Restorative Justice Evidence What do we know? Where are the gaps? - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Restorative Justice Evidence What do we know? Where are the gaps?

Heather Strang University of Cambridge

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Restorative Justice Council The Forgiveness Project Ministry of Justice

A seminar hosted by Lord Stone of Blackheath 5 February 2013

What we know already

A good deal about face-to-face RJC:

– About victims - very positive for those choosing to take part – About offenders - more complicated

• Different offences (serious/violent vs trivial)
• Different offenders (adult vs juveniles)
• Different points in the justice system (‘in addition’ vs

‘instead of’ normal cj processing)

• Procedural justice as well as reoffending outcomes

– About costs (Shapland et al evaluation)

• Across total costs of crime - 8:1
• Across cj costs only - 2:1

What kind of RJ is happening in UK?

• Programmes springing up all over

– Many police-led (Community Resolutions etc) – Mostly for juveniles – Mostly trivial offences – Mostly explicitly to save money

• Evidence-based?

– Little attention to research findings – Little programme evaluation (with honourable exceptions - West Midlands Police and TV Police)

Where are the research gaps?

• Evaluations of programmes already in place
• RJ for specific offenders (e.g. ethnic

minorities)

• RJ for specific offences (domestic abuse,

sexual offences)

• Long-term effects of RJ

Methodologies for specific research gaps

• Depends what you want to achieve
• To find out whether one ‘treatment’ works

better than another

– Nothing beats a randomised controlled trial – ‘Level 3’ experiments - before/after measures with a treatment and a comparison group - can provide useful findings

• Anything less often as time-consuming and

expensive as an RCT (esp when you add the cost of a useless programme)

Methodologies (continued): for programmes already in place

• To find out how well a programme is running -

process evaluation (monitoring and

• bservation)
• Essential step prior to outcome evaluation
• To gauge participant satisfaction and other

attitudes - interviews (but beware response rates)

• Need to ‘build in’ evaluation measures with

programme development - so reliable data available to evaluators

Evaluating RJ with sensitive populations

• First develop the programme (experience with RISE

and consequent role with JRC research)

• Some research already available in domestic abuse

and sex offences (US, Canada, UK, NZ, Australia)

• a little available on ethnic minority offenders
• Growing recognition that RJ may have a role for

these offences

• Some preliminary data on effectiveness may be
• btainable by methods less rigorous than RCT - but

how useful? how reliable?

Methodologies (continued)

• To assess long-term effects

– Follow-up interviews – Need for high quality contact information – Well trained (and persistent) interviewers – A questionnaire that focuses on the crime, its aftermath,the justice experience, life events (esp how RJ/not RJ affected their lives) – Evidence so far shows that effects could not have been predicted (RISE victims/offenders c.f. Indianapolis)