ABSTRACT
Meeting victims’ needs was one of the key aims the funders set for the three schemes. Reducing reoffending was the other. Reducing reoffending, however, is arguably likely to be linked to offenders’ own views and experiences of the restorative justice process. If, for example, offenders were to find the process unhelpful or unfairly denigratory, they would not be likely to react positively to it. Surprisingly, few evaluations have made a detailed study of offender expectations and reactions to restorative justice compared to the work which has been done with victims. In our evaluation, however, we determined very early on to look in as much detail at offender experiences of and reactions to the process and the outcome agreement as at those of victims. In this chapter, therefore, we start by exploring what offenders told us about their restorative justice experiences before considering, first, the extent to which offending behaviour was affected in the two years after experiencing restorative justice and then the extent to which reducing reoffending is congruent with restorative justice theoretical perspectives.
