It’s only a few weeks until the general election and, as always at general election time, there are opportunities now and in the next couple of months to promote new ideas that could reshape the policy environment. This will be harder to achieve once the daily grind of government sets in for whichever party or parties are successful in May.
The exhibition, Never throw out anyone, opens today at City Hall, London. It shows the restorative community reparation work done by young people who have offended and been supported by youth offending services across London and the Surrey Youth Support Service.
The latest evaluation of the youth conferencing restorative justice process in Northern Ireland has confirmed what previous studies have shown: that restorative justice is an effective way to deal with youth offending.
An evaluation of the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) restorative justice capacity building programme has been published. The 27 month programme, delivered by Restorative Solutions, aimed to increase provision of restorative justice within the prison and probation service through a large training programme for staff.
I’ve been working for the RJC for almost a year now and there’s one question that I’ve been asked more often than any other in that time, by everyone from members of my family to members of parliament: ‘What is restorative justice?’
For somebody like me, immersed in the justice system, giving a long, detailed and highly technical answer is the easy way out. I can describe the minutiae with the best of them. But that approach won’t work with people who are, let’s face it, just being polite.
The Restorative Justice Council (RJC) has launched the fourth in a series of information packs designed to help increase the use of restorative justice within the criminal justice system. The Restorative justice information pack for Community Rehabilitation Companies and the National Probation Service was developed in collaboration with key people in the probation field and provides information on the delivery of high quality restorative justice within the new probation landscape.
The RJC has published an information pack to raise awareness of restorative justice among magistrates. The pack has been developed with the help of the Magistrates’ Association, the Ministry of Justice and Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service. It provides an overview of key information magistrates need to know regarding restorative justice.
The Restorative Justice Council has published four information packs to help criminal justice professionals to make greater use of restorative justice within their work.
