The framework's predictions in [§9.13.3](<9.13.3 What is Predicted.md>) are assessed against the empirical and theoretical literature on justice-system performance. This section reviews the confirmations.

*First.* Property-crime spikes during legitimacy collapse. The empirical literature on crime rates during economic crisis is extensive. Property-crime rates rose sharply during the 1929–1933 contraction; they rose during the post-2008 recession in jurisdictions hardest hit; they rose during pandemic-disruption periods in 2020–2022. The pattern is consistent with the legitimacy-collapse prediction. The further pattern (property destruction in particular tracks legitimacy-collapse perception more closely than survival theft does) is visible in the riot-and-civil-disorder literature, where destruction patterns track perceived institutional failure more than they track absolute material need.

*Second.* High-trust societies have lower vandalism rates. The World Values Survey trust-index data, when correlated with crime-victimization data across OECD countries, shows the predicted pattern: trust levels correlate negatively with vandalism rates after controlling for absolute wealth and Gini coefficient. Putnam's *Bowling Alone* (2000) and the social-capital literature broadly trace the relationship between civic-engagement infrastructure and lower property-crime rates. The framework's mutual-recognition account predicts the relationship from first principles; the empirical record confirms it.

*Third.* Survival theft and pure vandalism are empirically separable. The criminology literature on motivation classifications in property crime supports the separability prediction. Survival-theft patterns (food theft, medicine theft, baseline-goods theft) cluster with poverty and food-insecurity indicators; pure-vandalism patterns cluster with social-isolation, perceived-institutional-failure, and youth-disconnection indicators. Targeted interventions track the separability: programs targeting food insecurity reduce survival-theft rates without reducing vandalism rates; programs targeting social cohesion and institutional trust reduce vandalism rates without reducing survival-theft rates. The empirical separability is the framework's prediction confirmed.

*Fourth.* Restitution-incorporating systems outperform pure-incarceration. Braithwaite (1989; *Crime, Shame and Reintegration*) and Zehr (1990; *Changing Lenses*) ground the theoretical framework. The empirical record on restorative-justice diversion programs is consistently favorable: lower recidivism, higher victim satisfaction, lower aggregate cost. The Sherman and Strang Cambridge restorative-justice meta-analyses document the recidivism reduction across multiple study designs and offense categories. The prediction is confirmed across decades of programs in multiple jurisdictions.

*Fifth.* Upstream-justice investment outperforms downstream. The Housing First empirical literature (Tsemberis et al. on Pathways to Housing; numerous city-level evaluations) shows that providing housing to chronically homeless populations costs less than the policing, emergency-room, and shelter costs the same population otherwise generates. The Portugal drug-decriminalization experience (Hughes and Stevens 2010; Greenwald 2009) records reduced criminal-justice burden combined with improved health outcomes from upstream-routing to treatment. CAHOOTS and similar mental-health-first crisis-response programs in Eugene, Denver, and elsewhere register substantially lower per-incident costs than police-first responses. The juvenile-justice diversion literature broadly shows better outcomes from upstream intervention than from incarceration. The *everybody wins* prediction is confirmed across multiple natural experiments in multiple jurisdictions.

*Sixth.* Drug crime tracks treatment availability. The Portugal experience is the cleanest natural experiment. Drug-related crime declined after decriminalization combined with treatment expansion; the pattern would not have been predicted by prohibition-severity-only accounts but is predicted by the framework's healthcare-as-upstream-of-justice coupling. Comparative studies of Swiss heroin-assisted treatment, Vancouver supervised-injection-site programs, and other harm-reduction implementations confirm the pattern: where treatment access expands, drug-related crime declines, even when prohibition-severity remains high.

*Seventh.* Justice-system extraction patterns at every scale. The private-prison literature (Selman and Leighton 2010 on the prison-industrial complex; Eisen 2017 on the Justice Investment Act context) traces the institutional-extraction pattern: contracts incentivizing higher incarceration; lobbying for stricter sentencing; political-economic capture of corrections-policy domains. Civil-asset-forfeiture revenue patterns in US jurisdictions show equivalent extraction at a different layer of the justice system. The criminal-justice-reform literature surfaces the same pattern in cash-bail-system and for-profit-probation extractions. The framework's prediction that the same structural pattern appears at every scale is empirically confirmed.

*Eighth.* Restorative-justice succeeds where mutual recognition is possible. The meta-analyses cited above (Sherman and Strang) and the broader restorative-justice empirical literature show the pattern: highest success rates in offenses where victim and offender are identifiable, where the offender has capacity for engagement, and where community accountability infrastructure exists. Lower success rates where these conditions are absent. The differentiated-success pattern is the framework's prediction confirmed; restorative justice is not a universal solvent and the framework does not predict it to be.

*On theoretical convergences.* The framework converges on conclusions independently reached in: restorative-justice traditions broadly (Zehr 1990; Braithwaite 1989; Sullivan and Tifft 2001), communitarian property theory (Etzioni; Sandel), capabilities-based criminology (Nussbaum on human dignity in punishment), procedural-justice scholarship (Tyler 1990 on legitimacy and compliance), and abolitionist scholarship (Davis; Gilmore on the framework's account of upstream-conditions). The convergence supports the prediction that the framework's conclusions are robust under alternate premises.

*What does not confirm the framework.* Strong-form retributive theories (Kant; M. S. Moore 1997) ground the wrongness of crime in pre-political moral facts that the framework's stewardship-within-political-community account does not endorse. The framework precludes pure-retributive accounts at the derivation level, while granting that retributive intuitions track real moral phenomena (mutual-recognition failures producing legitimate response). Strong-form Lockean property theories (Nozick 1974) ground property in pre-political natural rights; the framework precludes that grounding while preserving the wrongness of property destruction on different grounds. Where the empirical record diverges from these accounts, the framework's predictions track the record. The confirmations stated in this subsection are made under engagement with the contested punishment-theory opposition traditions [§9.13.1](<9.13.1 What is Disputed.md>) names at premise: retributivism (Kant, *Doctrine of Right* 1797, §49; Moore, *Placing Blame* 1997; Duff, *Punishment, Communication, and Community* 2001), abolitionism (Davis, *Are Prisons Obsolete?* 2003; Gilmore, *Golden Gulag* 2007; Kaba, *We Do This 'Til We Free Us* 2021), and restorative-maximalism (Zehr, *Changing Lenses* 1990; Braithwaite, *Crime, Shame and Reintegration* 1989). Those traditions are engaged at section length in [§9.13.1](<9.13.1 What is Disputed.md>), and the confirmation record stated here applies under that engagement.


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← [9.13.3 What is Predicted](<9.13.3 What is Predicted.md>) | [9.13.5 What is Concluded](<9.13.5 What is Concluded.md>) →
