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2003 Utah L. Rev. 413 (2003)
Still Tough on Crime - Prospects for Restorative Justice in the United States

handle is hein.journals/utahlr2003 and id is 423 raw text is: Still Tough on Crime? Prospects for Restorative Justice in the United States Sara Sun Beale* I. INTRODUCTION In the 1980s and 1990s, the criminal justice system in the United States became increasingly punitive. This Article describes the move toward greater punitiveness and contrasts this development in the United States with the restorative justice movement in Australia and New Zealand. Though punitiveness, rather than restorative justice, has been the dominant theme in American criminal justice policy, there are programs now operating in the United States that fit the restorative justice model. To date, restorative justice in the United States has operated at the fringes of the criminal justice system with small programs, often run by churches and -private agencies, handling a relatively small number of juvenile cases and cases involving minor offenses. By contrast, in many countries restorative justice is now fully in the mainstream, and in some countries restorative justice handles the majority of cases involving adult offenders. What are the prospects for widespread adoption of restorative justice principles and a substantial restructuring of the criminal justice system in the United States to accommodate those principles? Is the American public prepared to turn from punitive policies to restorative justice? As a background to the issue of the public's receptivity to restorative justice principles and policies, this Article first reviews the punitive policies of the 1980s and 1990s and the dramatic declines in American crime rates during the last decade. The sharply declining crime rate might mean the time is ripe for a switch from punitive to restorative criminal justice policies, and there is some evidence that public anxiety about crime is starting to decrease and that support for punitive policies has declined. There are, however, several significant barriers to the adoption of restorative justice principles, including: (1) the market-driven media, which has an incentive to stress crime stories and frame them in a fashion that supports punitive responses and cues racial attitudes, (2) a political system that rewards the candidates and parties that play the crime card, and (3) a recent emphasis on sentencing principles that are difficult to square with restorative justice practices. *Charles L.B. Lowndes Professor, Duke University School of Law. The author would like to thank Juliet Karastelev '03 and Melanie Merry Roewe '02 for their excellent research assistance, and my colleague Robert Mosteller for his helpful comments. Thanks also to Professor Erik Luna of the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah and to the Utah Law Review for inviting me to participate in the Utah Restorative Justice Conference.

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