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Restorative Justice
Abstract
Restorative justice is philosophy that places repairing the victim's harm as a primary goal in the justice process. It includes concepts of reparation, reconciliation, and transformation while offering a space for victim healing and forgiveness. Restorative justice requires that offenders acknowledge the impact their behavior has on victims, family members, and the community and mandates some form of amends. Various models of restorative justice exist with mixed evaluative results. Restorative justice continues to serve as an alternate sanction for juvenile and adult offenders and has increasingly become a more popular solution in educational settings.
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Learning about restorative justice involves examining conventional thinking about crime (or wrongdoing generally), values in relation to how people associated with wrongdoing are treated, and best responses when a wrongdoing occurs. In this introductory article, I highlight key developments in the restorative movement and main distinctions between the conventional and restorative justice approaches. I describe what restorative justice interventions involve and consider claims about effectiveness. In the article's conclusion, I note ongoing tensions and recent innovations in the field.
Objective: This article reports the results of a meta-analytic study of the relationship between participation in victim- offender mediation (VOM) and the prevalence of subsequent delinquent behavior. Method: Analyses were conducted with the results of 15 studies, conducted at 19 different sites, with a sample of 9,307 juveniles. Results: The results sug- gested that methodological factors explained all the significant variation across sites and studies in the magnitude of the difference between non-VOM and VOM groups in their reoffense prevalence. The odds of VOM participants were only about .70 as great as the odds of nonparticipants reoffending. Conclusion: The results support the efforts of social workers to advocate for, develop, and participate in VOM programs.
Despite claims that restorative justice is “victim centered,” and deliberately focused on healing harms to victims, some studies report that particular applications of restorative justice may not be fully consistent with its fundamental principles and values. Under such circumstances these programs may focus on outcomes (e.g., rehabilitation of youthful offenders) rather than process, and in doing so, may fail to identify and respond effectively to victims' needs. To take a closer look at this phenomenon, this article examines a sample of published restorative justice studies that highlight ‘negative’ experiences of victims. Given a number of studies that indicate victims typically have satisfying experiences in restorative justice practices such reports of negative experiences and practices should be viewed as ‘outliers.’ However, such outliers may provide substantively meaningful insights that inform best practice standard for restorative justice. Implications are drawn for the use of restorative justice practices for youth justice.
This paper explores definitions and understandings of restorative practices in education. It offers a critique of current theoretical models of restorative justice originally derived from the criminal justice system and now becoming popular in educational settings. It questions the appropriateness of these concepts as they are being introduced to schools in parts of the UK and refers to a recent Scottish Executive funded pilot initiative to implement restorative practices in schools. The paper then reflects on some findings from the evaluation of this pilot project, outlines a new notion of restorative approaches and suggests that this broader conceptualisation may offer an important way in which to promote social justice in education and to reassess the importance and inevitability of conflicting social interaction and structures inherent in schools as complex social institutions.
The practice of restorative justice in schools has the capacity to build social and human capital through challenging students in the context of social and emotional learning. While restorative justice was originally introduced to schools to address serious incidents of misconduct and harmful behavior, the potential this philosophy offers is much greater. The conviction is that the key challenge for schools is addressing the culture change required to make the shift from traditional discipline, driven by punitive (or rewards based) external motivators, to restorative discipline, driven by relational motivators that seeks to empower individuals and their communities. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. 2005
This article provides an empirical synthesis of the existing literature on the effectiveness of restorative justice practices using meta-analytic techniques. The data were aggregated from studies that compared restorative justice programs to traditional nonrestorative approaches to criminal behavior. Victim and offender satisfaction, restitution compliance, and recidivism were selected as appropriate outcomes to adequately measure effectiveness. Although restorative programs were found to be significantly more effective, these positive findings are tempered by an important self-selection bias inherent in restorative justice research. A possible method of addressing this problem, as well as directions for future research, are provided.
“That’s not fair!” This phrase was uttered daily by many of the students in Oakland’s public school system. Even when they were caught in an act that violated school rules, students did not readily take responsibility for their actions. They were simply playing their role in our punitive system, in which most students tend to blame others rather than accept the consequences for their behavior. Our search for ways to change this paradigm led us to explore the practice of restorative justice.
During the fall of 2005, I (Rita) was employed by the Oakland Unified School District as a case manager working with students and their families who were referred for expulsion. As case managers with backgrounds in counseling and mental health, we were charged with finding alternatives to suspensions and expulsions. In December 2005, I was mandated to attend a four-day training on restorative justice, organized by a local community agency, Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth. The training was facilitated by Roca, a youth development agency from Chelsea, Massachusetts.
After completing the training, I was assigned to Cole Middle School and worked closely with the principal and assistant principal as a case manager for the school’s Pupil Disciplinary Hearing Panel. The administrators and I had several conversations about student suspensions and expulsions and lamented that the children returned to school showing no behavior changes. It was a vicious cycle, an unending revolving door. This situation exacerbated the already chaotic school culture of fights and defiance.
My job was to create a paradigm shift within the school context by introducing restorative justice as an alternative to the traditional discipline system. After my training with Roca, I returned renewed and ready to try this new way of working with student violations. The principal, having had several years of experience as an assistant principal, agreed that suspensions and expulsions did not work to change student behavior. Together, we began the restorative justice journey at Cole.
Harsh school discipline drives many students into juvenile and adult prisons. Students illustrated the school-to-prison pipeline at a Representing the Pipeline event in Chicago in July 2010. See suspensionstories.com.
I began the restorative justice educational process by offering support meetings for teachers to vent and reflect on their experiences with the students in the classroom. Many of them were in their first year, and classroom management was especially challenging. I built close relationships with several teachers and offered assistance to them in their classrooms whenever I could.
A circle meets at Cole Middle School in Oakland, California. The restorative justice pilot program at Cole, which Rita Alfred coordinated, was so effective in reducing suspensions, expulsions, and violence that staff at about twenty schools sought training and assistance to bring restorative practices to their sites. In large part due to these efforts, in January 2010, Oakland’s school board passed a resolution adopting restorative justice district-wide as official policy.
In August of 2006, after several planning meetings with the principal, we launched a year of training for the teachers. We unearthed conflicts among staff and used the restorative justice process to work through them. At the same time I was facilitating restorative circles with students and discipline conferences with students, families, administrators, and teachers when needed. We started out with a two-day training in August, negotiated a monthly staff training using the process, a follow-up two-day training in November, and another follow-up two-day training in the spring.
The staff built a closeness and willingness to work through differences. By the end of that year, the majority of the adults at Cole were ready to bring this new practice to the students and their families. We experienced some good results in the first year: a reduction in fights, suspensions, and referrals for expulsion. We also saw close to 100 percent retention of teachers—this was unprecedented as turnover was usually around 50 percent—with just one teacher leaving for higher studies. And we all experienced a more positive school culture.
Scholars of restorative justice have long debated its theoretical relationship with formal criminal justice. This analysis critically examines the range of socio-structural conditions in contemporary society that have halted the spread of restorative policies in practice and prevented them from realizing their transformative potential as an alternative system of justice. These factors are attributed largely to a punitive penal culture that is characterized by policy-making based on penal populism, the governance of risk and a managerialist criminal justice agenda; and the widespread co-optation of restorative programs by the state. This broad argument is explored in the context of two particular case studies – recent developments in youth justice and in sexual offending respectively in England and Wales and elsewhere. This examination ultimately highlights challenges for restorative justice in the current risk-driven penal climate and advocates a need to re-evaluate its relationship with formal state justice.
Programs with restorative justice ideals attempt to incorporate victims and community members into the administration of justice. Although these programs have become increasingly popular, only a few programs in the United States have been the focus of prior studies. Using official juvenile court data from an urban, metropolitan area, this study finds that juveniles who participated in a restorative justice program were less likely to recidivate than juveniles in a comparison group. Also, gender and prior offenses indirectly influence recidivism in important ways. Girls and offenders with minimal criminal history records exhibit the most success from participating in such programs. Findings demonstrate the importance of examining additive and interactive effects in restorative justice research.
This bulletin focuses on four restorative conferencing models within the juvenile justice system: victim-offender mediation; community reparative boards; family group conferencing; and circle sentencing. The bulletin first describes each of the four restorative justice models, presenting information on background, concept, procedures and goals, considerations in implementation, lessons learned from research, and sources of additional information. It then compares and contrasts the models on the following dimensions: origins and current applications; administrative and procedural aspects (eligibility, point of referral, staffing, setting, process and protocols, and management of dialog); and community involvement and other dimensions (participants, victim role, gatekeepers, relationship to the formal justice system, preparation, enforcement, monitoring, and primary outcomes sought). Next, the bulletin discusses various issues and concerns to be addressed in the development and implementation of restorative conferencing approaches. It also offers guidelines for clearly grounding interventions in restorative justice principles and includes a test for determining whether an intervention strengthens the community response to youth crime and creates new roles for citizens and community groups. (Contains 60 references.) (SM)
This essay examines the democratic aspects of restorative justice, placing it in the context of a more general civic engagement movement attempting to narrow the distance between citizens and the state. Along with the goals of fostering healing dialogs between victims, offenders, and communities that can lead to forgiveness and restoration of loss rather than compensatory penal harm, restorative justice programs such as the Vermont reparative probation program attempt to share responsibility and decision-making power for the awful tasks of criminal justice. Over the last 35 years, while restorative justice programs have become more widespread and more mainstream, their democratic dimensions have remained underdeveloped. This essay critically reflects on the degree to which restorative justice programs have involved the public in the professional domain of criminal justice administration and how well they have managed to operate within rule-bound bureaucratic environments while remaining informal and open to community members. It also assesses how well restorative justice, as a reform movement, has addressed the so-called populist punitiveness many commentators believe has driven the ‘get tough’ criminal justice policies, such as mandatory minimum sentencing, that make the US the current world leader in imprisonment.
Restorative justice (RJ) programs have become widespread in the United States and in other countries. These programs are often seen as a viable alternative to traditional retributive processing, especially for minor, and sometimes more serious, forms of delinquency and adult criminality. The programs hold promise for achieving several goals, including increased community and victim involvement, greater satisfaction with the case outcomes, improved offender compliance, increased perceptions of fairness, and even recidivism reduction. Meta-analyses have demonstrated varying degrees of program success in recidivism reduction, which may in part reflect differential effectiveness of the RJ approach for various kinds of offenders. This study examined whether an RJ program for juvenile offenders had differential impacts on recidivism across various offender characteristics (including age, gender, racial group, offending history, and current offense). Results generally support the effectiveness of the program for many types of offenders. Implications for future research and potential improvements to the RJ model are discussed.
In this article Belinda Hopkins provides a welcome introduction to the use of restorative justice (RJ) principles in addressing challenging or disruptive behaviour. As an initiative, it shares much in common with the thinking outlined in the previous article on peer mediation. The underlying principles of the restorative approach suggest its worth as an expression of a school’s commitment to, for example, Active Citizenship and the Healthy Schools Programme.
This qualitative study examined the multiple perspectives of participants' experiences of a Victim Offender Mediation (VOM) program operating in a Midwestern city. Thirty-four face-to-face interviews were conducted with 37 participants, including juvenile offenders and their parents, adult crime victims, mediators, and referral sources. The findings indicate disparities exist between the juvenile offenders and their victims in their perceptions of the genuineness of the apology delivered. The nature of apology is explored and its meaning in the restorative justice context is set out. This study provides a snapshot of the process and practice of restorative justice work. In particular, this study highlights the complicated nature of communication between and among VOM participants. Recommendations are made to improve victim-sensitive restorative justice practices through the composition and delivery of the apology.
This paper examines “restorative justice,” a new approach to the problem of juvenile crime, from an economic point of view. Advocates assert that the personal, social, and economic harms inflicted by many juvenile crimes are more adequately repaired through mediated face-to-face conferences between victims and offenders than through the conventional disposition of juvenile cases. Parallels between this conception and key elements of the “economic model of crime” are reviewed, followed by an application of the concept of social capital to this process. We conclude with a brief review of early empirical evidence suggestive of the promise of this new approach.
Studies of restorative justice programs continue to provide a review of restorative justice practice and impact. While this body of research is growing, many questions remain regarding the impact of restorative justice in reducing crime. By relying on individual and community-level data, the present study examined how offense type and poverty level influenced program completion and recidivism among juveniles in a restorative justice program. This study also examined the relationship between program completion and recidivism. Findings revealed that status offenders in the restorative justice program were more likely to complete the program and less likely to recidivate than status offenders in the comparison group. In addition, property offenders in the restorative justice program were less likely to recidivate than property offenders in the comparison group. Poverty level at the community-level had a significant influence in both program completion and recidivism.
Restorative justice in New Zealand: Family group conferences
- Morris A.
Restorative justice conferences as an early response to young offenders (OJJDP Bulletin)
- E. F. McGarrell
The little book of restorative justice
- H. Zehr