Communities, Conferences and Restorative Social Justice

Source: (2003) Criminal Justice. 3(2): 139-160.

This article discusses how community-building in Australia can be integrated into the practices of juvenile justice work, with attention to the need for conceptualizing juvenile delinquency prevention and juvenile sanctioning as a community task. As used in this article, “community” refers to a wide diversity of people with varying perceptions, interests, and safety concerns. As the first part of this article shows, the extent of community cohesion and societal resources at the neighborhood level has a major influence on the propensity of youth to develop criminal and antisocial behavior. This suggests that an effective policy for responding to juvenile crime is to enhance community prospects in addition to addressing specific factors related to individual behaviors. The second part of the article describes recent trends in “restorative justice,” which is a model for responding to juvenile offending that emphasizes the repairing of social harm caused by crime by involving the offender, victims, and relevant community members in the sanctioning process. Abstract courtesy of National Criminal Justice Reference Service, www.ncjrs.org.