II Jornada de Justícia Restaurativa, que va tenir lloc al Centre d'Estudis Jurídics i Formació Especialitzada, 16 d'octubre de 2012

1. Evaluating Restorative Justice
Professor Gerry Johnstone
University of Hull, UK

2. The Restorative Justice Movement
Broad Goals
revolutionize the way contemporary
societies view and respond to crime.
Shift:
In focus: from punishment to repair
In process: from professional to participatory
justice
In values: relational justice

3. Forms of restorative justice
Victim/Offender mediation
Restorative Conferencing
Circles
Panels
TRCs
Commemorations

4. Claims for Restorative Justice
Controls crime more effectively
Holds offenders genuinely accountable for
their behavior
Offers offenders a route to reintegration into
law-abiding society
Provides victims and communities with a
meaningful experience of justice

5. Does it work?
Concern for evaluation
What is evaluation?
the systematic assessment of the worth
or merit of some object

6. What is being evaluated?
Evaluation is often of specific schemes
or programmes
Often presented as evaluations of
‘Restorative Justice’
Raises Issues of
Generalizability
Definition of restorative justice

7. Who is evaluation For?
Government/policy makers
Sponsors
Public
Practitioners
All have different questions and needs

8. Difficulty of evaluation I
Multiple, Unclear and Un-prioritised
Goals
Restoring victims
Bring offender to recognise wrong
Healing conflict
Repair breach in community’s sense of trust
Reassure community that further offending
unlikely
Diminish fear of crime

9. Standards commonly used for
Evaluation
Impact on recidivism
Participant satisfaction
With process
With outcomes

10. Difficulty of Evaluation II
Methodological problems
Comparative or absolute standards
Restorative justice, by its nature, cannot be
used randomly
Operationalizing ‘recidivism’, ‘participant
satisfaction’
Relating satisfactory outcomes to causes
Quantitative/qualitative issues

11. Evaluative styles
Statistical studies of outcomes
Stories (reliability issues)
Observation (+ participant observation)
In-depth qualitative methods (e.g.
interviews)
Theoretical critique

12. Braithwaite’s review
Restorative justice practices:
restore and satisfy victims better than
existing criminal justice practices
restore and satisfy offenders better than
existing criminal justice practices
restore and satisfy communities better
than existing criminal justice practices

13. Issues
The limits of the ‘what works’ paradigm
The limits of testing (RJ cannot be put in
a test-tube)
Governmental concerns versus
scholarship concerns
Governmental concerns versus
practitioner concerns