Crime Reduction - Helping to Reduce Crime in Your Area

Existing research evidence suggests that restorative justice programmes can have a positive effect on reducing reoffending, as well as producing generally high levels of satisfaction from those participating in such programmes.

However, much of this research has been based on small schemes, has lacked well-matched control groups, or else has been conducted overseas. Consequently, we do not know the extent to which such results might be replicable on a wider scale in England and Wales. Furthermore, there is not yet much information available about the potential of extending restorative justice with adult offenders.

The Crime Reduction Programme (CRP), which was launched in January 1999 with three year funding from April 1999, includes restorative justice as one of the three topics in its sentencing theme. The aim of these schemes is to “examine the effectiveness of some current restorative justice schemes in reducing crime and use that knowledge to develop new, more effective schemes”. While reducing offending is the principal aim of this work, the other traditional aims of restorative justice practice - such as better representing the interests of the parties involved than the conventional criminal justice process is thought to do - remain very important.

The first part of this CRP work is now complete. The final report from a study of some existing restorative justice schemes was published  in September 2001.

For the next phase of the work, we are funding the development and evaluation of new restorative justice schemes (or expansions of existing ones). The results of this work will inform future Home Office thinking on restorative justice.

The aim of this work therefore is to try and fill the existing gaps in research knowledge by funding the provision of restorative justice schemes to ensure that there are programmes in existence capable of delivering sufficient high quality data for a robust evaluation.

The three schemes selected for funding are:

Justice Research Consortium - a consortium project consisting of different criminal justice agencies (Metropolitan Police, Northumbria Police, Thames Valley Area of the National Probation Service, and HMP Bullingdon) and led by Professor Lawrence Sherman of University of Pennsylvania and Dr Heather Strang of Australian National University. This scheme will be testing restorative justice in a number of operational sites, employing randomised controlled trials.

REMEDI (South Yorkshire Victim-Offender Mediation Service) - REMEDI, a local mediation service, will be using Home Office funding to extent their service right across South Yorkshire, offering restorative justice primarily to offenders on probation.

NACRO/London Probation Area - this scheme will operate at a busy inner London magistrates' court, where magistrates will defer sentence on convicted offenders to allow an opportunity for restorative justice to be attempted.

All three schemes have been awarded funding until the end of March 2003. They started work over the summer of 2001.

The Home Office will shortly be appointing evaluators to assess the impacts of these schemes.