Restorative Justice

Research papers on restorative justice point to one of the newest initiatives in criminal justice approaches western societies is the adoption of restorative justice approaches.The criminal justice writers at Paper Masters will help you write your research project on restorative justice and explain the many questions that this community based program bring up.

Restorative justice is defined by several key principles around which community support can be built.

1. It is a research concept based not a specific program, but a way of thinking about responding to the problems of crime, a set of values that guides decisions on policy and practice.
2. Defying traditional "liberal" or "conservative" labels, it is based on the redefinition of crime as an injury to the victim and the community, as opposed to an affront to the power of the state.
3. The primary purpose of restorative justice is to repair the harm of crime to whatever possible degree.
4. It is a community-building response.

Restorative justice is the latest trend in criminal justice theory, which contains the seeds of a "radically different paradigm on crime and justice" than traditional deterrence approaches. Reducing recidivism is one measure of the capacity of restorative justice to address the important needs created by juvenile offence. A reduction in re-offending is one of a number of the goals of the restorative approach, assuming that holding offenders accountable to their victims would increase offender empathy and therefore lead to a reduction in offending behavior.

There are a few of the important questions that the advocates of restorative justice address as they lay out their program to revive a tepid and ineffectual criminal justice system.

1. Why are the efforts of the criminal justice system ineffective in fighting crime?
2. Why does prison make offenders worse instead of rehabilitating or deterring them?
3. Why are victims unhappy with the way they are treated by the criminal justice system?

Restorative justice is not the first justice model to address these questions however, the majority of its predecessors focused primarily on only one of the parties involved in a criminal offense - the victim, the offender or the government. Most of them have failed to adequately speak to the need for restoration and rehabilitation on behalf of all those involved, a necessity that is sufficiently accorded in the restorative justice model.