A challenge

from the entry on Restore:

I’m listening this morning to the slew of financial statistics–housing starts, unemployment rate, bank closings, those without health care, bankruptcies, houses in foreclosure….

It seems to me that restorative justice needs to come up with an index of its own:  one that marks the measure of social justice.  Are we moving closer or further away from our goal of less reliance on prisons, improving social relationships in our communities, looking at how well or how poorly alternatives to incarceration are funded?  What is the ratio between expenditures on prisons vs. what we spend on schools?  What is the ratio of crime to poverty?  Number of dispute resolution programs to police officers?

Nov 10, 2009 Limitations, Theory, Tool, Potential, Evaluation

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More equal societies do better at almost everything

from Ben Duncan's entry on Ben's Bookshop:

The Spirit Level by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson is a statistical romp through the data on a range of social ills: mental ill-health, teenage pregnancy levels, poor life expectancy, levels of crime and violence in society, and so on, and it finds something that is either remarkable, or stands to reason, depending on your perspective.

In short, Picket and Wilkinson conclude, the more equal a society is - the smaller the gap between the richest and poorest, in other words - the better that society performs, at pretty much everything, for pretty much everyone.

Nov 06, 2009 Limitations, Potential, Theory

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