For those of you that aren’t aware, restorative justice (RJ) is an approach to justice that looks to focus on the needs of victims, offenders and the involved community, as opposed to simply punishing the offender.
RJ seeks to provide both victims and offenders with a better experience of the justice system. Indeed, according to a Sentencing Report by Victim Support “Victims’ Justice?”, where victims and offenders came together post offence, victim satisfaction rates increased to 90%. This approach is intended to make the offender see the error of their ways, and to understand the pain and suffering they have caused to the victims and the wider community. RJ is a key proponent to reducing re-offending which will in turn reduce the cost to the public purse.
Given the diverse nature of the crimes that RJ can be applied to, it is clear to see that it is not a one dimensional scheme. The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) has defined three different levels of RJ.
The RJ approach has been steadily gaining popularity in recent years, with police records indicating that use of informal resolutions increased from 0.5% to 12% of all case disposals between 2008 and 2011. Its use by youth offending teams is widespread, although the same can’t be said for its implementation within prisons/young offender institutions and probation services.
RJ is a multi-agency initiative and coordinating information sharing between agencies is not without its challenges. With so many moving parts it can be difficult to organise the conference process for victims and offenders, not to mention the emotional strain that this can cause for victims, their families and friends as well as the offender.
With this in mind we have developed an RJ solution alongside experts and pioneers in the field, and our interactions with these innovators are now reflected for your benefit in pam. We have made the whole experience paperless and digital in order to ease the heavy work load placed on practitioners, allowing them to focus on the people involved and not the process.
As Paul Darby at Staffordshire & West Midlands Probation testifies here, our customers are rapidly realising the benefits of using pam for RJ. Thanks to pam’s UK first multi-agency IL3 Pan-Government Accreditation, customers are able to drive out inefficiencies and cost across agencies safe in the knowledge that they are working in a secure and trusted cloud-based environment.
If you would like to know if our RJ solution is right for you, or if anything else in your world is pamable, it’s easy to get in touch!