New Practitioner’s Toolkit for Restorative Justice
In late 2007, the Restorative Justice Initiative of Southern Africa released its Practice Standards for Restorative Justice. Focused on ensuring quality of service in restorative programmes in both government agencies and non-governmental organizations, the standards create a means for organizations to evaluate the quality and restorativeness of their programmes.
The Practice Standards for Restorative Justice: A Practitioners Toolkit was commissioned by the Restorative Justice Initiative with funding from the Danish embassy.
The authors, Cheryl Frank and Ann Skelton, used a three-phased process in developing the toolkit. Phase one included a literature review of local and international publications to identify generally accepted values and principles and to develop a preliminary statement of practice standards. Phase two consisted of consultations with various local and international stakeholders to comment on the standards. Phase three included a workshop for local stakeholders to review and approve the final standards.
The authors were guided by two fundamental concerns:
- Ensure that human rights standards are upheld within restorative justice processes
- Ensure that programmes and processes reflect restorative values and principles
They were careful not to create a system for ‘standardised’ processes but rather ‘minimum standards’ for measuring a process's adherence to the fundamental concerns. The standards provide a measurable, practical expression of core restorative values.
Recognizing that a variety of programmes and processes use the 'restorative justice' name, Frank and Skelton used Howard Zehr's definition to identify restorative interventions:
"Restorative justice is a process to involve, to the extent possible, those who have a stake in a specific offence and to collectively identify and address harms, needs, and obligations, in order to heal and put things as right as possible."
They drew heavily from previously-published statements of values and principles, especially those of the Restorative Justice Consortium in the UK. They did not restrict the use of restorative justice practices to any particular stage of the criminal justice.
The final toolkit contains 33 practice standards and a variety of tools for measuring their application. The report is divided into four parts:
- Part 1 explains the individual practice standards, provides measures for evaluating implementation, and offers a brief discussion of different practice issues.
- Part 2 presents an overview of how the research project to create the toolkit was developed and implemented.
- Part 3 restates the standards and includes a "measurable outcomes list" to aid practitioners in the development of a process.
- Part 4 offers evaluation measures intended to be used by organizations on a routine basis to assess how well their programmes adhere to the standards.
These parts are designed for a variety of uses. For example, the first three can be used by trainers in teaching practitioners how to operate a programme. Part three can also be used by individual practitioners as they develop a single process or case. Part four provides tools for organizations to undertake periodic evaluations of their practices.
The report, Practice Standards for Restorative Justice: A Practitioners Toolkit, is available online.
May 2008
