ABSTRACT
Restorative justice programmes have been developed in a number of jurisdictions worldwide and there is considerable interest in exploring further the potential of restorative justice in relation to crime. Yet, with some notable exceptions, there have been few large-scale evaluations and those which exist have concentrated primarily upon young offenders (for example, the evaluations of RISE, the New Zealand statutory family group conferencing and the Northern Ireland Youth Conferencing Service). The distinctive features of the evaluation results presented in this book are that the schemes focused upon adult offenders and that most of the restorative justice delivered was undertaken within the context of the main criminal justice system. Restorative justice occurred pre-sentence or during sentence (whether that be a community sentence or a prison term) and the results were fed back to criminal justice personnel. The minority of cases which were, in strict terms, diversionary (in that the case did not proceed further through the criminal justice system) were in fact also within the normal criminal justice diversionary mechanisms in England and Wales of final warnings (for young offenders) or formal cautions (for adult offenders) delivered by police officers. The result, as we saw in Chapter 1, was that the offences concerned ranged from relatively minor (theft, minor assault, damage) to very serious (robbery, causing grievous bodily harm).
