A second chance?

Restorative justice, in which criminals meet their victims, is gaining support. But, asks Robert Verkaik, who benefits most?

David Collins is not a very nice man. Last year, he viciously attacked his 55-year-old boyfriend, slashing his arms and body with a knife as he lay sleeping in his bed. The victim suffered a collapsed lung and, in his terror, fled naked from the London flat where they had spent the evening drinking. Seven days later, Collins, 26, robbed a school teacher on her way to work, grabbing her handbag in the street. He was arrested by police hours later and, after admitting everything, was sentenced to a total of seven years imprisonment for both the knife attack and the street robbery.

On 18 March this year, Collins returned to court to ask three judges to have his sentence reduced. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, Mr Justice Moses and Mr Justice Gage said they were impressed with Collins's willingness to meet the school teacher face to face to discuss the impact the crime had had on her life. As a result, the court agreed to cut his prison sentence by two years. Understandably, that ruling was not widely publicised. Restorative justice, where the offender is made to take responsibility for the crime, has been deliberately represented by the media as a softpunishment. But with our prisons full to bursting and no sign that the cycle of crime and punishment will be broken, the Government and the courts now know that they need to think differently about persistent offending.

The course Collins agreed to take was not an easy one. Not only was he required to meet the school teacher, but he also had to meet five members of her family, too.The judges were also impressed with Collins's willingness to deal with the drug problems that contributed to his criminality and the fact that he had worked closely with a drugs liaison officer and regularly attended a Narcotics Anonymous group. But the court emphasised that without the progress in Collins's rehabilitation, the original sentence would have stood.

Next month, the Home Office is expected to publish plans to increase the opportunity for mediation between offenders and victims, and reparation to the community. The seeds of this new approach to restorative justice can be traced back to Jack Straw's time as Home Secretary, when evidence from the juvenile crime programme first began to show that these meetings were having a real impact.

Now there are plans to extend schemes across the country and give restorative justice a permanent place in the criminal justice system.

Nevertheless, groups representing victims of crime believe schemes should be driven by the needs of the victim rather than those of the offender. Anne Coughlan, chief executive of Victim Support London, is pressing the Government to fund more pilots that assess the satisfaction levels that face-to-face meetings have on the victim.

Victim Support believes that the distinctions between the two systems of restorative and retributive justice have become blurred since the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999 incorporated elements of restorative justice into their youth provision.

"In the main," says Coughlan, "our retributive system does not call offenders to account for their actions, and far too little attention is paid to their victims. Many, if not most, victims feel excluded from the processes."

Enver Solomon, a policy officer at the Prison Reform Trust, argues that the process focuses on the damage done to the victim and "the solutions that emerge really begin to meet the needs of the people who have been victimised." He adds: "Theimpact for the offender is that they must think about the harm they have caused to others."

Coughlan concedes that mediation and reparation, if done properly, can be enormously beneficial to victims. "They provide an opportunity to express feelings and ask questions of the offender. Because reparation is, or should be, essentially about the victim's wishes or needs, the victim needs to be actively involved in determining whether or not to participate in mediation or to receive reparation."

Victim Support's conditional support for a national restorative justice scheme has given the programme an enormous political boost. But this should not be read as a sign that ministers are about to withdraw their commitment to retributive justice. Far from it. There is plenty in the Criminal Justice Bill that will help punish the guilty and push the prison population even higher, by as many as 14,000. Some criminal justice reformers believe that the only way to escape this schizophrenic approach to the punishment and rehabilitation of offenders is make restorative justice a non-retributive alternative to court punishments. Such a radical step would give offenders, especially young ones, a genuine second chance.

In the case of Collins, the school teacher later wrote to him expressing the hope that "things would go well for him in the future." If the victim can forgive the offender for their crime, why can't the system do the same?