Summary
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Restorative justice, as an informal process, has to address concerns about being held in private, without lawyers, and with little or no monitoring of the quality of the facilitation. This is the first book to address the issues comprehensively. There are useful discussions of issues such as the pros and cons of using volunteers as facilitators of restorative conferences; Roche argues against using criminal justice professionals, especially police officers, in this role. He examines the tension between the right of the offender (and the victim, he might have added) to legal advice, and lawyers’ tendency to be adversarial. On proportionality, he argues for maximum autonomy of participants; a contrite offender should even be entitled to offer more reparation than a judge would have ordered, and a victim to accept less, provided that the process was conducted fairly. Restorative justice in schools is also described.
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