Earlier steps described the landscape of youth criminalization, the impact of the criminal legal system on people harmed, and introduced restorative justice diversion (RJD). We hope that you’re now familiar with the issues and frameworks covered so far. Restorative justice, rooted in age-old practices of indigenous communities as a relationship-oriented, non-punitive response to harm, can be an intuitive process for many who first learn of it. When being first introduced to restorative justice, people often feel a sense of familiarity—that this way of addressing harm is one that folks have already been practicing in many ways, perhaps without using the term “restorative justice.” Whether this is your experience or not, it’s still important to look at the quantifiable evidence which supports RJD so we can connect what we know in our bones with what can be measured.

Measuring the success of any diversion program comes down to how participants and communities are impacted by the program and how the program reduces the harmful impacts of the criminal legal system. While traditional assessments of diversion programs rely heavily on recidivism rates, survivor satisfaction, and cost-benefit analyses to measure effectiveness, we maintain that this is a limited view. Restorative justice processes and programs must be measured beyond these considerations and explore impacts that are unique to a restorative justice experience (for example, whether participants feel more connected and supported through the process or whether needs are met for all participants involved). We encourage all RJD programs to explore additional measures of success and develop data collection processes that feel meaningful and comprehensive. This step highlights the effectiveness of this RJD model and of restorative justice processes across the globe, and offers resources for continued reading about restorative justice evaluation.

Measuring Restorative Justice

A primary measure of a restorative justice program is whether people harmed are able to express the impact of the harm and make their needs known. Additionally, restorative justice must foster accountability and generate steps for the person who caused the harm to take to repair it. There should be supportive or impacted community members and caregivers present for the process. Above all, throughout the process, the dignity and humanity of all participants must remain intact. Without these components, the program will likely not achieve the level of healing and accountability it is capable of and it cannot truly be called restorative justice.

Said in another way, Howard Zehr writes of restorative justice,

Are the wrongs being acknowledged? Are the needs of those who were harmed being addressed? Is the one who committed the harm being encouraged to understand the damage and accept [their] obligation to make right the wrong? Are those involved in or affected by this being invited to be part of the ‘solution?’ Is concern being shown for everyone involved? If the answers to these questions are ‘no,’ then even though it may have restorative elements, it isn’t restorative justice.

Restorative Community Conferencing

A report titled, Restorative Community Conferencing: A study of Community Works West’s restorative justice youth diversion program in Alameda County, evaluated the RCC program which is the primary restorative practice used in this toolkit. We strongly encourage you to read and share this report with those in your community who are interested in RJD. The report evaluated the Alameda County RJD program based on analysis of available data from January 2012 through December 2014 and interviews with participants. It revealed many notable findings, including the following:

• Satisfaction Among People Harmed
  91% of people harmed who participated reported they would participate in another conference, and an equal number (91%) stated they would recommend the process to a friend.

• Family Connectedness
  75% of participating youth indicated the process had either a “good” or “big positive” impact on their relationship with their family; 80% of participating parents/guardians reported that their child talked with them more after having completed the RJD process.

• Lower Recidivism Rates
  Participating youth were 44% less likely to recidivate, compared to similarly situated probation youth: an 18.4% versus 32.1% recidivism rate after 12 months, respectively.

• Cost Savings
  In 2010 Alameda County’s restorative justice program carried a one-time cost of approximately $4,500 per case. Today, we estimate that new RCC program costs may rise to approximately $10,000 per case in the implementation phase, reducing to approximately $7,000 at scale. It costs over $490,000 per year to incarcerate a young person in Alameda County in 2018. Given that youth are rarely involved in the juvenile justice system for just one year, the cost savings are tremendous.

A diversion program does not support racial justice and ending youth criminalization if it reinforces racial and ethnic disparities or extends the reach of the criminal legal system. Cases that would otherwise be dismissed or dropped should not be picked up by a diversion program in order to avoid the net-widening effect. Additionally, given the overwhelmingly disproportionate impact and harm the criminal legal system has on youth of color, successful implementation of a restorative justice diversion program will reduce the number of youth of color entering the system. On these fronts, Alameda County’s RJD program produced these results:

• Reduced Criminalization
  During its first two years, the program diverted 102 youth for crimes that would otherwise have been addressed through the juvenile legal system.

• Reducing Racial & Ethnic Disparities
  Of the 102 participants in this study, the majority were youth of color; 45% were Black and 33% were Latinx.

In 2013, the San Francisco district attorney’s office launched a replication of the Alameda County RJD program in San Francisco called Make it Right, which is also operated by Community Works West along with Huckleberry Youth Programs’ Community Assessment and Resource Center (CARC). A January 2022 policy brief from the California Policy Lab found that youth given the opportunity to participate in the Make it Right program had a 19-percentage-point lower likelihood of rearrest within six months, a 44 percent reduction relative to the control group of youth who were prosecuted in the traditional juvenile justice system. This reduction in contact with the legal system persisted even four years after program participation.

As you learned in Step 1C: Restorative Justice and 1D: Restorative Justice Diversion, the Restorative Community Conferencing model is adapted from the model of Family Group Conferencing (FGC) in Aotearoa. A report commissioned by the New Zealand government released in 1988 revealed that institutional racism was leading to Māori youth being disproportionately incarcerated at a drastically higher rate than non-Māori youth, among other disproportionate negative impacts. The government responded with a concerted effort to undo this harm and reduce youth incarceration overall by passing the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Act of 1989. The Act mandated that restorative justice be used throughout the juvenile legal system, replacing punitive practices with restorative ones. The form of restorative justice that was written into the act is Family Group Conferencing, in which a young person who caused harm is brought into a structured dialogue along with their family, the person harmed, and others (e.g., the police, a social worker, youth advocate, etc.) to discuss the harm and create a plan to repair it. As mentioned in 1C: Restorative Justice, The Little Book of Family Group Conferences: New Zealand Style and the documentary Restoring Hope are great sources for learning more about FGCs in New Zealand.

Since the passage of the Children, Young Persons, and Their Families Act, youth incarceration has declined. However, overrepresentation of Māori youth in the system has persisted and even increased. A report titled New Zealand’s Youth Justice Transformation: Lessons for the United States, released in 2018, examines why and how these racial disparities endured and offers policy recommendations and lessons learned in response, including:

• The need to legislate limits around arrest and charging
• Diverting as many youth as possible
• Using restorative justice processes for handling youth with more serious cases, and
• Placing those most harmed by the system at the forefront of changing it.

These recommendations align with the restorative justice diversion model described in this toolkit, particularly the call to center those who are disproportionately impacted by the current punitive legal system, which, in the United States, are youth of color.

Restorative Justice Works

There have been numerous studies demonstrating the effectiveness of restorative justice in many different contexts. Generally, restorative justice has been shown to reduce Post Traumatic Stress Symptoms (PTSS) in survivors, and survivors have reported feeling more included and satisfied by restorative justice processes than the criminal legal system. In addition, while it may seem counterintuitive, restorative processes addressing more serious crimes have been shown to have better outcomes for all parties, including lower recidivism rates for those who’ve caused harm.

For further exploration into the effectiveness of restorative justice processes, in addition to the Community Works report above, we recommend starting with the following sources and encourage you to seek other sources:

• The Zehr Institute advocates for restorative justice as a social movement. They share knowledge of restorative justice with practitioners and learners through conferences, webinars, and both in-person and online courses.

• Restorative Justice: The Evidence is a comprehensive meta-analysis of 36 restorative justice programs conducted in 2007 by Lawrence W. Sherman and Heather Strang, which found that restorative justice:
  • Reduced PTSS among people harmed and related fiscal costs
  • Provided both people harmed and those responsible for causing the harm with more satisfaction with justice than the criminal legal system;
  • Substantially reduced recidivism for those responsible for harm, and
  • Reduced the costs of the criminal legal system when used as diversion

• Restorative Justice on the Rise is a global virtual network and community of practitioners, academics, students, teachers, and citizens who amplify the movement within, and beyond, restorative justice.

As you dig deeper into studies and resources about restorative justice, keep in mind that restorative justice is not a monolith that can be easily generalized. The design of any restorative justice process will affect the outcomes. The ways to measure restorative justice processes and diversion programs that use restorative justice vary. As you learn more about this restorative justice diversion model and the lessons from New Zealand, share your thoughts and reflections with others in your community who may support the RJD program. Building your RJD program requires a strong foundational understanding of RJD, and in particular, the core elements of the model laid out in Step 1D: Restorative Justice Diversion.

Effective Elements of Restorative Justice

Although the effectiveness of restorative justice has been well documented across the globe, we also know that they are elements of good restorative justice practice that have also been shown to have strong outcomes. As mentioned before, evaluating restorative justice through the lens of the criminal legal context can limit our ability to connect the practice to other fields of study and evidence. For example:

• Restorative justice programs held within a community based organization can have a tremendous impact on strengthening social cohesion and social efficacy. Restorative practices such as RCC and other practices that include members from the impacted community have the potential to the level of investment community members have in improving their community and establishing a set of shared agreements about how their community will operate. Participating in restorative processes can also impact how community members think and feel about their community, especially after harm has happened.
• When held in a community based organization, restorative justice is able to contribute to the demonstrated impact that increased community organizations have on reductions in crime rates.
• Restorative justice offers a structured and facilitated space to focus on building, nurturing and mending relationships with a variety of people. For adolescents, identity development is often informed by relationships in their lives. The presence of positive, non-parental adult relationships may be associated with greater levels of self-esteem and positive self-concept. When restorative processes are able to restore relationships and create new relationships with positive adults, these additional impacts are possible.

Further, as important as it is to develop an understanding of youth criminalization, people harmed, and restorative justice through reading reports and other resources, nothing can replace the deeper understanding achieved through an interactive learning experience in your community. The next step of this toolkit will explain why this is the case and offer referrals to experiential learning and training opportunities.

Tools and Resources

Restorative Community Conferencing: A study of Community Works West’s restorative justice youth diversion program in Alameda County