Juvenile Justice Reform and Restorative Justice

During the 1990s restorative justice emerged as an international movement for criminal justice reform, and a number of countries adopted policies encouraging or requiring the use of restorative justice practices as an alternative or in addition to adversarial court proceedings. In the United States, by 1998 over 20 states have changed their juvenile justice codes to incorporate the language of restorative justice, and a dozen states were experimenting actively with restorative justice decision-making or conferencing. By 2001 almost every state in the United States had begin to experiment with such practices.This book, based on a large-scale research project funded by the National Institute of Justice and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, provides an overview of the restorative justice conferencing programs currently in operation in the United States, paying particular attention to the qualitative dimensions of this, based on interviews, focus groups and ethnographic observation. It provides an unrivalled view of restorative justice conferencing in practice, and what the people involved felt and thought about it.The book looks at four structural variations in the face-to-face form of restorative decision-making: family group conferences, victim-offender mediation/dialogue, neighborhood accountability boards, and peacemaking circles. An overriding concern of the book is to build and improve theory, guide future research, and to inform policy and practice in restorative justice decision-making. In doing so it addresses two issues that have received limited research emphasis in restorative justice: the lack of clear and consistent standards that can be used to gauge both the strength and consistency of restorative intervention, and the absence of testable theories of intervention that reflect what has become a rather diverse practice. In response to this the authors conclude the book with a proposed structure for principle-based evaluation designed to test emerging theories of restorative decision-making.