Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, Vol 30(4), Nov 2024, 409-420; doi:10.1037/law0000425
Restorative justice principles offer a framework for successful, community-focused alternatives to the punishment-focused criminal justice system in the United States. Brief restorative justice interventions (bRJIs) are economical, interactive programs designed to facilitate participants’ understanding of restorative justice and insight into the impact of crime. Yet, little is understood about the psychological mechanisms through which bRJIs are effective in promoting behavioral change for incarcerated people. The present study considers two proximate outcomes that may serve as mechanisms for behavioral change (perceived restorative justice understanding and sympathy) and tests the impact of a bRJI on these potential mechanisms for people in prison (n = 1,631). Employing a Solomon split sample technique, we performed exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to validate measures of perceived restorative justice understanding and sympathy, identifying a two-factor structure for each measure. Then, we tested the effect of a bRJI on perceived restorative justice understanding and sympathy. The findings indicated that compared to the preintervention scores, the postintervention scores were higher from both perceived restorative justice understanding and sympathy, consistent with a large and small effect size, respectively. These findings lay the foundation for future research examining these factors as plausible causal mechanisms of changes in distal outcomes such as recidivism and desistence. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)