Week 8: Restorative Justice (continued)

So, we've looked at some of the historical roots of Restorative Justice (RJ), and at some of the key values: inclusiveness, informality, looking forwards rather than back, making amends rather than punishment of wrongdoing. But how does it actually work? What are the distinctive features of a restorative process?

As I stressed a couple of weeks ago, RJ means many different things. To confuse the picture even further, some advocates of RJ have associated it with an alarmingly wide range of alternatives to criminal justice, from "tough love" family interventions to a "round up the usual suspects" approach to policing - and that's just John Braithwaite (references on request). But a few key features can be identified. (NB: not every RJ initiative has all these features; some have only one or two.)

Restoration, not punishment
(This looks as if it gives you the answer to one of the essay questions, but bear with me!)
One of the key features of RJ in most of its forms is that it aims to 'restore' - to put things back to how they were before the crime. It 'restores' the victims of crime, enabling them to get on with their lives without being traumatised by the crime, haunted by their memories or obsessed by thoughts of vengeance. It 'restores' the offender, bringing him or her back into the social consensus about the crime that's been committed (i.e. encouraging a sense of shame and disapproval). And it 'restores' the community, reintegrating the offender and undoing any polarisation that has been created by the crime. As such it's forward-looking - as distinct from the backward-looking approach of the criminal justice system - and it's focused on making things better in future rather than on making the offender suffer.

Whether this actually means that RJ is not about punishment is another question. You could argue that 'punishment' refers to all the ways in which offenders are made to understand how bad their crime was and feel sorry for it; in this case RJ would not be an alternative to punishment at all, but an effective form of punishment.

Bringing victim and offender together
Victim-offender mediation is based on the idea that these two people, who have the greatest stake in the crime, are also best placed to resolve it. Victims can also play a key role in group-based forms of RJ. Reintegrative shaming, which is one of the key mechanisms for 'restoration', is based on an interaction in which the offender accepts responsibility for the offence and apologises, and the victim in turn accepts the apology; instead of being set aside and branded - stigmatised - as a 'criminal', the offender can then be accepted as a fellow-citizen, based on a shared denunciation of the crime.

Community problem-solving
One of the key values of RJ is deprofessionalisation, taking crimes and other 'conflicts' away from the specialists of the criminal justice system and enabling the community to resolve them, if necessary by a free-ranging discussion of what has gone on. (There's a certain amount of tension between this ideal and the use of RJ as a form of cautioning, and police-led RJ in general.) This is perhaps one of the areas where the gap between the ideal and the reality of RJ is largest: the idea of 'community' works much better in some contexts than others, and contemporary urban societies in the developed world are not the best context. It can be argued that we are all members of multiple cross-cutting communities rather than a single geographically-based one - family, friends, work, study, leisure, online - but this doesn't necessarily help. The 'community' which is supposed to be mobilised for RJ is a community which includes both the offender and the victim, which isn't necessarily going to work for these plural, non-geographical communities.

Community self-regulation
Another ideal associated with RJ, and perhaps one which has come closer to becoming a reality, is that of community self-regulation. The idea here is that local communities can be empowered to manage problematic elements within them, in the same way that businesses manage low-level white-collar crime. In this model, RJ is not a way to initiate a free-ranging discussion of the rights and wrongs of a particular crime (as in the previous model), so much as a way to bring moral pressure to bear on people who are causing disruption. This model fits very well into some current ways of thinking about neighbourhood disorder and anti-social behaviour; it's often associated with a 'pyramid' model, involving a threat of escalation to more coercive measures if the 'restorative' stage does not have the desired result.

So that (finally) is the theory. In the next lecture, we look at RJ in practice.

Week 7: Victim Support

We've devoted quite a lot of attention to things that victims need (but aren't getting) and problems with the criminal justice system. This week, for a change, we looked at one of the positive features of the system and described how it actually does give victims something they need.

Victim Support is a charity, albeit one with a constant source of funding from the Home Office; it's probably best considered as a semi-detached part of the criminal justice system. It has a public face which campaigns for a better deal for victims, but it's not primarily a campaigning organisation: the bulk of what it does is simply to provide support to victims. Initially a purely voluntary organisation, Victim Support now has a substantial layer of permanent staff, but the people at the sharp end are still mainly volunteers: the organisation has something like a 1:4 staff:volunteer ratio. This means that Victim Support can offer a level of personal commitment and dedication which you don't always get from a government department: as a rule, people who work for Victim Support are doing it because they really want to. At the same time, Victim Support has 'core' Home Office funding, i.e. funding which isn't going to be turned off overnight; this supports its administrative superstructure and makes it possible to train and manage all those volunteers. The Victim Support budget has become more discretionary since the establishment of Police and Crime Commissioners; the budget for Victim Support in each PCC region is controlled by the PCC, and can be directed to whatever area of work the PCC thinks appropriate. Although in theory the PCC could turn off the tap, what this has meant in practice is that more funding can be given to areas of work which are particularly prominent in one area - e.g. support for victims of domestic violence or anti-social behaviour.

Victim Support does some campaigning on behalf of victims, but it campaigns in a very specific way. Unlike some groups which claim to speak on behalf of victims, Victim Support never claims that 'victims' in general want more of a particular kind of sentence (either harsher or more lenient). Victim Support's view, based on years of working with victims, is that 'victims' as a group don't have any particular view on how criminal cases should be resolved: some victims are very vindictive, some are forgiving, some don't care either way and just want to put the crime behind them.

Rights for victims within the criminal justice process are Victim Support's key campaigning priority: instead of outcome-oriented reforms, Victim Support focuses on the process. Victims may not have any views in common, but what they do have in common is the experience of being a victim and being involved in the criminal justice system. Over the years, most of Victim Support's core demands have been met to a greater or lesser degree; the only one which has clearly not been met is the universal right to compensation. The key process-based rights of respect, protection and information (giving and receiving) are now very largely respected, along with the negative right of not having responsibility for the outcome of cases.

So, where next for victims - what needs to victims have which are still not being met?