UK 2004

December 2004
The IIRP's SaferSanerSchools program. Article, by Laura Mirsky, describes how restorative practices are being implemented at three diverse school districts and relates the ways in which administrators, teachers and students have benefited.
Read Article

November 15th, 2004
'Two Year Resanctioning Study: a comparison on restorative and traditional cautions'This study reports the results of two year reconviction study of restorative and traditional cautions. The work follows on from a previous study of restorative cautions in Thames Valley (Hoyle et al., 2002) which found that
around one-quarter of offenders reported that they had either desisted from crime or reduced their offending at least in part because of the restorative caution. The current report compares two-year resanctioning rates in Thames Valley against rates in two similar police force areas which used
traditional cautioning. It also makes a comparison of different types of caution within Thames Valley. The research suggests that the restorative cautioning initiative was no more effective than traditional cautioning in terms of resanctioning. However the scheme did not appear to increase resanctioning. The earlier research had identified wider benefits for victims and offenders of restorative cautioning.
Link to report

Autumn 2004
Restorative Justice Projects - The National Evaluation of the Youth Justice Board's Restorative Justice Projects (Aidan Wilcox with Carolyn Hoyle - Centre for Criminological Research, University of Oxford)
This report is based on an evaluation of 46 restorative justice projects which were funded by the Youth Justice Board. The main areas covered include a description of the projects and the characteristics of the young people on these projects, a discussion of the implementation problems which staff in the projects have faced, and an assessment of the outcomes pf the restorative interventions in terms of completion rates, reconviction and feedback from participants. The report concludes with the main lessons which have emerged for evaluation and implementation of restorative justice projects.
Full Report

Full Report

August 2004
Pilot research in: 'Community Penalties and Restorative Justice: Police Knowledge and Views'
The Restorative Justice Consortium carried out research with the help and support of Cambridgeshire Constabulary on Police knowledge of Restorative Justice and Community Penalties.

It had already been identified that the general public receive their views on criminal justice not only from the media, but also from police officers with whom they come into contact, often following a crime. The pilot looks at how much police officers know about Restorative Justice (RJ) and Community Penalties, what they thought about them and whether they would find further information useful.
Full Report

July 2004
'Fair Justice for All? The Response of the Criminal Justice System to the Bradford Disturbances of July 2001' (Alan Carling, Darrell Davies, Amritha Fernandes-Bakshi, Neil Jarman, Peter Nias).

The events in Bradford in July 2001 came after disturbances ealier that year in a number of northern cities.
This report looks into the significant questions raised concerning the lengths of the resulting custodial sentences in Bradford in comparison with disturbances at other times and places.

This report highlights two issues for the future:

1.Clarification is urgently required about the circumstances under which Riot charges are used, and the broader purposes for which they are used, given that the prosecuting authorities appear to be using a threshold level of disorder different from that laid down by law. In the absence of this clarification, doubts and allegation about injustice are bound to recur.

2. Restorative Justice initiatives try to incorporate inputs from the community, the victim and the offender with the aim to better meet the needs - the short and long term - of all three. Across the world, especially in New Zealand, initiatives are beginning to be developed for incorporating this approach into the handling of post-riot situations. This field deserves immediate attention.
Better Bradford website
Full Report

July 2004 - April 2006 (This has now been cancelled)
Restorative Justice Diversion Pilot
As part of the Government’s restorative justice strategy, the Home Office has commissioned a project to research the effects of restorative justice as a diversion from court.

The Government received some high quality, imaginative and impressive bids to run the project and selected a bid from Justice Research Consortium to run the project in London

The pilot will test the use of both direct and indirect victim/offender mediation and community reparation, and will undertake a restorative process in a target of 400 cases. The results will be independently evaluated to assess how well these processes satisfy victims, reduce re-offending and provide an effective and efficient criminal disposal. The evaluation will also compare different approaches to restorative justice alongside reparation without victim involvement. In conjunction with the current restorative justice pilots -testing restorative justice within the Criminal Justice System -this pilot will be of key importance as the basis for future policy making and will therefore use a randomised control trial to obtain the most robust results.

The project will be aimed at cases where there is an adult offender who has
admitted responsibility for an offence. The cases included will be selected by crown prosecutors taking into account all the circumstances of the case rather than simply the offence type. They will all be cases that would have otherwise been prosecuted. The pilot will use the new legal provision
of the conditional caution to divert offenders from prosecution, but it will
target a greater range of offences including some more serious cases that
would not normally be conditional cautioned-although very serious cases will be excluded together with any with a sexual or domestic violence element. Each restorative process will work towards an outcome agreement which will form the conditions of the conditional caution - making the outcome agreement enforceable. The pilot will be carried out with the Metropolitan Police however, the particular boroughs have yet not been finalised but it is likely to include several boroughs both north and south of the river.

The project is expected to begin in July 2004 and to continue until April 2006. The independent evaluation aims to report on ITS success in September 2007.

July 2004
'Implementing restorative justice schemes' -research carried out September 2001-December 2003. First year report published 9th July 2004 by the Home Office
For full details and first year report see UK 2003

This briefing is based on research carried out by Kate Akester and Shari Tickell. Their report 'Restorative Justice:The Way Ahead is available from JUSTICE, 59 Carter Lane London EC4V 5AQ.
Email admin@justice.org.uk