Restorative Justice

1920 Words8 Pages
"How Restorative Justice provide a satisfactory outcome for victims and offenders?" 'Restorative Justice is a problem-solving approach to crime which involves the parties themselves and the community generally, in an active relationship with statutory agencies.' (Johnstone 2004:5) As mentioned in Johnstone, G (2004), in the modern west, the best way of responding to a crime committed is to 'punish' the offender in a way which is in correlation to the crime committed. However, there are evidently fundamental flaws to such a system; prisons are often described as 'universities of crime', whereby people who get sent there as part of their punishment, mix with other criminals and once released are highly likely to re-offend. The evidence for whether…show more content…
Therefore, if offenders are spared of prison, this could lead to 'private justice' - an idea mention by (Johnstone, 2004) whereby victims or the family of the victim(s) are left unsatisfied by the outcome which restorative justice has provided and feel the need to take revenge on the offender which may be violent (treating violence with violence). For example restorative justice promotes the idea of the offender being offered help and puts little emphasis on the idea of 'punishment'. On the other hand, one of Restorative justice's main aims is to improve society. It may be suggested that people who commit crime in the first place aren't considered to be completely 'sane' members of society compared with their law-abiding counter-parts. Therefore, by offering offenders help and support, it may prevent them from committing crimes in the future; helping make society a better place. Something that prisons are continuously criticised for not doing, which is backed up by such high re-offending…show more content…
So, instead of throwing the offender in prison (costing taxpayers thousands of pounds each year) they could be doing some good for society and the community could get something out of their wrongdoing. This is backed up by figures mentioned in the Home Office Report by Marshall, T (1999) - a prosecution costs on average around £2,500 per case, whereas mediation case costs around £500 per case; a huge difference in price. However, a clear flaw to this is that there may not always be a clear victim (Marshall T, 1999). For example, what happens to the offender who gets arrested for personal drug use? Where is the victim? Furthermore an article about restorative justice published on the Guardian website states that in "a report released...by two charities, Victim Support and the Restorative Justice Consortium, suggests policy could save £185m in two years by cutting

More about Restorative Justice

Open Document