Gatekeeping or Gate-pushing Restorative Justice?
Criminal justice officials use their discretion to refer cases to victim-offender mediation. Working with time constraints, however, they may limit case referral, or gatekeep mediation to maintain efficiency. Recent studies also report the purposeful use of mediation to manage demand. Drawing on str...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Scandinavian University Press
2025-06-01
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| Series: | Nordic Journal of Studies in Policing |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.scup.com/doi/10.18261/njsp.12.1.4 |
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| Summary: | Criminal justice officials use their discretion to refer cases to victim-offender mediation. Working with time constraints, however, they may limit case referral, or gatekeep mediation to maintain efficiency. Recent studies also report the purposeful use of mediation to manage demand. Drawing on street-level bureaucracy, this study analyzes how criminal justice officials in Finland implement mediation while coping with conflicts of interest. The data consists of semi-structured interviews (N=17) with police officers and prosecutors. The term gate-pushing is introduced to account for the excessive use of mediation. The results show that police and prosecutors cope with dilemmas related to knowledge maintenance, resource constraints, and assessing consent to mediation. Many coping strategies prioritize clients, implying access to mediation. However, others advocate either for the underuse or overuse of mediation, suggesting both gatekeeping and gate-pushing. This study highlights the importance of studying gate-pushing to understand the challenges involved in integrating restorative and criminal justice. |
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| ISSN: | 2703-7045 |