You’d need 5 minutes?!

Good idea, giving something back to the community…

It’s a good job then that neither of ye claim to be experts in the field.

Not that I would claim the same but what you are suggesting may be a practical step with respect to offenders not just lying around at the cost of the state but it’s not anything to do with restorative justice.

Restorative practice is massively helpful in 2 ways:
Helps prevent re-offending – which is valuable to society
Helps victims and their families – which is something which is not in any way addressed by street sweeping and is sorely neglected.

Definitely no expert in this field!

Could bring in public floggings, “live on the internet”?!

Some very good points but there can be some very serious non-violent crime which certainly warrants jail time too (as a deterrent if nothing else) eg. multi-million white collar crime, investment scams robbing pensioners of their life savings etc..

Who would? It is among the most brutal on the planet, up there with countries like China, with a huge percentage of the population behind bars, and the death penalty. Either we want only vengeance (which is hard to understand in a largely Christian country) or we want something that actually rehabilitates people and has less chance of recidivism (ie that actually works for society), in which case we will go for something more like the Finnish system.

You can’t debate crime and punishment in this country because there’s a number of complete fabrications that are accepted as fundamental fact by almost everyone. Firstly, we have tough sentences already – higher than most other EU countries. We also don’t have a crime rate that is on a par with the US, China or anything even in the realm of it that would justify a legal system such as exists in those countries. Last (but certainly not least) we have signed a raft of treaties that prohibit quite categorically torture and cruel and unusual punishments.

Certain things would greatly impact on the crime levels but are politically unpalatable. One is a different approach to drugs. There is and will continue to be a demand for psychoactive substances. When you take into account that a huge percentage of all serious crime has it’s root in the drug trade surely a new approach is needed?

We have a justice-sentencing system?!

One of the main flaws of the justice/courts system is that the person most affected by a crime, the victim, does not have his/her voice heard (save victim impact statement). Restorative practice facilitates this process and offers opportunity for monetary or otherwise restitution, and does not have to replace custodial sentence.

Actually John, there is research behind this – it’s not about softly softly approach. It actually works.

Some of the people I’ve seen will not be converted to angelic ways with a chat.

No – but research is not based on anecdotal groupings that account for “some of the people”.

Restorative practice is something that can be targeted and so specific groupings are far more likely to be affected than others.

Nobody is talking about conversion – and nobody expects angels.

You also seem to think that restorative process is one way – that it’s all for the offender. It’s not – if the offender gets something from it then that means society is likely to also, given it reduces the likelihood of re-offending – but there is also the side of the victim who stands to gain from the process too.

Will you pay for them?

Something people don’t seem to understand is that throwing away the key is not always the right option.

Appropriate sentencing is the right thing to do – just like appropriate fines are a deterrent and a small fine makes it almost worth breaking the law.

what???