Gordon has advised and provided training and technical assistance to more than 30 states and several federal agencies on restorative juvenile justice, restorative reentry, performance measurement, and victim services reform. He has served as a keynote speaker at more than 40 state juvenile and criminal justice conferences in the past decade. Internationally, Gordon has spoken on restorative justice at conferences in Northern Ireland, Germany, Colombia, Australia, Canada, Belgium, and Brazil.

For 20 years, Gordon’s research has focused primarily on juvenile justice and youth policy, restorative justice, crime victims, community corrections, and community policing. He has authored almost 200 publications including 65 peer-reviewed journal articles, 34 book chapters, 25 monographs and technical reports, and has authored three books.

He is currently working on a book tentatively titled “Pillars for a New Juvenile Justice: Restorative Justice, Youth Development, And Community Building” that proposes a pathway for preserving and “rehabilitating” the juvenile court and justice system based on three core components:

• an approach to doing justice for young people that defines justice as a participatory restorative process based primarily on  taking responsibility (accountability) to repair harm to one’s victims and the community
• a broad approach to pro-social rehabilitative intervention and habilitation/prevention building on strengths-based assumptions and youth development theory and practice
• a new community-building model that addresses “ownership” and sustainability of youth justice and defines the role, boundaries, skills, and responsibilities of such a system as these articulate with the role, capacities and responsibilities of civil society, community and “socializing/mediating institutions” (Polk and Kobrin, 1970; Bellah et al., 1991)

For 15 years Gordon directed the Balanced and Restorative Justice project, a training, technical assistance and action research project funded by the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. With the assistance of many colleagues including Dr. Mark Umbreit, the late Dennis Maloney, Kay Pranis, Dr. Dee Bell, and many other restorative justice practitioners, this project provided an introduction to restorative justice to many juvenile justice practitioners around the country.

In addition to hundreds of state and local trainings, BARJ provided an intensive train-the-trainer program producing some 300 restorative justice trainers in almost every U.S. state. Many of these trainers have also become leaders in developing and implementing restorative justice programs and policies.

The BARJ project also spurred systemic reforms in many states and local jurisdictions and assisted in making restorative justice part of the purpose clauses of juvenile justice codes in more than 20 states.

Project staff and consultants have also produced an extensive new literature on restorative juvenile justice including: research and policy publications, technical assistance monographs, training curricula, and practice guides on topics such as restorative group conferencing, restorative community service, competency development as a rehabilitative strategy, restorative justice inventories and evaluation tools and research on crime victim involvement in juvenile justice and judicial attitudes toward restorative justice.

Important Idea

1. Restorative justice needs to be flexible and adaptable if it is to be sustainable. We must replicate core principles, rather than program models. These principles, and theories of transformation that can be linked to them, must guide practice in diverse community and system contexts.

2. Restorative justice has been, and will continue to be, successful (and sustainable) not when it simply provides an effective alternative to meet the needs of individual victims and offenders for dialogue. Though that focus will/must remain paramount and is at the core of restorative justice, it is vulnerable on its own to being seen as somewhat pristine and isolated from larger systemic problems in criminal justice.

The sustainability of restorative justice is therefore most likely to depend on its capacity to resolve core problems related to crime and the response to it.

--Gordon Bazemore

Leading Edge

Currently, Gordon’s research focuses on developing evaluation logic models for research on restorative justice that address strength and integrity of the restorative process grounded in core principles that suggest theory-based intermediate outcomes linked to long-term healing and reintegration . In addition, he is working with colleagues on a local randomized experiment examining the relative impact on reoffending and other outcomes of informal diversion (to one of several programs including restorative justice alternatives) vs. formal probation.

Contact Gordon Bazemore

bazemor@fau.edu

Bibliography

October 2007