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Restorative Justice Centre's submission to Ministry of Justice on victims' rights
The Restorative Justice Centre at AUT University in New Zealand has responded to a discussion draft titled "A Focus on Victims of Crime: A Review of Victims' Rights" on how the government might better address the needs of crime victims. Following are excerpts from RJC's response:
9. The central justice needs of victims are submitted to be accountability, vindication, empowerment, information, truth-telling and future safety. Only the first and last of these are addressed (to some degree) by the current legal process, and then only when the offender is convicted. Thus in crimes that go largely unreported, such as sexual offences, there can be no feeling of accountability in the absence of alternative processes, and victims remain unsafe.
10. The remaining four central justice needs are those which Dr Howard Zehr, known to and used by MoJ as a consultant in restorative justice, has said are “especially neglected”. They are next mentioned separately. However they overlap with needs identified by other writers.
Mar 30, 2010 Region: Pacific, Support, Mediation, System, Country:New Zealand, Other, Victim, Court, Restitution
Why is criminal justice only partially privatized?
from Ron Wright's entry in Criminal Law Jotwell:
Ric Simmons has written an article that makes sense of two long-term trends in the privatizing of criminal justice. He links a growing body of legal scholarship about private policing to an enormous academic literature on restorative justice, and reframes them both as part of a long-term trend toward co-existing public and private systems for delivery of criminal justice.
Simmons begins this enterprise by describing the enormous growth of private law enforcement in the United States over the last few decades....
The second major component of this article is a review of the far-flung literature on “restorative justice,” a method of responding to crimes that emphasizes the experience of the crime victim, both during the adjudication of the charge and in the selection and execution of the punishment. After summarizing the diverse literature on this topic (drawn from criminology, psychology, and other disciplines) Simmons moves to the heart of his project: he draws out the connections between these two phenomena.
