Restorative justice

• Restorative justice emphasises the need of the victim to be involved in the process of restoring the offender to society.

  It identifies the needs of the state of victims and the needs of the victims.
• In this, offenders come face to face with their victims as an alternative or in addition to custodial sentencing.

  Here the offender accepts responsibility of their actions, which poses less emphasis on punishment.

  This occurs in a supervised meeting with a trained mediator, the survivor confronts and explains the impacts of the incident and the offender then sees the consequences and emotional distress they have caused.
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  The benefits of this is that it has degrees of flexibility is that it can be some face to face or over the phone etc.

  The programme can also be tailored to the offender which results in it more likely to be successful as it all comes under the offender terms.

  Therefore this shows that it may be more appropriate than the likes of custodial sentencing.
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  Research support from Latimer ey al shows that recidivism is lower with Restorative Justice and both the victim and offender have higher satisfaction levels.

  This therefore demonstrates how restorative justice compares favourably in comparison to the alternatives of custodial sentencing.
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  The issues of restorative justice is that it requires active participation and therefore is not suitable for all types of criminal cases for example cases of domestic violence or sexual offences.

  This results in the victim not wanting to engage with the offender and it makes it so that restorative justice is impossible and useless.

  Therefore this shows that restorative justice may just not be useful and some cases and this limits it‘s effectiveness.
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  Restorative justice requires skilled and experienced mediators which is likely to be expensive.

  However if restorative justice leads to lower recidivism rate compared to custodial sentencing it is more cost effective in the long term.

  Therefore although it’s more expensive it’s more beneficial to deal with offending behaviour long term.