CRM 376 Restorative Justice Midterm

What is restorative justice?

practices rooted in the idea that both the origins and outcomes of crime can be articulated as needs in communities, victims, and offenders

What is therapeutic jurisprudence?

Studies how the law and legal system impact affect human behavior and well-being, including emotions, psychological impact, and mental and physical health

What is external containment?

The outside forces of restraint that keep individuals from breaking the law such as effective supervision, parental disapproval, and sanctioning

What is internal containment?

The inner forces that keep us from breaking the law such as a sense of right and wrong, moral reasoning, and a sense of responsibility to others

Who is Albert Eglash?

A psychologist who worked with offenders in Alcoholics Anonymous. He was inspired by AA’s concept of making amends to question how restitution in criminal justice could be reimagined to mirror this. He coined the term “creative restitution” and is credited with “restorative justice”

What are the three elements of creative restitution?

• Be driven by offender

• Relate directly to offense

• Contribute constructively to those directly impacted by the offense/crime

Who was Nils Christie?

A Norwegian Criminologist/sociologist who focused on the link between social distance/detachment and crime/harm. He wrote the article Conflicts as Property in which he argued that conflicts are opportunities to strengthen community when processed in a way that facilitates that outcome, but the state steals these conflicts and assumes a victim role

Who is Howard Zehr?

The grandfather of restorative justice and published the first book of its kind to articulate and explain restorative justice. Sees crime as a violation of people/relationships which creates needs for everyone and the justice should focus on meeting said needs

What was Braithwaite’s reintegrative shaming theory?

contends that shaming, if coupled with community reintegration,
can prevent crime rather than generate it. We show disapproval while sustaining respect, conduct a ceremony, and see the deed as deviant but not the person and their deviance is not a master status

What are the three elements of active accountability?

• understanding

• acknowledgement

• action

What is a victim-offender mediation?

a facilitated dialog process that includes a goal for stakeholders to reach a bilateral reparation or restitution agreement in order to repair the harm and socially reintegrate the victim and offender

What is a victim-offender dialogue?

similar to the other form of a facilitated encounter but without the goal of a restitution agreement

What is unilateral reparation?

Plan is imposed upon offender by authorities and is affiliated with punitive and some rehabilitative models. Victim is not directly involved but considered and can include unrelated to the victim fines and fees

What is bilateral reparation?

Plan is mutually created and agreed upon by victim and offender. It is restorative and somewhat rehabilitative affiliated and the victim is directly involved

What are the two potential risks of a victim-offender mediation/dialogue?

• disproportionate outcomes

• victim can be re-victimized or relive trauma

• offender can lose needed advocacy

What are two potential benefits of victim-offender mediation/dialogue?

• Empower victims

• Provide offenders with opportunity to take responsibility/reintegrate into community

• Relieve courts and CJS agencies

• Higher rates of completed/fulfilled restitution

• Higher rates of victim and offender satisfaction

• Reduction in victim fear

• Recidivism, even in cases of violent crime, decreases

What are the implementation challenges of victim-offender mediation?

• Collaborative and philosophical tensions between community-based orgs and CJS agencies

• Time intensive, making it tempting to cut corners in facilitation

What is a Family Group Conference?

a decision-making process designed to include relevant stakeholders in a dialog aimed at identifying transformative action steps that help the family or group meet shared goals

What are the components of a family group counseling process?

• Referral

  • referring agency identifies needs that should be addressed

• Planning and Prep

  • meet with offender and immediate family to invite people, plan opening/closing rituals, go over the process and rules, finalize needs to address

• Convene FGC

  • open ritual

  • reminder of everything

  • info sharing

  • private family time

  • facilitator goes over plan

  • close ritual

How can victims participate in a family group counseling?

• Not participate

• Information sharing portion

• representative

• contribute information

• fully participate of part of family

How can children participate in family group counseling?

• not include

• during part of FGC, but not decision making

• assigned family member to be advocate

• photo/symbol of child

• art/writing to give child voice without presence

What are two potential benefits of the family group counseling model?

• encourages family/community to support and take interest and role in their desistance

• reintegration

• ease reliance and dependency on formal system

• can be initiated as often as family wants

What are two potential risks of family group counseling?

• not all families supportive

• offender’s lack of love/support by family can be reinforced

• existing family conflicts and divisions can thwart

What are two implementation challenges for family group counseling?

• working with unhealthy/abusive families

• defensiveness and shame within families

• shifting agency/facilitator/family mindset from dependency to empowerment

What is a victim impact panel?

a forum for victims to tell their story to a group of offenders and share the impact the incident had on their lives and friends/family

How is victim impact panels associated with mothers against drunk driving?

First one was hosted by MADD to educate

What is a surrogate victim?

has been victimized in a similar way as the offender’s direct victim

What are the benefits of a surrogate victim?

• Limits emotion without eliminating it

• Empowers victims to give purpose to their experience

• Increases safety for all parties

What are two potential benefits of victim impact panels ?

• Helps offender develop empathy

• Cost effective

• Frees up courts

• Contributes to a victim’s healing process

What are two potential risks of victim impact panels?

• Victims can experience burnout

• Coercive participation of offenders can decrease benefits

What are two potential implementation challenges of victim impact panels?

• Difficult to find and retain victim presenters

• making sure that victims stories resonate with offenders

What is a reparitive board?

a group of community volunteers that either respond to crime through the creation of a reparation plan with an offender or supervise an offender while they complete an existing, court-mandated plan

How are reparative boards associated with Vermont?

First created here when there were rising rates of incarceration

What are two potential benefits of reparative boards?

• Frees up courts and prosecutors

• Allows some offenders to avoid felony conviction

• Increases morale in probation staff

• Brings community oversight to community-based corrections

What are two potential risks of reparative boards?

• Diversion can put community at risk

• Community volunteers may lack education, experience, training, or understanding of RJ

What are two implementation challenges of reparative boards?

• Finding, training, and retaining community volunteers

• Earning buy-in prosecutors and judges

• Sustaining inter-agency collaboration

What are the common characteristics of peacemaking circles?

• Ceremony/ritual of circling as well as opening/closing

• Use of a talking piece

• Use of a circle-keeper or facilitator

• Group-generated or shared guidelines

• Consensus decision-making

How are talking pieces beneficial?

• slows things down and allows everyone time to reflect/focus before speaking

• prevents one-on-one debates

• encourages everyone to share in responsibility for the process

• encourages introverted, highly sensitive, and some neurodivergent persons to speak

• reinforces equality

What is a sentencing circle?

operate within formal/conventional systems of justice to bring together those most affected by an offense to create a sentencing plan that is reasonable, proportionate, and meets needs of everyone involved

What is a circle of understanding?

the goal is not to create a plan, but rather try to understand why or how the crime (or conflict) occurred. Tend to occur outside of formal justice systems

What are talking circles?

Organized so that members of a community or group can discuss an issue that concerns them and possibly make a group decision or action plan

What is a healing circle?

typically organized for the purpose of providing support and care for a person, family, or group that has been victimized by crime

What are support circles?

operate much like healing circles, but they can be utilized by offenders and victims alike

What are transition/reintegration circles?

Used to foster reconciliation and the social reintegration of an offender after crime or after a period of separation due to detention or incarceration

What is diversion?

an effort to place low-risk offenders into community-based programs that can address their needs and criminogenic factors outside of the formal justice system and its agencies

What is incorportation?

folds the restorative justice process into the system itself

What is parallelism?

restorative processes or programs that work alongside a formal justice system, but do not affect the formal outcome of a case

What is the unified model?

Fully restorative system in its values, policies, and operations

What is the Dual Track Model?

supports two separate systems of justice that work alongside one another and cooperate when possible

What is the Safety Net Model?

a predominantly restorative system that retains some non-restorative options just in case restorative justice fails to meet the needs or circumstances of a particular case or offender

What is the Hybrid Model?

Fully integrates restorative justice into the conventional justice system, utilized within conventional approaches to justice

What is Braithwaite’s 3 characteristics of responsive regulation?

• Law should not/does not mandate uniform response

• Consistency is not an ideal

• response of the offender should guide regulation

What are the five levels of Braithwaite’s responsive regulation pyramid?

1. Learning citizen = capacity building (top)

2. Virtuous citizen = restorative

3. Rational actor = deterrence

4. Incompetent or irrational actor = incapacitation (bottom)

What is the Wagga Wagga model?

the use of police-facilitated, restorative conferences to divert juvenile offenders away from the formal court process

What is street diversion?

On the spot mediation and conferences during a call for service

What is restorative cautioning?

police-led/referred diversion programs

What are the four steps of implementation in Bazemore and Griffith’s 4 track model for implementing restorative justice reform?

1. Legislation and policy

2. Organization/agency

3. Individual officers

4. Community

What are courts of Indian offenses (code of regulation courts- CFR)?

Operate regionally where tribal jurisdiction exists but a tribal court has not been established

What is peacemaking court?

Implements connection to culture and spirituality, consensus decision making, direct participation, and focus on harmony and reconciliation in peacemaking ceremonies in a tribal court

What are specialty courts?

relatively recent innovation that diverts people from detention/prison and can integrate restorative and rehabilitative processes

What are community based corrections?

court-ordered supervision that occurs within community such as probation and parole

What is institutional corrections?

includes the detention, incarceration, or institutionalization of either a suspected or convicted offender in a facility such as a jail, prison, or juvenile detention center

What is recidivism?

the measurement of criminal relapse or re-offense

What is desistance?

when an offender succeeds in moving away from criminal behavior

What is pretrial diversion (deferred prosecution)?

moves an offender into a probation-based program without requiring them to enter a formal plea in court

What is deferred adjudication?

provides offender with opportunity to avoid a formal criminal record but they must enter a guilty plea in court

What are the five ways RJ can operate in correctional institutions?

• Restorative programming

  • Focused on offenders, including their social, developmental, and therapeutic needs

• Restorative Housing

  • Isolate RJ to one unit, pod, or dorm

• Restorative Living

  • refers to someone’s personal application of restorative values into their daily life, relationships, and interactions

• Restorative Discipline

  • addressing how behavior impacts others rather than mere violation of rules (circles, inmate-led reparative boards)

• Restorative Prison

  • total transformation in how we see and operate institutional corrections would take place

What are Edgar and Newell’s 6 elements of organizational culture?

• Power structures

• Organizational structures

• control systems

• routines and rituals

• myths & stories

• symbols