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2003 Utah L. Rev. 15 (2003)
Repairing the Harm: Victims and Restorative Justice

handle is hein.journals/utahlr2003 and id is 25 raw text is: Repairing the Harm: Victims and Restorative Justice Heather Strang* Lawrence W. Sherman I. INTRODUCTION One of the leading arguments for restorative justice is the abandonment of victims' interests by the jurisprudence of retribution. That jurisprudence is arguably based on false assumptions about facts and limited imagination about possibilities. The past decade of research and development work on restorative justice in the common law jurisprudence of Australia and England provides better evidence and broader imagination for a new jurisprudence. Such a jurisprudence would include victims in ways that victims and the general public actually prefer-and not in ways that law professors fear. Most of all, it would focus the law on repairing and preventing the harm of crime, rather than on exacting a just measure of pain from offenders. Whether it can succeed in preventing crime will take many years to learn. But evidence for the success of restorative justice in repairing the harm of crime is rapidly accumulating. This Article examines key claims about what victims want, and what the public thinks they should have, in relation to the disposition of apprehended offenders. It then shows evidence from randomized field tests comparing restorative justice to conventional justice. This evidence shows that victims say they get far more justice, in their own terms, from restorative alternatives to court processes than they do from a court. This evidence raises critical issues about the relationship between victim interests, offender interests, and community interests in public safety. The possibility that serving victim interests could harm public safety is one that requires careful empirical examination as restorative justice develops. But so far it is a possibility that has not been demonstrated to occur in any field test. Thus, the central question remains whether a new jurisprudence should be developed around a model of justice that gives more procedural and distributive fairness to victims without harming offender rights or public safety. Heather Strang, Director, Centre for Restorative Justice, Australian National University, Canberra. E-mail: Heather.Strang@anu.edu.au. 'Lawrence W. Sherman, A.M. Greenfield Professor of Human Relations and Director, Jerry Lee Center of Criminology, University of Pennsylvania. E-mail: lws@sas.upenn.edu.

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