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Book Review: Juvenile Justice Reform and Restorative Justice: Building Theory and Policy From Practice
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How much restorative justice is being done, how well is it done, and where is it leading? Like anything worth doing it can be done well or badly, and Bazemore and Schiff start by taking stock of the current situation in America. Martin Wright reviews their recent book.
Reviewed by Martin Wright
How much restorative justice is being done, how well is it done, and where is it leading? Like anything worth doing it can be done well or badly, and Bazemore and Schiff start by taking stock of the current situation in America. Their nationwide survey found 773 programmes; nearly every state had at least one, but few had widespread coverage. Only 24.5 per cent of these responded to a detailed questionnaire, and the authors make no assessment of how typical these are; nonetheless they proceed to analyse them in detail. Nearly three quarters had budgets of less than $75,000; about 50 per cent used victim/offender mediation and dialogue; nearly 30 per cent used neighbourhood accountability boards, which are stronger on community input but generally less strong on victim involvement; and 12 per cent used conferencing. The focus on juveniles excludes victims of adult offenders. The authors do not make a judgement between models of restorative interventions, but conferencing fits best with their communitarian approach.
Various more or less restorative practices are described; and then a small group of well established programmes are examined in more detail. There are some encouraging examples, particularly from Minnesota and Arizona, often resulting from the inspiration of one person. A secondary school in Stafford, AZ, for example, which had been calling the police 300 times a year, reduced this figure to 2 when conferencing was introduced; short-term expulsions were reduced from 500 to 75, and long-term or permanent ones from 40 to 5.
How do the authors define the Big Idea behind all this? One version is ‘earned redemption and respectful disapproval’, which is concise but offender focused; victim and community involvement is only implied. Further, it is difficult to see it as a sound bite which a politician would want to use. The authors focus on the threefold vision of Van Ness and Strong: repairing harm, involvement of ‘stakeholders’, and transformation of the community/ government relationship. The latter is an exciting extension of the restorative idea that after someone has harmed someone else, a conference can do more than resolve it. It can also bring together members of the community to consider preventive action for the future. The more a society tries to control crime, especially low-level local crime, by increased police presence and formal controls, the more it loses the skills of informal social control. Conferencing is a way of reversing this trend. It recognises the accountability not only of the individual but also of the community. The authors say (p. 294) that volunteers and staff of restorative projects may as a result become involved in social justice issues; it would be interesting to know more about how far they are prepared to go towards a radical re-structuring of our criminogenic capitalist society.
The book is full of useful insights. One is that all that a young person learns from punishment is that he can take punishment. Another, that part of the restorative process should be listing the offender’s strengths; this is valuable for its own sake and sometimes to help choose suitable work by way of reparation. The task, they emphasize, is to solve a community problem not merely uphold the criminal law.
Bazemore and Schiff say that there should be a clear theory behind restorative justice work, and they provide one; putting it into practice, however, will take some time. They offer examples of conferences which were not very restorative, and it may be difficult to persuade the professionals to let go until they (and whoever sets their performance targets) realize that they have a new role: to ensure the restorativeness of the process. It would be helpful if the authors suggested how to persuade politicians and the media, too, that restorative justice would be popular with their voters and readers if it were well explained.
Martin Wright
June 2005
Last modified 2005-06-24 20:49
