Book Reviews

These books have been reviewed on Restorative Justice Online.

Book Review: The Machinery of Criminal Justice

from the review by Andrew Taslitz on Jotwell: ....Bibas’s new book, The Machinery of Criminal Justice, is so humane and thoughtful an analysis of the reforms needed in our criminal justice system that I find myself drawn to giving him still more good press....Bibas’s argument turns on three central ideas: (1) the system pretends to a mechanistic efficiency deaf to the emotions and meaningful expressions that undergird any sound system of criminal justice; (2) lawyers and other experts have hijacked the system to serve their own needs, displacing defendants, victims, and even judges; and (3) the political forces at work are skewed toward undue penal harshness and elite control rather than adequately balanced by informed lay participation.

Review: The forgiving life: A pathway to overcoming resentment and creating a legacy of love

by Jacqueline Song, University of the Philippines-Dilman Justice can be restored in many ways, as the readers of this site are well aware. Sometimes, victims and offenders choose to bring mercy alongside justice as a way to heal from the ravages of injustice. Forgiving and seeking forgiveness together constitute one of these merciful strategies. To forgive is to struggle to rid oneself of resentment and to respond to an offender with goodness. To seek forgiveness includes internal sorrow, a conviction not to repeat the offense, and recompense where appropriate. When one forgives, he or she never condones the wrong and never tosses justice aside. Forgiveness and justice work side by side for good.

Review: Restorative justice in practice: Evaluating what works for victims and offenders.

by Eric Assur Three British criminology researchers and educators, affiliated with the University of Sheffield, have offered a very rich book on the use of victim-offender mediation programs (what they call schemes) in adult criminal justice venues in England. Most early Restorative Justice (RJ) writing has focused on juvenile justice programs, generally with a concentration on diversionary approaches for first time offenders. The Shapland, Robinson and Sorsby book looks exclusively and intensely at three ‘schemes’ and several hundred ‘cases’ involving adults. The criminal justice programs they studied were funded by the British Ministry of Justice – Home Office between 2001 and 2008. They worked with adults at arrest, while going through the courts and even with some while imprisoned. In a nutshell, this is a thought provoking book that has few significant weak points. This is not a primer on Restorative Justice. It assumes that readers are at least moderately informed about RJ. It belongs in the hands of North American justice administrators. While not designed as a textbook (no end of chapter discussion questions), it concludes with end notes and references that make it a useful reference for anyone seeking to look further into transformative justice and RJ, especially as found in the United Kingdom and Australia.

Review: A community-based approach to the reduction of sexual re-offending: circles of support and accountability

by Martin Wright Often sex offenders are isolated people who have difficulty making relationships, and when they come out of prison the double stigma of prison and the nature of their offence isolates them still more – an extra hardship for them, and an increased risk that they will revert to their previous behaviour. So the idea of forming a circle of support for them is both humane and a safeguard. It does not fall under the usual definition of restorative justice, because it does not include dialogue with the victim, which would in many cases be unwanted and/or inappropriate. It does however restore or even improve the situation of the offender, and it involves members of the community.

Review: Child victims and restorative justice: A needs-rights model

from the article by Bill Lyons in Law & Politics Review: ....Combining the right to participate from the Convention on the Rights of the Child with an empirical analysis of a child's need to regain control, participation emerges as a critically important need and right for at least three reasons. First, for immediate instrumental reasons, participation is both an immediate coping mechanism and is expected to improve criminal justice outcomes. Second, for longer term developmental reasons, meaningful participation in experiential learning opportunities is a developmental step toward empowering young adults to master the problem solving skills necessary to make democracy both possible and desirable.

Summer reading

from Howard Zehr's entry in Restorative Justice Blog: Our friends at Community Justice Initiatives British Columbia have just posted a free on-line publication, Walking the Talk: Developing Ethics Frameworks for the Practice of Restorative Justice, by Susan Sharpe. This resource is intended to help organizations sort out the values that they wish to live by. Given the difficulties of living by the principles we espouse in our organizations, this will be an important publication for those of involved in restorative justice programs. Susan L. Miller’s After the Crime: The power of restorative justice – dialogues between victims and offenders (New York University Press, 2011) is a careful and readable examination of severe violence dialogue approaches.

Badlands or fairyland? How to misuse statistics and confuse the public

from Rethining Crime and Punishment's new newsletter Truth in Justice: If Truth in Justice were to have an annual award in 12 months time for the most inaccurate, misleading and appalling publication on crime and punishment, it is unlikely that anything would surpass Badlands: NZ - A Land Fit for Criminals by David Fraser and published by Ian Wishart. While we were reluctant to give it any more publicity, the book is a self-contained case study of what can happen when someone with a set ideological agenda sets out to prove their position through false logic and the misuse of statistics. It almost qualifies as a serious hazard to public safety. We asked three people to review the book. Each has approached it from a different perspective.

After the crime: the power of restorative justice. Dialogues between victims and violent offenders

by Martin Wright Violence, rape, murder and other abusive crimes: not usually pleasant subjects to read about, yet Susan Miller's book left this reader with a positive feeling. This is largely due to Miller herself, who presents the information in a straightforward, sympathetic but non-judgemental way; to Kim Book, who started the organization Victims' Voices Heard after her daughter was murdered; and to the participants themselves. Not all victims felt able to forgive, and this should not be a criterion for 'success'; but they followed the Amish precept: don't balance hurt with hate. Not all offenders accepted full responsibility. Miller divides restorative justice into diversion, taking the place of the criminal justice process for relatively minor cases, and 'therapeutic' RJ, where the offender is already in custody or has served a prison term. These cases are all in the latter category.

Restorative justice realities: research in a European context

reviewed by Martin Wright: Nine countries, nine ways of doing restorative justice, and several approaches to researching it. In order to describe the research, the authors also provide useful summaries of how restorative justice has been put into practice in Belgium, Norway, Austria, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and England and Wales. Mostly these countries use victim-offender mediation, in some cases with a high proportion of indirect (shuttle) mediations; a few, including the Netherlands and Norway, have begun to experiment with conferencing. Perhaps the best way to indicate the book’s scope is to give examples of the information it contains, rather than attempt a summary.

The promise of restorative justice: New approaches for criminal justice and beyond

reviewed by Martin Wright It is becoming increasingly clear that the principles of restorative justice can be used, as the editors say, outside the formal criminal justice system, and this book bears witness to that. Half is about criminal justice, and half about other applications in schools and elsewhere. The contributors reflect the book’s origins among a group at Fresno Pacific University in California, but other chapters come from Bulgaria, Canada, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom.

Social work and restorative justice

from Howard Zehr's entry on Restorative Justice Blog Social Work and Restorative Justice: Skills for Dialogue, Peacemaking and Reconciliation, edited by Elizabeth Beck, Nancy P. Kropf and Pamela Blume-Leonard (Oxford University Press, 2011), is an important collection of essays on this subject. It will be of interest to both social work and restorative justice practitioners. The following is the Afterward that Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz and I were invited to contribute: The field that has come to be known as restorative justice was born in experiment and practice rather than theory; the term “restorative justice” and the conceptual framework came later. Although it did not directly emerge from the field of social work, restorative justice was born in a context and era much influenced by social work. It is appropriate, then, that the fields of restorative justice and social work are again converging, as the authors in this volume so convincingly argue....

Restorative Justice Dialogue: An essential guide for research and practice

Restorative Justice Dialogue: An essential guide for research and practice. Mark Umbreit and Marilyn Peterson Armour (2010). New York: Springer Publishing Co. 339 pages.

Parallel Justice for Victims of Crime

by Eric Assur Not too many years ago Restorative Justice (RJ) was introduced, or artfully expounded on, by Howard Zehr. Now we have what appears to be a similarly unique view of the victim of crime topic through new and different lenses. The author, a seasoned and well credentialed victim advocate, and the “National Center” now offer an enlightening commentary and daunting challenge regarding the state of victim services. The book recommends a new way to do business, a paradigm shift to what is now labeled, Parallel Justice (PJ).

What have I done? A victim empathy programme for young people

by Eric Assur This book is very practice oriented. It looks and feels like a workbook. The accompanying DVD is to help with didactic use with groups of teens. The professionals Wallis acknowledges as having helped him are largely probation or ‘youth offending service’ professionals in the United Kingdom. The Canadian, Australian, or United States reader immediately notes that the spelling of the Kings Language is of the British or UK variety. Regardless of spelling, this book is a simple, easy to use workbook to guide the skilled and the not-so-well-informed youth services professional who works with teens who have offended.

True stories of false confessions

by Eric Assur The justice system seeks to administer true justice. That a number of citizens have been executed and then later been revealed as innocent is a profound statement that the system is not perfect. The Innocence Project and similar groups in the North American justice system have shown that hundreds of incarcerated persons should never have been found guilty. This book is a sobering rendition of a few dozen such crime stories and legal travesties. Confessions would seem to be convincing evidence of actual guilt. But they are not. True Stories is an anthology of unnumbered chapters (there are over 40) called ‘cases’ that are arranged or presented in groupings based on the type of faulty confession.

Book Review: The penal crisis and the Clapham Omnibus: Questions and answers in restorative justice.

There has always been a temptation to regard restorative justice as an accessory to the conventional process, in which less serious cases may be diverted out of the system, but for more serious ones a restorative process is only available as an addition to punishment. After two books explaining the theoretical and political case for restorative justice (Cornwell 2006, 2007), the author has drawn up a proposal for basing the whole system on restorative principles. His book is structured in three sections of five chapters, each addressing one of the questions which the ‘man on the Clapham omnibus’ (the lawyer’s stereotype of the ordinary person) would want answered.

Book Review: Discipline that restores

 

Book Review: As We Forgive

 

Book Review: Urban Crime Prevention, Surveillance and Restorative Justice.

This work is a collection of papers on various themes from the 2006 Criminology conference at the University of Sheffield. As might be expected, the presenters are generally from London, Oxford, and Cambridge, Sheffield and/or United Kingdom governments. This review will only comment on the four Restorative Justice segments, almost 100 pages, of the book

Book Review: Urban Crime Prevention, Surveillance and Restorative Justice.

by Eric Assur This work is a collection of papers on various themes from the 2006 Criminology conference at the University of Sheffield. As might be expected, the presenters are generally from London, Oxford, and Cambridge, Sheffield and/or United Kingdom governments. This review will only comment on the four Restorative Justice (RJ) segments, almost 100 pages, of the book.