Evaluation of restorative justice

Source: (2007) in, Gerry Johnstone and Daniel W. Van Ness, eds., Handbook of Restorative Justice. Cullompton, Devon: Willan Publishing. pp. 397-425

“The purpose of this chapter is to propose principle-based standards for determining the strength and integrity of practice that purports to be restorative. While our hope is to develop standards that have broad application to a wide range of restorative practices, policies and even movements, we focus primarily on restorative group conferencing programmes — i.e. non-adversarial decision-making processes that generally fit one of four generic types (Brazemore and Umbreit 2001; Bazemore and Schiff 2004): victim-offender dialogue/mediation, family group conferencing, neighbourhood boards and peace-making circles. We use examples based on qualitative observation as part of a national case study of restorative group conferencing in the USA (Schiff and Bazemore 2002) to illustrate relative adherence to core restorative principles in practitioner decisions about how to structure and facilitate these encounters.” (excerpt)