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Restorative Justice

During the past several decades, restorative justice has emerged as an important new approach to criminal justice theory and practice. It is based on the goal of repairing the harm of crime rather than the traditional criminal justice goals of assigning blame and imposing punishment for criminal transgressions. Advocates of restorative justice maintain that it is more than a program for reform; it is a new way of envisioning criminal justice that involves the victim, the offender, and the affected community in a search for solutions.

Restorative justice practice generally consists of informal, voluntary face-to-face encounters among the victim, offender, and relevant community members, in which the parties come to greater understanding and empathy, offenders express remorse, and a plan for repairing the harm of crime is negotiated, resulting in an agreement that emphasizes reparative solutions such as restitution, apologies, and community service rather than punishment.

Basic Principles

The critical difference between restorative justice and traditional justice is its focus on the offense as a source of harm to people and not simply as a violation of the law. Under traditional criminal justice theory, a criminal offense is against the state rather than the individual victim. The state, critics claimed, has “stolen the conflict” from those directly involved and established a system of coercive punishment dedicated to maintaining order rather than resolving conflicts, compensating losses, and reintegrating offenders. While numerous reforms in recent years attempted to redress the historic neglect of victims, the restorative justice approach takes this concern for the victim to a new level of involvement by positioning the victim as a central decision maker in cases in which the defendant admits criminal culpability.

The restorative justice alternative is essentially informal and nonpunitive. The offender becomes accountable for his or her conduct not through passive submission to punishment but by taking active steps to repair the damage she or he caused, including the damage to the victim's self-respect. In so doing, the offender not only redresses the losses to the victim and the community but advances his or her own social rehabilitation as well.

By offering itself as a radical alternative to conventional criminal justice, restorative justice has attracted a multitude of criminal justice critics and reformers in search of fundamental change. As a result, there is no “standard” definition of restorative justice. While some definitions emphasize a unique restorative justice process that requires the involvement of the victim, the offender, and the community in search of restorative solutions, a more expansive definition emphasizes the central objective of restoration: repairing the harm of crime.

Restorative Justice Programs

The essential tools of restorative justice consist of victim-offender mediation (VOM), family group conferencing, community circles, and victim-offender panels. Presently, 1,500 such programs exist worldwide, with more than 300 in the United States alone. Private agencies, probation departments, or court personnel usually administer them. The vast majority of these programs involve juvenile offenders and property offenses, and, since restorative justice is not a system of adjudication, these programs are not applicable to contested cases.

The function of VOM is to enable the offender and the victim to meet with each other under the supervision of a trained mediator (or “facilitator”) to search for a plan for reparation. The format typically involves several stages of encounter. In the first stage, the victim is encouraged to tell his or her story and communicate the full emotional and psychological extent of the psychological and emotional losses suffered, following which the offender tells his own story and, typically, expresses remorse. In the second stage, the participants devise a way to make things right to the extent possible, including the adoption of a plan of restitution, in-kind services, rehabilitation, and monitoring procedures. The mediator helps to reduce the agreement to writing, which is enforced through the court system.

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