ESTORATIVE USTICE

- is a response to crime that focuses on restoring the losses suffered by victims, holding offenders accountable for the harm they have caused, and building peace within communities.

1. How is Restorative Justice different from what we do now? It views criminal acts more comprehensively, rather than defining crime only as lawbreaking. It recognizes that offenders harm victims, communities and even themselves.

1. How is Restorative Justice

It involves more parties, rather than giving key roles only to government and offender. It includes victims and communities as well.

It measures success differently, rather than measuring how much punishment has been inflicted. It measures how much harm has been repaired or prevented.

1. How is Restorative Justice

It recognizes the importance of community involvement and initiative in responding to and reducing crime, rather than leaving the problem of crime to the government alone.

2. How does Restorative Justice respond to crime?

It emphasizes victim recovery through redress, vindication, and healing. It emphasizes recompense by the offender through reparation, fair treatment, and rehabilitation.

2. How does Restorative Justice

It establishes processes through which parties are able to discover the truth about what happened and the harms that resulted, to identify the injustices involved and to agree on future actions to address those harms.
It establishes evaluation processes through which the community and government may consider whether new strategies to prevent crime are needed.

3. How does Restorative Justice seek to prevent crime? It builds on the strengths of community and government. The community can build peace through strong, inclusive and righteous relationships; the government can bring order through fair, effective and parsimonious use of force.

3. How does Restorative Justice

It emphasizes the need to repair past harms in order to prepare for the future. It seeks to reconcile offenders with those they have harmed. It helps communities learn to reintegrate victims and offenders.

3. How does Restorative Justice

It is a different way of thinking about crime and our response to it.

It focuses on the harm caused by crime: repairing the harm done to the victims and reducing future harm by preventing crime.

3. How does Restorative Justice

It requires offenders to take responsibility for their actions and for the harm they have caused. It seeks redress for victims; recompense by offenders, and reintegration of both within the community.

It is achieved through a cooperative effort by communities and the government.

THREE PRINCIPLES FORM THE FOUNDATION FOR RJ

Justice requires that we work to restore those who have been injured.
Those most directly involved and affected by crime should have the opportunity to participate fully in the response if they wish.

THREE PRINCIPLES

Governments role is to preserve a just public order, and the communitys is to build and maintain a just peace.

RESTORATIVE PROGRAMS ARE CHARACTERIZED BY FOUR KEY VALUES:

1. Encounter: Create opportunities

for victims, offenders and community members who want to do so to meet to discuss the crime and its aftermath.

take steps to repair the harm they have caused.

2. Amends: Expect offenders to

RESTORATIVE PROGRAMS

restore victims and offenders to whole, contributing members of society.

3. Reintegration: Seek to

4. Inclusion: Provide

opportunities for parties with a stake in a specific crime to participate in its resolution.

PROGRAMS IDENTIFIED WITH RESTORATIVE JUSTICE INCLUDE: Victim offender mediation

Conferencing
Circles Victim assistance Ex-offender assistance Restitution

Community Service

HALLMARKS OF RESTORATIVE JUSTICE: THE VICTIM, OFFENDER & COMMUNITY MEETINGS

Victim-offender mediation.
This is a process that provides an interested victim the opportunity to meet his offender in a safe and structured setting, engaging in a discussion of the crime with the assistance of a trained mediator.

HALLMARKS
Victim-offender mediation

The goals of victim-offender mediation include: permitting victims to meet their offenders on a voluntary basis, encouraging the offender to learn about the crimes impact and to take responsibility for the resulting harm, and providing victim and offender the opportunity to develop a plan that addresses the harm.

HALLMARKS

Family or Community Group Conferencing. This process brings together the victim, offender, and family, friends and key supporters of both in deciding how to address the aftermath of the crime.

HALLMARKS
Family

The goals of conferencing include: giving the victim an opportunity to be directly involved in responding to the crime, increasing the offenders awareness of the impact of his or her behavior and providing an opportunity to take responsibility for it, engaging the offenders support system for making amends and shaping the offenders future behavior, and allowing the offender and the victim to connect to key community support.

HALLMARKS

Peacemaking or Sentencing Circles.

This is a process designed to develop consensus among community members, victims, victim supporters, offenders, offender supporters, judges, prosecutors, defense counsel, police and court workers on an appropriate sentencing plan that addresses the concerns of all interested parties.

REPAIRING THE HARM CAUSED BY CRIME

Each hallmark of the Restorative Justice processes victim-offender mediation, community or family group conferencing, and peacemaking or sentencing circles ends with an agreement on how the offender will make amends for the harm caused by the crime.

REPAIRING

Two traditional criminal justice sanctions are used in restorative responses to crime: restitution and community service.
o Restitution is the payment by an offender of a sum of money to compensate the victim for the financial losses cause by the crime. It is justified in a restorative perspective as a method of holding offenders accountable for their wrongdoing, and as a method of repairing the victims injury.

REPAIRING

o Community service is work performed by an offender for the benefit of the community. It is justified in a restorative perspective as a method of addressing the harm experienced by communities when a crime occurs. However, it can be used instead for retributive reasons or as a means of rehabilitating the offender.

RETRIBUTIVE/RESTORATIVE JUSTICE COMPARED

RETRIBUTIVE JUSTICE is
a dominant approach to criminal justice, focused on determining what law was broken, who broke it, how they should be punished.

RETRIBUTIVE/RESTORATIVE JUSTICE COMPARED...

a value-based approach to criminal justice, with a balanced focus on offender, victim and community. The foundation of restorative justice is to determine the harm resulting from crime. What needs to be done to repair the harm, who is responsible for repairing the harm.

RESTORATIVE JUSTICE is

RETRIBUTIVE/RESTORATIVE JUSTICE COMPARED...

OFFENDER AND VICTIM

RETRIBUTIVE
Dependence upon the proxy professionals

RESTORATIVE
Direct involvement by the participants

Victims are peripheral to the Victims are central to the process process of resolving a crime Focus on establishing Focus on problem solving, blame, on guilt, on past. (Did on liabilities/obligations, he/she do it?) future (What should be done? Response focused on offenders past behavior Response focused on harmful consequences of offenders behavior; emphasis on the future

RETRIBUTIVE/RESTORATIVE JUSTICE COMPARED...

RELATIONSHIP RETRIBUTIVE Emphasis on adversarial relationship RESTORATIVE Emphasis on dialogue and negotiation

RETRIBUTIVE/RESTORATIVE JUSTICE COMPARED...

ACCOUNTABILITY
RETRIBUTIVE Crime is an individual act with individual responsibility Offender accountability defined as taking punishment Punishment is effective. Threat of punishment deters crime. Punishment changes behavior. RESTORATIVE Crime has both individual and social dimensions of responsibility Accountability defined as assuming responsibility and taking action to repair harm Punishment alone is not effective in changing behavior and is disruptive to community harmony and good relationships

RETRIBUTIVE/RESTORATIVE JUSTICE COMPARED...

RELATIONSHIP
RETRIBUTIVE Crime is an act against the State, a violation of law, an abstract idea Control of crime lies in the criminal justice system Community on the sideline, represented abstractly by the State RESTORATIVE Crime is an act against another person and the community Control lies primarily in the community Community as facilitator in the restorative process