The Bethlehem Police Family Group Conferencing Experiment was the first randomized trial of restorative justice in the United States. Moderately serious juvenile offenses were randomly assigned either to court or to a diversionary "restorative policing" process called family group conferencing. Police-based family group conferencing used trained police officers to facilitate a meeting attended by juvenile offenders, their victims, and their respective family and friends. This group would discuss the harm caused by the offender's actions and develop an agreement to repair the harm.The effect of the program was measured through surveys of victims, offenders, offender's parents, and police officers, and also by examining the outcomes of conferences and formal adjudication. The book contains an extended appendix that presents these outcome-based statistics for this seminal program. At a time when research for new restorative justice programs in the 1990s was just beginning to surface, this study provides a valuable picture of the successes of the family conferencing model in its early formation.

In the UK and elsewhere, restorative justice and policing are core components of a range of university programmes; however, currently no such text exists on the intersection of these two areas of study. This book draws together these diverse theoretical perspectives to provide an innovative, knowledge-rich text that is essential reading for all those engaged with the evolution and practice of restorative policing. Restorative Policing surveys the twenty-five year history of restorative policing practice, during which its use and influence over criminal justice has slowly grown. It then situates this experience within a criminological discussion about neo-liberal responses to crime control. There has been insufficient debate about how the concepts of ‘restorative justice’ and ‘policing’ sit alongside each other and how they may be connected or disconnected in theoretical and conceptual terms. The book seeks to fill this gap through an exploration of concepts, theory, policy and practice. In doing so, the authors make a case for a more transformative vision of restorative policing that can impact positively upon the shape and practice of policing and outline a framework for the implementation of such a strategy. This pathbreaking book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students taking courses on restorative justice, policing and crime control, as well as professionals interested in the implementation of restorative practices in the police force.

In the UK and elsewhere, restorative justice and policing are core components of a range of university programmes; however, currently no such text exists on the intersection of these two areas of study. This book draws together these diverse theoretical perspectives to provide an innovative, knowledge-rich text that is essential reading for all those engaged with the evolution and practice of restorative policing. Restorative Policing surveys the twenty-five year history of restorative policing practice, during which its use and influence over criminal justice has slowly grown. It then situates this experience within a criminological discussion about neo-liberal responses to crime control. There has been insufficient debate about how the concepts of ‘restorative justice’ and ‘policing’ sit alongside each other and how they may be connected or disconnected in theoretical and conceptual terms. The book seeks to fill this gap through an exploration of concepts, theory, policy and practice. In doing so, the authors make a case for a more transformative vision of restorative policing that can impact positively upon the shape and practice of policing and outline a framework for the implementation of such a strategy. This pathbreaking book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students taking courses on restorative justice, policing and crime control, as well as professionals interested in the implementation of restorative practices in the police force.

The focus of restorative policing is within a community-oriented policing approach, where the police have important tasks in rendering services to the population. Traditional forms of penal treatment no longer satisfy entirely, especially in relation to nuisances, incivilities, and petty crime. Is the community police officer the simple 'registrator' of events between victim and offender? Can s/he take the role of mediator, or can s/he refer to external instances in the domain of mediation or to civil judges? Do the police have their own restorative regulations and institutionalized practices, and are they involved in mediation in penal matters? In what ways do police officers contribute to informal restorative practices and conflict resolution in neighborhoods? This book is about restorative policing practices, and the place and role police forces can take in this kind of approach.

The development of crime policy in the United States for many generations has been hampered by a drastic shortage of knowledge and data, an excess of partisanship and instinctual responses, and a one-way tendency to expand the criminal justice system. Even if a three-decade pattern of prison growth came to a full stop in the early 2000s, the current decade will be by far the most punitive in U.S. history, hitting some minority communities particularly hard. The book examines the history, scope, and effects of the revolution in America's response to crime since 1970. Henry Ruth and Kevin Reitz offer a comprehensive, long-term, pragmatic approach to increase public understanding of and find improvements in the nation's response to crime. Concentrating on meaningful areas for change in policing, sentencing, guns, drugs, and juvenile crime, they discuss such topics as new priorities for the use of incarceration; aggressive policing; the war on drugs; the need to switch the gun control debate to a focus on crime gun regulation; a new focus on offenders' transition from confinement to freedom; and the role of private enterprise. A book that rejects traditional liberal and conservative outlooks, The Challenge of Crime takes a major step in offering new approaches for the nation's responses to crime.

Covers scholarly work in criminology and criminal justice studies, sociology of law, and the sociology of deviance.

Braithwaite's argument against punitive justice systems and for restorative justice systems establishes that there are good theoretical and empirical grounds for anticipating that well designed restorative justice processes will restore victims, offenders, and communities better than existing criminal justice practices. Counterintuitively, he also shows that a restorative justice system may deter, incapacitate, and rehabilitate more effectively than a punitive system. This is particularly true when the restorative justice system is embedded in a responsive regulatory framework that opts for deterrence only after restoration repeatedly fails, and incapacitation only after escalated deterrence fails. Braithwaite's empirical research demonstrates that active deterrence under the dynamic regulatory pyramid that is a hallmark of the restorative justice system he supports, is far more effective than the passive deterrence that is notable in the stricter "sentencing grid" of current criminal justice systems.