Common Ground

What’s your idea?

To provide a safe space for offenders and victims of crime to engage in dialogue in a restorative fashion. These discussions would also give the perspective of both parties to the wider public, transforming their perceptions of young people in trouble with the law. The web-based application would aid existing restorative justice processes or all cases where the victim and the offender want to have a channel of communication.

For instance case worker in YOTs would encourage both parties to write to a page about the reasons for the violation, their experience of it, what they could do to amend, as well as their own backgrounds and life stories. The participants can choose to make their stories available, under appropriate levels of anonymity, to the broader public.

For other users, accessing this information can change the way the view the offenders: starting to see them as full persons with a life story, instead of defining them through their crimes.

What is the problem your idea could address?

Criminologists have shown that a basic pattern exists: As long as familiarity prevails in daily life, violations are not met with demands for retribution and punishment, but concern with compensation for the harm caused.

Because of what you know of other people and where they come from, reducing their acts to legal categories and demands for proportionate punishment just doesn’t seem right. As long as the person that is to some extent familiar to us shows remorse and is willing to make amends, we forgive them. After all we can understand why they may be disposed to offend, and we can relate to the reasons that led to the event of crime.
Today we live in society where most of the people we encounter are strangers and unknown to us.

Consequently, the range things that are seen to require punishment and dealt with through formal proceedings of the criminal justice system has expanded. Common Ground is a new way to establish communication between victim and offender that brings about familiarity and understanding, and can facilitate solving violations through reparation and apology instead of retribution. By presenting the stories and dialogues produced within the system to the wider public, a similar change can be encouraged on a wider scale.

What’s really new about your idea?

Restorative justice is all about establishing dialogue between offenders and their victims. So far different means of communication have not been explored: Restorative interventions previously have exclusively on face-to-face interactions.

While talking in person has some obvious benefits, facing the perpetrator or the victim of a crime can sometimes be demanding. Information technology can expand the range of people that are willing in taking part in restorative work. The idea of making use of restorative dialogue by communicating it to a wider public is also new.

Very few places are available where the public could learn about the experiences of crime through stories written by the victims and offenders themselves. This could provide a radical opportunity for changing public perceptions of criminals and the causes and consequences of crime.

What kind of impact will your idea make? (Think of how many people might benefit form it, who would those people be, and in what way?)

The programme will impact both participants and the wider audience. It will make restorative work more effective and accessible to a wider range of people. It will also offer a unique perspective to the wider public on the backgrounds of offenders, their reason of offending, as well as the experience of victims.

In the best case this will change the views and perceptions that the public has of offenders. Research has consistently shown that people hold less punitive attitudes if they have knowledge of the background of offenders. The system can have a further beneficial impact by increasing the profile of restorative work in the local area.

It can demonstrate to local inhabitants what type of work is being undertaken as well as some of the beneficial effects that it can have.

Why might people want to commission or pay for your idea?

Restorative justice interventions have been found to be a very effective way of reducing reoffending. The reconviction rates following such interventions are systematically lower than in comparable cases where traditional approaches are applied.

They also bring additional benefits to the victim, offering them some ways to be engaged in the justice system and to resolve their situation in a productive manner. Restorative justice and engagement with the public can increase the confidence and trust that local inhabitants place on the justice system – a crucial part of what makes it effective.

Local authorities and youth justice agencies are willing to invest in any initiative that provides restorative interventions in a cost-effective manner or that increases the profile of other restorative work.

What do you think the biggest challenge will be to making this work in practice?

The most challenging thing would be to design and frame the service in a way that the victims and offenders would want to use it. To be properly engaged with the process they would have to feel that they can get something out of it. For the tool to be widely used there would also have to be buy-in from the practitioners.

It would have to fit into their work-flow so that it would not just represent additional cumbersome work, but something that could facilitate or make easier the restorative work that they are doing currently.

What inspired you to come up with your idea in the first place?

Some fancy references: A book by Robert Reiner that quoted newspaper articles from the 1940s and 1980s, showing how all reporting on the social context has disappeared. Also Nils Christie with a radical humanist view on how estrangement expands the range of the criminal.

From 1-5, what stage of development would you say your idea was in?

1

What can we do for you?

The idea would need to be scoped by talking to actual practitioners to find out what they believe the service would have to look like to fit their work and to be used by offenders and victims. After that testing in some areas would probably be very useful. We would possibly require some legal advice for the process of making the produced information public.

The tool would also have to be carefully designed so that the interaction and potential commenting by the public would be guided to a productive direction. The software development itself is likely to be relatively simple.

If you’re not able to take the idea onward after the weekend, would you be happy for someone else to take ownership of your idea and move it forward?

Most probably yes.

This idea was submitted by Aleksi Knuutila.

Aleksi is a researcher at the New Economics Foundation. Part of his work is studying the youth justice system from an economicsy perspective.