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RESTORATIVE JUSTICE AN OVERVIEW - prismacarcere

RESTORATIVE JUSTICE . AN OVERVIEW . by Tony F. Marshall RESTORATIVE JUSTICE : AN OVERVIEW . by Tony F. Marshall A report by the Home Office Research Development and Statistics Directorate Additional copies of this report can be be obtained from the Home Office, Information & Publications Group, Research Development and Statistics Directorate, Room 201, 50 Queen Anne's Gate, London SW1H 9AT. Crown copyright 1999. ISBN 1 84082 244 9. CONTENTS. Page What is RESTORATIVE JUSTICE ? 5. What is RESTORATIVE JUSTICE for? 6. Why is it called RESTORATIVE JUSTICE ? 7. How did the idea of RESTORATIVE JUSTICE arise? 7. Relationship of RESTORATIVE JUSTICE to legal JUSTICE 8. Limitations of RESTORATIVE JUSTICE 8. Organisations promoting RESTORATIVE JUSTICE 9. Examples of RESTORATIVE JUSTICE practice 11.

RESTORATIVE JUSTICE: AN OVERVIEW What is Restorative Justice? Restorative Justice is a problem-solving approach to crime which involves the parties themselves, and the community generally, in an active relationship with statutory agencies. It is not any particular practice, but a set of principles which may orientate the general practice of any ...

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Transcription of RESTORATIVE JUSTICE AN OVERVIEW - prismacarcere

1 RESTORATIVE JUSTICE . AN OVERVIEW . by Tony F. Marshall RESTORATIVE JUSTICE : AN OVERVIEW . by Tony F. Marshall A report by the Home Office Research Development and Statistics Directorate Additional copies of this report can be be obtained from the Home Office, Information & Publications Group, Research Development and Statistics Directorate, Room 201, 50 Queen Anne's Gate, London SW1H 9AT. Crown copyright 1999. ISBN 1 84082 244 9. CONTENTS. Page What is RESTORATIVE JUSTICE ? 5. What is RESTORATIVE JUSTICE for? 6. Why is it called RESTORATIVE JUSTICE ? 7. How did the idea of RESTORATIVE JUSTICE arise? 7. Relationship of RESTORATIVE JUSTICE to legal JUSTICE 8. Limitations of RESTORATIVE JUSTICE 8. Organisations promoting RESTORATIVE JUSTICE 9. Examples of RESTORATIVE JUSTICE practice 11.

2 Research on RESTORATIVE JUSTICE practice 17. RESTORATIVE JUSTICE and crime policy 20. Major issues in the development of RESTORATIVE JUSTICE 22. Theories related to RESTORATIVE JUSTICE 29. References 33. 1. 2. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. I have received materials and information from a number of parties and am grateful for their generosity. They are too many to list here, but they, or their organisations, are mentioned in the text. I wish to record special thanks, however, to Annie Roberts for assiduously keeping me abreast of the American literature in particular, and for the general support and intellectual stimulation of Marian Liebmann and Martin Wright over many years. Tony F Marshall 3. 4. RESTORATIVE JUSTICE : AN OVERVIEW . What is RESTORATIVE JUSTICE ? RESTORATIVE JUSTICE is a problem-solving approach to crime which involves the parties themselves, and the community generally, in an active relationship with statutory agencies.

3 It is not any particular practice, but a set of principles which may orientate the general practice of any agency or group in relation to crime. These principles are: making room for the personal involvement of those mainly concerned (particularly the offender and the victim, but also their families and communities). seeing crime problems in their social context a forward-looking (or preventative) problem-solving orientation flexibility of practice (creativity). RESTORATIVE JUSTICE may be seen as criminal JUSTICE embedded in its social context, with the stress on its relationship to the other components, rather than a closed system in isolation (see diagram below). A commonly accepted definition used internationally is: RESTORATIVE JUSTICE is a process whereby parties with a s t a ke in a specific offence collective ly re s o l ve how to deal with the aftermath of the offence and its implications for the future.

4 5. What is RESTORATIVE JUSTICE for? The primary objectives of RESTORATIVE JUSTICE are: to attend fully to victims' needs material, financial, emotional and social (including those personally close to the victim who may be similarly affected). to prevent re offending by reintegrating offenders into the community to enable offenders to assume active responsibility for their actions to recreate a working community that supports the rehabilitation of offenders and victims and is active in preventing crime to provide a means of avoiding escalation of legal JUSTICE and the associated costs and delays. These might all be objectives of the current criminal JUSTICE system, and although primacy has been given in the new Crime and Disorder Act to the prevention of offending as the statutory aim of youth JUSTICE , the system only partially and haphazardly achieves this, or any other aim.

5 It is not centrally concerned with victims and does not address most of their needs. Only limited action is taken to encourage the reintegration of offenders, and the evidence shows that this is largely unsuccessful. It requires only the passive acquiescence of offenders, who are not expected to take the initiative in making good what they have done but only to suffer their punishment. It is distant from the community and does little to encourage any role for it in the prevention of crime. Despite various programmes intended to divert offences from the full process and reduce costs and delays, their use without parallel attention to victims' needs and future prevention has sometimes led to the criticism that much crime is not taken sufficiently seriously.

6 (The new Crime and Disorder Act seeks to deal with this last point by eliminating the use of multiple cautions and instituting opportunities for victim consultation and preventive measures, an approach which is in accord with RESTORATIVE JUSTICE .). RESTORATIVE JUSTICE is based on the following assumptions: that crime has its origins in social conditions and relationships in the community that crime-prevention is dependent on communities taking some responsibility (along with local and central governments' responsibility for general social policy) for remedying those conditions that cause crime that the aftermath of crime cannot be fully resolved for the parties themselves without facilitating their personal involvement that JUSTICE measures must be flexible enough to respond to the particular exigencies, personal needs and potential for action in each case that partnership and common objectives among JUSTICE agencies, and between them and the community, are essential to optimal effectiveness and efficiency that JUSTICE consists of a balanced approach in which a single objective is not allowed to dominate the others.

7 6. Why is it called RESTORATIVE JUSTICE ? RESTORATIVE JUSTICE is centrally concerned with restoration: restoration of the victim, restoration of the offender to a law-abiding life, restoration of the damage caused by crime to the community. Restoration is not solely backward-looking; it is equally, if not more, concerned with the construction of a better society in the present and the future. Other terms have been used to refer to basically identical ideas (see Marshall, 1997 for a discussion of these). The Relationships Foundation (previously the Jubilee Policy Group) has used the term Relational JUSTICE to emphasise the fact that this kind of JUSTICE is more concerned with the creation of positive relationships than traditional JUSTICE processes. Positive JUSTICE was used by an eponymous group that advocated the same ideas as a means of moving away from the negative emphasis on punishment for its own sake to a more constructive approach to JUSTICE .

8 Reintegrative JUSTICE has also been used, both as a synonym for RESTORATIVE and to refer more specifically to Braithwaite's (1989) theory of reintegrative shaming (see below, Theories of RESTORATIVE JUSTICE ). The term RESTORATIVE JUSTICE is not inherently better than any of the alternatives, but it has the longest history, is the internationally accepted term, and is the most commonly known in this country. How did the idea of RESTORATIVE JUSTICE arise? The first use of the term is generally ascribed to Barnett (1977) referring to certain principles arising out of early experiments in America using mediation between victims and offenders (see Wright, 1991, for more on the early history of the idea). These principles have been developed further over time, as commentators have thought them through and as other innova t i ve practices have been taken into account, but their basic justification is still grounded in practical experience.

9 Innovation in criminal JUSTICE has mainly been in response to frustrations that many practitioners have felt with the limitations, as they perceived them, of traditional approaches. In the course of their normal work these practitioners started to experiment with new ways of dealing with crime problems. Practice developed through experience of what worked in terms of impact on offenders, satisfaction of victims, and public acceptability. In particular, it was realised that the needs of victims, offenders and the community generally were not independent and that JUSTICE agencies had to engage actively with all three in order to make any impact. For instance, public demands for severe punishment, which those working to reform offenders found to be counter-productive, could only be relieved if attention was paid to victims' needs and healing the community, so that offender-rehabilitation could only occur in parallel with the satisfaction of other objectives.

10 Similarly, the overloading of courts and other JUSTICE agencies was due to the increasing lack of capacity of local communities to manage their indigenous crime problems, so that escalating costs could only be prevented by agencies working in partnership with communities to reconstruct their resources for crime-prevention and social control. RESTORATIVE JUSTICE is not, therefore, a single academic theory of crime or JUSTICE , but represents, in a more or less eclectic way, the accretion of actual experience in working successfully with particular crime problems. Although contributing practice has been extremely varied (including victim-support, mediation, conferencing, problem-oriented policing and both community- and institution-based rehabilitation programmes), all these innovations were based on recognition of the need for engagement between two or more of the various parties represented in the diagram on page 5.


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