ADR in Criminal Justice: Restorative Justice for Minor Offenses

Abstract

Restorative justice (RJ), a form of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) with an orienting belief towards creating a form of repair by means of dialogue between victims, offenders and affected communities has attracted a resurgence of attention with respect to the over-criminalization and over-catlectric dockets that typify many modern criminal justice systems. This essay discusses the potential and restriction of implementing the process of restorative justice to minor crimes. It establishes restorative justice in the framework of international policy-making, namely in the form of the United Nations Basic Principles and further on UNODC guidance, and then evaluates empirical data on victim outcomes, offender responsibility, and recidivism. The recent meta-analyses and program evaluations have shown mostly positive results in terms of victim satisfaction and psychological recovery, with inconclusive but promising results of recidivism reduction with well-implemented and targeted programs. Reliant on comparative practice (especially youth family-group conferencing in New Zealand and community conferencing models in various common-law jurisdictions) and on emergent scholarly analysis of the informal restorative practices of Pakistan, the paper suggests several legal and institutional preconditions of successful RJ introduction in minor-crime pathways: effective statutory provision, protection against voluntariness and power imbalance, trained facilitator, prosecutorial triage systems, and strong monitoring and evaluation. It ends with policy suggestions of piloting RJ in stream of minor offences whilst guarding the right to due-process- they contend that restorative options can alleviate the burden of procedure and better accommodate victims and low-risk offenders provided the efforts are undertaken with legal protection and empirical controls.