Restorative Justice Conferences Research Articles

Doing difference and accountability in restorative justice conferences

This article analyses social dynamics in restorative justice conferences employing two distinct meanings of accountability: one embodied in performing gendered (and other) social relations, and the second, in performing remorse. Engaging feminist theory of ‘doing gender’ and structured action, offenders’ accounts of their behaviour, gendered participation of parents and community representatives are analysed. Specifically examined are three ideals of restorative justice: empowerment, remorse and reintegration, and bridging barriers between participants. The data analysed are from extensive field notes collected during six months of research into restorative justice in Australia and as a practitioner in Maine. Analyses reveal that achieving these ideals is more elusive than anticipated. Rather, accountability dynamics around gender, race and social class reinforce social privileges and disadvantage.

Informal resolution of complaints against the police

In many jurisdictions it is increasingly recognized that police complaints systems should contain a mixture of formal and less formal procedures, as well as allow for a variety of outcomes including remedial and punitive ones. Recent changes to the system for handling complaints against the police in England and Wales envisage an expanded role for local (informal) resolution, with a new range of options including restorative justice conferences. Yet little is known about whether complainants would welcome the option of a restorative justice conference or whether restorative processes would constitute an improvement on conventional practices. This article presents the results of a Nuffield Foundation funded study of these issues carried out in 2002-3 in two police force areas. The findings suggest that restorative processes can achieve moderately better results than conventional processes. While widespread implementation of this new approach is likely to prove problematic for many police services, a flexible approach to introducing changes, drawing on the experience of restorative practitioners in related areas, is likely to benefit complainants without creating dissatisfaction among police officers.

Assessing Reoffending in Restorative Justice Conferences

Restorative justice conferencing, in response to youthful offending, has grown in popularity around the world.While there is now substantial empirical evidence that shows offenders and victims are satisfied with outcomes and perceive the process as generally fair, available data on reoffending have produced mixed results. Uncertainty about how conferencing affects future offending may result from how reoffending is analysed. In this paper, I used survival analysis to reanalyse data from the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania Restorative Policing Experiment and assessed two methodological approaches: a standard comparative approach to examine differences in reoffending between offenders in conference and court and a variation analysis to examine differences in reoffending within conference and court groups. Comparative analyses showed that violent offenders referred to conference were less likely to reoffend compared to violent offenders referred to court. There were no differences in reoffending for property offenders in conference and in court. Variation analyses showed that female offenders attending conferences were less likely to reoffend than male offenders in conferences. There were no differences in reoffending for males and females in court. These results suggest that there is value in comparing the effects of traditional and restorative interventions, as well as assessing how variation within interventions is related to future offending.

Assessing Reoffending in Restorative Justice Conferences

Assessing Reoffending in Restorative Justice Conferences

Evidence-Based Crime Prevention: Conclusions and Directions for a Safer Society

In an evidence-based society, government crime prevention policy and local practice would be based on interventions with demonstrated effectiveness in preventing crime - using what works best. Systematic reviews are the most comprehensive method of assessing the effectiveness of crime prevention measures and, in an evidence-based society, they would be the source that governments would turn to for help in the development of policy. This article summarizes the main findings of a project of the Campbell Collaboration Crime and Justice Group to advance knowledge on what works to prevent crime for a wide range of interventions, organized around four important domains: at-risk children, offenders, victims, and high-crime places. The full conclusions are published in the forthcoming book, Preventing Crime: What Works for Children, Offenders, Victims, and Places. The good news from this first wave of reviews is that most of the interventions are effective in preventing crime and, in many cases, produce sizeable effects. This includes social-skills training for children, cognitive-behavioural therapy and incarceration-based drug treatment for offenders, face-to-face restorative justice conferences involving victims and offenders, prevention of repeat residential burglary victimization, hot spots policing, closed-circuit television surveillance, and improved street lighting. Acting on the evidence from these systematic reviews could contribute to a safer society, both now and in the long run. Alongside the Campbell Collaboration effort to prepare and maintain systematic reviews for use by policy makers, practitioners, and the general public, a program of research into new crime prevention and intervention experiments needs to be initiated.

Reassessing the dimensionality of the moral emotions.

The dimensionality of the moral emotions was tested to examine whether theoretical distinctions between specific emotions were empirically supported. A total of 720 drink-driving offenders indicated the degree to which they experienced feelings associated with the moral emotions, in an interview conducted after attending court or a restorative justice conference. Expected distinctions between shame and guilt were not found. Instead the principal components analysis identified three factors: shame-guilt, embarrassment-exposure, and unresolved shame. The results also show that shame-guilt was related to higher feelings of empathy and lower feelings of anger/hostility. It is concluded that differences between shame and guilt may be overstated. Furthermore, it is suggested that the relationship between situational experiences of shame and the disposition to feel it may be more complicated than initially thought.

Restorative Justice for Juveniles: Conferencing, Mediation and Circles

Part 1 Setting the scene: introducing restorative justice, Daniel Van Ness, Allison Morris, Gabrielle Maxwell on restoration and punishment - favourable similarities and fortunate differences, Lode Walgrave. Part 2 Describing restorative practices: primary restorative justice practices, Paul McCold conferencing in Australia and New Zealand - variations, research findings and prospects, Kathleen Daly restorative justice and family group conferences in England - current state and future prospects, Jim Dignan and Peter Marsh conferencing in South Africa - returning to our future, Ann Skelton and Cheryl Frank victim impact of meeting with young offenders - two decades of victim offender mediation practice and research, Mark S. Umbreit, Robert B. Coates and Betty Vos mediation in Europe - paradoxes, problems and promises, Elmar G. M. Weitekamp circle sentencing - part of the restorative justice continuum, Heino Lilles. Part 3 Critical issues in restorative justice: justice for victims of young offenders - the centrality of emotional harm and restoration, Heather Strang just cops doing "shameful" business? police-led restorative justice and the lessons of research, Richard Young aboriginal youth and restorative justice - critical notes from the Australian frontier, Harry Blagg family group conferences and reoffending, Gabrielle Maxwell and Allison Morris. Part 4 What next for restorative justice?: implementing restorative justice - what works?, Allison Morris and Gabrielle Maxwell.

Moral emotions in restorative justice conferences

This article deals with the emotional dynamics of restorative conferences, focusing on the functions of shame, as enunciated in the theories of Moore, Scheff and Retzinger. According to these researchers, the restorative justice conferences aim to redirect aggressive emotions and elicit shame and other hurt-revealing emotions that can lead to empathy. These approaches are confronted with the views of the guilt-theorists Tangney and Baumeister who argue that guilt is related to empathy and reparation, whereas shame tends to provoke avoidance or rejection of responsibility. The view that guilt is the more moral emotion appears to turn Braithwaite’s theory of reintegrative shaming upside down. In accordance with recent research results of the Braithwaite group, it is concluded that guilt is an important aspect of the restorative process. But guilt has limited affect resonance possibilities, misses the other-regarding aspects of remorse and does not seem to incite the offender to reconsider his or her identity. In conclusion, it is argued that (reintegrative) ‘shaming’ is a dubious concept.

CONFERENCING AND PLURALITY: Reply to Blagg

Blagg observes that a most undervalued fact about the New Zealand juvenile justice reforms of 1989 was the creation of new gatekeepers, the youth justice co-ordinators: 'All youth justice matters had, by law, to be referred to the youth justice co-ordinator, the police were unable to by-pass the processes in the old way' (p. 7). A problem with most restorative justice programmes, for example victim-offender mediation programmes in Britain and the US, is that they have not been mainstreamed as well as the New Zealand family group conferencing reforms. A diversion programme thrust at the police or the courts will tend only to get a trickle of business, often only those cases the mainstream gatekeepers don't consider worth the bother. One consequence is that citizens from oppressed minorities benefit less from the restorative justice programme, remaining in the retributive mainstream. One limitation of the New Zealand youth justice co-ordinator solution is that a new gatekeeper is created for youth only. Hence, adult restorative justice programmes remain marginal in New Zealand and are denied to most Maori adult offenders. This is one reason why some of us find the transformation of police gatekeeping a worthwhile challenge, so that police do more informal cautioning (and in a decent and just way)1 and facilitate more restorative justice conferences. Just as an understudied virtue of the New Zealand model is the legally mandated gatekeeping of the youth justice co-ordinators, an understudied feature of the Wagga model was the committee of sergeants which reviewed cases headed for court, sending many back to the informant to reconsider a conference. The sergeants' meetings were open to interested parties, such as the Wagga Wagga Police-Community Consultative Committee. In Canberra we are only running around 500 conferences a year in a city of 300,000. Per capita Wagga was running many more conferences than this at its peak. My hypothesis is that the main reason the Wagga programme was more mainstreamed than the Canberra one was the transformation of gatekeeping by the committee of sergeants (the middle managers with real power) that was open to influence by the community and the rest