Restorative Justice in Prisons

Increasingly, Corrections departments throughout the world are implementing restorative programmes in the prison context. This work raises several issues related to the appropriateness of restorative justice in prison and objectives to be met by such programmes. Daniel W. Van Ness, executive director of the Centre for Justice and Reconciliation at Prison Fellowship International presents this overview of the use of restorative justice in prison. This paper was originally presented at Symposium on Restorative Justice and Peace in Colombia, Cali,Colombia, 9-12 February 2005.

Most restorative programmes take place outside prison. There are several reasons for this. One is that it is far easier for offenders to make amends if they are not in prison.

Another reason is that restorative justice is often community-based, which means that the programmes work with victims and offenders in the community. A third reason has been the hope of policy makers that restorative justice will be a method of reducing court and prison overcrowding. It may actually contribute to that if the people sent to restorative programmes would otherwise have gone to prison.

However, there have also been efforts to explore how restorative justice might fit into the context of a prison, and further, whether it would be possible to conceive of a restorative prison regime – one based fully on restorative principles and values. There are at least four ways these efforts have started.

One is when groups of prisoners have decided that they want to find ways to make amends and to meet with their victims.

A second is when leaders in correctional services in their countries become champions of restorative justice (two good examples can be found in Canada and the US state of Minnesota). “Corrections” is a broader term than prison; it can include community based sanctions such as probation and parole. As restorative ideas have been tried successfully in the community, these leaders have decided to see whether the programmes could be useful inside prison.

A third is when people working on prisoner rehabilitation have discovered that it is necessary to deal with prisoners’ responsibilities to those they have harmed as part of their reintegration process.

A fourth is when victims of serious crime decide that they would like to meet with their offender. This is usually years after the crime took place, and the offender will have gone through the criminal justice system and been sent to prison.

What I would like to do is briefly review attempts that have been made to introduce restorative practices or programmes into the prison setting. These efforts range from relatively modest experiments to those that are extremely ambitious. I will organise these programmes by categories based on their objectives, and will give illustrations of each.

For the full-text of this paper.

Daniel W. Van Ness

July 2005

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