Restorative Juvenile Justice Reform

Restorative justice is a framework for juvenile justice reform that seeks to engage victims, offenders and their families, other citizens, and community groups both as clients of juvenile justice services and as resources in an effective response to youth crime. It focuses on the needs of the victims and the offenders, as well as the involved community, instead of satisfying abstract legal principles or punishing the offender. Victims take an active role in the process, while offenders are encouraged to take responsibility for their actions, "to repair the harm they 've done” (Webber, 2009). Restorative justice involves both victim and offender and focuses on their personal needs. In addition, it provides help for the offender in order to avoid
Aboriginal concepts of restorative justice tend to be strongly focused on the community, with an emphasis on collective well-being rather than individual rights (Department of Justice Canada, 2001). They stress the need to heal relationships between clans or family groupings as well a between the offender and the victim, so that balance may be restored to the community as a whole. In other words Aboriginal communities try to look at all of the factors leading to an incident, in order to understand the offender as a person and to uncover the causes of their behavior. Restorative Justice practices are becoming increasingly more popular as the guideposts to effective corrections policy, both inside prisons and within the wider
Therefore, when a person becomes alienated or disconnected from that society, it is the responsibility of everyone in that society to bring the person back into a harmonious relationship with him/her “self”, as well as with the rest of the community. This may mean that the society itself needs to take a long hard look at its own practices and systems, which may be “contributing factors” to the person’s alienation from it. The society may need to heal itself. When a crime is committed it results in the creation of an inequality between the victim and the offender. Unlike the vertical structures of European/ Canadian Justice systems where crime is a violation of the law of the state, all matters in an Aboriginal society are private (James, 1999). Aboriginal societies do not make the distinction between criminal and civil law that is found in the Euro- American tradition. In an Aboriginal society, when a crime is committed the debt that is created is owed to the victim, not the state. The victim has been placed in a lowered status by the victimizer. It becomes the obligation of the victimizer to raise the victim to the status previously held; that being equal with all others within the