Net-Widening
-(Center for Justice and Reconciliation, 2014; Dignan, 1990; Roach, 2000; Umbreit,Coates, & Vos, 2004)
Re-Victimizing The Victims
Other Conflicts
- Concerns have been raised that restorative justice interventions may lead to net-widening
- Increased social control due to processing offenders using restorative interventions who would normally be ignored by the formal justice system
- With minor offences, more severe sanctions are sometimes imposed using restorative justice interventions than they would have received in a formal system
- Low-risk offenders who normally wouldn't be prosecuted or involved in the criminal justice system are brought into restorative interventions, labelled as offenders
- When restorative justice interventions aren't used for minor infractions, but are instead formal processed, many offenders plead guilty and end up with nothing more than a fine
- Victim-Offender Mediation programs have been demonstrated to cause a 13% net-widening effect
- Is this form of net-widening actually a concern? Is social control through the community a bad thing?
-(Center for Justice and Reconciliation, 2014; Dignan, 1990; Roach, 2000; Umbreit,Coates, & Vos, 2004)
Re-Victimizing The Victims
- Not all victims are the same.
- The victim may only be slightly harmed in one case, while in another they may experience numerous disabling effects such as sleeplessness, loss of self-confidence and other health related problems.
- This is known as victim distress.
- Most victims that suffered high distress were much more likely to demand they be treated fairly and the offender be punished as severely as they would have, had they gone through the formal court system.
- Most victims that experienced a low distress were much more interested in finding common grounds with the offender and respected their need to be treated as an individual.
- When comparing the level of victim distress to the level of satisfaction a year later, it was found that 63 percent of the moderate distress, 78 percent of the low and 95 percent of the no distress victims had recovered from the crime a year later. However, 71 percent of high distress victims had not recovered. (SAJJ, 1999).
- Most victims would agree that during any formal court process their needs are not met.
- Rather, the state meets its own needs.
- Many victims are left feeling unequal, disrespected and craving harsher penalties for their offender.
- A major fault in restorative justice is that it cannot be used on severe offences such as assault.
- This is due to the victim not being satisfied with the punishment the offender receives.
- The victim is not very keen to sitting down face-to-face with their assaulter to develop an action plan.
- They are unlikely to believe any apology the offender makes.
- Victims remain fearful of their offender for a long period of time in high distress cases.
- although 76% of victims have reported no increased fear due to direct mediation with the offender, 24% did report an increase -- -(Wemmers & Cyr, 2005)
- 89 cases in the sample (Daly, 2005).
- Communication failure and mixed signals are present when apologies are made and received. Such communication gaps are overlaid by the variable degree to which offenders are in fact sorry for what they have done.
- In 34 per cent of cases, the offenders and victims agreed (or were in partial agreement) that the offender was sorry.
- In 27 per cent, the offenders and victims definitely agreed that the offender was not sorry.
- For 30 per cent, there was a perceptual mismatch: the offenders were not sorry, but the victims thought they were (12 per cent); or the offenders were sorry, but the victims did not think so (18 per cent).
- For the remaining 9 per cent, it was not possible to determine.
- The findings show that a sincere apology may be difficult to achieve because offenders are not really sorry for what they have done.
Other Conflicts
- Restorative justice advocates believe that the cost of diminished offender rights is outweighed by the benefits of accountability.
- Restorative justice systems lack the due process protections and procedural safeguards that are awarded to offenders in the more formal adversarial system.
- Until a complete paradigm has occurred, restorative justice policies will potentially inflict additional punishment on offenders, because it was discovered that contrary to the program's design, offenders were subjected to both reparative conditions and traditional probation supervision.
- As conditions of probation expand through restorative justice programs, the potential that offenders will not meet these conditions also increases. Thus, the higher level of noncompliance, combined with heightened public scrutiny and demand for offender accountability, will likely result in the revocation of more offenders. (According to Braithwaite and Mugford (1994), one strategy to resolve this problem is to provide offenders the opportunity to have multiple conferences when they fail to fulfill the requirements of their mediation agreements.
- Restorative justice may increase punishment if reforms fail to develop policies and programs that are unable to reintegrate offenders into society.
- Lawrence (1991) sees a danger in advocating shaming activities since they've been wrongly interpreted as a revival of support for public shaming practices and these shaming penalties are gaining popularity because they can fulfill retributive aims of the public.