ABSTRACT
In mainstream juvenile justice policy debates, restorative justice proponents often suffer from a problem of ‘disconnect’. Essentially, advocates have promoted restorative justice on the basis of its potential for providing a more satisfying experience for individual victims, offenders and their supporters, a principle-based appeal also consistent with demonstrated empirical outcomes associated with restorative justice conferencing programmes (Umbreit 1999; Van Ness and Schiff 2001). But while many policymakers and juvenile justice administrators are now interested in restorative justice – if only because of its trendiness – many also struggle to figure out whether, and how, restorative justice ‘fits’ within the larger juvenile justice agenda. Though restorative justice advocates may smugly conclude that this is simply because these practitioners have the wrong agenda, administrators also legitimately want to know how the feelings of individual victims and offenders relate to the achievement of broader, often mandated, objectives of their agencies. And no matter how narrowly conceptualized some of these system objectives may seem to be (Griffiths and Corrado 1999), some are also linked to more universal public concerns with community safety, sanctioning and censure of crime, fairness and justice – and to public expectations that juvenile justice agencies and systems demonstrate effectiveness in addressing these concerns.
