Book Reviews

These books have been reviewed on Restorative Justice Online.

Restorative interventions needed for 97% cases where defendants plead guilt

from the entry by Lorenn Walker on Restorative Justice & Other Public Health Approaches for Healing: Not Guilty: Are the Acquitted Innocent? is an excellent new book by Dan Givelber, Northeastern Law School professor, and Amy Farrell Northeastern Criminal Justice School professor. In this easy to read book, the authors provide valuable information and insights into how judges and juries behave, and how understanding acquittals better (acquittals occur once in every 100 cases) could improve our justice system....

Lynette Parker on What have I done? A victim empathy programme for young people

Dear Rosina, The book is published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers and is available from them for $49.00. The link to learn more is http://www.jkp.com/catalogue/book/9781843109792. Blessings, [...]

Rosina Williams on What have I done? A victim empathy programme for young people

We are in the process to develop a manual for first time offenders and troubled youth. It seems as this book will help us a [...]

Review: Regulating restorative justice: A comparative study of legislative provision in European countries

Reviewed by Martin Wright Many European countries have taken at least some steps towards incorporating restorative justice in their system, and this book assess how far some of them have gone in formalizing their progress in legislation. The countries represented are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and two neighbours, Israel and Turkey. Each chapter, after two introductory ones, follows a template giving a legal description and evaluation of restorative processes, and the political and legal understanding of victim-offender mediation and restorative justice. The list of nearly 40 subdivisions, combined with the analysis in the concluding chapter, are in themselves a useful outline of factors that need to be considered by anyone planning to introduce restorative justice or indeed to improve on measures already introduced. There is something to learn from most countries about how to introduce RJ, or in some cases how not to.

Review: The legacy of community justice

Reviewed by Dan Van Ness There are really two subjects of this collection of articles: One is community justice, which continues to exert influence in the juvenile and criminal justice fields. The second, and perhaps more important one, is Dennis (Denny) Maloney. Denny was an influential, charismatic, larger than life leader in the restorative and community justice movement until his untimely death in 2007.

Jillian Post on Review: Art in Action: Expressive Arts Therapy and Social Change

Just finishing an M.S. in Conflict Resolution, after checking into several Art Therapy programs. Makes me feel wishy washy about my decision... or like I [...]

Review: Art in Action: Expressive Arts Therapy and Social Change

By Marian Liebmann It’s refreshing to see a book which contains many surprising and good techniques using our ‘right brains’ and the whole of ourselves. We spend too much time on ‘left-brain’ activities, planning, writing notes and reports, working out logistics, spending hours in front of our computer screens. This book is about another way of experiencing the world, and of helping many others in the process. This collection of essays seems to be an outcome of collaboration between staff of Lesley University (in Cambridge, USA and Israel) and the European Graduate School in Switzerland, the only master’s degree course in Expressive Arts in Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding. In fact many of the authors are involved in both institutions.

Review: Why Punishment? How Much?

Why Punishment? How Much? Editor Michael Tonry, Oxford University Press, New York, 2011 publication , www.oup.com, Hardcover 443 pages reviewed by Eric Assur Those interested in restorative justice (RJ) will often only explore the world of the contemporary justice scene through literature which largely reflects on the application of RJ in all of its flavors over the past two or three decades. This punishment collection with a catchy title, edited by a Univ. of Minnesota law professor, looks at the bigger picture with RJ providing one slice of the larger discussion.

Review: Emotions, Crime and Justice

from the review by Susan A. Bandes on Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books: Emotions, Crime and Justice is a major step toward a more theoretically and practically nuanced conversation. As this book reveals in a series of original essays of great range, depth and sophistication, criminology has much to gain by investigating the emotions underlying crime and punishment. The collection spans a range of theoretical, ethnographic and experimental approaches, a range of criminal justice institutions and roles, and a range of cultures (indeed, for many U.S. readers, one of the pleasures of this volume will be the opportunity to become immersed in the criminology literature of the U.K., Australia and New Zealand; all but four of the twenty-two contributors are from non U.S. common law countries). Perhaps its greatest strength lies in the range of emotional experience it reveals and explores, including the emotions that accompany violence and that animate attitudes toward crime, the emotional experience of obeying or resisting the law, the implicit rules governing the display or feeling of emotions by employees of police departments or prisons, the emotional roots of collective violence and collective reconciliation, and the moral sentiments and public emotions animating democratic discourse on crime and punishment.

Review: The Collapse of American Criminal Justice

reviewed by Michael Corbin on Crime and Punishment: “The rule of law has vanished in America’s criminal justice system.” That is how Harvard University Press begins its description of last year’s The Collapse of American Criminal Justice--Harvard professor William Stuntz’s magisterial, synoptic look at our country’s system of punishment.

Thanks!

The Forgiving Life sounds GREAT. I've been looking for another book on forgiveness to read - I just finished "Forgiving The Unforgivable" by Master Charles [...]

Book Review: The Machinery of Criminal Justice

from the review by Andrew Taslitz on Jotwell: ....Bibas’s new book, The Machinery of Criminal Justice, is so humane and thoughtful an analysis of the reforms needed in our criminal justice system that I find myself drawn to giving him still more good press....Bibas’s argument turns on three central ideas: (1) the system pretends to a mechanistic efficiency deaf to the emotions and meaningful expressions that undergird any sound system of criminal justice; (2) lawyers and other experts have hijacked the system to serve their own needs, displacing defendants, victims, and even judges; and (3) the political forces at work are skewed toward undue penal harshness and elite control rather than adequately balanced by informed lay participation.

Review: The forgiving life: A pathway to overcoming resentment and creating a legacy of love

by Jacqueline Song, University of the Philippines-Dilman Justice can be restored in many ways, as the readers of this site are well aware. Sometimes, victims and offenders choose to bring mercy alongside justice as a way to heal from the ravages of injustice. Forgiving and seeking forgiveness together constitute one of these merciful strategies. To forgive is to struggle to rid oneself of resentment and to respond to an offender with goodness. To seek forgiveness includes internal sorrow, a conviction not to repeat the offense, and recompense where appropriate. When one forgives, he or she never condones the wrong and never tosses justice aside. Forgiveness and justice work side by side for good.

Review: Restorative justice in practice: Evaluating what works for victims and offenders.

by Eric Assur Three British criminology researchers and educators, affiliated with the University of Sheffield, have offered a very rich book on the use of victim-offender mediation programs (what they call schemes) in adult criminal justice venues in England. Most early Restorative Justice (RJ) writing has focused on juvenile justice programs, generally with a concentration on diversionary approaches for first time offenders. The Shapland, Robinson and Sorsby book looks exclusively and intensely at three ‘schemes’ and several hundred ‘cases’ involving adults. The criminal justice programs they studied were funded by the British Ministry of Justice – Home Office between 2001 and 2008. They worked with adults at arrest, while going through the courts and even with some while imprisoned. In a nutshell, this is a thought provoking book that has few significant weak points. This is not a primer on Restorative Justice. It assumes that readers are at least moderately informed about RJ. It belongs in the hands of North American justice administrators. While not designed as a textbook (no end of chapter discussion questions), it concludes with end notes and references that make it a useful reference for anyone seeking to look further into transformative justice and RJ, especially as found in the United Kingdom and Australia.

Review: A community-based approach to the reduction of sexual re-offending: circles of support and accountability

by Martin Wright Often sex offenders are isolated people who have difficulty making relationships, and when they come out of prison the double stigma of prison and the nature of their offence isolates them still more – an extra hardship for them, and an increased risk that they will revert to their previous behaviour. So the idea of forming a circle of support for them is both humane and a safeguard. It does not fall under the usual definition of restorative justice, because it does not include dialogue with the victim, which would in many cases be unwanted and/or inappropriate. It does however restore or even improve the situation of the offender, and it involves members of the community.

Review: Child victims and restorative justice: A needs-rights model

from the article by Bill Lyons in Law & Politics Review: ....Combining the right to participate from the Convention on the Rights of the Child with an empirical analysis of a child's need to regain control, participation emerges as a critically important need and right for at least three reasons. First, for immediate instrumental reasons, participation is both an immediate coping mechanism and is expected to improve criminal justice outcomes. Second, for longer term developmental reasons, meaningful participation in experiential learning opportunities is a developmental step toward empowering young adults to master the problem solving skills necessary to make democracy both possible and desirable.

Summer reading

from Howard Zehr's entry in Restorative Justice Blog: Our friends at Community Justice Initiatives British Columbia have just posted a free on-line publication, Walking the Talk: Developing Ethics Frameworks for the Practice of Restorative Justice, by Susan Sharpe. This resource is intended to help organizations sort out the values that they wish to live by. Given the difficulties of living by the principles we espouse in our organizations, this will be an important publication for those of involved in restorative justice programs. Susan L. Miller’s After the Crime: The power of restorative justice – dialogues between victims and offenders (New York University Press, 2011) is a careful and readable examination of severe violence dialogue approaches.

Badlands or fairyland? How to misuse statistics and confuse the public

from Rethining Crime and Punishment's new newsletter Truth in Justice: If Truth in Justice were to have an annual award in 12 months time for the most inaccurate, misleading and appalling publication on crime and punishment, it is unlikely that anything would surpass Badlands: NZ - A Land Fit for Criminals by David Fraser and published by Ian Wishart. While we were reluctant to give it any more publicity, the book is a self-contained case study of what can happen when someone with a set ideological agenda sets out to prove their position through false logic and the misuse of statistics. It almost qualifies as a serious hazard to public safety. We asked three people to review the book. Each has approached it from a different perspective.

After the crime: the power of restorative justice. Dialogues between victims and violent offenders

by Martin Wright Violence, rape, murder and other abusive crimes: not usually pleasant subjects to read about, yet Susan Miller's book left this reader with a positive feeling. This is largely due to Miller herself, who presents the information in a straightforward, sympathetic but non-judgemental way; to Kim Book, who started the organization Victims' Voices Heard after her daughter was murdered; and to the participants themselves. Not all victims felt able to forgive, and this should not be a criterion for 'success'; but they followed the Amish precept: don't balance hurt with hate. Not all offenders accepted full responsibility. Miller divides restorative justice into diversion, taking the place of the criminal justice process for relatively minor cases, and 'therapeutic' RJ, where the offender is already in custody or has served a prison term. These cases are all in the latter category.

Restorative practices

A useful and relevant resource