Spotlight on Balanced and Restorative Juvenile Justice

by Gordon Bazemore, Ph.D.

What is it?

Balanced and Restorative Justice (BARJ) is a new framework for juvenile justice reform which seeks to engage citizens and community groups both as clients of juvenile justice services and as resources in a more effective response to youth crime. To do this, juvenile justice intervention needs to focus on serving basic community needs and expectations. Communities expect "justice" systems to improve public safety; sanction juvenile crime, and rehabilitate offenders. True "balance" is achieved when juvenile justice professionals consider all three of these needs and goals in each case and when a juvenile justice system allocates its resources equally to meeting each need.

Restorative justice is a new way of thinking about and responding to crime which emphasizes one fundamental fact: crime damages people, communities, and relationships. If crime is about harm, a "justice" process should emphasize repairing the harm. As a vision for systemic juvenile justice reform, restorative justice suggests that the responses to youth crime must also strike a "balance" between the needs of communities, victims and offenders, involving each to the greatest extent possible in the justice process.

Restorative justice builds on traditional positive comity values. But what is most new, and most important about restorative justice is a set of principles that redefine the way justice systems address public safety, sanctioning and rehabilitative objectives. Specifically, when crime is understood as harm and justice as repair or healing, and when the importance of active participation of victims and community members in the response to crime is emphasized, the basic community need to sanction youth crime is met by requiring that offenders take responsibility for their actions and demonstrate accountability by making amends to victims and their community. Rehabilitation needs are addressed not just by "treatment programs," but by ensuring that offenders strengthen relationships with law-abiding adults and increase the competencies they need to become productive citizens. Public safety needs are met not only by incapacitation, but by ensuring that the offenders work, provide community service, and go to school. To assist the system in this effort, citizens are actively involved in prevention programs, offender monitoring and mentoring.

The Role of Prosecutors

Today, when a crime is committed, most juvenile justice prosecutors are primarily concerned with three questions: who did it, what laws were broken, and what should be done to punish or treat the offender? While questions of guilt and appropriate intervention are certainly vital, these questions alone may lead to a limited range of interventions based solely on treatment and punishment of the individual.

Viewed through the restorative "lens," crime is understood in a broader context than what is suggested by the questions of guilt and what should be done to punish or treat the offender. Howard Zehr (1990) argues that in a restorative justice approach, three very different questions receive primary emphasis. First, what is the nature of the harm resulting from the crime? Second, what needs to be done to "make it right" or repair the harm? Third, who is responsible for the repair?

Defining the harm and determining what should be done to repair it is best accomplished with input from crime victims, citizens and offenders in a decisionmaking process that maximizes their participation. The decision about who is responsible for the repair focuses attention on the future rather than the past and also sets up a different configuration of obligations in the response to crime. No longer simply the objects of punishment, offenders are now primarily responsible for repairing the harm caused by their crimes. A restorative juvenile justice system makes sure the offender is held accountable for the damage and suffering caused to victims and victimized communities by supporting, facilitating, and enforcing reparative agreements. Crime victims and the community play critical roles in setting the terms of accountability and monitoring and supporting completion of obligations. Many prosecutors already acknowledge that meeting victim needs may require more than responding sensitively to victims when they are subpoenaed as witnesses for the state. they must also begin to understand that "communities" can also be victims of juvenile crime.

What Can Prosecutors Do?

Rethinking Sanctions

• In inner-city Pittsburgh, young offenders in an intensive day treatment program solicit input from community organizations about service projects the organizations would like to see completed in the neighborhood. The offenders then work with community residents on projects that include home repair and gardening for the elderly, voter registration drives, painting homes and public buildings, and planting and cultivating community gardens.
  
  
• In cities and towns in Pennsylvania, Montana and Minnesota, offenders, crime victims, family members and other citizens acquainted with them gather to determine what should be done in response to an offense. These family group conferences are aimed at ensuring that offenders are made to hear community disapproval of their behavior and apologize to the victim, and that an "agreement" for repairing the damages to victim and community is developed.

Rethinking Public Safety

• Community police officers in Boston, Pompano Beach, Florida and other jurisdictions work collaboratively with probation officers to monitor youth on probation and aftercare supervision during evening hours in high-risk neighborhoods. In the process, some officers develop their own mentoring and prevention programs.
  
  
• In several Minnesota towns, juvenile police officers train school personnel in family group conferencing techniques for resolving school disputes without recourse to courts. In several Oregon towns, probation officers provide parenting classes in schools and train teachers in anger management techniques.

Prosecutors represent the state. They are also uniquely poised to represent the interests of crime victims and their communities. The task of community-building is not an easy one and it is sometimes difficult to define "community." Yet, as Austin, TX District Attorney Ronald Earle suggests, public safety may depend on the justice system building and strengthening communities because "there is no public safety without peace, there is no peace without justice, and there is no justice without community. Community means the network of relationships that share joy and pain." Finding and strengthening these networks is the key to building safer communities, and is at the core of a balanced and restorative justice response to crime.

To find out more:

Read:

Balanced and Restorative Justice for Juveniles, A Framework for Juvenile Justice in the 21st Century, joint publication by University of Minnesota and Florida Atlantic University, August 1997. To order a copy call OJJDP at (800) 638-8736, or email askncjrs@ncrjs.org.

Balanced and Restorative Justice in Pennsylvania: A New Mission and Changing Roles within the Juvenile Justice System, published by Juvenile Court Judges' Commission, March 1997. Call (717) 787-6910 for a copy.

"Restorative Juvenile Justice, Maryland's Legislature Reaffirms Commitment to Juvenile Justice Reform," in Corrections Today, December 1997. Call APRI at (703) 518-4386 for a copy.

Attend:

Second Annual International Conference on Restorative Justice for Juveniles, November 7-9, 1998, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where various components of restorative justice for juveniles, such as research, policy, and practice, will be examined. Call the Community Justice Institute at (954) 762-5668 for more information.

Contact:

Community Justice Institute at (954) 762-5668 or email dclark@fau.edu Center for Restorative Justice & Mediation at (612) 624-4923 or email ctr4rjm@che2.che.umn.edu The Restorative Justice Institute at (703) 404-1246 or (904) 424-9200.

American Prosecutors Research Institute (APRI)
99 Canal Center Plaza, Suite 510
Alexandria, VA 22314

(703) 518-4386

juvenilejustice@ndaa-apri.org

Gordon Bazemore is a Criminal Justice Professor at Florida Atlantic University, Fort Lauderdale, FL. The Balanced and Restorative Justice Project is supported by a grant from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). It is a joint project of the Center for Restorative Justice & Mediation at the University of Minnesota and the Community Justice Institute at Florida Atlantic University.