Restorative Justice Model Research Articles

Zero Tolerance Policy in Schools: Rationale, Consequences, and Alternatives

This article discusses theory and related policies that support zero tolerance policy in schools, including rational choice theory in criminology and national crime policies based on deterrence. Potential consequences of zero tolerance policy implementation in schools are also described. These consequences are shown to involve outcomes similar to those identified by researchers who have studied national crime policy, especially in relation to incarceration. Drawing from the qualitative data, anecdotal evidence, and related research, the article concludes with suggestions for violence prevention based on a model of restorative justice, including a practical agenda for what schools may do to prevent violence and to discipline students who act aggressively.

Zero Tolerance Policy in Schools: Rationale, Consequences, and Alternatives

This article discusses theory and related policies that support zero tolerance policy in schools, including rational choice theory in criminology and national crime policies based on deterrence. Potential consequences of zero tolerance policy implementation in schools are also described. These consequences are shown to involve outcomes similar to those identified by researchers who have studied national crime policy, especially in relation to incarceration. Drawing from the qualitative data, anecdotal evidence, and related research, the article concludes with suggestions for violence prevention based on a model of restorative justice, including a practical agenda for what schools may do to prevent violence and to discipline students who act aggressively.

Restorative Justice: A New Paradigm for Criminal Justice Policy

In this article, Donald Schmid reviews trends towards restorative justice across several common law jurisdictions, most notably New Zealand and the United States. He examines different models of restorative justice and concludes that, while none of these practices will completely eliminate the need for other, court-based criminal justice processes, they have a large number of practical and social advantages over more traditional approaches.

Alternatives to Custody in the New Zealand Criminal Justice System: Current Features and Future Prospects

Alternatives to custody in New Zealand have followed a format similar to criminal justice systems in the UK and other European countries but with a stronger emphasis on both punitive, work‐based options like periodic detention, and more recently home detention, as well as restorative justice models. Much of current practice relies heavily on the now dated Criminal Justice Act 1985. However, a new sentencing and parole act is proposed for 2002. In this paper the authors review the current alternatives to custody in New Zealand, paying particular attention to issues arising from their recent research on home detention—surveillance, control and impacts on family members—and offering a reflection on the future prospects for alternatives to custody.

Narrative accounts from the citizens, victims, and offenders restoring justice program

This paper describes the Citizens, Victims, and Offenders Restoring Justice (CVORJ) program, a prison-based program conducted as a pilot study at the Washington State Reformatory. The program brings together offenders and victims - though not involved in the same crime - in the company of interested community members to discuss restorative justice principles. The program focuses on the sharing of personal narratives of crime to explore how the harms resulting from crime can best be addressed and justice achieved. Of interest was how a restorative justice model that highlighted community participation could be incorporated into a correctional setting and whether healing could result from the use of surrogate offenders, victims, and community members. The restorative nature of the program, its method of operation, results from the qualitative evaluation, and key implementation challenges are presented.

Harm and Repair: Observing restorative justice in Vermont*

This paper analyzes the decision-making process for negotiating reparative contracts with offenders in a restorative justice model. Based on a content analysis of videotaped Community Reparative Board meetings with probationers in Vermont, this paper defines restoration as a core concept in restorative justice; examines how boards identify harm to victims and community; discusses how boards identify strategies to repair identified harm; addresses how repair often becomes a line item in reparative contracts; and offers interpretation for situations in which harm is not identified and/or not repaired.

The Limits of Reconciliation: The Story of a Perpetrator, Katherine Ann Power

In this paper, I apply concepts of restorative justice, along with moral philosopher Joanna North's (1998) multistage model of the process of earning forgiveness to the case of 1960s antiwar militant, Katherine Power. Both frameworks assume that forgiveness ought to culminate in reconciliation between perpetrator and victim. On September 23, 1970, Katherine Ann Power, a 20-year-old college student, was a member of a group of five who were robbing a bank near Boston to support the movement against the Vietnam War. One from the group stayed at the bank and shot and killed a Boston police officer and father of nine. Under Massachusetts' felony murder law, all five were chargeable with murder. Power went underground for 23 years, remaining on the FBI's Ten-Most-Wanted list longer than any other woman in history. During her fugitive years, Power lived her life in a purposeful attempt to make atonement. Ultimately, though, she came to understand that her crime was not a private matter, but demanded social and relational modes of remediation, including public confession, public penance (in a “penitentiary”), and efforts at reconciliation with the family of her victim. So in 1993, she turned herself in, pleaded guilty to manslaughter, and began serving an 8–12-year sentence in Massachusetts. She completed her prison sentence in October, 1999. Power spent her years in prison engaging in reflection and action that maps well onto the first five stages of North's model and onto much of the restorative justice model. So far, though, Power's efforts have failed to yield the hypothesized reconciliation with her victims. Examination of the parallels and divergences between these theoretical frameworks and Power's narrative provides significant insight into the meaning, the promise, and the limits of reconciliation.

Comment on Umbreit and Vos

Should states be encouraged to develop programs that bring together families of homicide victims with killers of their loved ones who have been sentenced to death? After all, Professors M.S. Umbreit and B. Vos have presented data from two such encounters that indicate the participants, both killer and family member alike, derive benefits from such meetings. The data presented by Umbreit and Vos conversations before an execution do not fit the model of restorative justice in at least three important ways. First, restorative justice requires from both offender and victim not only a willingness or desire to communicate and perhaps meet, but also a willingness and ability to change attitudes and understandings as a result of their communication. Capital punishment and restorative justice are contradictory on this point; nothing can be restored after meetings in the last days of a prisoner's life, as the inmate is soon dead, and dead because of a retributive punishment that is increasingly administered hi the name of the victim's relatives. Second, restorative justice emphasizes recompense by the offender, actively taking steps to atone for the harm and injury he or she has caused. Success is measured partially in terms of the amount of harm repaired or prevented. Hence, any punishment process that does not help to repair injuries but simply creates new ones is incompatible with the restorative justice model. Third, restorative justice seeks to reduce the state's role in the justice process and to revitalize the ancient model in which victims, offenders, and communities all were actively involved in responding to crime and restoring peaceful relationships. Rather than minimizing the role of the state, the death penalty maximizes it.

Results from the Pilot Study of the Citizens, Victims, and Offenders Restoring Justice Program at the Washington State Reformatory

Citizens, Victims, and Offenders Restoring Justice Program is a prison-based program conducted as a pilot study at the Washington State Reformatory from 1997 to 1998. The purpose of the study was to explore ways in which the restorative justice model may be practically applied in a correctional setting. The pilot project consisted of development, implementation, and evaluation of three trials of a seminar on restorative justice involving victims, offenders, and citizens as participants. The development of the program is outlined, program goals and evaluation methods are summarized, and the evaluation results are presented. The combined quantitative and participant observational results show that the program was effective in achieving the four program goals. The seminar provided a safe environment for inmates to begin making amends for their crimes and for victims to heal, facilitated constructive communication between polarized groups, and encouraged participants to develop creative ways of thinking about justice and strategies for dealing with crime. Implications of the results for future programs are discussed.

Development of the Citizens, Victims, and Offenders Restoring Justice Program at the Washington State Reformatory

This paper describes the developmental phase of "Citizens, Victims, and Offenders Restoring Justice," a prison-based pilot study conducted at the Washington State Reformatory. The purpose of the study is to explore ways in which the restorative justice model may be practically applied in a correctional setting. The study consists of the development, implementation, and evaluation of a seminar on restorative justice involving victims, offenders, and community members as participants. The project and evaluation methods are summarized and results from the evaluation of the first seminar trial are discussed.

The Fork in the Road to Juvenile Court Reform

Juvenile justice reform efforts seeking a more criminalized juvenile court and justice system, as well as those aimed at revitalizing the individual treatment mission, have been one-dimensional in their failure to address the multiple justice needs of communities associated with youth crime, and they have been insular in their singular focus on the needs and risks of offenders. In the late 1990s, a growing number of juvenile justice professionals began to embrace a third, more holistic vision for reform based on a normative concern with repairing the harm caused by crime to individuals and relationships and a commitment to victims, communities, and offenders as primary stakeholders in the justice process. This article considers the implications of emerging practice based on a restorative community justice model for systemic reform in the context, content, and structure of juvenile justice and the response to youth crime.

Navajo Nation Courts, Peacemaking and Restorative Justice Issues

The basic principles of Navajo peacemaking predate Euro-based restorative justice models and programs. Because Peacemaking is the result of different cultural processes from those on which Euro-based programs are based, many of the issues that cause concern about Euro-based restorative justice have already been resolved for Peacemaking. Some of these resolutions may be useful to Euro-based programs; some may not because of their rootedness in Navajo culture. Ten issues are discussed: the relationship between retributive and restorative systems; victim perceptions of justice; offender perceptions of justice; due process; community perceptions of justice; antagonism from criminal justice personnel; lack of program resources; program effectiveness in reducing incarceration and recidivism; mediator skills; and expanding clientele to include organizations, repeat offenders and violent offenders. Of these, only three issues - lack of resources, community perceptions of justice, and antagonism from criminal justice personnel - are relevant to both Peacemaking and Euro-based restorative programs. Peacemaking has developed solutions to the other issues. Of these solutions, the use of victim and offender support groups, and the use of consensus to deal with victim and offender concerns, have definite potential use in relation to the Euro-based programs. The other resolutions will have to be considered on a one by one basis.

Restoring justice for juveniles: A critical analysis of victimoffender mediation

Increases in youth crime have placed considerable strain on both the criminal justice and the juvenile justice system. In response to mounting caseloads and diminishing resources, some experts suggest that a restorative justice model, using victim-offender mediation (VOM) principles, is necessary for combating crime and its impact on victims, juveniles, and the community. In this article we evaluate the merits of VOM programs and the philosophy of restorative justice as applied to adolescent offenders. Relying on the interpretive tools of the postmodern sciences, we carefully examine the language of restoration as structuring victim-offender mediation sessions. Integrated, selected contributions from psychoanalytic semiotics and chaos theory underpin this investigation. We demonstrate how VOM discourse advertently or inadvertently marginalizes juveniles. Therefore, as a policy matter, we argue that the goals of restorative justice are not presently realized. We conclude by provisionally describing how a more humane dialogue can be achieved through language, advancing the transformative themes of restoration and reconciliation. Here, too, the analysis is informed by a synthesis of additional insights found in psychoanalytic semiotics and chaos theory.

Children Without Childhoods

Summary The numbers of female adolescents entering the Juvenile Justice systems of this country are increasing at a rapid rate. Are these girls subjected to a gender bias that detains girls in greater numbers and for lesser offenses than their male counterparts? Drawing upon the work of juvenile justice experts, developmental psychologists and current research documents, this paper will put forth a theoretical framework for viewing the causal issues of female adolescent offending, the gender inequities in arrest, sentencing and program options and gender-specific treatment implications for mental health professionals. Giving recognition to Carol Giliigan's research on the developmental phenomenon of adolescent girls “losing their voice,” issues of self-identity and self-advocacy will be discussed discussed from a feminist perspective. Mental health treatment methods in detention facilities will be examined with a critical look at the limited access female adolescents have to comprehensive counseling that addresses their victimization. Strength-based treatment planning based on a systems theory model will be explored as an effective method of facilitating the female adolescent's ability to self-advocate within a support network. This paper will call for a paradigm shift away from society's current retributive justice response to female adolescent offending and toward the healing model of restorative justice.

Gauging the Intensity of Criminal Sanctions: Developing the Criminal Punishment Severity Scale (CPSS)

Retributive theorists have claimed that restorative and other justice models are inadequate because they do not sufficiently consider proportionality either between crimes and punishments or between different types of penalties themselves. The retributive model, however, has been unable to adequately relate the severity of criminal harms to the gravity of criminal punishments, i.e., to establish cardinal proportionality. As a result, judges and other key criminal justice decision makers have had no means by which to assess the relative punitiveness of incarcerative and nonincarcerative sanctions, either to one another or to the seriousness of the harm that was inflicted on the victim. This article suggests that comparing the severity of disparate penalties on a single, multidimensional scale is both possible and desirable. It assumes that virtually any sentencing system, irrespective of its underlying philosophy and the degree to which severity is important, requires some means by which to characterize penalty severity to ensure the imposition of just sanctions. The article first lays a conceptual foundation for gauging penalty severity and then translates these concepts into a practical scale that can be applied at sentencing. The model is then applied to a variety of punishment options in New York City, and finally the policy implications and limitations of the model are discussed.

‘AlterNative’ approaches to criminal justice: John Braithwaite’s theory of reintegrative shaming revisited

Conservative crime control measures, such as incarceration, capital punishment, and boot camps, have done little, if anything, to prevent and control crime in North America and elsewhere. What, then, is to be done? Like other progressive criminologists, I contend that we need to radically rethink the administration of justice and seek insight from First Nations societies and communities that rely on informal means of resolving a wide range of conflicts. The main objective of this essay is to demonstrate that such ‘AlterNative’ social control strategies are more effective and humane means of curbing crime and achieving social justice. The progressive initiatives proposed here are heavily informed by the Inuit model of restorative justice and John Braitwaite’s theory of reintegrative shaming. These have the potential to alleviate much pain and suffering caused by crime and other symptoms of structured social inequality.

Towards a Framework for Conceptualizing and Evaluating Models of Criminal Justice from a Victim's Perspective

In this article we outline a typology of ‘models’ or conceptual contexts within which a variety of victim-based measures has been proposed, and in many cases adopted, in various common law jurisdictions. The purpose of the typology is to clarify some of the confusion surrounding these measures and, in particular, the scope they offer for reparative and restorative approaches to operate either within or alongside the mainstream criminal process. Drawing on recent empirical findings and theoretical writings we also seek to evaluate the victim-oriented measures that are associated with each of the models. Within the typology three distinct models of restorative justice are examined and we argue that one of these, the Communitarian Model, emerges as the most coherent, credible and constructive challenger to the hitherto predominant Retributive Model.

Community justice/restorative justice: Prospects for a new social ecology for community corrections

Community corrections policies and programs have lacked a framework which articulates strategies for engaging community groups and defines roles for citizens in the corrections process. In this paper we critique both traditional approaches to community corrections based on an individual treatment model and the new “get tough” approaches which emphasize punitive sanctions and surveillance. We outline a restorative justice model as an alternative to both of these one‐dimensional, case‐driven approaches. The restorative model targets victims, communities, and offenders for intervention and attempts to engage each of these correctional clients in an effort to repair harm, strengthen communities, and reintegrate offenders following appropriate sanctioning. Obstacles to implementation and threats to cooptation and dilution of a restorative agenda are discussed.