Police experiment with restorative cautioning ‘helps to prevent youth crime’

Evaluation of a pioneering initiative by Thames Valley Police found that victims and offenders mostly took a positive view of restorative sessions, which took the form of a structured discussion about the harm caused by an offence and how it could best be repaired. But the study also produced encouraging evidence that offenders who took part were only half as likely to be convicted or cautioned for further offences in the following year as those given a standard caution.

The Thames Valley initiative is the largest restorative justice programme to be tested in the UK to date. Traditional cautions – used for a third of all criminal cases resulting in a criminal record – consist of a formal warning to an offender by a police officer. Under restorative cautioning everyone affected by an offence, including members of the victim’s and offender’s families, are invited to participate in the conference, which is facilitated by trained officers following a script.

Researchers from the Centre for Criminological Research at Oxford University helped Thames Valley Police to implement their initiative, as well as carrying out an assessment of its effectiveness from its start in 1998. They found that:

• In the first three years, 1,915 restorative conferences were held where victims were present, and there were a further 12,065 restorative cautions, where victims’ views were relayed by the facilitating officer.
• Police officers told the researchers that their previous aim with conventional cautioning had usually been to give offenders a severe dressing down. There had been no training, no supervision and little consistency.
• Implementation of the restorative cautioning initiative also proved problematic. In the first year especially, police facilitators tended to dominate the conferences, reducing other participants to passive observers. Additional training and a revised script helped to reduce these problems but did not eliminate them altogether.
• Offenders, victims and their supporters were generally satisfied with the fairness of proceedings and the results. Apologies were usually offered to the victims and were mostly viewed as the result of genuine remorse. One in three offenders entered into a formal written agreement to make some kind of reparation.
• High-quality facilitation produced the most effective results: victims were more likely to consider that the offender felt ashamed and had understood the effects of his behaviour; offenders were more likely to report feelings of remorse, a reduction in criminal behaviour and a better subsequent relationship with the police.

Almost 80 restorative conferences were recorded during the study and more than 300 participants were interviewed. Police records for 56 young offenders (aged 10 to 17) whose restorative cautions were monitored during 2000 showed that 14 per cent were convicted in court or given further cautions for offences committed during the following year. This was half the rate of re-offending in a previous study of conventional cautioning. The researchers emphasise that research on a larger scale will now be needed to confirm the validity of this highly promising result.

Dr Carolyn Hoyle, Lecturer in Criminology, and co-author of the study, said: “Thames Valley Police has been largely successful in transforming the way that young and adult offenders are cautioned. To an impressive degree, the force has engineered a shift away from the idiosyncratic and sometimes stigmatising treatment of offenders under conventional cautioning to a more consistent and visible system of restorative cautioning, with defined aims and standards.”

Her co-author, Dr Richard Young, Lecturer in Criminal Justice, added: “While there was considerable room for further improvement, the findings suggest that even restorative conferences that were less well-run were a substantial improvement on traditional cautioning. However, there is no doubt that the best results were achieved where police facilitators did good preparation beforehand, ran the meeting in a structured way, and gave victims, offenders and everyone else who attended a proper opportunity to contribute. Restorative measures are playing an increasing part in the efforts by Youth Offending Teams and other agencies to prevent re-offending. Our study supports the case for greater use of restorative justice, but we also warn against seeing it as just a way of cutting crime.”

Dr Hoyle added: “Our research suggests that restorative justice can have real benefits for victims as well as offender. One victim of a serious assault told us that he had thought of the offender as an animal, but that the conference made him realise the offender was just a normal person, like anyone else. Realising that helped him to get on with his life.”