Learning from the Human Services: How to Build Better Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation

A theme of this book has been that restorative justice has little chance of resilience and scale of transformative potential when it stands alone. Either as an alternative to or an add-on to criminal justice, marginalization remains its fate. We have seen that when it does scale up inside the criminal justice system, its empowerment and relational values tend to wither. While we support making restorative justice values more mainstream inside the justice system, the battle for its core strengths will be lost unless we also have a strategy for putting families, parenting and other primary group relationships as its core and at its front door across justice, health, education and other social welfare and social service settings. If the only time families encounter restorative justice is when they collide with the criminal or youth justice systems, then the family will never become a cohering locus that brings together all the institutions, specialties and sub-specialties they run into as a family with education, health, social services, car accidents and beyond. In this concluding chapter we argue that a degree of institutional forcing of a New Zealand kind is required to make families nodally powerful (Shearing, 2001; Drahos, Shearing, & Burris, 2005; Wood & Shearing, 2013). We must empower individual families (legislatively) to provide the glue to connect up the constellations of complex systems that circle around families.