An early research report on restorative justice used the title Crime and accountability (Marshall and Merry 1990), referring to holding offenders accountable.  Declan Roche uses the same word to focus on the need for the system to be accountable. He has conducted remarkably wide-ranging research, on 25 programmes of five types in four continents (though, as he recognizes, not continental Europe), with useful summary descriptions. 

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.

Some ideas may need further exploration.  Roche suggests that in ‘deliberative justice’ the first line of accountability should, like the process, be informal, especially in models of restorative justice that use conferencing or sentencing circles; the participants themselves, and perhaps observers, keep an eye on the process, and query it if necessary.  This requires of course that they be told what it ought to be like; and if, for example, the problem is a dominating facilitator, it is perhaps optimistic to rely on participants standing up to him or her.  He also proposes that courts, suitably informed about restorative principles, should oversee the process; but could confidentiality be compromised?

Perhaps the most groundbreaking programme is Zwelethemba, in South Africa.  It embodies ‘the maximum voluntarism consistent with the unacceptability of the state doing nothing at all when confronted with a serious criminal offence’ (p. 85).  It is firmly rooted in the community; people often approach it rather than the police.  Even more radically, it offers a response to the criticism that restorative justice places all the responsibility on the offender, ignoring social pressures towards crime.  Its parallel ‘peace-building process’ ‘aims to address the structural problems underlying conflicts’ (p. 264).  Part of the grant received for each case is allocated to community improvements, and by linking crime with, for example, ‘extreme poverty and the chronic lack of employment opportunities and basic amenities’ (ibid.), it can begin to push these- rather than draconian repressive measures- higher up the political agenda, and promote recognition that ‘praise can be as powerful a motivator as punishment’ (p. 231).  This book should be read both by those who are, and who are not, advocates of restorative justice; it could open an important debate about the whole question of coercive, rather than persuasive, social control.

This review originally appeared in the December 2003 newsletter of the British Society of Criminology.

August 2004