After Appalachian hospitals merged into a monopoly, their emergency departments slowed to a crawl

Has restorative justice been applied in environments where the gap in education and social standing/status are as wide as they can be in the United States?

I suspect our society is too fragmented, that we have othered ourselves into too many pieces, to be capable of negotiating this at scale.

For instance, how would this play out in a situation where a hypothetical home owner has their home burgled, the burglars are people earning below poverty wages, they stole several thousand dollars of both replaceable and irreplaceable items, these items are lost due to the black and gray markets. The home owners experience the trauma of violation. Perhaps dead pets are lost as a door/window is left open for a significant period of time.

No bodily harm is done yet real harm is done.

Are these burglars likely to feel empathy for the people they robbed? Are the people who were robbed, who lost family heirlooms and even members of their family (pets) likely to feel empathy for the burglars? How do you get to a participatory conflict resolution here, even when you include the community in the negotiation?

It seems more likely that the burglars would have, at best, apathy for their victims.

I would genuinely like to see a better way but I have difficulty believing it is this.

By way of alternative, is "incarceration" so terrible if, as in Nordic countries, it isn't punitive but genuinely rehabilitative?

So much crime seems to be a failure of an adequate education and acculturation. People coming from disadvantaged beginnings are kept disadvantaged by a system rigged to keep the wealthy where they are at the cost of everyone else. Again, an enshittification. Education alone doesn't fix this. Restoring dignity to those with less privilege seems critical. Also, providing a meaningful social safety net (see my original comment above).