Nathan Monk

The restorative ideology is about the democratic and active participation of victims, offenders and the communities affected by crime in the reaching of consensual solutions to deal with its consequences. It is a breath of fresh air for a traditional criminal justice system which is recognised by many as being in crisis. The discourse of restorative justice recognizes the balance between victims’ and offenders’ needs and rights, but in practice many of the existing schemes are mainly geared towards the offenders’ needs. The victim support community arrived late to restorative justice and has identified three main ideas concerning victims’ involvement in restorative practices: a greater openness and sensitivity to the victim’s needs and specificities, an increased knowledge based on indepth evaluation and research into the participation of victims, and a greater intervention of victim support organisations.

While references are frequently made in the restorative justice literature to the desirability of eliciting empathy towards their victims from offenders, little is known about whether it is, in fact, worthwhile to do so. Does empathy towards victims influence offenders’ future behaviour? Empathy itself is an ambiguous concept which has been defined in a variety of ways. The implications for the practice and evaluation of restorative justice are that considerably greater clarity is required; the use of common measures of empathy may also be helpful. A distinction needs to be made between perspective taking and empathy; it is suggested that there is a continuum between intellectualising about other’s feelings, responding compassionately to them and actively communicating with them. It is concluded that practitioner involvement in the design of future research on this topic should help to avoid further confusion.

This article provides a review and critique of the current research findings about restorative justice. It is suggested that some of the positive findings are not due to programme efficacy, but rather to well-known threats to validity. The effect of case attrition on selection bias is considered in light of the voluntary nature of many restorative justice programs. Standardization of program measures is urged with specific research protocols presented and described. Protocols for measuring participant perceptions are compared. Before scientifically valid statements can be made about best practices, much more rigorous research needs to be conducted. If the results of multiple program evaluations are going to contribute to accumulated understanding of the practice, measures across programs must be standardized. A research agenda is described that would eventually allow for empirically fitting the forum to the fuss and establishing best practice standards across models. Six programme level and six case level measures are proposed as the minimum required for basic program comparisons to be meaningful.

During autumn 2005, the author led a feasibility study investigating the experiences of 17 Xhosa men and women from the Eastern Cape who had, in some way, fought in the struggle for liberation from apartheid in its early days. The study showed, firstly, that it was possible to identify people who fell into this category with the help of archive collections and local veterans’ associations. Secondly it showed that, with the assistance of final year Theology students at the University of Fort Hare, access could be gained to these ‘veterans’ and in-depth qualitative interviews conducted, with the students providing translation where necessary. Finally, the interviews themselves highlighted a group of people who had sacrificed much for the freedom of their country, some  still optimistic, some disillusioned, but nearly all with outstanding health and social care needs. Transitional community justice aspires to a healing and restoration which still eludes many in the post-democracy years.

In the past twenty-five years or so, the pluralist tradition in the criminal justice system has been undermined by a political obsession with punishment, and one of the consequences of this has been the marginalisation of probation values and practice and a misguided reshaping of the probation model. Recent policy developments have, we argue, been based on lack of understanding of both the traditions and potential of probation. Against the background of the different forms probation models have taken we put forward a model for the future which we believe restores it as an important part of a plural response to crime, decouples it from punishment, and fits with the values that Brian Williams so consistently espoused.