IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/29150.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Can Restorative Justice Conferencing Reduce Recidivism? Evidence From the Make-it-Right Program

Author

Listed:
  • Yotam Shem-Tov
  • Steven Raphael
  • Alissa Skog

Abstract

This paper studies the effect of a restorative justice intervention targeted at youth ages 13 to 17 facing felony charges of medium severity (e.g., burglary, assault). Eligible youths were randomly assigned to participate in the Make-it-Right (MIR) restorative justice program or a control group where they faced standard criminal prosecution. We estimate the effects of MIR on the likelihood that a youth will be rearrested in the four years following randomization. Assignment to MIR reduces the probability of a rearrest within six months by 19 percentage points, a 44 percent reduction relative to the control group. Moreover, the reduction in recidivism persists even four years after randomization. Thus, our estimates show that restorative justice conferencing can reduce recidivism among youth charged with relatively serious offenses and can be an effective alternative to traditional criminal justice practices.

Suggested Citation

  • Yotam Shem-Tov & Steven Raphael & Alissa Skog, 2021. "Can Restorative Justice Conferencing Reduce Recidivism? Evidence From the Make-it-Right Program," NBER Working Papers 29150, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29150
    Note: LE LS
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w29150.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Yotam Shem‐Tov & Steven Raphael & Alissa Skog, 2024. "Can Restorative Justice Conferencing Reduce Recidivism? Evidence From the Make‐it‐Right Program," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 92(1), pages 61-78, January.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • J18 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Public Policy
    • K14 - Law and Economics - - Basic Areas of Law - - - Criminal Law
    • K42 - Law and Economics - - Legal Procedure, the Legal System, and Illegal Behavior - - - Illegal Behavior and the Enforcement of Law

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29150. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.