The impact of restorative and conventional responses to harm on victims: a comparative study

Abstract

Introduction Over past two decades there has been increasing attention paid by North American and European Union governments to public concerns about youth criminal justice system. Despite considerable evidence of an actual decreasing incidence of youthful harms over this period (Thornton, Craft, Dahlberg, Lynch, & Baer, 2002), selective media coverage of sensational harms caused by youth have served to produce chronic pressure on policy makers in both educational and justice institutions to react with a get tough or just-desserts mentality to youthful wrongdoers (Ghetti & Redlich, 2001; Roberts, 2003). Seemingly lost in this punitive focus are needs and voices of victims, where despite considerable personal and financial cost, victims continue to be marginalized in youth justice system (Zehr, 1990). As Choi and Severson (2009) note: Many crime victims face insensitive treatment in criminal justice system. They often receive no restitution and rarely do they hear genuine expressions of remorse from offender when case is processed within traditional criminal justice system proceedings. (p. 813) Dissatisfaction with treatment of victims under current retributive regime may have in part contributed to emergence of restorative approaches (Zehr, 1990, 2002). Unlike youth justice policy in New Zealand and Australia, where legislation mandates restorative approaches, and in some Western European nations, where welfare models predominate (Arthur, 2004; Pitts, 2005), Canada's Youth Criminal Justice Act includes both 'get tough' measures and opportunities for restorative responses (Denov, 2004; Erickson & Butters, 2005; Hillian et al 2004). Like their counterparts in United States (Bazemore & Schiff, 2005; Varma, 2006) and Britain (Arthur, 2004; Barnett & Hodgson, 2006; Field, 2007; Gillen & McCormack, 2007), Canada's youth justice policy makers may be attempting to reconcile public pressure to get tough on youth crime with simultaneous but contradictory pressure to protect the best interests of child (Denov, 2004; Roberts, 2003). In face of negative public perception and generally political and reactive responses, there is urgent need to examine and document outcomes of few opportunities afforded by governing legislation for exemplary and promising (Merlo & Benekos, 2003) alternatives to increasingly dominant punitive sanctioning approaches. To contribute to discourse on finding more appropriate responses to needs of victims, primary purpose of this study is to compare effects of restorative versus conventional justice approaches on people who had been harmed by a young person. The research was conducted in collaboration with a restorative justice program in Calgary. Following a brief description of retributive and restorative paradigms as well as pertinent research, we will describe restorative justice program undertaken by Calgary Community Conferencing, process of specifying variables for study, and finally methods, results, and implications of this research. Contemporary Paradigms in Youth Justice Underpinning contemporary discourse on youth justice initiatives are two models that offer different definitions of wrongdoing, processes and outcomes. These paradigms include retributive and restorative models. The retributive model codifies wrongdoings into systems of abstract rules associated with particular consequences assumes that wrongs are discrete events to which some true and universal meaning can be assigned (Hudson, 1998; Llewellyn and Howse, 1999). This process focuses on a search for facts that will irrefutably establish innocence or guilt of alleged wrongdoer (Zehr, 1990). Once guilt for wrongdoing has been established, its consequences are predetermined (Van Ness and Strong, 1997), which suggests an underlying assumption that there is a standard average victim (Hudson, 1998, p. …