued that greater focus needs to be placed on psychological approaches whose goal is to connect with and activate internal values within wrongdoers with the goal of encouraging self-regulatory law-related behavior in the future.