Offenders to face victims

[andrewducker]

This is a fantastic idea (in certain circumstances). It should help both victims and perpetrators to move on.

People who commit crimes could avoid prosecution if they agree to face-to-face meetings with their victims and see the impact of their offences, it has been suggested.

Both victims and offenders would have to consent to taking part in the scheme with the perpetrator admitting to the offence.

Restorative justice has so far been confined largely to young offenders but will be stepped up to include more adult offenders, school bullies and anti-social hooligans.

Mr Blunkett said: "Restorative justice means victims can get an apology from their offender, but it is about more than 'saying sorry' - it provides the victim with an explanation of why the crime was committed.

"This is something a prison sentence on its own can never do and can enable victims to move on and carry on with their lives.

"It also means that for the first time offenders will be personally held to account for the crimes they have committed."

Comments

[allorin.livejournal.com]

"It also means that for the first time offenders will be personally held to account for the crimes they have committed."

Isn't that what a prison sentence means?

Personally, I think it's an awful idea. Let me see, prison sentence or meeting with victim, as a deterant to future crime.

Apologies don't make up for a crime.

[andrewducker]

And punishment doesn't tend to act as a detterant. At least not unless it's mixed in with other rehabilitation at the same time.

I'm not averse to punishment in addition to rehabilitation, but punishment by itself is just revenge, which doesn't make anything better.

[guyinahat.livejournal.com]

Punishment does act as a deterrent - it just isn't as effective as we would like it to be (but I doubt it could ever achieve that). Locking people up does other things also. For a start it physically protects the rest of us from them while they are locked up contemplating their actions. It is also a means by which society can demonstrate how seriously a crime is considered. If you don't make these statements there are repercussions.

Another element is supposed to be rehabilitation...

...which is the real problem. We are absolutely crap at rehabilitation of criminals. Instead they tend to get educated and indoctrinated into a worse kind of culture while inside.

[allorin.livejournal.com]

What he said.

I don't think the correction system is perfect (far from it), but it does keep criminals off the streets.

[andrewducker]

Keeping dangerous people off the streets is definitely a good thing. But unless you're going to lock them all up forever, you're going to have to do _something_ in there to make them not do it again.

And if you've got something that has that effect, and doesn't take long periods of time to do, then you can do it without the locking people up bit at all.

Some sort of middle ground will undoubtably be reached I'm sure. I'm just glad they're experimenting with different methods to see what works.

[wordofblake.livejournal.com]

I wouldnt really be interested in an apology or a deterrent. If someone hurt me I'd want vengeance.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Prison does nothing except teach inmates to be sociopaths and to learn how to be better criminals. The threat prison makes sense as a deterrent, but the logic of placing people in a hellish place and then expecting them to adapt back to society in some useful fashion after their release has always baffled me. If handled well, this program sounds like a wonderful option to punitive justice.

[allorin.livejournal.com]

Hey. I'm not really up to 'discussing' anything right now, but I just wanted to say I do sorta see what you're saying.

For me, it depends on the crime. I think murderers, rapists and child molesters should never be given the chance to reintegrate with society, so for them, jail works fine. IMHO, of course. And that was sorta who I was thinking about when I read that.

If you're talking, I don't know, robbery, or assault or something, then yeah, I guess prison doesn't solve anything. I mean, I can accept that first time offenders, who's crime is relatively small (don't ask me to measure what's small, and what isn't), deserve the chance not to do it again.

Continual abusers of the system though? What do you do if someone has no interest in being part of society?

[guyinahat.livejournal.com]

It's a good idea, but I think it would be better to have it as a form of rehabilitation in addition to other corrections rather than a substitution. Not all criminals are unaware of the reality of the harm they do - they just don't care, or think their need is more important. People can become desensitized to anything.

If I were a victim, I think I would like to confront the person who offended against me, but not at the expense of them doing time.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

I would actually quite have liked to know that Jeffrey Archer had to face up to Monica Coghlan and apologise to her.

If the point is to prevent someone from committing a crime again, bringing the victim and the criminal face-to-face can have remarkably good effects.

But it depends what you see the point of a criminal conviction as being. If it's to punish, you'll go in one direction. If it's to prevent the criminal from recividism, you'll go in another. I've been burgled and had an (attempted) mugging: I would rather prevention than punishment.

[andrewducker]

I'd rather have whatever works.

Imprisonment has a high recidivism rate, other techniques have lower ones.

Imprisonment seems to work well when it's used to prevent the person committing more crimes while they're "cured".

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, but works how?

I think from what you're saying you see conviction as an opportunity to "cure" (which isn't a word I particularly like), rather than as an opportunity to punish. And I agree with this - having been burgled, and (nearly) mugged, I'd a lot rather prevention than punishment, which seems futile.

But for a lot of people, they see conviction as an opportunity to punish, and rehabilition as a secondary purpose. Those who are not interested in rehabilitation will not see any value in this opportunity.

[andrewducker]

Works in that it lowers crime and makes a happier populace.

I don't like the idea of hurting people, but I'd be willing to see it done if it was an effective measure of reducing crime and making civilisations more, well, civilised.

I'm rather glad it isn't.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

I don't like the idea of hurting people, but I'd be willing to see it done if it was an effective measure of reducing crime and making civilisations more, well, civilised.

It would certainly raise some interesting moral questions about why we try to reduce crime at all, if not that it's wrong to hurt people.... of course, it already did, decades ago.

[andrewducker]

Yup. Lots of questions, with whole ranges of interesting answers.

I never, of course, made any claim about the rightness or wrongness of hurting people.

I did say what I did and didn't like.

Oh, except for the line "Keeping dangerous people off the streets is definitely a good thing." which is fairly inarguable. I could rephrase it in the form of a preference if you prefer.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

It would certainly raise some interesting moral questions about why we try to reduce crime at all, if not that it's wrong to hurt people

Well, as does inprisonment, actually: it's wrong to imprison people, for the most part. We do something to one group of people which is wrong when done to most people. We (as a society, I think) accept that removing the right to freedom of movement is OK, but we don't all agree that removing the right to live free from pain and torture is OK, no matter what the person's done.

I'm just sayin'...

[heron61.livejournal.com]

The question is works to what end? The question of what the justice system is attempting to achieve should come first and if handled in a reasonable fashion a variety of options would then be tested and the most effective used. The current system claims to be about reform, but (in the US at east, I know nothing of such things in other nations) it is solely about punishment and vengeance. I think the US system actually manages this fairly well. However, it is exceptionally poor at preventing people from committing additional crimes.

[wolflady26.livejournal.com]

I agree with some of the other posters, that it sounds like an excellent possibility to throw into the range of options available.

I don't think you can make a blanket statement like "this is a good thing for criminals" or "this is a bad thing for criminals," beause "criminals" aren't homogeneous. People commit different crimes, and they commit them for different reasons.

Case 1: A starving person picks the pocket of a very wealthy man, taking the cash from his wallet and leaving the other effects behind, where it is found by police and returned to the man.

Case 2: A drunk driver on his way home from a bar strikes and kills a young girl playing in the street.

Obviously, the second case will be much more prone to having an impact if the victim meets the grieving parents face-to-face. In the first case, what kind of effect will it have?

Punishment and rehabilitation should be twin goals, not an either-or thing. In both cases, I think the criminal should spend time in jail, but I wouldn't mind if, in the second case, the driver has the chance to reduce his sentence somewhat by spending time with the girl's parents, because this will probably have a big impact on him.

By the way, I don't think you can say that prison is not a deterrence. I think that, without taking away the possibility of jail, you can't compare how life would be without it. I think many people ARE deterred from minor crimes by the possibility of spending time in jail. I just think that some people are beyond deterrence, either because they are really desperate, or really sick, or really arrogant.

[andrewducker]

That's probably true - the people that go to jail obviously weren't deterred, but how many people have been?

And yes, it's definitely going to have to be a "right tool for the right job" approach.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

By the way, I don't think you can say that prison is not a deterrence. I think that, without taking away the possibility of jail, you can't compare how life would be without it.

But there are plenty of opportunities to compare situations where people have been given community service orders or whatever and people who've been sent to prison for comparable crimes. (And, as I recall, practically anything else has a lower recidivism rate.) Unless you meant that the threat of jail has to be there, which I agree with.

[andrewducker]

That's the problem - how do you threaten people with jail (which probably keeps down a fair bit of casual crime) while not sending people to jail (which doesn't stop them doing it again)?

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

Well, I think there are people who should not be on the streets while they work on their tendencies to commit crime - serial rapists, for example - and there are people who wouldn't agree to take part in restoratively-based programmes and therefore need other forms of punishment, and for them, jail needs to stay an option. So there would still be jails, though I think jail isn't incompatible with restorative justice; most of the meetings between murderers and their victims' families have taken place while the killer was in jail.

I'd interpret "restorative" pretty widely, by the way, to include restoration to communities as a whole, and taking part in education about communities that the person has targeted, as well as "meeting the victims". Whatever it takes to humanise the crime, really.

[wolflady26.livejournal.com]

Probably more productive is to ask how to change the jail system, so that it does prevent people from returning there.

Maybe more programs to help criminals receive real jobs after they are released. Maybe smaller prisons, more programs while the criminals are in jail to show them other possibilites than crime, more education, etc.

But the problems aren't easy to solve. I mean, maybe it would help ex-prisoners to integrate back into society better, if no one was told that they spent time in jail. But then again, would you really want to have to hire people with no idea if they have a prison record or not?

Smaller, more frequent prisons would mean more communities would have prisons near them, and many people don't want that.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

People in the UK already have the right not to disclose some "spent" convictions, ones which were of a certain seriousness and which took place a certain length of time ago. That's fine with me, actually, though in practice it means applicants who've been in prison have big gaps to account for somehow. But, yeah, I really wouldn't want to know if someone I was considering for employment had a conviction. I'd want to know if they were still considered a risk, but otherwise: no.

[wolflady26.livejournal.com]

But there are plenty of opportunities to compare situations where people have been given community service orders or whatever and people who've been sent to prison for comparable crimes

This would compare the liklihood of criminals committing a crime again. I am talking about deterring people from committing crimes in the first place. Like, I might really, really want to punch out that guy insulting me in the bar, but the liklihood of getting caught and thrown in prison, and the attendant negative associations thrown on me (including making it harder to find a job in the future, etc.) is just too high to be worth it.

Sure, some people will cave in and just punch the guy, but many others will resist because of the deterrence of going to prison.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

Cross-society comparisons? I know they're poorly controlled, but punishment regimes are sufficiently different between moderately comparable countries to make it worth at least a casual look.

Also, I suppose, comparing "those who do" with "those who don't" and asking what the factors in the decision were, and controlling for known risk factors (gender, income etc.).

[autodidactic.livejournal.com]

Dude, as long as they're not making kids have to face their rapists, I'm okay with it.

A.

[wolflady26.livejournal.com]

Well...maybe if they were allowed to face them with baseball bats in hand....

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

I'd actually be very much up for facing the guy who assaulted me when I was a teenager: no baseball bat, just an interpreter and as much time as I wanted to explain what he did and what it meant. Yes, not made to, and I'm no longer a kid, but it's not out of the question. Perhaps an offender speaking to a volunteer who was the victim of the same type of crime? That's what I meant when I was wittering about broader concepts of restorative justice, actually: the aims are for the offender to understand what they did, and the victim to know that they know and that they accept responsibility. There's a few different ways to do that, and face-to-face is one of them.

[derumi.livejournal.com]

Are they going to do this with necrophiliacs and animal-buggerers too?