Quakers back restorative justice programmes
Friends work for more harmonious communities
Restorative Justice (RJ) has worked with young offenders in Northern Ireland and the Prison Reform Trust has statistics to prove it. Its report Making Amends: Restorative Youth Justice in Northern Ireland, launched last week, showed that only forty per cent of young offenders between the ages of ten and seventeen on RJ programmes committed further crimes within a year compared to seventy-one per cent of those sent to prison.
Kimmett Edgar, a Friend and the research manager at the PRT, told the Friend: ‘of course we need to be a bit cautious of headline figures – this was a self-selecting programme so it’s quite likely the ones who partook in the programme were less likely to reoffend. But that’s not to downplay what an immediate effect the programme has had both on victims and the community as a whole, all of which is shown in the reported satisfaction levels of everyone involved.’
Friends have long had a strong interest in restorative justice (RJ), and this report has been a boost for many of those involved. Friend Marian Liebmann is a consultant and trainer in RJ, detailed many pioneering Quaker projects to the Friend, including Nick McGeorge’s work with communities and antisocial behaviour in Southampton, community mediation and prison projects in Bristol, at least four peace education projects in schools across the country and one of Sheffield’s longest-standing RJ mediators.
‘This report is helpful,’ says Kimmett, ‘as this is an important time to be supporting RJ with the upcoming election meaning all the parties are keen to emphasise crime, punishment and justice. The sad thing is that they each try to be “tougher” than the others by promising to send most offenders to prison for the longest time.’ Both Kimmett and Marian say that the biggest problem facing proponents of RJ is right-wing newspapers driving the political agenda. ‘Politicians have a perception that the public think they’re soft’, says Marian, ‘when in fact this may just be an illusion created by newspaper headlines. But because of this, having come to power saying “we’ll do what works”, the politicians then do nothing of the sort.’
‘We’ve had to deal with things like the Press Association announcement on the successes in Northern Ireland’, says Kimmett, ‘which said: “Forcing Young Offenders To Apologise”, when of course there’s no compulsion in RJ and it can only work if it is voluntary on the part of both parties. Likewise the papers characterise it as “say sorry and you get off”, which trivialises it and ignores weeks of preparation, what the offender agrees to and the follow-through that ensures making amends.’
The arguments for RJ include not just its effectiveness but its relative cheapness. ‘The current government plans for prison expansion are costed at two billion pounds,’ says Kimmett, ‘not including the £40,000 a year per prisoner to keep them there, so it’s amazing they can’t find money for alternatives.’ Marian points to programmes like Liverpool’s Community Justice and the Restorative Justice Consortium, which struggle to keep public funding, and Mediation UK, which ‘has been allowed to die quietly’. ‘The problem is they don’t find money for co-ordination across the country’, she says, ‘even though it’s much more efficient to do that than funding a few small projects.’
Despite the success of the RJ work in Northern Ireland, there is no sign that any of the major parties are keen to expand RJ significantly in the rest of the UK. Kimmett says: ‘for Friends who have a hope for a more harmonious community, the most important thing to do now is to inform themselves about what RJ actually is, and to counter the false and harmful image of it that is currently propagated’.
For more information, or to download the full report, visit the Prison Reform Trust’s website.
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