It is a voluntary process for both the victim and the offender. Typically, the offender is required to acknowledge or accept responsibility for their actions in order to access the program. Restorative justice can take many forms and varies widely from community to community, but it can include mediation programs and restitution agreements, including community service, financial compensation and service to the victim.
Research shows restorative justice tends to be more efficient and cost-effective than the traditional justice system — and it reduces repeat offences. There are currently almost different such programs running in communities across the country, primarily for youth offenders. We recently held a Senate open caucus forum on the issue and experts from across the country emphasized the need for Canada to further explore restorative justice.
Chantell Barker, the justice development co-ordinator at the Southern Chiefs' Organization, which represents 34 southern First Nation communities in Manitoba, told the forum that restorative justice is more in line with traditional Indigenous models of justice that have an emphasis on healing root causes and the restoring of harmony, allowing an offender to learn from their mistakes and to make amends for their behaviour. Eighteen months ago, Beardy was released from prison on parole.
Prior to that, he had spent the last two decades in and out of the prison system, spending several years behind bars. Now he's a second-year university student studying political science and conflict resolution, a student mentor and a father who sits on many non-profit boards. I wanted to change. Restorative Justice understands that sometimes court and imprisonment are not the ideal solution in response to a crime and seeks to create just outcomes by repairing the harm caused by crime and violence.
Communities or community members are often actively involved in the Restorative Justice process as interested stakeholders, supporters or facilitators. In a Restorative Justice process, those who caused the harm must first accept responsibility for their role in an offence and the harm they have caused.
Those who experienced the harm must voluntarily choose to participate. Depending on the crime, the individual who caused the harm may or may not be able to avoid a criminal record or a court process by participating in a Restorative Justice process. In Canada, modern-day Restorative Justice originated in the s as mediation or reconciliation between victims and offenders.
Instead, this report presents a "snapshot" of RJ in much of Canada at a particular point in time. While the Working Group was interested in gathering wide-ranging data on all aspects of RJ, limitations on the amount of staff time that could be devoted to this project made it necessary to focus on a smaller, more manageable amount of data. For this reason, the Working Group agreed that this initial effort would focus on RJ in the criminal justice sector.
In the longer term, the Working Group is interested in gathering more extensive data about RJ in communities and other sectors such as the education, child protection and regulatory systems. The survey resulted in the following key findings. For additional information about each topic, please see section 3. It should be noted that the number of responses varied, as not every ministry chose to answer every question in the survey.
This section analyzes the data and provides additional information about questions in the survey and how FPT departments responded. As previously discussed, FPT ministries were asked to provide information about the number of RJ programs they funded, supported or provided in the criminal justice sector. The results indicated that:. Additionally, five ministries indicated that they provided direct RJ services such as having employees facilitate cases, conduct victim-offender mediations or conferences, and operate youth centres that focused on RJ principles and processes.
Ministries were asked how many community-based RJ programs in the criminal justice sector they funded or supported between April 1, and March 31, Chart 1 indicates that there were RJ programs funded or supported by the 13 ministries which responded to the question. Additionally, a few respondents indicated that RJ programs in their jurisdiction offered other services such as fine option programs, community service work, traditional Aboriginal activities, special school programs, senior safety programs and facilitation for groups experiencing conflict.
Just as there is variation in how RJ is understood and practiced across Canada, there are differences in how terms such as "conferences", "victim-offender mediation" and "circles" are understood and implemented. With this caution in mind, the information provided for this survey suggested that conferences are the most commonly used model within RJ programs that are funded, supported or provided by FPT ministries in the criminal justice sector.
All of the 17 respondents who answered this question indicated that RJ programs in their jurisdiction used various kinds of conferences, such as community justice forums a model that may be facilitated by a police officer and often involves a script , community justice conferences with adults, and family group conferences with children, youth, family members or other supportive adults.
Other kinds of circles were used less frequently. These included sentencing circles, which provide advice to a judge about an appropriate sentence; Circles of Support and Accountability, in which community members provide assistance to offenders who have been released following a term of incarceration while holding the offender accountable for living peacefully and safely in the community; and peacemaking circles that involve the victim, the offender, their friends and families, community members and others in resolving crime and conflict.
Three respondents indicated that RJ programs used other models such as "on the land programs. Some jurisdictions did not have the capacity to record RJ-related statistics and others used different terms or methods for collecting this information, which makes it difficult to compare data. As five respondents did not answer this question or commented that the information was unavailable, the responses provide a limited amount of data that give a rough approximation of the number of criminal referrals and cases across much of Canada.
The number in the brackets indicates the number of ministries that answered this question. Two respondents could only provide a total number of cases or referrals for youth and adults as an aggregated sum and were unable to break it down in terms of the number of pre-charge, post-charge or post-sentence matters, and there were other cases or referrals in which the respondents were unsure of the stage at which the matter was referred.
As illustrated in Chart 3 below, there was a fair amount of variability in regards to defining terms such as "case", "referral", "closed case", and the "agreement" about how to resolve the referral or case.
For example, about half of the 18 respondents indicated that their ministry had a definition or common understanding about the term "case", while three indicated that their ministry did not and the remaining respondents indicated that they left it up to restorative programs to self-define these terms. Some of the definitions that were provided for a "case" included:. A case is an offender, charge s and a victim.
If there is more than one victim, that is more than one case. A case is a referral that is made to an agency. It may be more than one set of charges. One ministry indicated that they do not use "case" as a definition and that the statistics they record are "based upon people referred". Another ministry reported that they have three different types of referrals. This bar chart shows how many ministries define the following terms: case, referral, closed case, and agreement.
Most ministries do define these terms. In some cases, it is the RJ program that defines the term. In each case, there are only 4 or less jurisdictions where these terms are not defined. Survey participants were also asked if there were any other definitions their ministry used to identify or measure RJ activities. Responses included: restorative justice, victim-offender mediation, conference, accountability conference, victim offender resolution conference, community justice forum, community justice conference, family group conference and non-diversion activities.
Respondents indicated that many challenges affected their ministries' ability to collect data on government-funded RJ programs in the criminal justice sector. Technological issues included uncertainty about the quality of data provided by community-based RJ agencies and challenges related to having multiple data systems, old systems that needed to be updated, or difficulties with collecting or entering historic data.
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