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

Issues and Concerns

Restorative justice is assuming an ever higher profile, and its new decisionmaking structures and processes are bound to come under close scrutiny. It is therefore important to address critical issues and concerns related to evaluating the success of new restorative justice approaches, gauging progress in their development, and meeting the challenges of balancing and sharing power.

Field-Initiated Program

In 1996, the Hudson Institute, a public policy research organization located in Indianapolis, IN, began to work with the local police department, sheriff’s department, juvenile court, prosecutor’s office, and mayor on a project to use Australian-style restorative justice conferences as an alternative response to juvenile offending. The project, which is ongoing, focuses on young (under age 15), first-time offenders in Marion County, IN.

Later that year, the Institute applied for and received a grant from OJJDP through its field-initiated research and evaluation program. These funds were used to conduct an evaluation of the impact of these restorative justice conferences on the recidivism rate of young offenders and other outcomes. To date, more than 400 youth have participated in the experimental design used for this evaluation.

The findings are very encouraging. They indicate that restorative justice conferences can be successfully implemented in an urban setting in the United States. More than 80 percent of youth referred to a conference are attending the conference and successfully completing the terms of the reparation agreement. For Indianapolis, this compares very favorably with other court-related diversion programs. In addition, trained observers report that conferences are being implemented according to restorative justice principles such as inclusion of affected parties, respect, and problem solving. Victims receive apologies, and other mutually agreed-to actions are included in the agreements. These characteristics translate into victims reporting high levels of satisfaction.

In terms of reoffending, the results are also promising. Both for the total sample and for youth who successfully completed their diversion programs, youth who attended conferences were significantly less likely to be rearrested 6 months after the initial incident. Researchers are completing the 12-month followup of participants, and final results of the study will be published in a forthcoming OJJDP Bulletin.

Evaluating Success and Gauging Progress

Despite the proliferation of restorative justice programs, there is a significant lack of evaluation research to provide an empirical basis for determining whether new initiatives are achieving their stated objectives. The exception is victim-offender mediation, which has been the subject of numerous studies in North America and Europe (Coates and Gehm, 1989; Dignan, 1990; Marshal and Merry, 1990; Umbreit, 1994, 1995; Umbreit and Coates, 1993; Umbreit, Coates, and Roberts, 1997; Umbreit and Roberts, 1997).

Perhaps the most critical concern for evaluators and juvenile justice professionals is that many of the new restorative justice initiatives have objectives that are far more holistic than those of traditional crime control responses. Whereas traditional crime control efforts typically have used recidivism rates as a primary outcome measure, an evaluative framework for these new approaches needs to include criteria for measuring outcomes of community empowerment and solidarity, victim interests, and crime prevention. The framework should also take into account intermediate and process outcomes such as community and victim involvement, reintegrative shaming, reparation to victims, dispute resolution, and healing. As new and more appropriate standards emerge for evaluating restorative justice models, it is essential that the basis for comparison be the reality of the current system rather than an idealized version of its performance. It is also essential that any comparisons between restorative justice models and the current system use similar indicators to measure performance.

Another important consideration for any new restorative justice process is its integrity, i.e., its consistency with restorative justice principles. With 25 years of experience to draw upon, victim-offender mediation offers the following basic guidelines that can serve to inform any new restorative conferencing initiative and its implementation:

If public agencies such as police or probation initiate a restorative conferencing process, actual sessions should be cofacilitated by trained community volunteers. This increases citizen participation and reduces the likelihood of an imbalance of power among parties involved in the sessions. Community involvement and volunteer participation are essential to the success of restorative conferencing but do not preclude the need for public support (e.g., funding to cover the costs of systems development, referrals, training, etc.) to sustain high-quality programs.
If a local victim-offender mediation or dialog program already exists, other restorative conferencing initiatives should be developed in collaboration with the existing program. For example, volunteer mediators could also serve as cofacilitators.
Session facilitators should be trained in mediation and conflict resolution skills, approaches to understanding the experiences and needs of crime victims and young offenders, and cultural and ethical issues that are likely to affect the process and participants.
Victims should be able to make informed decisions about their participation. They should be told about potential benefits and risks and should never be pressured to participate or told to “just trust” the facilitator’s judgment. Victims should also be allowed to choose when and where the session is held and should have the opportunity to present their story first if they wish.
In-person preparation of primary participants (victims, offenders, and their immediate families) should take place whenever possible. It is important for facilitators to connect with the parties, provide information, encourage participation, and build rapport, trust, and a sense of safety.

Regardless of what model or combination of models a local community or juvenile court might choose, ongoing monitoring and evaluation will be needed to ensure that conferencing processes adhere to restorative justice principles. No model or process is perfect. In practice, therefore, adherence to these principles may be viewed as a continuum within which new approaches can be assessed and continuously improved (table 3).

Table 3: Restorative Community Justice: Least- to Most-Restorative Impact

Building Community Through Restorative Conferencing

The true test of restorative conferencing. The ultimate measure of success for any approach that claims to advance restorative justice should be its ability to strengthen the capacity of communities to respond effectively to crime (Bazemore, 2000). In restorative justice, crime is viewed as both a cause and result of broken or weakened relationships. As Pranis (1998, p. 10) suggests: “The fabric of community is the weaving of relationships. Crime harms relationships and thus weakens community. Our response to crime needs to attend to these relationships to rebuild or strengthen the community fabric.”

If restorative conferencing models are to be more than another programmatic add-on, advocates of the models should be challenged to ask whether the models meet the test of building community. Do these models:

Create positive new relationships or strengthen existing relationships?
Increase community skills in problem solving and constructive conflict resolution?
Increase the community sense of capacity and efficacy in addressing problems?
Increase individual awareness of and commitment to the common good?
Create informal support systems or safety nets for victims and offenders?

Potential roles for the community. Experience has shown that given the chance, citizens and community groups can play significant roles in restorative justice. Such roles may include service on advisory boards at local, county, and State levels; policy input through public forums and community surveys; prevention policy development; a variety of victim and offender support activities, including church- and community-based programs, police chaplaincy programs, healing circles, and neighborhood outreach programs; and volunteer service as victim advocates, mediators for victim-offender mediation programs, and reparative board members.

New functions for juvenile justice professionals. Despite emphasis on the community role, restorative justice should never be viewed as something independent of the formal justice system. Juvenile courts and juvenile justice professionals must play key leadership roles in partnerships with community groups to develop and sustain a credible community response to youth crime. Because current job descriptions for juvenile justice professionals usually do not include functions associated with restorative justice, another test for efforts to engage the community in decisionmaking must be whether new professional roles are being developed. Such new roles are emerging in several communities where restorative justice is now actively practiced. For example, in Deschutes County, OR, probation officers are now called community justice officers, and their responsibilities include developing and supporting community service projects, developing restorative conferencing, coordinating services to crime victims, and performing a variety of community-building and restorative functions.

The process of engaging the community. The process followed by juvenile justice professionals in engaging the community may be the most important aspect of creating a new collaborative relationship between the justice system and the community. Such a process is illustrated in the following steps suggested by the Minnesota Department of Corrections:

Gather information about restorative justice and possible models in the community.
Educate yourself about the community you will be working with.
Identify credible leaders in the community or neighborhood, attend community gatherings, read local papers, and ask local residents about issues and leaders.
Educate yourself about victim services in the community and establish contact with those services.
Clarify your own goals and values in approaching the community. (What are you trying to achieve? What is important to you about what you are doing and how you do it?)
Assess potential support in the criminal and juvenile justice systems and educate key leaders about restorative justice.
Working with community leaders, plan informational sessions to explore community interest. Invite participation by victims’ representatives.
At each session, recruit volunteers who would like to be involved in creating a new approach in the community based on restorative values.

Sharing and Balancing Power

The restorative justice processes discussed in this Bulletin are often proposed as alternatives to the legal-procedural approach to dispositional decisionmaking by the juvenile court. Concerns have been raised, however, about the mechanisms of accountability in restorative justice decisionmaking. In considering the development of justice programs in aboriginal communities in Canada, Griffiths and Hamilton (1996) have raised concerns that are just as relevant in urban
U.S. communities:

Care must be taken to ensure that family and kinship networks and the community power hierarchy do not compromise the administration of justice. As in any community, there is a danger of a tyranny of community in which certain individuals and groups of residents, particularly those who are members of vulnerable groups, find themselves at the mercy of those in positions of power and influence. (Griffiths and Hamilton, 1996:187–188)

The often dramatic and dysfunctional power differentials within communities may make true participatory justice difficult to achieve and, in some settings, may instead produce harmful side effects (Griffiths and Corrado, 1998). Ironically, those communities most in need of holistic restorative justice programs that encourage residents to become involved in the disposition process are often precisely those communities that are the most dysfunctional. Also, residents of such communities may have only limited interest in and/or capacity for involvement, in part because they have never had the opportunity to develop meaningful partnerships with the juvenile justice system. If these communities are ever to benefit from a restorative approach to the problem of youth crime, proponents of restorative justice must direct specific attention to developing strategies for building a sense of community among residents and for recruiting and retaining resident volunteers.

A critical issue surrounding the development and implementation of restorative justice models is: “Who controls the agenda?” Traditionally, the formal justice system has maintained a tight rein on initiatives designed as alternatives to criminal and juvenile justice processes. This is evident in the origins and evolution of diversion programs, which in many jurisdictions appear to have become appendages to the formal justice process. In this context, the inability or unwillingness of decisionmakers in the formal juvenile justice system to share discretion and power with communities is likely to result in “net-widening” (expanding the number and types of youth brought under the supervision of the juvenile justice system) rather than the development of more effective alternative decisionmaking processes (Blomberg, 1983; Polk, 1994).

If the new restorative justice models follow the pattern of development of earlier neighborhood dispute resolution models (and to a lesser extent of victim-offender mediation, as the oldest of the new models), one would anticipate significant additions to the richness and diversity possible in alternative sanctioning but little impact on the formal system. Both victim-offender mediation and family group conferencing (except as practiced in New Zealand) ultimately depend on system decisionmakers for referrals; the potential for true sharing of power is minimal. If new models are to avoid net-widening, marginalization, and irrelevance, community advocates should begin to work with sympathetic justice professionals who are also committed to community-driven systemic reform.

Although a primary objective of proponents of restorative justice is to have new concepts institutionalized as part of the justice process, the danger is that system control will lead to top-down development of generic models. Hence, both promise and risk are implied in the degree of institutionalization that some new approaches have achieved in a relatively short time and in the rather dramatic system-community collaboration that appears to be possible with these approaches.

Clearly, the high profile given to restorative justice initiatives may result in grant funding for research and new programs. Yet, such support is no guarantee of long-term impact of the type envisioned in the restorative justice literature. Moreover, in the absence of substantive community input (including input from crime victims) at the design and implementation phases of specific initiatives, an administrative focus (i.e., one concerned primarily with grant-funding processes) may even result in cooptation or watering down of new approaches in ways that ultimately function to undermine the philosophy and objectives of restorative justice (Van Ness, 1993).

For example, from a restorative justice perspective, perhaps the biggest challenge to Vermont’s reparative boards is the fact that they have been implemented within the State’s formal justice system itself. On one hand, the boards may have the greatest potential for significant impact on the response of the formal system to nonviolent crimes. Moreover, the commitment of administrators to local control may also result in communities assuming and demanding a broader mandate. On the other hand, as a creation of the State corrections bureaucracy, the reparative boards may find themselves at the center of an ongoing struggle between efforts to give greater power and autonomy to citizens and needs of administrators to maintain control and ensure system accountability. Indeed, citizen board members may ultimately be challenged to decide the extent to which their primary client is the community or the probation and court system.

Of the four models considered in this Bulletin, circle sentencing appears to be the most advanced in terms of primacy of the community’s decisionmaking role. In its placement of neighborhood residents in the gatekeeper role (see table 2), this model provides the most complete example of power sharing. Acting through the community justice committees, communities are clearly the “drivers” in determining which offenders will be admitted to the circle and what should be done in the collective effort to heal the community. Eligibility for circles is limited only by the ability of offenders to demonstrate to community justice committees their sincerity and willingness to change. Surprisingly, the most promising lesson of circle sentencing has been that, when given decisionmaking power, neighbor-hood residents often choose to include the most, rather than the least, serious offenders in restorative justice processes (Griffiths and Corrado, 1998; Stuart, 1996). As a result, however, certain tensions have developed within courts and other agencies in Canadian communities that are experimenting with circle sentencing. The tensions concern the extent to which power sharing with the community should be limited and the issue of whether statutes are being violated.

Contents


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