Restorative justice, policing and the Big Society

from the speech by The Rt Hon Nick Herbert MP, Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice in England:

There has been much talk about restorative justice. We’ve seen encouraging pilots and there’s talk about it not only in this country, but around the world. So why is it that something that offers such encouraging results should not have taken a greater hold in our system?

Well, I think it is because we’ve seen evolving over the last few years a criminal justice system that has been very much directed from the centre.

We’ve been through the recent era of targets and what has eloquently been described as ‘deliverology’. The idea of managing from the centre, of close direction in order to try and drive up the performance of public services. This was done for benign reasons, but we all know what the consequences were.

Mar 02, 2011 Country:England&Wales, Theory, Support, Potential, Region: Europe, Policy, Politics

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