Beginning April 2001, the Home Office granted funding to three new, or expanded, restorative justice programs for offenders: CONNECT, the Justice Research Consortium (JRC), and REMEDI. The development of these programs and their efforts at implementation are reviewed in this report. Chapter 1 presents an introduction and describes the restorative justice approach. Evaluation methods included interviews with personnel; observations of meetings and training sessions; observations of meetings between victims and offenders; pre- and post-conference interviews or questionnaires; and post-restorative justice and control group interviews with offenders and victims. Chapter 2 describes the CONNECT program and presents evaluation results. The CONNECT program strives to reduce re-offending; enable the victims to ask questions of, and receive information from, the perpetrator; enable the victim to receive reparation from the perpetrator; increase the offenders sense of responsibility for the offense; and provide offender and victim with a sense of satisfaction with the criminal justice system. Although all forms of mediation are possible within this scheme, the major restorative justice mechanism is family group conferencing. Key difficulties for this program included the lack of an adequate case flow and problems with contacting victims. Chapter 3 discusses the goals and results of the JRC program, which operates in three sites and relies on randomized controlled trial (RTC) to bring restorative justice conferencing to adult and young offenders. Goals include obtaining high consistency between RTC's; reducing re-offending; and providing benefits to victims. Evaluation results for all three sites are presented; JRC programs suffered from low case flow and problems contacting victims. Chapter 4 describes the REMEDI program and presents evaluation results. REMEDI specializes in mediation services for post-sentence adult offenders. Goals include repairing relationships between victims and offenders and providing a just outcome in relation to the offense. Key difficulties have been handling the different types of referrals and work and contacting victims. Chapter 5 discusses four key issues that emerged from the evaluation process and are important to the continued success of restorative justice schemes: (1) maintaining sufficient case flow; (2) knowing relevant agencies; (3) maintaining an image as a reliable partner; and (4) managing programs within agency performance measures. Tables, references, appendix