Internationally,there is now an acceptance of the need to develop new strategies in criminal justice which reflect restorative justice principles. At the same time, theory, research and practice in restorative justice is making rapid advances. This book provides an up to date and critical account of recent developments. It describes the practice of restorative justice with respect to young offenders in a number of jurisdictions - Australia, Canada, England, New Zealand, South Africa, the United States and various continental European countries. Research findings on the three most common formats – conferencing, victims offender mediation and circles – are presented. Critical issues for the future development of restorative justice are identified. Two main themes run through the collection - the potential of restorative processes to transform criminal justice processes and the potential for aboriginal or indigenous communities to impact on conventional processes. Contributors include active researchers and leading theorists from around the world.

A selection of papers presented at the international conference, Leuven, May 12-14, 1997.

Authors from Australia (John Braithwaite, Christine Parker), Europe (Lode Walgrave, Klaus Sessar, ElmarWeitekamp) and North America (Gordon Bazemore, Ray Corrado, Barry Feld, Curt Taylor Griffiths, Susan Guarino-Ghezzi, Russ Immarigeon, Andrew Klein, Maria Schiff, Mark Umbreit, Daniel van Ness) discuss juvenile justice and the response the youth crime.

Adolescence is a distinct, yet transient, period of development between childhood and adulthood characterized by increased experimentation and risk-taking, a tendency to discount long-term consequences, and heightened sensitivity to peers and other social influences. A key function of adolescence is developing an integrated sense of self, including individualization, separation from parents, and personal identity. Experimentation and novelty-seeking behavior, such as alcohol and drug use, unsafe sex, and reckless driving, are thought to serve a number of adaptive functions despite their risks. Research indicates that for most youth, the period of risky experimentation does not extend beyond adolescence, ceasing as identity becomes settled with maturity. Much adolescent involvement in criminal activity is part of the normal developmental process of identity formation and most adolescents will mature out of these tendencies. Evidence of significant changes in brain structure and function during adolescence strongly suggests that these cognitive tendencies characteristic of adolescents are associated with biological immaturity of the brain and with an imbalance among developing brain systems. This imbalance model implies dual systems: one involved in cognitive and behavioral control and one involved in socio-emotional processes. Accordingly adolescents lack mature capacity for self-regulations because the brain system that influences pleasure-seeking and emotional reactivity develops more rapidly than the brain system that supports self-control. This knowledge of adolescent development has underscored important differences between adults and adolescents with direct bearing on the design and operation of the justice system, raising doubts about the core assumptions driving the criminalization of juvenile justice policy in the late decades of the 20th century. It was in this context that the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) asked the National Research Council to convene a committee to conduct a study of juvenile justice reform. The goal of Reforming Juvenile Justice: A Developmental Approach was to review recent advances in behavioral and neuroscience research and draw out the implications of this knowledge for juvenile justice reform, to assess the new generation of reform activities occurring in the United States, and to assess the performance of OJJDP in carrying out its statutory mission as well as its potential role in supporting scientifically based reform efforts.

Contributors describe recent developments in restorative justice with respect to young offenders, looking at programs in Australia, Canada, England, New Zealand, South Africa, and the US. They present and explain findings on conferencing, victim-offender mediation, and circles, the three most common restorative justice formats, and discuss issues for the future of restorative justice. A major theme discussed is the potential, through restorative justice, for indigenous communities to have an impact on conventional criminal justice processes. The editors are affiliated with the Institute of Criminology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Distributed by ISBS. c. Book News Inc.