By James Dignan. Maidenhead:  Open University Press.  2005.  238 pp. ISBN 0 335 209793 pbk; 0 335 209807 hbk.

The government claims to be ‘rebalancing’ the criminal justice system in favour of victims.  Restorative justice has been accused, not always wrongly, of being too offender-oriented, so a book focusing on the victim’s point of view is welcome.  It will make an excellent textbook, with subject and author indexes, suggestions for further reading, a glossary, and hundreds of meticulous footnotes;  one wonders whether some of them could not have been eased into the text.

Dignan starts with victimology:  how crime impacts mainly on the poor,  for example, and how victims of corporate offenders are often neglected.  He might have added that victims of fraud are sometimes caught by their hope of getting something for nothing.  Policymaking, as Dignan describes, is largely based on a welfare approach.  This first surfaced in the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme, a major reform, but based on the stereotype of the ‘ideal’, blameless victim and therefore excluding those with previous convictions or an undesirable way of life.  It excludes victims of offences against the Factory Acts.  He could have mentioned also the unfair way in which a person receiving means-tested benefits can lose them on receiving a large compensation award.  There is an account of the development of organizations for victims, including Victim Support, Women’s Aid and Rape Crisis (but omitting the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children).  Dignan rightly says that a fully restorative approach should include victims whose offenders are not caught, which restorative justice advocates often forget. 

Efforts have been made to assist victims as they encounter the criminal justice system, and there have been improvements, but inviting them to make ‘personal statements’ that do not affect the sentence has caused confusion.  It does not provide dialogue between victim and offender, which should be on offer in any comprehensive plan for victims.  Dignan usefully summarizes varieties of restorative justice, which will be useful to newcomers to the subject;  he traces the development of victim-offender mediation and different forms of conferencing, though he says little about the untidy (to put it mildly) way in which they were introduced in England.  He rightly comments that some, such as citizens’ panels in Vermont and referral order panels in England, do not  adequately involve victims.  A further dimension is the involvement of the community, and he usefully analyses the tensions between empowerment of the victim and of the community (with a discussion of the meaning of that all-too-flexible word);  but there is only a footnote reference to the creative programme in Zwelethemba, South Africa, which combines involvement of victims and community and an element of tackling the social criminogenic factors that the restorative process brings to light.

Even those who are familiar with the development of restorative justice will find useful the discussion, in the final chapter, of philosophical differences in the way restorative justice relates to the criminal justice system.  Community involvement entails some form of oversight, probably judicial, as a safeguard against unreasonable outcomes.  It also implies the use of stand-alone NGO mediation services.  Dignan rightly observes that these often struggle to attract enough cases, and funds, to make them viable.  He infers that therefore this model is not viable, and mediation should therefore be mainstreamed into the criminal justice system.  This is questionable, however;  it is equally arguable that they could provide a good, comprehensive service if the government enables it to do so, as it has done with Victim Support, and that this moreover would strengthen its compliance with restorative ideals, rather than their distortion into a retributive mould.  Otherwise there is a danger that people will say of restorative justice, as G K Chesterton said of Christianity, that it has not been tried and found wanting, but found difficult and not tried. 



Martin Wright
Board Member, European Forum for Restorative Justice
September 2006.