ABSTRACT
Despite the many differences between the different court-based projects on individual variables, the overall similarities in experience are more striking. Taken together they succeeded in demonstrating a number of positive achievements. Most importantly, the experiments demonstrate that victim/offender mediation can be carried out, that a good many victims welcome the opportunity to meet their offender, and that most participants were satisfied with the experience (the majority would do it again or recommend it to others). They demonstrate, too, that the community has a role to play in dealing with crime, enabling society to construct a positive experience to complement what is, perhaps inevitably, the emotively negative impact of the law alone. That experience seems to affect offenders even more than an appearance at court, and affect them in such a way as to increase their sense of responsibility rather than feeling inadequate and rejected. As far as the victims go, it was apparent that reparation in its wider sense — psychological and social, as well as material — was seen as a part of natural justice. If some were critical it was often because their expectations of receiving some returns in compensation for their suffering were heightened by participation beyond what they would ordinarily have been at the hands of normal criminal justice processes. Lastly, the schemes demonstrate that other agencies, especially sentencers, recognise the validity of what they accomplished and were willing to take it into account in making their decisions. The court-based schemes exhibited these achievements much more than the police-based ones because they had sufficient independence, practical and philosophical, to employ mediation in a truly innovative and liberating way. In doing so they have taken the first step in questioning many of the assumptions we tend to make about the nature of criminality, justice and effective social control.
