Juvenile Justice Reform and Restorative Justice: Building Theory and Policy from Practice.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Date: 01 April 2006
• Author: Gill, Charlotte

Juvenile Justice Reform and Restorative Justice: Building Theory and Policy from Practice

Gordon Bazemore and Mara Schiff (2005) Cullompton:Willan Publishing, xiv + 386pp, ISBN 1843290948

Gordon Bazemore and Mara Schiff's book is an interesting addition to the restorative justice literature, and will undoubtedly add to the debate about whether, and how, restorative justice should be implemented in modern criminal justice systems. Restorative justice has gained popularity in the western world in recent decades (p. 27), and has been a popular subject for research and analysis, as both a theoretical challenge to the traditional adversarial court process and a practical intervention bringing together the parties affected by a crime. However, Leena Kurki has noted (2003, p. 307) that restorative programs are often evaluated in terms of their outcomes--reduced recidivism, victim satisfaction and so on--but rarely in terms of the extent to which they satisfy core principles of 'restorativeness'.

Bazemore and Schiff share Kurki's concern, and much of this book is focused on their identification of three broad core principles, derived from the work of Van Ness and Strong (1997)--repairing harm, stakeholder involvement and transformation in community/government relationships--and the development of these principles into a model for evaluating the restorative quality and outcomes of conferencing schemes. The principles are described in detail in Chapter 2, and their various elements linked to conferencing tasks and outcomes, and they are later applied to the authors' own study of United States juvenile justice conferencing. In Chapters 5, 6 and 7, the authors explain how each principle in turn was understood and applied by restorative justice practitioners. In Chapter 8, they are used as a framework for the authors' comprehensive future research agenda. Through this model, Bazemore and Schiff aim to connect theory with practice and provide a straightforward evaluation tool that may be used with a wide range of restorative practices.

This book aims to break new ground in several ways. The authors' national inventory of restorative conferencing programs for youth in the United States identified well over 700 victim-offender mediation/dialogue, family group conferencing, circle and board programs, and their subsequent survey of around a quarter of these, and in-depth ethnographic research with a selected sample of survey respondents, provide a wealth of...