Argumentos e hipótesis:

Recidivism—or offenders reoffending—is an exclusively offender outcome in restorative justice. The programs evaluated here, which included findings on recidivism, were programs which either were created in order to evaluate restorative justice or which were already in existence. The advantage of restorative justice programs which are built for evaluation is, of course, that researchers can control how offenders end up in restorative justice. Three studies reviewed here, for example, sent offenders to either restorative justice or court from the moment the offenders entered the justice system. Two of these studies, the Reintegrative Shaming Experiment (RISE) in Canberra, Australia (Sherman et al, 2000) and the Justice Research Consortium scheme in London (Shapland et al, 2004, 2008, 2011) were RCTs, and a third police RJ scheme in Bethlehem, PA had many elements of an RCT (McCold and and Wachtel, 1998; McCold, 2003; and Hayes, 2005). Other programmes have compared RJ offenders to court offenders by matching them on various variables (Hayes and Daly, 2003; Hayes and Daly, 2004; Rodriguez, 2007; Luke and Lind, 2002; Maxwell et al, 2004; Bergseth and Bouffard, 2007; Shapland et al, 2008: Shapland et al, 2011, etc) while one study reported recidivism figures without explaining the methodology behind them (Moore and O'Connell, 1994).

72 Next, views on how to research recidivism differs from study to study (Hayes, 2005; Hayes and Daly, 2004). These differences may make comparing outcomes across these studies problematic. In the studies reviewed below, for example, the data collected on recidivism may count any and all arrests by participants (Hayes and Daly, 2004: 172), or it may count convictions (Shapland et al, 2008: 11). Follow-up times, in turn, range from one year (McCold and Wachtel, 1998); 2 years (Rodriguez, 2007; Shapland et al, 2008); 2-3 years (Luke and Lind, 2002); 3-5 years (Hayes and Daly, 2004); and 4 years (Bergseth and Bouffard, 2007).

Similarly, the offenders who took part in RJ in these studies are not the same. In the studies reviewed, some programs offer restorative justice for minor types of violence and theft (McCold, 2003) while others allow for a mix of high and low level offences (Chatterjee and Elliott, 2003, Daly, 2008) or even include offences that are not considered ‘crimes’ per say (O’Mahony and Doak, 2004). Some programs only offer restorative justice to offenders with no past convictions (McCold, 2003) while others include a range of offenders with diverse criminal pasts (Chatterjee and Elliott, 2003, Rodriguez, 2007, Bergseth and Bouffard, 2007).

Finally, something to keep in mind while gathering ‘evidence’ as to which programs achieved the best recidivism outcomes with offenders, is that although they are all conferencing programs, some differ in terms of who is involved during the conferences. While many of the programs run conferences for offenders, victims, and members of the community, others offer a type of restorative justice ‘conference’ where offenders only meet with a police officer (see O’Mahony and Doak, 2004) or meet with ‘victims’ who was a member of the organization offended against or an individual who has been victimised in a similar fashion but not connected to the offence RJ’d (see Miers et al, 2001; Bergseth and Bouffard, 2007; McCold and Wachtel, 1998; O’Mahony and Doak, 2004, etc). These ‘other’ victim-offender RJ scenarios actually seem common in police RJ. The Bethlehem, PA conferencing scheme for example, which will be discussed on several occasions in this chapter as achieving fairly good outcomes, in reality only had offenders and victims meet in 23% of the cases (McCold and Wachtel, 1998: 29).

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Offenders

Keeping in mind the issues above, several studies on police RJ have shown lowered recidivism for offenders after participating (Bergseth and Bouffard, 2007, Sherman and Strang, 2007, McCold and Wachtel, 1998, Hayes, 2005, Moore and O'Connell, 1994, Hayes and Daly, 2004, Rodriguez, 2007, Luke and Lind, 2002, Hoyle et al., 2002, Miers et al., 2001, Latimer et al., 2005, Shapland et al., 2011, Shapland et al., 2008).

Although these results have sometimes been explained as being due to offence type in RJ (Sherman and Strang, 2007; Sherman et al, 2000; McCold and Wachtel, 1998), the findings are contradictory. An RCT in Canberra, Australia, for example, where offenders were followed up for up to a year, found that recidivism was lower for RJ offenders who committed violent offences (Sherman et al, 2000). The same, however, was not true for offenders who committed property offences or driving while intoxicated offences, leading the authors to conclude that “restorative justice affects offenders charged with different kinds of offences differently” (Sherman et al, 2000:15). Similar successes involving violent offences was found in the quasi RCT in Bethlehem, PA for young offenders with no previous convictions (McCold and Wachtel, 1998; Hayes, 2005). Like Sherman et al (2000), McCold and Wachtel (1998), did not discover an impact for property offenders, leading them to believe that “conferencing affects recidivism by resolving conflict between disputing parties rather than any reduction in recidivism from an offender rehabilitation effect” (McCold and Wachtel, 1998: 78). While this might lead us to hypothesise that violent offending is best suited for RJ (see, for example Sherman and Strang, 2007), a handful of other programs have also found lowered recidivism for acquisitive offences (Luke and Lind, 2002; Bergseth and Bouffard, 2007). This included a New Zealand study involving youth with no previous convictions (Luke and Lind, 2002: 8), and a US study involving young offenders who had committed a range of former offences (Bergseth and Bouffard, 2007).

Likewise, the outcomes of the studies suggest that the age of RJ offenders does not seem to matter in terms of lowering recidivism. While many of the studies here only involve youth, a major study of RJ programs in the UK described as “primarily for adult offenders” including “persistent offenders with many previous convictions,” (Shapland et al, 2011: 35, 166) thus traditionally individuals who might be screened out of police

74 RJ schemes (Shapland et al, 2011), found differences in recidivism in all three programmes after a two year follow-up (Shapland et al, 2011: 170). The programs were composed of one RCT and the others relied on matches samples (Shapland et al, 2008: Shapland et al, 2004).

However, despite these ‘successes,’ there are plenty programs which have no or minor significant differences in recidivism. Among these was an evaluation by the Home Office of seven RJ programs serving a mixture of young and adult offenders (Miers et al, 2001). A conclusion from that evaluation was that rather than offence type, it was the type of offender who mattered. RJ might be “less successful with those offenders who are in the highest risk categories for reconviction” (Miers et al, 2001: 46). The same has been found in programs only dealing with youth (Hayes and Daly, 2004, Rodriguez, 2007), especially child offenders whose early offending may be indicative of deeper behavioural problems (Hayes and Daly, 2004: 177) (i.e. see also Moffitt, 1993’s description of ‘life-course persistent’ and ‘adolescent-limited’ offenders as discussed in the first chapter).

Other suggestions for reasons why some programs succeed in lowering recidivism and others do not, include ideas that some cases are simply more appropriate for communication-type interventions (McCold and Wachtel, 1998:78 and Hayes, 2005:92) or that the emphasis/lack of emphasis of specific key components in RJ might make a difference (Hayes and Daly, 2003, Shapland et al., 2008); however, the latter explanation has been offered with caveats (Hayes and Daly, 2004). Hayes and Daly (2003: 748), for example, found that “when young people show remorse in the conference, the odds of reoffending are reduced by about a third, and when outcome decisions are arrived at by genuine consensus, the odds of re-offending are reduced by about a quarter.” As a slight contradiction, Hayes and Daly (2003), found that “whether offenders offered an apology or agreed to other outcomes (such as direct restitution, work for victims, community work, commitment not to-reoffend” did not lead to reductions in offending (Hayes and Daly, 2003: 178). This, however, might have to do with the sincerity of apologies made by offenders in conferences. As research by O’Mahony and Doak (2004:13) has demonstrated, police facilitators have been noted to force apologies, which means such apologies would not be an indication of

75 “remorse”, if that is part of what might encourage less offending in the future (Hayes and Daly, 2004:748).

Young female offenders

As chapter two illustrated, women as offenders might not be frequent participants in restorative justice (Daly, 1996 in Daly and Stubbs, 2006). In the studies reviewed in this chapter, which describe participation by gender, the percentages of women who participate as offenders include 15% (Maxwell et al, 2004); 16% (Hayes and Daly, 2004); 20% (Luke and Lind, 2002); 22-23% (O’Mahony and Doak, 2004); 24% (Hayes and Daly, 2003); 29.5% (Berseth and Bouffard, 2007); 38-40% (Rodriguez, 2007) and 47% (McCold and Wachtel, 1998). Some studies, however, do not mention the gender breakdown of participants at all (Chatterjee, August 10 2010, Chatterjee and Elliott, 2003, Moore and O'Connell, 1994, Sherman et al., 2000). The previous chapter pointed to research by Daly (1996) (cited in Daly and Stubbs, 2006) and commentary by Braithwaite (1999:99) who illustrated that women were “influential” participants in restorative justice but often fulfilled roles as support persons (Daly and Stubbs, 2006, Braithwaite, 1999). A failure to break down recidivism data by gender (Elis, 2005), however, suggests that women—and young women—are still not a major part of the criminological discussion in restorative justice. As the sections below on ‘satisfaction’ and transformation’ will illustrate many methodologies treat offenders as a group rather than separating them out by gender (Elis, 2005; Daly and Stubbs, 2006) (with the exceptions being those studies, which report female recidivism, naturally).

A few studies, however, have found that RJ may work especially well in helping young women desist (Rodriguez, 2007, Hayes, 2005, Hayes and Daly, 2004, Sherman and Strang, 2007). In secondary analysis of the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania dataset, Hayes (2005) found that young women offenders “had an estimated rated of survival significantly higher than for male offenders attending a conference…However, there were no differences in estimated rates of reoffending for male and females who were processed normally” (Hayes, 2005: 94). Similar findings were echoed by Rodriguez (2007: 369) on a second American sample, matched with court attendees, leading her to conclude that “girls in the restorative justice program had a lower probability of recidivating than girls in the comparison group (19.5% versus 29.2%)”. Sherman and Strang (2007: 68) in their review of 26 restorative justice programs pointed to a sharp

76 reduction in young women’s violent offending in Northumbria after RJ. Shapland (2008:20), however, took issue with Sherman et al’s findings by suggesting that it was their method of analysis (in part due to a follow-up of only one year) which caused the differences rather than an actual reduction in offending.

Sherman et al (2008: 48-49) have suggested that while these figures are interesting, “until the restorative justice agenda includes separate experiments designed from the outset to be 100% female samples, not much more can be said based on research.” This, therefore, suggests that this is a gap in the research that warrants not only further quantitative study but also qualitative study, as suggested by Hayes and Daly (2004) and Daly and Stubbs (2006). As Maxwell et al (2004: 15), for example, along with Miers et al (2001) and Hoyle et al (2002) have suggested, “events subsequent to the conferences” are a crucial part of the narrative as well in order to understand whether restorative justice—or something else outside of, or as a result of, restorative justice— helps bring about desistance.