Restorative justice is a value-based approach to criminal justice, with a balanced focus on the offender, victim, and community. The foundation of restorative justice is to determine the harm resulting from a crime, what needs to be done to repair the harm, and who is responsible for repairing the harm. In contrast, the traditional approach to criminal justice today, retributive justice, focuses on determining what law was broken, who broke it, and how they will be punished.

Restorative Justice:

-is far more concerned about restoration of the victim and victimized community than costly punishment of the offender.

-elevates the importance of the victim in the criminal justice process, through increased involvement, input, and services.

-requires that offenders be held directly accountable to the person and/or community that they victimized.

-encourages the entire community to be involved in holding the offender accountable and promoting a healing response to the needs of victims and offenders.

-places greater emphasis on the offender accepting responsibility for their behavior and making amends, whenever possible, rather than on the severity of punishment.

-recognizes a community responsibility for social conditions which contribute to offender behavior.

Other Restorative Justice resources

Center for Restorative Justice and Peacemaking – University of Minnesota
And international resource center in support of restorative dialogue, practice, research and training
http://www.rjp.umn.edu

Centre for Restorative Justice
Many links and information about restorative justice
http://www.sfu.ca/crj/links.html

Office of Victim Services
The Restorative Justice and Mediation Collection
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/ovc/publications/
infores/ restorative_justice/welcome.html

The Center for Peacemaking and Conflict Studies
Fresno Pacific University
http://peace.fresno.edu/rjp/