Hennessey Duane Hayes

Assessing Reoffending in Restorative Justice Conferences

Abstract Restorative justice conferencing, in response to youthful offending, has grown in popularity around the world.While there is now substantial empirical evidence that shows offenders and victims are satisfied with outcomes and perceive the process as generally fair, available data on reoffending have produced mixed results. Uncertainty about how conferencing affects future offending may result from how reoffending is analysed. In this paper, I used survival analysis to reanalyse data from the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania Restorative Policing Experiment and assessed two methodological approaches: a standard comparative approach to examine differences in reoffending between offenders in conference and court and a variation analysis to examine differences in reoffending within conference and court groups. Comparative analyses showed that violent offenders referred to conference were less likely to reoffend compared to violent offenders referred to court. There were no differences in reoffending for property offenders in conference and in court. Variation analyses showed that female offenders attending conferences were less likely to reoffend than male offenders in conferences. There were no differences in reoffending for males and females in court. These results suggest that there is value in comparing the effects of traditional and restorative interventions, as well as assessing how variation within interventions is related to future offending.

Apologies and Accounts in Youth Justice Conferencing: Reinterpreting Research Outcomes 1

The literature on restorative justice is replete with findings showing that offenders and victims judge restorative processes as fair and view outcomes as satisfactory. There is less evidence to suggest, however, that restorative processes are in fact restorative. I first consider how apology and forgiveness feature in one form of restorative justice (youth justice conferencing) and then examine findings from two major research projects in Australia (RISE and SAJJ) to show why reconciliation and repair are not common outcomes in restorative justice conferences.

Restorative Justice Developments in the Pacific Region: A Comprehensive Survey

Restorative justice has grown in popularity around the world, and various restorative initiatives are in place or are being trialled in many countries. New Zealand and Australia have the most experience with restorative justice in the form of conferencing primarily for young offenders, although conferencing for adult offenders is increasingly being used in these jurisdictions. In the Pacific Islands older forms of customary practices endure despite the introduction of modern Western justice systems. In this article we provide a comprehensive review of these developments to show the degree to which this region has embraced restorative justice as a way of responding to crime.

Using integrated theory to explain the movement into juvenile delinquency

Research grounded in labeling, differential association, social learning, and social control theory provides useful information about various phases of the delinquency process. However, none of these theories accounts for the entire delinquency process. Recent work has demonstrated, for example, that social control theory may be more suitable for explaining initial delinquency, whereas labeling theory is more useful in explaining continued delinquency. This paper incorporates theoretical elements of labeling, differential association, social learning, and social control theories into a model that explains both initial and continued delinquency. Analysis of data from three waves of the National Youth Survey provides support for the model and shows that weakened social controls increase opportunities for associating with delinquent peers, learning delinquent behaviors, and committing initial delinquent acts. Initial delinquency increases the likelihood of being observed and negatively labeled by parents. Th...

The complexity of child protection recurrence: The case for a systems approach

OBJECTIVE Research on child protection recurrence has found consistent child, family, and case characteristics associated with repeated involvement with the child protection system. Despite the considerable body of empirical research, knowledge about why recurrence occurs, and what can be done to reduce it, is limited. METHOD This paper reviews the empirical literature and analyses the approaches of prior recurrence research. Four related conceptual challenges are identified: (1) a tendency to conflate child protection recurrence with repeated child maltreatment; (2) uncertainty about how best to operationalize and measure child protection recurrence in research; (3) inconsistency between prevailing explanations for the most frequently observed patterns of recurrence; and (4) difficulty in developing coherent strategies to address child protection recurrence based on research. RESULTS Addressing these challenges requires a greater consideration of the effects of decision-making in the child protection system on recurrence. This paper proposes a methodology based in systems theory and drawing on existing administrative data to examine the characteristics of the child protection system that may also produce recurrence.

The idea of selective release

We interviewed 203 juvenile inmates housed in a juvenile corrections facility in New Orleans, using a revised version of the Rand instrument developed by Chaiken and Chaiken. The purpose was to demonstrate how prediction scales, used in the past to identify high-rate offenders for selective incapacitation, actually may be more suitable for identifying low-rate offenders for selective release. Our results show that the prediction scale performed worse at identifying high-rate offenders but better at identifying low-rate offenders. We discuss the policy implications of our findings.

Youth restorative justice conferencing: facilitator's language - help or hindrance?

Abstract Youth crime is an ongoing concern in Australia. Victims, offenders and the community are all affected by crime and the current criminal justice approach seems both ineffective and inefficient. Restorative justice proponents have posited that their approach to justice through dialogue and negotiation in the conferencing process may be more effective than the traditional retributive justice. Restorative justice conferencing for young offenders is not, however, unfaultable in its ability to reduce the harm caused by crime or to reduce recidivism. The main focus of conferencing has been on the outcomes with limited attention paid to the process and its impact on a young offender’s sense of wrongdoing and remorse. There has been limited research undertaken into the oral competencies of young offenders in relation to their performance in conferencing, and equally limited studies on the specific use of language by facilitators. Other research has shown a coexistence of youth offending and developmental language and learning disabilities. The secondary study discussed in this paper reveals the language difficulties encountered by young offenders in the conferencing process. It is recommended that in order for young offenders to understand what they have been asked, to reflect on it, to express their thoughts and feelings, and for behavioural change to occur, the communication, both verbal and non-verbal, must be unambiguous, comprehensible and pitched at their individual demographic. More research is required into language use by conference facilitators and its impact on young offenders.

Factors associated with child protection recurrence in Australia

The aim of the current research was to advance understanding of child protection in Australia by examining the factors associated with recurrence of child protection notifications to the formal child protection system. Extant research has been primarily undertaken in the USA and it is important to understand whether similar factors associated with recurrence actually hold in the Australian context. Administrative data were obtained for a sample of 9608 children first subject to a screened-in report in 2011-12. Children were followed for 12 months. Cox Proportional Hazard models were used to measure associations between 26 independent variables and four types of recurrence: subsequent reports, subsequent investigations, subsequent substantiations, and subsequent intervention. Factors associated with recurrence in Australia were broadly similar to those identified in other jurisdictions, including reports and substantiation for neglect, younger age, prior child protection involvement in the household, and parental characteristics including drug use, mental health problems, and history of maltreatment as a child. As in previous studies, post-investigative service provision was positively associated with recurrence. In prior US research, race did not predict recurrence. However, in the present study, Indigenous Australian children were significantly more likely to be subject to all types of recurrence measured. Future research on recurrence should aim to disentangle the complex relationships between child protection recurrence, child maltreatment, and service delivery. Recurrence is not a good proxy indicator of child safety. The findings have implications for the equity of recurrence-based risk assessment tools as they are applied to indigenous populations.

Emotion and Language in Restorative Youth Justice

Both Australia and New Zealand have developed crime prevention and response strategies specifically to address youth offending. This chapter explores one form of restorative justice (conferencing) and questions why this type of response to youthful offending may have had limited success in achieving key aims. It links the requirements and expectations of restorative justice processes with the potentially limited emotional and language development of youth to show that sometimes unrealistic expectations by some restorative justice conference participants can have adverse outcomes for youth. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that better knowledge of young offenders’ language capacities will likely lead to better restorative justice conference outcomes for both young offenders and victims of crime.