Introduction

Restorative justice is a framework for juvenile justice reform that seeks to engage victims, offenders and their families, other citizens, and community groups both as clients of juvenile justice services and as resources in an effective response to youth crime. Traditionally, when a crime is committed, juvenile justice systems have been primarily concerned with three questions: Who did it? What laws were broken? What should be done to punish or treat the offender? As noted by Howard Zehr (1990), restorative justice emphasizes three very different questions: What is the nature of the harm resulting from the crime? What needs to be done to “make it right” or repair the harm? Who is responsible for this repair? Restorative justice also suggests that the response to youth crime must strike a balance among the needs of victims, offenders, and communities and that each should be actively involved in the justice process to the greatest extent possible.

The term “restorative conferencing” is used in this Bulletin to encompass a range of strategies for bringing together victims, offenders, and community members in nonadversarial community-based processes aimed at responding to crime by holding offenders accountable and repairing the harm caused to victims and communities. Such strategies, now being implemented in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Europe, are one component of a new movement in the 1990’s concerned with making criminal and juvenile justice processes less formal, bringing the processes into neighborhoods, and involving community members in planning and implementation (Barajas, 1995; Bazemore and Schiff, 1996; Griffiths and Hamilton, 1996; Travis, 1996).

This Bulletin focuses on four restorative conferencing models: victim-offender mediation, community reparative boards, family group conferencing, and circle sentencing. Although these four models by no means exhaust the possibilities for community involvement in decisions about how to respond to youth crime, the models do illustrate both the diversity and common themes apparent in what appears to be a new philosophy of citizen participation in sanctioning processes.

The Bulletin first describes each of the four restorative conferencing models,¹ presenting information on background and concept, procedures and goals, considerations in implementation, lessons learned from research, and sources of additional information. The Bulletin then compares and contrasts the models on the following dimensions: origins and current applications; administrative and procedural aspects (eligibility, point of referral, staffing, setting, process and protocols, and management of dialog); and community involvement and other dimensions (participants, victim role, gatekeepers, relationship to the formal justice system, preparation, enforcement, monitoring, and primary outcomes sought). Next the Bulletin discusses a number of issues and concerns to be addressed in the development and implementation of restorative conferencing approaches. The Bulletin also offers guidelines for clearly grounding interventions in restorative justice principles and includes a test for determining whether an intervention strengthens the community response to youth crime and creates new roles for citizens and community groups.

In an evolving movement in which innovations are emerging rapidly, it is important to identify common principles that can be replicated by local juvenile courts and communities and that can serve to guide decisionmakers in choosing models best suited to local community needs. Toward this end, this Bulletin provides a general framework within which the myriad alternative interventions currently being characterized as restorative justice can be categorized and objectively analyzed and evaluated. Comparative discussions of new approaches at this relatively early stage of development are important because they serve to highlight similarities and differences across emerging models. In considering the four models discussed in the Bulletin, however, it is important to avoid confusing the vision of prototypes with the realities of implementation and also to remember that the philosophy and practices of any given restorative conferencing program may deviate substantially from the prototypes presented here.

A Comparison of Four Restorative Conferencing Models	Juvenile Justice Bulletin • February 2001