Projects

• The Reintegrative Shaming Experiments (RISE) have produced a rich collection of data which explore the effectiveness of restorative justice conferencing by comparing the reoffending patterns of offenders and the satisfaction experienced by victims who were randomly assigned to be diverted from court, with those who experienced the formal court system in the usual way. The Principal Investigator for this research is the leading experimental criminologist Professor Lawrence Sherman. It has been managed by Dr Heather Strang, who is also Director of the Centre.
  
  Dr Strang has recently published Repair or Revenge: Victims and Restorative Justice ( Clarendon Press, 2002) which reports on the experiences of the victims of violence and property crime who participated in these experiments.

• The Justice Research Consortium Experiments are a Home Office-funded series of randomised controlled trials now being conducted in the United Kingdom which build on the findings of RISE. The objective is to investigate the effectiveness of restorative justice in reducing reoffending and increasing victim satisfaction when introduced at various points in the criminal justice system, both pre- and post-conviction. The experiments, which are co-directed by Professor Sherman and Dr Strang, are being conducted in three sites in the UK:
  
  - in London where adult offenders pleading guilty to burglary or street crime/robbery charges in the Crown Courts are randomly assigned either to court in the normal way, or to a restorative justice conference followed by court. The outcome agreement reached between victims and offenders in the conference is placed before the judge to be taken into consideration in sentencing.
  
  - in Northumbria where offenders pleading guilty to assault or property offences in the Magistrates Courts (adults) or receiving a Final Warning from police for violent or property offences (juveniles) are randomly assigned either to the treatment normally given for such offenders, or to a restorative justice conference followed by this treatment. The outcome agreement is placed before the Magistrate to be taken into consideration in sentencing.
  
  - in the Thames Valley Probation area where offenders convicted of violent offences and sentenced to terms of imprisonment are invited, based on random assignment, to participate in a restorative justice conference in addition to serving their sentence. A second experiment in the same area is exploring the effectiveness of conferencs for violent offenders sentenced to community supervision orders..

• A program on integrating the normative and explanatory theory of restorative justice, led by Professor John Braithwaite. This has now been published as J. Braithwaite, Restorative Justice: Assessing Optimistic and Pessimistic Accounts, Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, Vol. 25 (ed. M. Tonry), 1999, pp. 1-127.

• Life at School Project
  A program of research by Dr Valerie Brathwaite, Dr Brenda Morrison and Dr Eliza Ahmed on school bullying and the application of restorative justice in the school setting

• A comparative project on attitudes to restorative justice in Japan and Australia coordinated by Professor Yoko Hosoi of Toyo University, Tokyo, with a team of Japanese research scholars.

• National audit of restorative justice programs and legislation across Australia by Dr Heather Strang on behalf of the Criminology Research Council.