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Abstract

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.

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