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Conference papers

Reviewing restorative justice for the Campbell Collaboration

Heather Strang
Australian National University

Presented at:
Evaluation in Crime and Justice : Trends and Methods
ABS House, Canberra
24-25 March 2003

Abstract

The Campbell Collaboration in Crime and Justice commissions systematic reviews of evidence on a variety of crime and justice topics and sets rigorous standards for the quality of the research to be considered. The author is currently undertaking such a review on the topic of restorative justice, a relatively new area of criminological research with few studies employing randomised controlled trials (RCTs), the standard currently set by Campbell for inclusion in the review. The review focuses on RCTs that examine the effect of restorative justice (in the form of conferencing) on reoffending and on victim satisfaction with the justice process, and has identified seven completed RCTs that meet the selection criteria, including the RISE experiments. This presentation, which consists of slides in point format, considers what the review reveals about the effectiveness of restorative justice as a crime reduction intervention, the consequences of setting the standard for inclusion at the level of RCTs, and methodological issues including inconsistencies in design and analysis and standard solutions to these.