Restorative justice is something that has become more and more prominent within the criminal justice sphere. The use of the concept and practice has emerged in its own right within the juvenile justice realm. The efficacy of restorative justice when it comes to juvenile offenders is a very important topic because being able to top the patterns of crime, addition and deviance in general is something that should absolutely be stopped and regulated early on in an offender's life due to how hard it becomes to do the same as an offender enters and reenters the justice system over the course of their life. It is important to create and retain a connection between these young offenders and the victims that suffer at their hands so that the connection is not lost and the offender becomes ambivalent or even hostile about the feelings, suffering and toil that their crimes take on said victims. It is only through the use of empirically proven evidence and history that the offenders can remain with and make peace with their community rather than having their lives lost to institutionalization and a life a crime. The purpose of this brief fairly brief literature review is to get a sense as to whether restorative justice shows promise based on the data and merits knows up to this point. With that said, findings up to this point have indicated some positive results but this is not completely uniform and consistent across the board given the sample that was used for this report. With that being said, this report has assembled ten different empirical studies and reviews of restorative justice, its efficacy and important aspects of the same.
Restorative Justice for Juveniles
The primary question to ask about the concept behind restorative justice, whether it be with juveniles or offenders in general, is just how far one takes the concept before resorting to more severe and punitive punishments based on real-world results, patterns and statistics. Rather than use simple forms of persuasion, this report shall focus on the empirical and historical evidence that exists on the subject. There some that argue that some people just need a second chance and a little faith while others say that a direct path to punishment is the only sure way. A related but different example would be the use of house arrest, probation or other non-prison punishments rather that incarceration due to the proverbial in the sand that is created and manifested when a person is foisted into the system. Either way, there would seem to be marked shift away from conventional prison and similar tactics and towards alternative means to both lower crime rates, recidivism rates and incarceration rates. Of course, whether any or all of these approaches work can only be proven and shown through attempting them and them comparing them to the empirical results that come from the more traditional and widely used efforts. While restorative justice has promise in the eyes of many, it will take ongoing and seeable results to sell it to many criminal justice experts and scholars as a worthwhile alternative to what is done conventionally.
Restorative Justice
Something that was alluded to in the introduction is one of the more common and pervasive themes when it comes to restorative justice, and that would be using the tactic as a means to avoid or break away from the pattern of just sending juvenile offenders to jail and just allowing them to become part of the system. Even if some feel that such a method is a viable method, there is the open question as to whether there are better ways. One city in the United States that is a flashpoint in this regard is Chicago, given the rampant amount of gang and gun crime that pervades the city and greater area. Indeed, restorative justice is seen by many as a superior alternative to incarceration, although that opinion is not unanimous. In the Chicago iteration, there is a focus on victim/offender mediation and peacemaking, overall violence reduction programs and how to handle younger offenders that are guilty of murder. The topics and tactics in question are compared and contrasted with similar events and patterns in other parts of the world including Canada. The values and community facets in question are obviously mundane to the subject. Overall, there are four primary perceived upsides...
Variations of the area court model, such as teen courts, medicine courts, and household physical violence courts, focus on specific concerns in order to establish even more extensive options. The underlying presumption of neighborhood courts is that neighborhoods are deeply damaged by the sentencing procedure yet are seldom spoken with and associated with judicial results. Correcting Community justice has actually been slowest to show up in the correctional industry. Maybe this
Ruth-Heffelbauer, D. (2006). Restorative Justice FAQ. Victim Offender Mediation Association. Online at http://www.voma.org/rjfaq.shtml The source composed for the Victim Offender Mediation Association is a fact sheet and statement of purpose for the organization, detailing its efforts to bring about a greater acceptance of this methodology in mainstream legal contexts. Based in the United States, VOMA assembles legal experts and criminal justice advocates who view the benefits of restorative justice as tantamount
Instead, Hadley (2001) argues that an understanding of the role of spirituality in restorative justice today can encourage peaceful communities both domestically and internationally. In fact, the spiritual component of restorative justice left lingering from its formation impacts today's attempts to practice restorative justice at the individual, communal, and international levels. In each scenario, components of spirituality remaining from the spiritual roots of restorative justice can help bring healing
Restorative justice asks fundamentally different questions, and is based on a different set of assumptions, than the current criminal justice paradigm (Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, n.d.). The most notable and important difference between the current criminal justice paradigm and the restorative justice paradigm is that restorative justice does not focus on the punishment and does not advocate a punitive criminal justice system. Instead, the restorative justice model is based
2. Interventions for teens and wayward youths are such appealing programs because no one wants to assume that children and youths are born with deviant minds. Most agree that children and youths commit criminal acts because something has gone wrong in their lives. Most suggest that these things that go wrong have to do with parents, schools, and most often deviant peer groups. In fact, there is evidence to suggest
Restorative Justice in Education." In other words, how effective does the use of critical theory prove to be when applied to restorative justice in education? Author Dorothy Vaandering uses a logic and flow-driven narrative, which is informative and leaves a distinct impression that she has provided a worthwhile study for examination. What is restorative justice? Vaandering explains that restorative justice (RJ) is a process that eschews "punitive, managerial structures" in
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