Implications and Conclusions

The perpetual absence of the “community” in “community corrections,” either as a target of intervention or as a participant in the justice process (Byrne, 1989; Clear, 1996), may be due in part to an inability to identify meaningful roles for citizens. This Bulletin has described four nonadversarial decisionmaking models and compared and contrasted the ways in which they define and make operational the role of citizens in responding to youth crime. As illustrated by a growing number of restorative justice initiatives (Pranis, 1995), such citizen involvement may have important implications for juvenile justice. The models discussed here offer significant potential for changing the current dynamic in which the community is largely a passive observer of juvenile justice processes. When juvenile justice professionals identify citizens willing to participate in a community sanctioning process, they may also have identified a small support group willing to assist with offender reintegration and victim support.

This Bulletin has also attempted to provide a general framework for describing the dimensions of restorative conferencing processes. One purpose has been to avoid indiscriminate, arbitrary, and all-inclusive groupings of programs and practices under ill-defined terms such as community justice or restorative justice. As noted at the beginning of this Bulletin, 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. Such discussions may prevent, or at least minimize, what some have referred to as the “community-policing syndrome”: the widespread application (and misapplication) of a generic term to a broad range of initiatives without a clear understanding of the differences between interventions or benchmark criteria that can be used to assess consistency with fundamental principles and objectives (Mastrofsky and Ritti, 1995). Unless proponents of restorative justice distinguish what should and should not be included under that umbrella and unless they refine definitions of success for interventions, they will miss a unique and valuable opportunity to develop more effective methods for enhancing citizen involvement in the response to youth crime and misconduct. A useful context for refining definitions is to view restorative justice as a way of thinking about and responding to crime that emphasizes one basic fact: crime damages people, communities, and relationships. If crime is about harm, a justice process should therefore emphasize repairing the harm.

Systemic reform toward restorative justice must not begin and end with new programs and staff positions. It must encompass new values that articulate new roles for victims, offenders, and communities as key stakeholders in the justice process. Accordingly, such reform should create and perpetuate new decisionmaking models that meet stakeholder needs for meaningful involvement. The capacity of these models to influence, and even transform, juvenile justice decisionmaking and intervention seems to lie in the potential power of these new stakeholders. If victims, offenders, and other citizens are to be fully engaged in meaningful decisionmaking processes, however, a dramatic change must also occur in the role of juvenile justice professionals. That role must shift from sole decisionmaker to facilitator of community involvement and resource to the community (Bazemore and Schiff, 1996).

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