History of Restorative Justice Research Paper

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In the final decades of the twentieth century, an approach to criminal justice, called restorative justice, emerged in response to concerns about offender recidivism, corrections costs, and crime victims’ rights, along with encouraging outcomes in the use of victim-offender dialogue and restitution. Rather than defining criminal justice in terms of prosecution and punishment only, restorative justice focused on identifying and repairing the harms caused by criminal acts, holding offenders accountable for making things right with those harmed, and empowering victims and communities to participate in the response. In addition, restorative justice considered the proper roles and responsibilities of both government and communities for a just society.

Roots Of Restorative Justice

Much modern legal structure and popular thinking about criminal justice views crime as if the government and its law are the injured parties. Violation of a government-imposed law calls forth a series of government-initiated responses: investigation and prosecution, followed by imposition of a sentence proportionate to the offense. The sentence frequently involves a fine (payable to the government) and some period of supervision or incarceration to express the legal and social condemnation of the proscribed behavior. By serving their sentence, criminal offenders are said to “pay their debt to society” but this usually only abstractly relates to the harm experienced by the actual victims of a crime. The idea that offenders have wronged individuals and violated communities, and thus must make reparation to those directly harmed, is at the heart of restorative justice. Its roots can be found in the legal codes of the ancient Near East, Rome, Europe, and Britain.

Examples of this direct connection between the harm to victims and the sentence may be found in the Code of Hammurabi (c. 1700 B.C.E.) and the Code of Lipit-Ishtar (1875 B.C.E.), which prescribed payment of restitution to the victims of property offenses. Other codes, such as the Sumerian Code of Ur-Nammu (c. 2050 B.C.E.) and the Code of Eshnunna (c. 1700 B.C.E.), provided for restitution even in the case of violent offenses. The Roman Law of the 12 Tables (449 B.C.E.) required thieves to pay double restitution unless the property was found in their houses, in which case they paid triple damages; for resisting the search of their houses, they paid quadruple restitution. The Lex Salica (c. 496 C.E.), the earliest existing collection of Germanic tribal laws, included restitution for crimes ranging from theft to homicide. The Laws of Ethelbert (c. 600 C.E.), promulgated by the ruler of Kent, contained detailed restitution schedules that distinguished the values, for example, of each finger and its nail. Each of these diverse legal codes represent a mandate that offenders and their families should make amends to victims and their families—not simply to ensure that injured persons received restitution but also to restore community equilibrium and avoid repeating cycles of revenge. Although actual practice may not have lived up to this intent, the presence of restitution as a legal obligation is significant.

In addition to these examples, there is evidence that practices in precolonial African societies showed a willingness to forgo punishment of criminal offenders in order to address the consequences to their victims and the community. Many sanctions were compensatory rather than punitive, intended to restore victims to their previous position. Contemporary Japanese culture exhibits a similar emphasis on compensation to the victim and restoration of community peace. The traditions of indigenous peoples, for example, the Maoris in New Zealand and First Nations in Canada, allowed for working out an appropriate response to crime in the context of the affected community. Offenders were involved in the process of determining guilt and harm and taking necessary steps toward restoration of those harmed. Practices associated with restorative justice such as group conferencing or circle processes have their roots in these indigenous ways.

Validated in part by these historical and indigenous roots, several twentieth-century social movements or critiques fed into the emergence of restorative justice theory. In addition to what may be generally called the informal justice movement, there were explorations and proponents of restitution, victims’ rights, prison abolition, and alternative theories of social justice.

Informal Justice Movement

In the 1970s, amid a growing crisis of confidence in the legitimacy of formal, government structures, legal anthropologists noted that laws and legal processes are specific to their social and historical context and that, in virtually all societies, justice is pursued using both formal and informal proceedings. A series of proposals emerged for informal alternatives to government-controlled responses to crime, emphasizing greater participation of the parties, de-professionalization of the processes, and lessening both stigmatization and coercion for participants. Two leading proponents of informal justice were Jerold S. Auerbach and Nils Christie. Christie has been frequently cited in restorative justice literature because of seminal themes in his work. In his article, “Conflict as Property,” Christie (1977) made the case that the criminal justice system reflects the government’s theft of the dispute that is properly owned by the victim and offender. In his subsequent book on punishment, Limits to Pain (1981), Christie drew a connection between this “theft” and the use of punishment. In criminal law, values are clarified by graduated punishment. Rather than being established through conversation among the participants—the rightful “owners” of the conflict—values are communicated by the state through the infliction of degrees of pain. He proposed participatory justice as a better response to crime, a response characterized by direct communication between the owners of the conflict leading to compensation that satisfies the claims established between them.

Restitution Initiatives

Rediscovery of the historical notion that paying back the victim could be an appropriate modern criminal justice sanction led to restitution initiatives beginning in the 1960s. Several rationales were offered for the use of restitution: (1) the victim is the party harmed by criminal behavior, (2) restitution offers an alternative to restrictive or intrusive sanctions such as imprisonment in some cases, (3) there may be rehabilitative value in requiring the offender to pay the victim, (4) restitution is relatively easy to implement, and (5) this might lead to a reduction in more costly retributive sanctions when the public observes the offender actively repairing the harm done. Evaluations conducted in the 1970s and 1980s raised questions about whether restitution programs had adequately lived up to those expectations, but restitution has been increasingly ordered (and less frequently collected) in many countries nonetheless.

One proponent of restitution was Stephen Schafer (1970). He described the era of compensatory justice prior to the development of centralized governments in Europe as the “golden age of the victim” because it was a time in which the victim’s interests and freedom of action were given greatest deference. He proposed that compensation could once again become a means of sanctioning offenders, either in conjunction with or as an alternative to imprisonment.

Abel and Marsh (1984) argued that restitution offers an approach to punishment that is ethically, conceptually, and practically superior to the status quo. In their model, most offenders would live outside prison under varying degrees of supervision as necessary, working and paying restitution to their victims. Imprisonment should be used only as a last resort for truly dangerous offenders and even they should be given the opportunity and obligation to earn wages and compensate their victims as well as paying the state to offset the cost of their incarceration. This recognition of the obligation of offenders for redress to their victims flowed into the formation of restorative justice theory.

Victimology And The Crime Victims’ Movement

Beginning as early as the mid-1950s, some scholars took an interest in the needs and rights of crime victims and the deficiencies of an offender-oriented justice system. The notion that victims, not just offenders, ought to be considered in the study and response to crime began to gather momentum. In 1963, the first crime victim’s compensation law passed in New Zealand. In the following years, similar initiatives were established in England and parts of the United States, Canada Australia, and Europe. In 1972, the United States federal government began the National Crime Survey (renamed the National Criminal Victimization Survey in 1990), signaling a desire to discover the extent of victimization beyond what was officially reported to law enforcement agencies.

The First International Symposium on Victimology was held in 1973, primarily dealing with research on societies’ attitudes toward crime victims. Two years later, an International Study Institute on Victimology went further and introduced discussion of the treatment of victims and their standing in the criminal justice system. In 1975, Frank Carrington published The Victims, asserting that victims’ “current sorry status in the criminal justice system need not be so and that something can and must be done to enhance the rights of the victim.” Attention began to be focused on ways crime victims’ interests should be specifically accommodated in criminal justice and community processes. The crime victims’ movement, thus, rallied around victims’ experiences and applied victimology research; it organized advocacy coalesced in three broad areas: (1) appropriate services to victims in the aftermath of the crime, (2) financial compensation for the harm done, and (3) victims’ rights to information and intervention during the course of the criminal justice process.

Basic rights and protections for victims of crime began to be included in statutes in the late 1970s, and in 1982, the State of California became the first in the USA to pass a constitutional amendment guaranteeing crime victims’ certain enforceable rights. Other jurisdictions followed suit. Specific provisions vary, but generally victims are granted the right to be treated fairly and with dignity, to attend the trial or other proceedings, to be awarded restitution, to be informed of certain events such as the offender’s release and, further, to be heard at critical stages in the case such as sentencing or parole hearings.

All of these efforts and outcomes have served to make it explicit that crimes violate persons, not just laws; that victims have a legitimate and necessary role beyond simply giving evidence; and that the harms to victims ought to be acknowledged and addressed in a society’s response to crime. These tenets have been incorporated into the idea of restorative justice.

Prison Abolition Movement And Alternatives To Incarceration

Questions about the use and validity of prisons were also gaining attention and during the late 1960s and into the 1970s, an informal reform initiative emerged in Europe and North America calling for the abolition of prisons. It garnered support from a number of political and philosophical perspectives around the common theme that prisons not only fail to rehabilitate, they are in fact places of acute and morally indefensible suffering for prisoners. Although the Society of Friends (Quakers) helped invent the “penitentiary” in the late 1700s, they joined the prison abolition movement in urging that the use of prisons be significantly curtailed or abolished and replaced by other responses to crime. In part, this was due to prison abuses— abuses that seemed to be inherent in the institution of prison itself and consequently not amenable to reform.

Some proponents of prison abolition called for prisons to be done away with completely. Others sought to decrease the use of prisons dramatically. Still others campaigned for a moratorium on construction of new prisons. In place of prisons, they suggested that restitution, compensation, community service, and reconciliation programs be established in local communities so that the response to crime could be decentralized and, to some extent at least, humanized.

This notion was appealing to jurisdictions facing budget crises due to economic recession in the 1980s. Community corrections programs providing alternatives to expensive incarceration under the auspices of probation and parole agencies included such things as day reporting centers, halfway houses, work release, and community service. These initiatives were organized with multiple goals including offender accountability, rehabilitation, surveillance, and fiscal efficiency. Proponents built public support for these alternatives by emphasizing that they impose a higher level of accountability on offenders. Rather than sitting out their time in a cell, community corrections required them to take an active role such as doing community service or working in order to make restitution to their victims.

Alongside these developments, programs emerged involving mediated conversations between victims and offenders with the aim of a mutually agreed and enforceable reparative outcome. Initially, such programs focused on juveniles and diverted them from the formal criminal justice system, with judges’ cooperation in accepting and helping enforce reasonable agreements from the mediation. Rather than keeping victims and offenders away from each other, their interests represented principally by attorneys, these programs included them in informal processes that emphasized safety, dialogue, and agreement on appropriate redress and next steps. Outcome research found that the parties generally valued the opportunity to speak and be heard and had a higher level of satisfaction that justice had been served in the process, compared with those who simply went through the standard criminal justice approach. These experiments fed directly into the theoretical and practical development of restorative justice.

Social Justice Critiques

A conviction that justice could not be achieved in an unjust society found its voice in publications and advocacy alongside the prison abolitionists’ practical concerns about prison abuses. One influential expression of this concern was Struggle for Justice, the report from a working group assembled by the American Friends Service Committee (1971). The report articulated concerns about sentencing practices that were disproportionately adverse for poor defendants and people of color and also the coercive nature of so-called rehabilitative programs in corrections. Similar concerns about disproportionate penalties and disparate sentencing practices contributed to the rise of the “just deserts” model for corrections. Andrew von Hirsch, in Doing Justice (1976), proposed that it is just for society to punish someone for a criminal offense but unjust to tailor the punishment based on considerations of future offending (such as deterrence or rehabilitation). Rather, penalties must be proportionate to the severity of an offense and uniformly administered so that all similar offenses carry the same sentence. This important development, however, did not address the concerns expressed in Struggle for Justice about harsh penalties, degradation of offenders, and the brutality of prisons.

Gerald Austin McHugh’s Christian Faith and Criminal Justice (1978) argued that although Western penal models grew out of a medieval religious view of sin and retributive punishment, this was not the only relevant motif inherent in Judeo-Christian theology. Its profound themes of mercy, relationship, restoration, forgiveness, reconciliation, and hope ought also to be applied in response to crime. McHugh suggested that application of these values to criminal justice policy would result in very different structures and processes from those now in place. Daniel W. Van Ness’ Crime and Its Victims (1986) and Howard Zehr’s Changing Lenses (1990) also made the case that biblical justice is highly concerned with the needs and rights of victims, as well as with the worth of offenders, and that this has implications for the foundations and policies of a just society.

From a feminist perspective, scholar Harris (1987) called for a fundamental restructuring of criminal justice to reflect the equal value of all human beings, the social precedence of harmony and well-being over power and possession, and the assertion that the personal is the political. The criminal justice status quo, she asserted, is driven by the values of control and punishment. She suggested that a preoccupation with legitimate rights blinds parties to the need for a caring and interdependent response and that justice has a broader scope than individual rights. Citing Gloria Steinem’s principle that the means you use are reflected in the ends you achieve, Harris called for a recognition and response to the need and opportunity for participation by all parties in order to justly address the needs of all.

Criminologists Pepinski and Quinney (1991) also explored the idea that crime has a personal dimension in which society has a stake. They examined the factors that positively contribute to peace and safety and cited these as the proper focus of criminology, as opposed to a negative focus (“what causes deviance and criminal behavior?,” and “how do we win the war on crime and violence?”). Others echoed this positive, peacemaking focus for criminology, asserting that the goals of peace and safety require more than restraint of wrongdoing and its punishment. They need to be achieved through transformation of persons and social institutions, affirming individual responsibility for wrongdoing and also society’s contribution to it and implementing effective, fair, humane, and peace-building community responses.

All of these movements influenced and contributed to the development of restorative justice and their themes are evident in its theory and practice. Johnstone and Van Ness (2007) have identified three main concepts that typically are incorporated (in some way) in definitions of restorative justice. The first is encounter. The parties involved (e.g., victim, offender, community members) are engaged together in discussing the offense, its effects, and what should be done about it. Rather than being done for them by professionals in a court of law, the parties themselves engage in a dialogue that is safe and fair for all concerned. The second concept is reparation, meaning that the response to an offense should involve redress by the offender to those harmed. Preferably, the redress would be decided with the involvement of all parties. But if that is not possible, reparation in some form could and should still be made in order for the outcome to be considered at all restorative. The third concept is transformation; it is more expansive than the others. It recognizes social and structural issues that either are themselves unjust or create impediments to fair, harmonious, and healthy relationships among people and their social and physical environments. So beyond the restoration of individual instances of harm, restorative justice aims for a more just society and world.

The Meaning Of The Term “Restorative Justice”

The first use of the term “restorative justice” was by Albert Eglash in several 1958 scholarly articles in which he suggested that there are three types of criminal justice: (1) retributive justice, based on punishment; (2) distributive justice, based on therapeutic treatment of offenders; and (3) restorative justice, based on restitution. Both the punishment and treatment models, he noted, focus on the actions of offenders, deny victim participation in the justice process, and require merely passive participation by the offender. Restorative justice, on the other hand, focuses on the harmful effects of offenders’ actions and actively involves victims and offenders in the process of reparation and rehabilitation. Eglash’s ideas and terminology were rediscovered decades later.

From its more popular emergence in the early 1990s up to the present day, the term has come to have a variety of meanings and nuances. Some definitions focus more on outcomes, others on processes. Howard Zehr (1990) described restorative justice in this way: “Crime is a violation of people and relationships. It creates obligations to make things right. Justice involves the victim, the offender, and the community in a search for solutions which promote repair, reconciliation, and reassurance.” Martin Wright (1991) wrote that restorative justice would respond to crime in such as way as “not to add to the harm caused by imposing further harm on the offender, but to do as much as possible to restore the situation. The community offers aid to the victim; the offender is held accountable and required to make reparation. Attention would be given not only to the outcome, but also to evolving a process that respected the feelings and humanity of both the victim and the offender.” Tony Marshall (1999) described it as “a process whereby all the parties with a stake in a particular offense come together to resolve collectively how to deal with the aftermath of the offense and its implications for the future.” Van Ness and Strong (2010) define it as “a theory of justice that emphasizes repairing the harm caused or revealed by criminal behavior. It is best accomplished through cooperative processes that include all stakeholders.”

The term, restorative justice, today is used throughout the world to describe processes and programs that offer alternatives to simply punitive approaches to handling offending and sanctions. Over time, the term has even gone beyond its original scope as a response to crime and its ideas are finding applications in handling neighborhood disputes, school discipline, and even workplace problems. All of these are built on foundations laid by some key developers of the theory of restorative justice.

Developments In Restorative Justice

Howard Zehr is sometimes called the “grandfather” of restorative justice. Zehr’s early experience with victim-offender reconciliation programs led to articles, speeches, books, and teaching that have drawn others into theoretical and practical conversations about justice. In his 1990 book, Changing Lenses, Zehr consolidated and advanced his critique of criminal justice as failing to meet the needs of victims or offenders. He suggested that the current criminal justice “lens” views crime as law-breaking and justice as allocating blame and punishment. He contrasted that with restorative justice, which views crime as a violation of people and relationships, which in turn leads to obligations to “make things right.” Justice, then, is a process in which all parties search for reparative, reconciling, and reassuring solutions.

Another pioneer is Martin Wright, who contributed to the development of restorative justice thinking and practice, particularly in Europe. In his 1991 book, Justice for Victims and Offenders, Wright drew from his experiences as an advocate for victims and for prison reform. He argued that criminal justice should be restorative both in its process and its effect by expanding compensation, restitution, and mediation opportunities to permit greater participation by both victims and offenders. Wright suggested two governmental departments to facilitate this: one for crime prevention, emphasizing deterrence through enforcement rather than through punishment; the other to ensure a just response to crimes when they do occur, including victim support, mediation, and reparation, as well as courts that emphasize restitution.

In 1992, Virginia Mackey wrote an evocative discussion paper on restorative justice to facilitate conversation in the faith community on the problems of current approaches to crime and on biblically reflective alternatives. She proposed a restorative model built on six practical principles: (1) safety should be the primary consideration for the community, (2) offenders should be held responsible and accountable for their behavior and the resulting harm, (3) victims and communities harmed by crime need restoration, (4) the underlying conflicts that led to the harm should be resolved if possible, (5) there must be a continuum of service or treatment options available, and (6) there must be a coordinated and cooperative system in place that incorporates both public and private resources.

Whereas some discussions presumed that formal criminal justice processes are inherently counter to the foundational values of a restorative approach, Cragg (1992), a philosopher and a longtime volunteer with a prisoner advocacy and prison reform organization, thought otherwise. He found insupportable an emphasis on punishment, whose aim is to cause suffering. However, Cragg underscored the importance of formal processes that should provide within their frameworks the opportunity for informal resolution and offender acceptance of responsibility. Formal justice, in his view, need not be punishment-driven, but may incorporate restorative virtues such as forgiveness, compassion, mercy, and understanding.

Another theoretical framework related to restorative justice is “reintegrative shaming,” a term used by Braithwaite (1989)—an influential critic of the just deserts movement and contributor to restorative thinking about justice. The term refers to positive ways for offenders to acknowledge the wrongness of acts for which they should rightly be ashamed. The point of the process is not shame but rather reintegration—concretesteps to take the offender from shame to being a fully accepted individual within the community. But it was not until a family group conferencing program was being organized in Wagga Wagga, a city in New South Wales, Australia, that reintegrative shaming and restorative justice were intentionally linked. In 1993, David Moore reflected on this approach to crime and reintegration from the perspective of moral psychology, moral philosophy, and political theory. He concluded that reintegrative shaming offered a framework for theoretical analysis and evaluation of the restorative potential of conferencing programs. It is important to note that the notion of “shaming” has been quite controversial among restorative justice advocates. Some believe shaming is inherently dehumanizing and thus is an illegitimate means even if it leads to good outcomes. Others distinguish between stigmatizing and reintegrative shaming, wherein the former makes shame an end in itself that is attached to the offender’s identity and the latter is part of a humane process leading to removing the shame and restoring the individual.

Restorative justice includes victims as primary stakeholders who should play a direct role in the justice process. Some assert that there is a historical basis for questioning the criminal-civil separation in Western legal systems and allowing victims to have full standing to advocate on their own behalf for redress as a part of criminal proceedings. A scholarly debate on this point was published in 1993 in the Criminal Law Forum. Daniel Van Ness made the case for the idea that victims could be fully and procedurally included in criminal justice processes aimed at addressing the harms experienced by all stakeholders. Andrew Ashworth supported victims’ interests in certain outcomes but warned that it is important to distinguish between the needs of victims for assistance and any legal rights that they might have in criminal courts. He also cautioned about attempting to accomplish larger criminal justice goals through sentencing policy. Together with von Hirsch, Ashworth has defended the objectives of just deserts as preferable to those of restorative justice for both just processes and outcomes.

An attempt to root restorative criminal justice ideas within a broader conceptual framework was offered in Burnside and Baker (1994), Relational Justice. Noting erosion in the quality of relationships in Western cultures, these authors considered whether “relationalism” might provide an antidote to problems including criminal justice. Although not specifically referring to restorative justice theory, contributors presented victim-offender mediation and family group conferences as examples of relational justice and suggested ways the activities of police, probation, and prison authorities might be evaluated by their capacity to strengthen relationships.

From the beginning, restorative justice’s main focus was how to respond to crime. A number of writers have noted in passing that restorative justice principles may have relevance to crime prevention also. One of the more comprehensive proposals on that aspect of criminal justice policy was offered by Marlene A. Young, Executive Director of the US-based National Organization for Victim Assistance, in her paper Restorative Community Justice: A Call to Action (1995). She proposed a series of program elements that might constitute a model of restorative justice as a community responsibility with potential to develop more effective problem solving and foster healthier, less crime-prone communities. The elements of this model included community policing, community prosecution, community courts, and community corrections. The first, community policing, involves police officers actively building strong community bonds within the neighborhoods in which they function. Although none of these elements were new ideas, Young envisioned their integration into an overall structure that would shift from reactive to proactive engagement and increase the level of meaningful victim and community participation in prevention, adjudication, and corrections.

Victim advocates have often been concerned that restorative justice is actually offender-focused, suspecting that its programs are primarily designed to provide better conditions for offenders, with victims a secondary concern. Some claim that victims are being used as agents to achieve offender-focused goals. While this may not be accurate in theory, studies of actual practices of restorative justice show that there is validity in these concerns in at least some instances. For example, those who work with victims in some restorative justice programs are volunteers or professionals who lack sufficient expertise and understanding of the victims’ needs and perspectives. The very methods designed to give victims a voice, such as mediation or circles, are sometimes compromised by pressuring victims to participate or giving them more of a sideline role. Efforts to inform and contact victims for participation are sometimes short-changed in the interest of moving to a quicker and less complicated process.

So-called restorative programs occur in the midst of social contexts and are affected by such variable factors as public mood, government acceptance, and available funding. Evaluations of practices and outcomes help monitor the extent to which the idea of restorative justice meets the reality of its implementation. Advocates naturally highlight a wide variety of studies that underscore the good outcomes achieved through restorative justice processes. Critics point out that the same attention must be paid to studies that reveal problems since the good intentions of restorative justice practitioners and proponents may not necessarily result in processes and outcomes that are, in fact, restorative.

Summary

Restorative justice is now a global idea. Not only has it been influenced by people and developments in many parts of the world, it has also been adopted in diverse cultures, economies, political systems, and legal structures. In fact, one of the remarkable features of restorative justice is that elements of it emerged almost simultaneously in different regions of the world. In some cases, the program or theory was developed prior to contact with the ideas of restorative justice being discussed elsewhere.

One way to sum up the history of restorative justice is to consider several stages of its growth and reach: Stage One: Restorative justice as a community-based alternative to the criminal justice system. Early on, particularly in common law countries, restorative processes were viewed as an alternative, community-based response to crime that diverted some offenders out of the government-run process in favor of a more personalized and participatory one. That was certainly true of the first victim-offender reconciliation programs in Canada, the United States, and England. In countries in continental Europe, where the legality principle limits the discretion of police and prosecutors to divert cases out of the justice system, some legislative changes were needed, but the purpose of the changes was to allow pilot projects for demonstration and research.

Stage Two: Restorative justice as a resource for public policy. In the latter half of the 1980s, countries and organizations began exploring the policy implications of what was being learned from restorative processes. For example, Justice Fellowship, a nonprofit in the United States, embarked on a multiyear project to translate restorative vision into principles of public policy; Canada’s Parliamentary Standing Committee (known as the Daubney Committee for its chairman) affirmed that sentencing law changes in that country should take into consideration what was being learned in restorative processes. New Zealand incorporated elements of Maori practices in revising its juvenile justice laws.

Stage Three: Restorative justice as a viable part of the criminal justice system. The final decade of the twentieth century saw remarkable innovation and expansion in restorative justice. New models, and variations on those models, were developed as conferencing and circles took their place with victim-offender mediation. Governments took steps to encourage the use of restorative processes through grants, research, legislative change, and, in some instances (such as the Thames Valley Police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police), through offering restorative processes themselves. Organizations dedicated to promoting and expanding restorative processes emerged, offering practitioners and researchers the opportunity to network with others and to learn from their experiences. This information sharing has expanded dramatically through the Internet and the growing number of excellent sites dedicated to restorative justice.

Stage Four: Restorative justice as an international reform dynamic. The twenty-first century has seen multinational bodies such as the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and the European Union strongly endorse the potential of restorative justice and urge their member states to introduce and then expand their use of restorative processes. Restorative concepts have contributed to the development of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions to help address the deep social and personal consequences of violence and systemic injustice. Where early work with restorative processes was done by grassroots organizations, now they have been joined by multinational organizations in calling on governments to use these new approaches to criminal justice.

The future of restorative justice as an idea is intriguing. Although it has become an accepted and fairly common term, its specific meaning is far from uniform. In some ways it has become a catchall applied to a wide range of practices and policies that have one or another element typically associated with restorative justice. In addition to applications in the criminal justice area, restorative approaches are being considered and applied to conflict and discipline in schools, workplaces, and mass social conflicts. All these realities present a challenge to the idea of restorative justice. Some scholars have called for clear distinctions in terminology between theoretical, values-based foundations for restorative justice and their expressions in practice. Others have suggested a set of evaluative criteria or standards for what constitutes a restorative approach. Van Ness and Strong (2010) offer a framework for assessing a system to determine whether it is minimally, moderately, or fully restorative or if it is restorative at all regardless of its claims. In any case, the idea of restorative justice continues to develop, along with a proliferation of programmatic expressions that shows no sign of waning.

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