left realism - ReviseSociology

What is restorative justice and does it work?

Restorative Justice encompasses victim-offender mediation, family group conferences, and sentencing circles, emphasizing core values and ethical principles. It promotes lay encounters, narrative expression, and ritual dynamics, empowering communities and promoting emotional restoration. The approach aligns with principles of fairness, accountability, and empowerment and has shown promise in reducing reoffending rates.

Restorative Justice includes activities such as victim-offender mediation, family group conferences, restorative conferences, sentencing circles and community reparation boards.

Defining restorative justice

Restorative justice has been defined as both a set of values and practices, but also as a set of processes and even outcomes. There is no agreement on how to define the concept.

The goal of restorative justice for those focusing on values is to ‘cement a common set of core values and ethics’ (Shapland 2014).

Others prefer to define restorative justice in more concrete terms, as a set of practices, as this makes it easier to research.

Home Office researcher Tony Marshall defines restorative justice as a process whereby all parties with a stake in a particular offence come together to resolve collectively how to deal with the aftermath of the offence and its implications for the future.

In this definition restorative justice is both a practice, as people come together, and it includes a forward looking element. It is also a process involving dialogue, and an outcome, people agreeing on what should be done to repair the harm done by the offence.

Including an outcome as part of a definition is a problem because this means the definition may not be inclusive enough. For example in some restorative practices the victims may not consent to the outcomes.

A more useful definition may thus be provided by Daly (2016)…

“Restorative justice is a contemporary justice mechanism to address crime, disputes, and bounded community conflict. The mechanism is a meeting (or several meetings) of affected individuals, facilitated by one or more impartial people. Meetings can take place at all phases of the criminal process, pre-arrest, diversion from court, pre-sentence, and post-sentence, as well as for offending or conflicts not reported to the police. Specific practices will vary, depending on context, but are guided by rules and procedures that align with what is appropriate in the context of the crime, dispute, or bounded conflict.”

This definition is a practice and a process but not a value or an outcome. The core elements in this definition are

Lay encounters
Expresses narratives

Ritual dynamics

Lay encounters

Restorative Justice practices empower lay people – victims, families, friends and community members – to actively participate in the process.

This stands in contrast to traditional justice mechanisms in industrial societies, Usually the State takes control of justice through professional bureaucracies, denying communities any say in the process.

It is a bottom-up encounter where lay people interact to address the specific impacts of a particular criminal offence or conflict. The main forms this encounter can take include victim-offender mediation, family group conferencing and circle sentencing.

Victim-offender mediation, found in North America and Europe, involves an encounter between victim and offender, convened by a neutral third party facilitator.

Family group conferencing, mainly found in New Zealand and Australia, involves a larger circle: victims, offenders and direct stakeholders such as family, friends and respected community members.

Circle sentencing, usually found in North America, Australia and New Zealand is normally embedded within communities. It is especially common among First Nations peoples and includes the offender, victims, community elders, justices and other criminal justice officials.

While community members are involved, so are professionals such as facilitators, social workers, the police and probation officers.

Narrative Expression

Restorative Justice allows victims and offenders to tell their stories in their own words. It involves the development of a narrative that articulates the voices of lay people. Most encounters involve a carefully designed and managed script. As a bare minimum this process of narrative expression should involve:

The facilitator asks the offender to describe the events leading up to the offence and the details of it.
Then the victim and other participants speak about they have been affected
The facilitator asks the offender how they have been affected and what they have heard.

The expression of emotion is central to the restorative justice process and two narratives emerge: harm and accountability.

The narrative of harm emerges that allows victims to articulate the impact of the offence in their own words.

The narrative of accountability allows the offender to accept responsibility and express remorse

This is very different to the ‘hegemonic tales’ that dominate in courtroom interactions (Ewick and Silbey, 1995).

Victims may be allowed to speak in court, often through a victim statement, but this isn’t the same as a narrative that is co-produced and negotiated.

Offenders and other people are usually excluded from speaking. When they do they are obliged to speak in the alien formal language of the court.

Ritual Dynamics

It is widely acknowledged by sociologists and anthropologists that rituals play an important role in social life. (Durkheim 1995, Douglas 1984). As Durkheim pointed out over a century ago, rituals are important as they help people to make sense of a society’s collective values and give structure to otherwise shapeless social events. Rituals also provide social solidarity and help sustain a belief in a moral order.

Criminologists have noted that most criminal justice systems have developed increasingly sophisticated ‘degradation rituals’ to mark the guilt and punishment of an offender (Garfkinkel 1956). However, unlike other social institutions, criminal justice fails to provide corresponding ‘reintegrative rituals’. Restorative Justice allows for the performance of these reintegrative rituals.

The aspects of restorative justice rituals that make them unique are staging, choreography, casting, scripting and symbols.

There are clear physical boundaries: participants usually sit in a circle with no hierarchy. There is a clear delineation between who is part of the circle and who is an outsider. This sets it apart from the adversarial settings of a court.
Facilitators make an effort to design a seating arrangement that supports vulnerable parties and maximises interaction.
Effort goes into encouraging a ‘community of care.’

The process usually encourages some kind of agreement that reflects the consensus reached. The steps the offenders are to make to right the harms they have done are usually written down and signed by all present.

There will be variation in restorative justice processes. They will vary depending on the nature of the offence and who is involved.

Restorative values, principles and standards

Braithwaite (2008) distinguished between procedural standards and outcome standards.

Constraining standards

Constraining standards include empowerment, non-domination and accountability. These must be honoured as ‘fundamental procedural safeguards’.

Maximising standards

Maximising standards include restoration of relationships, emotional restoration, and the prevention of future injustice, usually interpreted as a reduction in offending. Maximising standards are conditional on the desires and capabilities of the parties.

Emergent standards

Emergent standards include remorse, apology, censure of act, forgiveness and mercy. These can only emerge organically, they can’t really be actively encouraged like maximising standards. For instance, a victim of crime should never be required to express forgiveness just an offender should never be compelled to show remorse, as this would violate the constraining standards of non-domination and empowerment.

Visually, constraining standards would be at the basis of a pyramid, they form the basis on which any restorative justice encounter is built upon..

Restorative Justice mechanisms are ritual dynamics, lay encounters and expressive narratives.

Depending on the dynamics in a session, maximising standards may be encouraged and emergent standards may emerge.

Braithwaite (2022) has argued that both crime and justice can be experienced as forms of domination. He sets out a theory of justice that is based on freedom as foundational in the fight against domination.

This concept of freedom here is located within a republican conception that is respectful, inclusive and intolerant to all forms of domination.

Restorative Justice values also reflect a deeply relational way of doing justice. This reflects a long history of indigenous and feminist ways of seeing and knowing the world. This takes as a starting point that we live in relations with others, and transforming these, both on a micro and macro level is central.

Explanatory theories of how restorative justice works

A number of criminological theories attempt to account for some of the claims made by restorative justice advocates. The three main theories are:

Shame theories
Procedural Justice Theory

Ritual theories.

Shame theories

Shame is the central emotion around which restorative justice is built. Braithwaite’s reintegrative shaming theory is the most well-known theoretical foundation for restorative justice.

In his groundbreaking Crime, Shame and Reintegration (1989) Braithwaite makes the distinction between stigmatic and reintegrative shaming.

Braithwaite demonstrates that most criminal justice processes shame both the act and the offender. This effectively ostracises the offender from the community making it difficult for them to reconnect.

Reintegrative shaming however shames the act but allows the offender a chance to express remorse and be welcomed back into the community.

Reintegrative shaming allows for a community to strengthen social bonds and allows remorse, apology, mercy and forgiveness to emerge.

Scheff and Retzinger (1991) have suggested that shame is a repressed emotion in contemporary society. Thus we are often ashamed about feeling shame. If an offender is ashamed about committing a crime he will feel worse because of the shame about feeling ashamed. This can lead to further aggression, violence and general dysfunctional behaviour.

Restorative Justice may work because it allows for both the offender and victims to express their shame, to openly feel it, and work through this, thus breaking the above negative cycle.

Procedural justice theory

Respect lies at the heart of procedural justice theory. If citizens feel that their treatment at the hands of authority figures is fair, inclusive and respectful, they are more likely to obey the law.

Defiance can result in a rejection of the law and future offending when an offender views a sanction as illegitimate, has weak bonds to the sanctioning agent, or denies his or her shame in an offence. Deterrence, on the other hand, is more likely if the sanctions are regarded as legitimate, offenders express shame for their actions and they have strong bonds to mainstream society.

The voluntary nature, deliberative structure and encouragement of stakeholder participation in restorative justice can lead to increased perceptions of fairness, legitimacy and social bonding (Tyler 2006).

Ritual theories

Ritual theories argue that one’s sense of morals, community bonds, and the self are a function of the rituals in which one partakes, both sacred and profane.

The restorative justice ritual brings together victims and offenders, their emotions, and their stories to produce solidarity and other conciliatory emotions. (Rosner 2013).

When bringing people together in a face-to-face encounter with clear barriers to outsiders and a shared focus of attention, a certain rhythm will build up between participants as they become more in sync with each other’s emotions and perspectives. This rhythm leads to entrainment – people are focused on and feel connected to each other akin to Durkheim’s notion of collective effervescence. Solidarity and shared emotion may then be demonstrated through expression of apology and forgiveness and symbolic integration through handshakes, eye contact and hugs.

This is a particularly striking type of ritual when one considers the asymmetrical degradation rituals of Court.

Bolitho (2017) draws on the concept of memory reconsolidation to explore how restorative justice can help victims. Through the ritualised act of telling one’s story within the supportive and structured confines of restorative justice circles a victim may rewrite a harmful emotional memory substituting it with the positive emotions experienced during the restorative encounters.

Empirical research on restorative justice

Restorative justice has been subjected to an enormous amount of empirical research, perhaps more than any other criminal justice innovation in recent history. More recent studies draw on randomised control trials.

Participant experiences with restorative justice

Research suggests that respect, accountability, empowerment, non-domination, apology and forgiveness are experienced on average in greater quantities by participants in restorative justice conferences compared to those whose cases end up in traditional courts.

Both offenders and victims perceive restorative justice as a more satisfying and legitimate process than that which is offered in the courtroom. Offenders who participate in restorative justice have a better understanding of what is happening, are more actively involved with their case and are more likely to report that they are treated with respect and fairness. Restorative justice conferences can also result in a higher frequency and amount of restitution paid to victims.

In a comprehensive study of restorative justice for British offenders Chaplin and colleagues (2007) reported that the large majority of victims and offenders found the process to be useful, felt a sense of closure and were more satisfied with their procedures and those who went to court. Notably those whose offences were more serious were significantly more likely to find their conferences useful compared to those who committed less serious offences.

Research from Australia examining the role of shame in restorative justice reports that offenders who participate in conferences experienced both reintegrative and stigmatic shame in higher quantities than offenders who go to court.

Healing victims

Victims who meet their offender and receive an apology are more forgiving, feel more sympathetic towards the offender and are less likely to desire physical revenge. Paulsons (2003) early review of restorative justice illustrates a range of positive psychological outcomes for victims.

Randomised trials in Great Britain provide strong evidence of increased well-being for victims who meet with their offender compared to victims who do not.

A minority of victims and offenders feel worse after a conference specifically when they reported not being involved or disrespected.

A minority of participants that were unhappy with their conference pointed to instances where they felt they were not being taken seriously or where they felt uninformed or not Included. When victims are unhappy with their experience it is often when they feel little attention has been paid to the process and most of the focus is on developing suitable outcomes for the offender.

Reoffending

The best research on restorative Justice and reoffending shows a modest but consistent positive effect on recidivism reduction. However much research on restorative justice and recidivism has been hindered by the lack of an adequate comparison groupS, little statistical power or other methodological issues.

Early reviews of the evidence on restorative justice resulted in cautiously optimistic conclusions about its effectiveness (Braithwaite 2002).

All studies conclude that restorative justice, compared to court, results in a modest reduction in offending. There is also a secondary benefit of a reduction in the desire for revenge by victims, possibly resulting in a reduction in revenge crimes.

Strang et al (2013) report on a systematic review of the most rigorous randomised control trials. This analysis indicated restorative justice may be more effective for violent crime than for property crime and for adults rather than for young offenders.

There is also evidence that Restorative Justice is cost effective compared to court.

Not all RJ conferences are the same. It is more likely to be successful when…

offenders are remorseful.
an outcome was agreed by consensus.

when offenders report it has been useful in helping them realise the harm their offences had done.
Also high intensity emotional conferences result in a greater reduction in reoffending.

One needs to be careful about generalising from the findings on restorative justice and realise it only works when done well, however such settings are difficult to replicate!

The Future of Restorative Justice

The United Kingdom government has committed to invest millions of pounds in restorative justice processes. However a 2020 review found that only 5.5% of victims were offered the opportunity to meet their offender.

Lack of government investment aside, there is ground-up expansion, Braithwaite (2021) refers to restorative justice as a street level meta strategy, with initiatives springing up in many areas:

Sexual violence

Hate crime
Environmental harm
Declaration and the movement for racial justice.

Potential barriers to the evolution of restorative justice

Restorative justice needs support, it’s been ‘about to take off’ since the 1980s.

We need to keep evaluating it as it expands. It doesn’t work all the time. Hurdles need to be overcome for it to be successful.

There is a tension between institutionalising community justice which may undermine its spirit!

This material is mainly relevant to the crime and deviance module.

Restorative Justice is most closely associated with Left Realism.

This post was written using the Oxford Criminology Handbook (2015) Liebling et al.

How successful are early interventions in reducing violent crime?

Early interventions with young offenders (or with those deemed to be at risk of offending) are one of the preferred methods of controlling crime by Left Realists.

Early interventions involve taking a multi-agency approach to give extra support and guidance to young offenders (or prospective offenders) involving the police, social services, education, employment and health services working together to offer young people extra support and guidance to ‘steer’ them away from crime.

The UK government has been funding several early intervention programmes for several years now and this recent parliament briefing from 2019 summarises some of the evidence of how successful some of these programmes have been in reducing violent crime.

Before getting into the evidence on solutions the report defines what it means by violent crime (it includes carrying a knife) and then looks at the factors correlated with people turning to crime.

What Type of People are More Likely to Commit Violent Crime?

Here the report cites evidence relating to two major factors:

Individual Risk factors – such as exposure to Adverse Childhood Experience (ACEs) for example domestic abuse, exclusion from school and poor mental health

Environmental Risk Factors such as coming from an area of social deprivation and have negative experiences with the police through stop and search, the later of which is especially correlated with being an ethnic minority.

Early Interventions to Prevent Crime

The report distinguishes between individual and environmental interventions. The later are focused on geographical areas

Individual Interventions to Prevent Crime

There are many one to one support services available to young people from a huge range of government and charitable institutions offering the following types of support:

Mentoring – in which a trustworthy adult guides a young person through the early stages of their life. However evidence of the effectiveness of mentoring to reduce crime is limited. One study of 350 programmes across England found a huge variety in the support structures, and while this can be successful if mentors are well trained in it for the long-term, it can also have negative effects on the mental health of both mentor and mentee.
Specialist Children’s Services – one example is where child support agencies find extra financial support for young people who have been victims of domestic abuse. One study found that this reduced offending rates from 25% to 7%.
The Troubled Families Programme – involved assigning a support worker to families whose children were statistically at risk from offending, with the aim of helping children make the most of local community and employment opportunities. The first phase ran with 120 000 families from 2012 to 2105 but an individual evaluation in 2016 found no evidence of this meeting its aims. As a result the second phase ramped up to 400 000 families, and I’ll blog later about how effective this was!

Mental Health Support – One interesting approach mentioned here is ‘Parent Infant Psychotherapy – helping parents with mental health issues develop a bond with their children can help reduce neglect and thus reduce crime later in life.

Environmental Interventions to Prevent Crime

Community interventions – Appropriate policing is mentioned here as one approach – such as increasing police visibility in high crime areas to reduce opportunities for crime.
School Based Interventions such as teaching children social, emotional and communication skills have shown a positive impact in reducing anti social behaviour and substance abuse, such as those offered by ‘Growing Against Violence’ which works in 600 London Schools. However, programmes involving fear tactics have proven less successful.

The public health approach -More than a decade ago the Scottish Crime Survey identified that more than 70% of crimes involved people being drunk, so the Scottish authorities developed measures to reduce alcohol consumption, and violent crime reduced every year between 2008 to 2018. This was a truly multi agency approach to reducing crime.

Relevance of this report to A-level sociology

This is a terrific update for evaluating Left Realist approaches to crime. The report seems to be balanced and notes mixed results in many of the interventions, though does seem to be generally positive about the positive impact these early interventions have had in reducing crime.

However from a methods point of view it is difficult to know whether crime would have reduced anyway, even without these interventions, and that is one of the main problems with long term interventions – it is difficult to isolate the independent effect they may have had on reducing crime!

The nationwide expansion of drug gangs

Drug gangs are expanding their operations from large city centres such as London, Birmingham and Manchester into smaller towns and rural areas. To do so they are using a new business model referred to as ‘county lines’ – dedicated mobile phone drug deal lines which local drug dealers in smaller towns can use to order drugs from the suppliers in the city centres. According to a recent report by the National Crime Agency, there are over 1000 established county line networks which are each capable of making profits of £800, 000 a year.

These lines are so profitable that gangs increasingly resort to violence to protect them, so this county line model of drug gang expansion probably goes a long way to explain the 50% increase in knife crime since 2015. In fact, a spike in knife crime in a small town or city is believed to be an indicator that a new drug line has been opened up.

How county lines work

Drug gangs in larger cities establish branded mobile phone lines using ‘burner phones’ which are disposable and anonymous, and these are then used to send out group messages to the local dealers around the country offering what drugs are for sale, which is mainly heroine and crack cocaine. Frequently there are special offers such as two for the price of one deals. The drugs are delivered by runners who also collect payment from the local dealers.

Children and drug lines

School-aged children, typically aged 15-17, but as young as 11, are usually used to deliver the drugs and collect payment. The charity Safer London estimates that 4000 children from London are involved. Sometimes these children might stay away in a drug-hub for an extended period, which is known as ‘going country’ or ‘going OT’ (out there).

The children recruited are usually vulnerable, having been excluded from school or from broken families, and many are drug users themselves. They are roped into the gangs by the lure of financial reward, or some might be debt bondage because of their drug habits. Once in, they are exposed to a violent lifestyle and effectively take all the risks for the upstream dealers.

NB – from a legal perspective, the use of children as drug mules now counts as child trafficking, so anyone caught being involved in this is likely to get a very lengthy spell in jail.

Cuckooing

A particularly insidious aspect of these drug networks is a process known as cuckooing…. Where a new local recruit’s house in a rural or coastal taken over by a drug dealer from one of the main centres and that house is turned into a local dealing hub, used to store and possibly manufacture drugs, and sell drugs.

One way this can escalate is that the local dealer is allowed to get into debt, and then has their house taken over as a means to repay this.

Such victims will often be drug addicts with mental health issues and are also likely to be in poverty.

Countering the problem of drug gangs and drug lines

This is an enormous problem, and its growing fast: 75% of police forces believed new lines had been opened up in 2017 and it’s estimated that the 1000 lines in existence are worth £500 million a year. With that kind of coverage and that amount of money involved, tackling this isn’t going to be easy!

A new National County Lines Coordination Unit has recently been established so the 43 police forces in England and Wales can easily share information, and the police are using anti trafficking and anti-slavery laws to punish the dealers.

In a week of raids in January police arrested 600 people and referred 600 children and 400 adults to safeguarding authorities. More than £200 000 in cash and 140 weapons were also seized.

Relevance to A-level sociology

This is obviously highly relevant to the crime and deviance specification. Probably the most obvious links are to right and left realism, and to my mind it’s a great example that proves the limitations of the right realist approach – the nature of this crime is that it’s hidden, and so right realist crime control techniques will probably be ineffective in controlling it.

It seems to offer support for left realism – relative deprivation and marginalisation are the root causes, and maybe addressing these are the only way we’re going to see a reduction in drug related crime in the future?

Sources

NCA 2018 report on drug gangs

NCA county lines report 2017

The Week, 9th Feb 2019

Why is Crime Increasing Again?

The latest crime figures show an increase in the overall number of crimes committed in England and Wales, for the year ending March 2018. The overall numbers of crimes have increased from approximately 5.8 million in 2016-17 to 6 million crimes in 2017-18 (excluding ‘computer misuse’).

While this may seem like a relatively small increase, this follows a 7 year downward trend in the overall crime rate. And if we drill down into different types of crime, we find that some crime categories have seen dramatic rises in recent years: Robbery is up 30%, and knife crime is up 16% for example.

These figures are taken from the Crime Survey of England and Wales, a victim survey which is widely regarded as having greater validity as a measure of crime compared to Police Recorded Crime Statistics.

As you might expect, the mainstream newspapers have been all over this. Typically the press blames the move away from more authoritarian forms of crime control associated with Right Realism and blames soft-touch Left Realist style policies for the increase in crime.

The Daily Mail has recently reported on how rural crime, as well as urban crime is spiraling out of control. The Sunday Telegraph has blamed the government’s ‘too soft’ approach to crime control, which focuses on rehabilitation rather than punishment. The Independent commented that the Tories might be blame for this increase in crime because they have cut funding to the police, resulting in fewer officers.

However, the theory that ‘soft touch’ approaches and fewer police officers may well be insufficient to explain why crime is increasing. For example, police numbers have been going down for years, while crime has also been going down:

The truth is probably more complex: it might just be that there are different causes of crime in different areas, and different causes of different crimes…. so perhaps we should steer clear of over-generalizing!

Left Realist Explanations for Ethnic Differences in Crime

Left Realists, Lea and Young suggest that ethnic minorities are disadvantaged in comparison with other groups in society, and this is especially true for young black males who have much higher levels of unemployment. In comparison with their peers from other ethnic groups, they are much less likely to be successful in the labour market and so suffer lower wages and thus higher levels of relative deprivation.

Young ethnic minority males are also more likely to experience marginalisation because they are under-represented at the highest levels of society, in government, political parties and trades unions for example.

Lea and young argue it would be surprising if there were not higher crime levels among those groups which experienced higher levels of deprivation and marginalisation.

Evaluating Left Realism

Read through the following two items, you should be able to find at least two reasons why Left Realism may be inadequate to explain the higher rates of offending by Black and Asian people.

Item A: Statistics on ethnicity and relative deprivation

Some ethnic minority groups experience higher levels of poverty than white people. According to the Labour Force Survey 2004/05 20% of White British households are in income poverty compared to 25% of Indian, 30% of Black Caribbean, 45% of Black African, 55% of Pakistani and 65% of Bangladeshi households.

In terms of social class, 42% of White British students are from homes in the top two social classes, compared to 37% of Black Caribbean, 36% of Black African, 29% of Indian, 19% of Pakistani and only 9% of Bangladeshi students.

Item B: The Home Office Affairs Committee 2006-7 Report on young black people and the criminal justice system

This recent report seems to offer broad support for Left Realism, but also suggests there are other factors which need to be taken into account in order to explain variations in patterns of offending by ethnicity…

Data gaps prevent us from building a comprehensive picture of young black people’s overrepresentation in the criminal justice system. However, the evidence we received suggests young black people are overrepresented as suspects for certain crimes such as robbery, drugs offences and—in some areas—firearms offences. Young black people are also more likely to be victims of violent crimes.

Some of our witnesses were concerned that the media distorts perceptions of young black people’s involvement in crime. Research commissioned by this Committee contradicted this view, indicating that most members of the public reject stereotyping as regards young black people’s involvement in crime.

Social exclusion is a key underlying cause of overrepresentation. Eighty per cent of Black African and Black Caribbean communities live in Neighbourhood Renewal Fund areas. Deprivation directly fuels involvement in some types of offence—such as acquisitive crime—and also has an important impact on educational achievement and the profile of the neighbourhood young people will live in. The level of school exclusions appears to be directly related to educational underachievement and both are linked to involvement in the criminal justice system. Witnesses also emphasised factors within black communities which help exacerbate disadvantage and fuel involvement in the criminal justice system.

They drew attention to a lack of father involvement and to other parenting issues. In the perceived absence of alternative routes to success, some young people also actively choose to emulate negative and violent lifestyles popularised in music and film. Criminal justice system factors play an important role in promoting overrepresentation.

There is some evidence to support allegations of direct or indirect discrimination in policing and the youth justice system. However, the perception as well as the reality of discrimination has an impact. Lack of confidence in the criminal justice system may mean some young black people take the law into their own hands or carry weapons in an attempt to distribute justice and ensure their own personal safety.