Interpreting | 2010.03.25
Therapeutic retribution | Libby Brooks
Justice is a public health concern too. Offenders meeting victims can cut the trauma crime causes
It was when the man sitting opposite him in HMP Pentonville casually referred to "the first time we met" that Will Riley finally erupted – because the businessman had not encountered Peter Woolf at a drinks reception but when the prolific burglar broke into his home and attacked him. "I was like a fire hydrant going off," Riley recalls. "I shouted at him that he had crushed every belief I had that I could handle myself and protect my family. "
For Woolf, this was the moment his perspective shifted irrevocably. "I wanted the ground to swallow me up, I felt so ashamed. So I went on the defensive, then Will started listing the effect I\'d had on him – so many things I hadn\'t given a thought to before."
The men were brought together by a process of "restorative conferencing", a model of restorative justice that holds the offender directly accountable to the people he has harmed, often in front of others he trusts, including members of his family or community.
Though many lobbyists would argue that it puts victims\' experience at the heart of the criminal justice system, where it belongs, that too readily lends itself to reinterpretation as retributive tabloid shorthand. More aptly, it can be said that restorative justice offers a controlled environment in which the anger, trauma and guilt surrounding an offence can be discharged by victim and offender, resulting in a – not necessarily instantaneous and certainly not simplistic – coming-to-terms for both.
Eight years later, Woolf has not reoffended, and is working as a restorative conference facilitator, while Riley was so inspired that he went on to found Why Me? , an organisation that campaigns for conferencing to be made available to all victims of crime. Yet, despite numerous glowing evaluations in Britain and abroad, as well as copious government lip service, only a handful of the 10.7m crimes with an identifiable victim committed last year were resolved with a restorative element. But with the shadow prisons minister, Alan Duncan , last month making a commitment to implement the scheme nationally if elected, that may be about to change.
Restorative justice is the most effective tool the criminal justice system doesn\'t use. Four different evaluations of pilot schemes by the Ministry of Justice have found an average fall of 27% in reoffending rates, while the Restorative Justice Consortium estimates that for every £1 spent on conferences it saves the taxpayer £8 through the reduction in reconviction.
Just as important, the schemes are hugely popular among victims, with a takeup rate of 77% and a satisfaction rate of 85%. Most compelling, compared with a control group of victims, those who had been through restorative justice were 32% less likely to show high levels of post-traumatic stress disorder . In New Zealand, where legislative provision for restorative practice was enshrined in 2002, the impact on reconviction and incarceration, particularly for young offenders, has been marked.
Of course, the purpose of any criminal justice system is to adjudicate, not ameliorate. Still, as Baroness Stern argued this week in her report on rape prosecution , a focus on conviction should not come at the expense of consideration for victims. According to Karin Madsen, who runs a pioneering centre in Denmark using restorative techniques with victims of sexual violence, the authorities can forget that victims have an immense need for information, which is excluded by a court system that requires defendants to counter allegations rather than explain their behaviour. Restorative justice humanises the cold instrumentalism of punishment.
Critics on the right display an unhelpful tendency to equate the restorative model with cleaning off graffiti instead of serving time. But it wasn\'t conceived of to divert serious offenders from custody. While many community sentences do now have a restorative flavour – and, yes, that can include graffiti removal – it\'s the specific nature of public confrontation and shaming involved in conferencing that has most impact.
Liberal sceptics are suspicious of this public element, but it is very different in intent and execution from the kind of punitive, unstructured shaming that results with an antisocial behaviour order (asbo). The Australian academic John Braithwaite, a leading advocate for restorative methods, believes that current criminal justice practice creates shame that is solely stigmatising and thus counterproductive, as it serves to symbolically exclude the criminal from law-abiding society long after their sentence has been served, making reoffending more likely. Reintegrative shaming, on the other hand, allows offenders to acknowledge wrongdoing, then offers ways to expiate that shame while encouraging others to readmit the offender to society.
Restorative justice is about balance: between therapeutic and retributive models; between the rights and responsibilities of offenders and the needs of victims; between a community\'s desire for local solutions and the state\'s duty to punish. Most fundamentally though, it recognises that justice should be as much a public health concern as a rational legal process.
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