The report evaluates research on restorative justice from the UK and elsewhere to assess when restorative justice works, and why it works when it does.

Among the issues discussed are:

Restorative justice came about as a new way of tackling the causes of crime and preventing reoffending, in recognition that punishment alone does not do this.

It is claimed that restorative justice is both more humane than conventional criminal justice and more effective.

The Smith Institute commissioned this independent report to examine the evidence on restorative justice from the UK and around the world.

The literature search used the following resources:

Both published and unpublished materials were used. The searches were international but all written in English. The methods used by the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) were used to assess the effectiveness of medical treatments. Home Office standards for reconviction studies were applied. 36 studies were used in the quantitative study of the effectiveness of restorative justice. A complex approach is taken to the assessment of effectiveness, to avoid meaningless over-generalisations.

Restorative justice was found to work in different ways on different people, and it is argued that a diverse bank of evidence should be used when deciding when to use it.

In general, restorative justice was found to work more effectively with serious crimes, with violent rather than property crimes, and with crimes involving personal victims.

The evidence strongly suggests that victims benefit in terms of their mental health from face-to-face conferences, but is less clear about the benefit to victims of other forms of restorative justice.

Studies from the US and Australia showed a very high take-up when restorative justice was offered to arrestees before charge as an alternative to conventional criminal justice. The volume of positive evidence on restorative justice would support a roll-out across the UK.

The Smith Institute
info@smith-institute.org.uk
Heather Strang (Co-author), tel. +44 20 7823 4240

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01/01/2007

Lawrence W Sherman, Wolfson Professor of Criminology at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania. Heather Strang, Director of the Centre for Restorative Justice at the Australia National University and lecturer in Criminology at the University of Pennsylvania.

research

Urban Policy > Security & crime prevention > Tackling crime

Working with offenders